End of the Circle Page 10

  Rem took a bold step forward and immersed a hand into the flow. The light raced up the length of his arm and outlined his body, as it was doing to other objects in the room. Minmei instantly became part of the tableau, her thoughts sent reeling by the tendrils’ inquisitive caress. And suddenly there was more longing in her heart than her mind could process, more light in the cabin than her eyes could absorb.

  Rem bellowed the most mournful sound she had ever heard and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  With the confusion of the Great Transition behind them, the Zentraedi Imperative in place, and the Compulsion implemented, the Robotech Masters went about systematically expunging Zor’s name from all records of the technovoyages of the starship Azstraph. They sought nothing less than to rewrite history in such a way that credit for the discovery of the Protoculture would go to the Elders themselves. However, Zor’s own accounts of those voyages survived in secret for some time, until destroyed by the young scientist himself as he began what has been termed his quiet rebellion—save for a precious few jottings preserved by Cabell. All details of Zor’s early investigations and experiments vanished with the destruction of these notebooks and journals. And it is likely that we will never know more than we do now about the Azstraph’s first sighting of Optera.

  From Emil Lang’s introduction to Cabell’s Zor and the Great Transition

  Rem’s cells remembered.

  So many worlds to explore, countless even within the limited zone defined by the ship’s reflex superluminals. So many alien landscapes to wander across with devices in hand, hillsides to climb, forests to penetrate, skies to soar. So many life-forms to contact, cultures to experience—more than a mortal man should be allowed to glimpse, let alone contemplate, more than an understanding god would have created … They were there but to tempt, those climes of eruptive heat or frozen waste, those worlds of nascent sentience or eons-old evolutionary struggle. But was there any greater rapture than to journey from one to the next? To watch worlds turn through the cycles of their lives? To gaze from a ship’s deck upon the sweep of time itself?… If there was, it was surely beyond the scope of his intellect to imagine, and even had that gift of imagining been his, would he choose to deprive himself of this joy? He supposed not …

  Always those thoughts upon awakening from the essential sleep, Zor told himself. The artificial extension of life, while the Azstraph thrust itself from star to star. Man’s little game played with time. A bit of existential trickery …

  He regarded the sleep chamber now—the nutrient drips that sustained the body, the contact studs that stimulated muscle and bone, the headband that helped to nourish dreams—and laughed away his musings, chest aching from disuse, unaccustomed to the sudden return of those chaotic, nay, inspired, rhythms.

  Vard was watching him from afar—able servant and faithful friend—the rest of them already hobbling away from their opened cocoons like aged ministers hurrying off to meetings and conferences. A spectacle ill befitting the courageous crew they were—scientists to the last, sworn to exploration and the search for truth. Zor breathed deep, congratulating himself on the choices he had made, the paths that had turned him away from government service and carried him offworld at last, clear of Tirol’s crowded skies. If only Vard could feel the same—content with the quest itself—instead of continually focusing on the goal.

  But Zor was too astute, too used to their calculated designs, not to feel in Vard’s promptings the hand of his Elders in the Academy. The hungry members of the Grand Chair; perhaps even Cabell himself, mentor and father in his own curious fashion. No, the data he transmitted were never enough for them: the trade arrangements and scientific exchanges too profitless to sate their appetites for progress.

  We must have worlds to use as way stations for our glorious expansion, they would tell him, as though it were conquest they had in mind. We must have discoveries that will further the glory of our race, as though it were immortality they were striving for.

  Oh, Vard, he thought, filling his lungs with the ship’s sweetened air, perhaps this next world will be the one your real masters would have me find. One with wondrous things to offer, the miraculous things they feel certain are out here for the taking.

  He stood up and stretched, as though reaching for the very stars beyond the reflective sheen of the viewport overhead. “Out among you somewhere,” he said to the fixed lights. “Out among you is the world I’m destined to discover. By Valivarre’s will, may the cause of peace profit above all.”

  Karen Penn tried one final time to inflict some damage on the lights, to extract a toll for whatever it was they had done to her Red teammates. With disciplined hand and quieted mind she reconfigured the Alpha to Fighter mode and burned for the fortress’s stern, where the lights had clustered on and around the reflex drive exhaust ports. Jack was in plain view at three o’clock, his burn through the eerie glow of newspace complete, a Veritech pas de deux as they fell toward the ship.

  The Blue team mecha, Battloid-configured, were hitting hard at the SDF-3’s bow from just below the midline, head lasers emitting a deadly light of their own.

  Karen planned on depleting her undercarriage lasers this time, taking no quarter, routing the light or luring it away, making it cry uncle or roll over and die.

  She was shifting her weight in the padded seat, composing herself for the kill, willing the VT in, when all at once the fog of newspace lifted.

  Her eyes were so fixed on the reticle of the Alpha’s targeting screen that it took a moment for the change to register. Then, suddenly, there was darkness where there had been glow, and the lights were gone.

  “Sonuvabitch,” she heard Jack exclaim. “We’re home, gang—we’re home!”

  But Karen was not buying it. Though they seemed to be drifting through the inky blackness of home space, something vital was missing.

  “If we’re home, Jack,” she asked over the net, “where the hell are the stars?”

  On the fortress bridge, Lisa mimicked Lang’s on-screen head-scratching pose. She did not understand it, either: One minute the lights were digesting critical portions of the ship, and the next they were gone. Had the SDF-3 punched or been punched out of the hyperdomain? she wondered. And was that actually the real world outside the viewports or yet another black tunnel in the sky?

  “Stations shipwide report all clear, Admiral,” Forsythe said from across the bridge. “The lights are gone.”

  Lisa ran a palsied hand through her undone hair. “Damage assessment, Mister Price. Immediate. All decks.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Lisa returned her attention to the com-line monitor. “Well, what about it, Lang? Are we home?”

  Lang looked at something off-screen and shook his head. “No, Lisa, nothing has changed.”

  “Maybe you’d better have a look outside, Doctor.”

  Lang’s puzzled expression remained in place. “I have looked, Admiral, I assure you. But present readings are identical to those previously assembled.” He snorted. “We’re still a long way from home.”

  Lisa felt her heart race.

  “We’ve lost a good deal of our reflex drive systemry,” Lang continued as though to himself, pupilless eyes glazed over. “I’m beginning to believe that the reason the Veritechs were assimilated had nothing to do with defense against intrusion. No, whatever was directing the lights had need of specimens. Perhaps it has yet to make up its mind about us.”

  Lisa swallowed hard. “You make it sound like our pilots were appetizers, Doctor.”

  “In effect, they were just that,” he told her, more animated suddenly. “By the time the lights reached the ship, they knew exactly what they were after.”

  “We’re crippled, then. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  The scientist shook his head. “Oh, no, we have some drive capacity left to us, although nowhere near what we’d require to go superluminal. In fact, as things stand we would be
as stranded in our own space as we are here.”

  Lisa let out her breath. “You’re full of good news, aren’t you?”

  Lang shrugged. “I’m sorry if I can’t tell you what you’d undoubtedly like to hear.”

  Lisa waved a hand at the screen. “I’m the one who’s sorry, Doctor. But you’ve got to give me something to go on. I mean, do we sit here and wait for those … things to come back and nibble away at more of our systemry?”

  “As opposed to what, Admiral?” Lang wanted to know.

  “Christ, I don’t know. Move. Somewhere.”

  Lang smiled, recalling Rem’s real-time bubble theory. “Your husband suggested that I fashion us a world.”

  Lisa regarded him tight-lipped. “Then do it,” she said after a moment.

  Minmei cradled Rem’s head in her arms. She pushed his hair back from his face and leaned an ear close to his parted lips. She was certain he had ceased breathing for a time, but that heart-stopping moment was past, his exhalation ruffling the strands of hair she had hooked behind her ear. Her breath was coming in shallow gasps as she pressed his head to her bosom, praying that he would regain consciousness soon.

  Holding him like that, staring down at his beautiful face, she found herself walking through an ancient memory. Tiresia, on the night of the SDF-3’s New Year’s celebration. The Sentinels’ ship, Farrago, had yet to arrive in Fantomaspace, and there she was with eyes only for Jonathan Wolfe. But she remembered watching Rem that night while Wolfe told her all the things he must have assumed she wanted to hear. And she remembered gazing at him the way she had often observed others gazing at her, with a look people reserved for screen idols and heroes. What might have happened if Rem had remained in Tiresia instead of joining the Sentinels? she wondered. Would his presence have altered events, given her the strength to steer clear of Edwards and his grandiose plans?

  It was Rem who had rushed to her side after she had killed Edwards’s horrible minion on Optera. Her voice had awarded her a personal victory, a fitting end, she had decided. But on that same day Janice had walked out of her life forever. And Lynn–Kyle so soon before that … It had been difficult for her to go on when the memories of the sacrifices made in her behalf were so vivid. When she had been so undeserving. So evil.

  But Rem had continued to stick by her in Tiresia, during the months she had languished under doctors’ care, the months and years when she had so little will to survive. And looking at him now, imagining the two of them walking Tiresia’s Romelike streets together, she was not sure she was envisioning a past that almost was or a future that could be. A kind of alternative present, she told herself. One they could fashion together to erase the mistakes both Zor and Minmei had made.

  She ran a hand across her belly and sighed. At the same time a soft groan escaped Rem’s lips, and he moved his head against her.

  “Rem,” she said. “Oh, please, darling …”

  And his eyelids fluttered and opened.

  Jack knuckled his eyes with gloved hands, wondering what could have given him such a shot to the head that he was seeing stars. It was not exactly unheard of for the “thinking caps” to malfunction and send a jolt of current through one’s system—to bite the head that fed them, as the saying went—but that usually left one with twitching limbs or feeling like someone had unzipped one’s backbone and poured hot lead down one’s spine. Not seeing stars. And he didn’t think he had sustained a hit from one of those lights, either, because he had seen them retreat into the black curtain newspace had unexpectedly lowered.

  Hadn’t he?

  Jack forced his eyes wide open.

  And kept seeing stars.

  It was as though the retreating light tendrils had simply decided to hang themselves out there for his benefit.

  “Uh, this is Red One,” he said slowly. “Is anybody seeing what I’m seeing? I mean, is anybody, uh …”

  Karen’s face resolved on the tactical screen, but she didn’t speak. She seemed to be staring off into space, and Jack had to call her several times before she responded.

  “Jack, did you see it?” she said.

  He exhaled in a relieved way. “I’m seeing stars if that’s what you’re talking about.”

  “But the way they got there, Jack … It was like they just assembled themselves into constellations.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s like Lang said. We were trapped in hyperspace, and now we’re not.” Jack gestured to the blackness outside the Alpha’s cockpit. “That’s real space out there, and those are stars. We’re home, kid. Get used to the idea.”

  She looked directly at him. “You don’t seriously believe that, do you?”

  Jack fell silent for a moment. “No, I suppose I don’t,” he conceded, contemplating the view. “But I guess I’ll take it over the alternative any day.”

  PART II

  COHERENT LIGHT

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  The question of Professor Nichols’s whereabouts during the years following the end of the Second Robotech War, including that period now referred to as the Occupation, remains a source of controversy. While it has been elsewhere demonstrated that he remained with Jonathan Wolfe through March of 2033 (see Tasner’s Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing), his subsequent alliances are more the product of conjecture than hard-earned investigative proof. However, based on evidence that links Nichols’s associates (Gibley, Shi-Ling, Stirson, et al.) to the Yakuza organization that inherited the remains of Lang’s Tokyo complex (see Makita and others), the author is of the opinion that Nichols somehow prevailed upon Wolfe to furnish him with safe passage to Japan, where he, we know, was eventually located by intelligence operatives assigned to his case by the REF G2 chief, Niles Obstat.

  From Ronstaad Irk’s preface to the fourth edition of Nichols’s Tripping the Light Fantastic

  “I’m sorry I ever had to drag you into this … Ariel,” Scott said, finally working up the courage to meet her gaze.

  “Please don’t make things worse,” Marlene told him weakly. “And don’t refer to me by that name, Scott. I’m Marlene. I have been since the day you found me.”

  Scott’s nostrils flared. “You’re not Marlene, damn it!” he yelled, turning away from her. He stormed three steps toward the cabin’s security door before swinging around. “You’re Ariel, and the sooner you understand that, the better.” He gestured offhandedly about the shipboard cell G2 had fashioned for her. “Why do you think you’re locked up in here? This isn’t some free ride. Intel’s convinced you know where the Regess is. So put yourself in touch with your real self, Ariel. Tell them what they want, for your own sake.”

  Marlene hung her head, waves of red hair falling forward to conceal hollow cheeks and colorless lips. “Don’t you think I’m trying, Scott?” She lifted her face to him. “Look at me. Can’t you see what this is doing to me?”

  He didn’t want to look, but when he did, he could not stop himself from hurrying to her and encircling her frail form with his arms. She was so pale, so thin. And he kept recalling Sera, wasting away in Lancer’s bed. “Marlene,” he whispered, rocking her gently back and forth. “Marlene …”

  He had already been through the same argument just hours earlier, shortly before the Ark Angel had folded from Earthspace. Some numbnuts from G2 had given permission for Kurt and Lana Rush—the real Marlene’s parents—to observe, by remote, one of Obstat’s brain probe sessions with Ariel. The Rushes had sought Scott out immediately afterward, understandably upset, visibly distressed and angered.

  “How could you do this to us, Scott?” Lana had sobbed from the safety and comfort of her husband’s thick arms. “Even if Marlene was captured and conditioned by the Regess. Why couldn’t you have left her alone? How could you let her be put through this hell?”

  Scott had been dumbstruck. “But that’s not your daughter,” he had managed to reply. “That … creature in there has green blood in its veins!”

  He remembered Marlene’s father taking a menacing step
forward, fists balled up. “Damn you for that, Bernard!” Rush had seethed. “I don’t care what color they turned her blood and hair. I know my own daughter. That’s Marlene your intel freaks are torturing with their devices. And you put her there!”

  There had been no convincing them and, in the end, no way of convincing himself, either. Each day saw more and more of Marlene emerge in the simulagent, more and more of what had been Ariel submerge. And each day seemed to bring both personalities closer and closer to death.

  Scott huddled with her on the cool floor of the cell, railing silently at the thought of losing her a second time.

  “I’m going to try harder, Scott,” Marlene said, full of false hope. “I know how much your friends mean to you, and I desperately want to help you find them. You know I’d give up my life—”

  “Don’t,” Scott said, stopping her. “I don’t want to find them only to lose you in return. I’ll help you. Maybe together …”

  She showed him a wan smile.

  “We’ll be on Haydon IV soon,” he went on. “Exedore will have some answers for us, I’m sure of it. We’ve made a start, Marlene, that’s what’s important. We’ll find the Regess. Even if we have to go back in time to do it.”

  In a spacious cabin aft of the Ark Angel’s astrogation section, Louie Nichols locked his hands behind his head and leaned away from a screenful of hyperspace position grids and spacetime calculations. “Well, I think it’s a righteous intro to interstellar travel,” he told Harry Penn and Vince Grant. “I mean, I’ve heard of missing the hoverbus, but missing an entire planet … This is one for the record files.”

  Gibley and Strucker, two of the mohawked members of Nichols’s team, laughed from their seats at the far end of the table, where they were headlocked into an interactive video comic book pulled up from the ship’s entertainment mainframe. Gleaming interface plugs studded their cranial cyber-ports.

  Penn, a curl to his upper lip, eyed the two with disdain, their tattoos, tight clothes, bad skin, and bad hair. Now that he had gotten to know Louie’s team a little, he had decided they were as unappealing a lot as he had ever encountered. Video fiends and substance abusers, they related only to things they could plug themselves into. Despite all their raving about artificial intellect and “machine mind,” it was almost a pre-Protoculture, electronic age fascination that animated them.