End of the Circle Read online

  A Del Rey Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1989 by HARMONY GOLD, U.S.A., INC., and TATSUNOKO PRODUCTION CO. LTD. All rights reserved. ROBOTECH is a trademark owned and licensed by HARMONY GOLD, U.S.A., INC.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-91799

  ISBN 0-345-36311-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-82396-0

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Part I: Wheel in Space

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part II: Coherent Light

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Part III: Awakenings

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part IV: Finale and Overture

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Dedication

  Other Books in This Series

  About the Author

  Appendix

  Robotech Chronology

  FOREWORD

  The publication of The End of the Circle, the eighteenth book of the series, concludes the Robotech saga. The story now spans five decades, from 1990 to 2040 or thereabouts, save for a period of “lost years,” covering the rise of Monument City and the Army of the Southern Cross, an account of which may yet see the light of day. Some of this material is in fact already being covered by other sources.

  With nearly one million words of print in the Ballantine/Del Rey series alone, eighty-five episodes of powerful animation, an equal number of comic book adaptations, numerous art and role-playing books, and supplemental source material—including several college theses—it should be clear that Robotech has traveled a great distance since “HAL,” Haruhiko Mikimoto, sat down at his desk one day and inked the first sketch of raven-haired songbird, Lynn-Minmei.

  As most readers of Robotech are aware, the eighty-five “continuous” animated episodes (which still show up in U.S. television markets) were actually a complete reworking—in terms of music, dialogue, and storylines—of three separate anime series that appeared in Japan over the course of several years: Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeda. Credit for this unique accomplishment goes to Carl Macek, as well as Harmony Gold U.S.A. Inc. Together with a talented team of writers, voice-over artists, and production personnel, Robotech Master Macek found an overall grand visual theme in the Japanese series and redefined both Robotechnology and Protoculture.

  It is a source of continuing disappointment that the project, as envisioned by Mr. Macek, was never brought to completion. The result would have been an additional sixty-five episodes of animation detailing the exploits of the Sentinels, and who knows how many more devoted to the material covered in this final book, presented here for the first time.

  But perhaps Robotech’s most important contributors have been the fans themselves, who have kept this project vital for five years running. More than seventy thousand strong have been aided and abetted in their efforts by the following, to whom the author wishes to express his heartfelt gratitude: Comico Comics, especially Markalan Joplin, who died shortly before completion of the illustrated series; Eternity Comics, which has inherited the mantle and is currently publishing twice-monthly issues of the Sentinels; Kevin Siembieda and the staff at Palladium Books for their role-playing games; Kay Reynolds and Ardith Carlton, creators of the Starblaze Robotech Art Books; Kevin Seymour of Books Nippan; and a special thanks to Claude Pelletier, Michel Gareau, Alain Dubreuil, and the staff at Protoculture Addicts, the official Robotech fanzine.

  We should all do it again sometime.

  PART I

  WHEEL IN SPACE

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  “Beware the skies, for the cerulean raiments of that sweet-scented realm mask a darkness and evil that know no bounds. And do not look to heaven for peace, for there resides hell. And beware all who descend from those skies, for they are the harbingers of death and destruction.”

  Dogma of the Church of Recurrent Tragedy as quoted in Weverka T’su’s

  Aftermath: Geopolitical and Religious Movements in the Southlands

  The starship Ark Angel hung in geosynch, 36,000 kilometers above Brazilas in the Southlands. Recently returned from a distant campaign, it alone had been spared the wrath of the Invid’s transubstantiating departure, one ship among scores in that moment of victorious defeat.

  Scott Bernard had yet to decide whether its survival constituted a curse or a blessing.

  He could just make out the warship’s underbelly through a small oblong viewport set high up in the curved hull of the chemical shuttle’s passenger cabin. A soft-soled boot, free-floating, drew his attention forward, and he watched it for a moment, thinking: Weightless. Hugged to the padded contours of an acceleration couch by web belts and Velcro straps, as if on some nostalgia-steeped theme park ride.

  Although restrained might have been a better word to describe his present circumstance, as in temporarily prevented from doing harm to himself or others. Not that he would. But there were half a dozen G2 analysts planetside who thought differently.

  Scott sniggered aloud, unperturbed by the curious glances his self-amusement had elicited. He returned the looks with interest until one by one each of his fellow passengers in the cramped cabinspace turned away.

  Oh, he had it, all right: what Rand had once called the look of the lost.

  Scott inclined his head to one side to get a better angle on the ship, her dark symmetry obscuring a narrow sweep of stars. Built and christened on the other side of the Quadrant, she was the very ship Colonel Wolfe had pirated from Tirol orbit years before. The ship that had become the Sentinels’ own.

  Running lights illuminated an array of weapons and sensor ports dimpling her underside—retrofitted sometime during the three years since Scott had last seen her—along with a swath of heavily blistered alloy, where angry tendrils loosed from the Invid’s mindstuff phoenix had brushed her just three months before. She rested alone in gravity anchor, save for the countless metal fragments that drifted above and below her: the lingering debris clouds of Dolza’s fleet; of Little Luna, the Zentraedi factory satellite; of the hapless, goose-necked ships of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter Divisions; of the Robotech Expeditionary Force’s tri-thrusters and Karbarran-manufactured boilerlike monstrosities.

  Earth was in fact haloed by death and destruction. But liberated—or so it seemed.

  A Tiresian-accente
d voice cautiously interrupted Scott’s painful reverie.

  “Colonel Bernard,” the woman repeated as Scott turned from the view. She stood wavering in the narrow aisle, Velcroed in place, strands of auburn hair wafting out from under a pearl-gray shuttle bonnet. The smile, too, seemed fastened there, detachable with the slightest tug.

  “What is it?” Scott asked, masking his thoughts.

  “Sir, General Grant wishes you to be informed that he’ll be on hand to meet the shuttle. Mrs. Grant and Senators Huxley and Penn are with him, sir.”

  Scott nodded and put on a pleasant face, certain it read as a twisted malicious grin. But the woman only broadened her smile in response and asked if there was anything he needed before docking. He told her he was fine and leaned over to watch her space-step down the aisle, a child learning to walk.

  So much to relearn, he told himself. So much to forget.

  The chemical shuttle itself was symbolic of the change. Launched from a twenty-five-year-old reconstructed base in Venezuela Nueva, the ferry and a handful of others like it were humankind’s only existing links with near space. There was the Angel, of course, but she had remained in geosynch ever since the disastrous finale to the assault on Reflex Point, the Invid queen’s hivelike stronghold on the North American continent. Word had it that a small portion of the REF’s mecha—Alphas and Shadow fighters, principally—was still functioning, but most of the older generation Cyclones and Veritechs had simply given up the ghost.

  No one knew what to make of the events that had occurred at Reflex Point. In the wake of the Invid departure all sorts of reports had reached Scott and his team of freedom fighters. The REF fleet had been destroyed; it had survived. The Invid had exited the solar system; the Regess had relocated her horde in the Southlands. The SDF-3 had been destroyed; it had manifested from fold and been swallowed up by the Invid phoenix; it had failed to appear at all … Eventually, Scott learned that the fleet had indeed been vaporized and that the flagship had failed to emerge from hyperspace. He had not bothered to wait around for verification. With an assist from Lunk and Rand, he had managed to prepare his Alpha-Beta Fighter for the long journey, only to find that the VT was not much good outside the envelope and that the Ark Angel had removed herself to stationary orbit over the Southlands.

  It had begun to make sense after the initial anger and disappointment had washed through him. Much of the northern hemisphere was devastated, and where else would reconstruction commence but in the south, where several cities had actually flourished during the occupation. Norristown, once the site of a Protoculture storage facility, was fast emerging as the leader of the pack, and it was there that Scott had ultimately set down. Like a fly on lacquered paper. Mired in red tape for close to two months before Provisional Command had okayed his request to be among those shuttled up to the starship.

  The question he had heard most often those two months had been: “Scott who?”

  It seemed that Mars and Jupiter Divisions were filed away in Command’s mainframe as having gone down with all hands, and so the person claiming to be Lieutenant Scott Bernard of the 21st Squadron, Mars Division, had to be a ghost, a zone loonie, or an ambulatory case of what the neurometrics were calling Post-Engagement Synaptic Trauma—PEST, for short.

  Ask Dr. Lang about Scott Bernard, he had pressed. I’m his godson, for chrissake!

  Only to hear: “We’re sorry, er, Lieutenant Bernard, but Doctor Lang is not available at this time.”

  Later, Scott would learn that his godfather and mentor had been aboard the ill-fated SDF-3 when it had jumped from Tirol. But in the meantime he suggested that Captain Harrington might be able to vouch for him. Harrington had commanded the first wave of Cyclone ground teams the REF had directed against Reflex Point.

  After all, it wasn’t like he was asking for medals, Scott had assured the analysts. But the least Command could do was acknowledge what he had achieved on the yearlong road to Reflex Point or applaud his one-on-one with the Invid Corg in the seasonally shifting skies above the hive cluster. Why, some of Harrington’s team had even seen the Invid simulagent’s flame cloud, had even seen Scott go into the central dome!

  He was sorry he said it even before the words had left his lips.

  “Now, uh, what was that you were saying about talking to the Regess, Lieutenant?” the boys from G2 had asked. “You did say something about her being, let me see here, ‘a bald-headed column of light twenty feet high.’ ”

  And so he had played the PEST for them, steering clear of any mention of Marlene or Sera or any of the mind-boggling time-space displacements he’d experienced inside the hive chambers.

  In retrospect, he had to ask himself whether pulling out all the stops would have brought the med teams’ debriefing reports to Jean Grant’s attention any sooner, but they had reached her on their own momentum in any case, and Scott had finally been granted permission to come aboard.

  And issued a battlefield commission to full bird, to boot.

  For Scott it was something else to snigger at: a promotion, in an armed force without ships or soldiers, defenders and liberators of a world that wanted little part of them even now.

  The shuttle docked in one of Ark Angel’s starboard bays just as Sol was flooding the eastern coast of the Southlands with morning light. Scott drank in the view that had been denied him when Mars Division had approached a year earlier: Earth’s characteristic clouds and swirling weather fronts, its deep-blue water oceans and healing landscape. And for the first time in years he found himself thinking about Base Gloval, his father’s forefinger thrust upward into the Martian night, pinpointing a homeworld. Huddled afterward in the prewarmed comfort of his sleep compartment, he would grapple with the notion—that faint light, a home. But even after his family had been transferred to the factory satellite to work on the SDF-3, Scott could not regard Earth as such. And he had so few memories of those years that he called Tirol home now and perhaps always would.

  Only a week ago he had learned that his parents were still there.

  The memories surrendered to more recent recollections as Scott and the rest of the shuttle’s privileged boarded a transfer vehicle that ferried them into the ship proper, Ark Angel’s artificial gravity settling on him like oppression itself. Nearly every component of the ship was different from what he remembered, from the illumination grids that checkered the holds to the persistent foot-tingling basso of the dreadnought’s internal systemry.

  He soon caught sight of Vince Grant, towering walnut-brown and square-shouldered over a small gathering of civilians and military personnel bottlenecked at the arrival hold’s security gate. There were hands in the air, salutes, a welter of voices that brought to mind vid-scenes of turn-of-the-century airport arrivals, and it was obvious to Scott all at once that the REF was as altered as the Angel herself. He sensed something cool but determined in the ship’s slightly sour air, a single-mindedness at work he had not experienced since Tiresia.

  A male aide appeared out of the crowd to escort him through security, and a moment later he stood facing the Grants and the two Plenipotentiary Council senators.

  “Colonel Bernard, reporting as ordered,” Scott said with a crisp salute. “Permission to come aboard, sir?”

  “Granted,” Vince returned, working the muscles of his massive jaw into a tight-lipped smile. “Welcome home, Scott.”

  “Oh, Scott,” Jean said, rushing forward to embrace him. “God, let me look at you.”

  He took a step back to allow for just that, extending a hand at the same time to Justine Huxley, then Dr. Penn. Vince and Jean were outfitted in modified REF uniforms, collarless now but with flared shoulders and simleather torso harnesses retained. The senators wore loose-fitting jumpsuits of a design that had originated on Garuda.

  “Good to see you, my boy,” Penn said with paternal sincerity. “I only wish Emil and Karen could be here with us.”

  There was no mention of Karen’s lover, Jack Baker; certainly there was no love lost
between Dr. Penn and Baker, in any case. Karen, like Bowie Grant, had elected to ship out aboard the SDF-3. Let them all have better luck than Marlene and I had, Scott thought. Even if that means dying together.

  The scientist’s words had thrown a curtain of silence around the five of them, a spot of stasis amid the bustling activity in the hold. “Is there any word?” Scott asked, hoping to break the spell.

  Jean shook her head, her dark honey complexion paled by the exchange. Her hair was pulled back into a tight chignon, imparting a touch of severity to what was normally the warmest of faces. “We’ve received some garbled subtrans from Tirol. The ship folded soon after Rheinhardt and the others were away. There’s been no word from the SDF-3 since.”

  “I think we should have this discussion elsewhere,” Vince said with a hint of suggestion in his voice. “We all have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Colonel,” Huxley said before everyone set off, “I do want to apologize for this somewhat subdued welcome.” She gestured around the hold with a quivering, aged hand. “As you can well imagine, we’ve all been trying to adjust to the loss of our friends and compatriots.”

  Scott could see that she was referring to the destruction of the fleet rather than the presumed loss of the SDF-3. “I understand, Senator,” he told her. “No need for apologies.”

  “Besides, Colonel,” Huxley continued after a deep breath, “what with the Council trying to set up summits with our planetside counterparts and Jean’s medical teams doing what they can … Well, I’m certain you do understand, Colonel Bernard.”

  Scott did not envy either group but thought it might be particularly rough going for the Council itself. To the last they had been respected members of the United Earth Government. But that was before the ascendancy of the Army of the Southern Cross, the arrival of the Robotech Masters and the Invid, and the factionalism and isolationalism that had thrived during the occupation. Those would-be leaders below barely trusted their neighbors, let alone a council of lawmakers and theoreticians absent for twenty-two years. Scott was not sure whether Huxley, Penn, and the rest had grasped the fact that Earth was a changed world.