End of the Circle Page 18

  Close-up cameras revealed planet and flotilla in a savage dance around the production ships, each searching for openings. But the Karbarrans were having a difficult time maintaining formation in the face of such maneuverings. As an added irritant, the Awareness had directed most of its labor droneships against the flotilla’s defensive fighter groups and was scoring heavily in all sectors.

  “They should break off the attack while there’s still time,” Vince said to no one in particular. He felt Jean’s warm hand on his shoulder.

  “We’ve pinpointed the ship,” she told him as he swung around from the view.

  Vince glanced over her head at intel officers and techs grouped around the tactical board. In tight close-up on-screen was one of the interdimensional sphere ships, with few labor drones about.

  “Is that the one?” Vince asked.

  “Yes, sir,” a lieutenant colonel replied. “We’re certain it’s the prototype. First off the line, first to be equipped with drive units.” The young man swiveled to face Vince. “It’s our best bet, General.”

  Vince answered him with a grim nod. “Any word from Nichols?”

  “Just up, sir,” a tech said, displaying a message on one of the sit board’s peripherals. “Looks like they’re inside the Awareness. We’ve also received reports of a full-scale hostage uprising planetside.”

  Vince studied the big board, then turned to the viewport, narrowing his eyes against an angry strobing of battle light.

  “All right, gentlemen,” he said after a moment. “Inform Colonel Bernard that his Veritech group has a green light. But make sure he understands they’re to wait for Dr. Nichols’s all-clear before attempting to board the prototype.”

  The tech activated the com-line. “Anything else, sir?”

  Vince snorted. “Wish him Godspeed, Sergeant.”

  * * *

  The Awareness was an argent temple that brought to mind Tiresia’s pyramidal Royal Hall. Louie and his infiltration team approached it cautiously, evading program sentries when necessary, although most of those had been successfully lured away to implement Exedore’s requests for system updates.

  Once they were inside, the place turned out to be a labyrinth of command corridors and data reservoirs, as difficult to enter as it probably was to exit. But there was no time to be selective. Gibley surrendered the point, and Louie joy-sticked himself through a columned portal. Angling through a maze of lower function hallways, he began arming the virus charges the raiders had carried in. The idea was to home in on the source of the disruption signals that would result once they were detonated.

  And in that, the charges did not disappoint.

  The Awareness rallied, filling its instinctual level corridors with a veritable horde of antibiotic programs. But the teams’ decision to engage early on had been predicated on the expectation of just such a primitive reaction, and by so doing, the Awareness not only lost momentary control of its logic circuits but allowed Louie’s team to ascend rapidly through its command and control hierarchy.

  Louie followed the path of most resistance, deploying ghosts to confuse trackers, and eventually entered a vaguely defined triangular chamber close to the pyramid’s summit. Normally there would have been access codes to decrypt there, but the Awareness had apparently been engaged in entering them when the Karbarran attack had begun.

  When Louie had brought the raiders to a halt, he sent three recon drones through the elaborate window at the chamber’s apex.

  The data they returned stilled his thoughts.

  In the space above—the temple’s golden triangle—were perhaps tens of thousands of discorporate intelligences.

  Louie had discovered where Haydon and his race were hiding.

  By the time he found the presence of mind to order the team out, the first of Haydon’s antipersonnel security-force programs was already engulfing them.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  “Now, children,” I heard one of the child-care staffers say into the mike, “stop being so damned destructive!” He turned to me red-faced and apologetic, but I was already thinking: Damned children, damned children … When and where had I heard that before?

  Lisa Hayes, Recollections: The Lost Journey

  Rem did not need the clonesongs to open his mind to what had happened once Zor had left Optera with the Flower of Life specimens the Regess had given him. He knew from both the historical record and the cellular memories he had summoned while at work on Lang’s facsimile matrix that the Regent had learned of his wife’s infidelity, exposed the hoax Zor had perpetrated, and ordered the landing party to leave the planet.

  Though the use of deception was still in vogue among the Tiresians of that period, the direction of physical force against other life-forms was not, and the landing party had assented to the outraged husband’s demands and exited the Tzuptum system the following day. But instead of continuing with their planned tour of the Quadrant, they had returned almost immediately to Tirol, where Zor had described for the Elders the wonders to be found on Optera and had given them their first look at the mysterious Flower he had accepted on their behalf.

  What had followed for Zor were years and years of tedious and most often solitary experimentation with the Flower. The Elders had been pleased to accept his gift, but their disappointment was apparent. True, the Invid-Flower symbiosis seemed to be a process worthy of further investigation, but that was the end of it. The Elders lacked the necessary vision to see how the Flower might have any lasting import to human life. So Zor had endeavored to demonstrate just what could be accomplished by harnessing the Flower’s bio-energy, and by employing the language the Regess had taught him, he introduced Protoculture to the Quadrant.

  So began the brief but catastrophic era known as the Great Transition: the years of barbaric infighting that led to the formation of the Robotech Masters, the rapid redevelopment of terror weapons and spacefold drives, the bloody programs that anticipated the early clone experiments, and finally, the neural re-programming of the miner-giant Zentraedi.

  Zor had long since lost control of his discovery and fallen victim to the Compulsion the Masters had placed upon him. And those same Masters would oversee his eventual return to Optera, no longer as trickster or would-be king but conqueror, thief, and destroyer of worlds …

  Rem wept in his quarters aboard the SDF-3, recalling the hell Optera had been sentenced to by his clone-father and the millions-strong Zentraedi. The theft of the Flowers, the ravaging of that garden planet, the overnight devolvement of the Invid, the war that had raged across the face of countless worlds …

  As little as two Earth-standard years ago, Rem had convinced himself that by reseeding Optera—New Praxis—he had actually redressed some of Zor’s injustices. But he understood now that he had balanced only half the equation. The Flowers prospered, but only to serve the demands of the beings that sowed them—to yield up the Protoculture.

  The Compulsion lived on. For in fabricating the matrix, Rem had helped deal yet another blow against the Flowers’ true guardians.

  He began to ask himself what Zor had hoped to accomplish by sending the original matrix to Earth. Zor’s hand had been guided by something he had learned on Haydon IV, Rem knew that much. But what was it he had discovered there?

  Some way to rescue the Invid, perhaps, to make amends to the Queen-Mother he had seduced.

  Some way to balance the other side of the equation.

  Rem realized that he would need Minmei’s help one final time to dredge up nucleic memories of Zor’s quiet rebellion against the Masters and of his critical encounter with Haydon IV’s artificial sentience, the Awareness.

  “I suppose we should be grateful they disassembled the thing,” Emilio Segundo, the ship’s pediatrician, suggested.

  Lisa looked at him askance, “ ‘Disassembled,’ Doctor? I’d say they destroyed it.”

  Kazianna Hesh issued a low, grunting sound that sent the nursery’s Micronian balcony vibrating. “What can w
e expect,” she said, “with world killers as their role models?”

  Lisa could have almost believed she was conversing with one of the women in the childbirth class she and Rick had taken before Roy was born. Although Lisa, Dr. Segundo, and Kazianna Hesh were standing eye to eye, the balcony was some forty feet above the nursery floor.

  But killed was certainly an apt description of what the human and Zentraedi young ones had done to the alloy and foam sphere they had expended such energy fashioning. The thing was literally in pieces, hemispheres cleaved, the complex transformable modules of their interiors scattered about. The nursery looked like a war zone, which was how the pediatrician had related it to Lisa over the intercom several minutes before.

  “Did they give any explanation?” she asked him.

  Segundo shook his head, one hand tugging at his salt-and-pepper goatee. “None whatsoever. One minute they had the sphere opened and transformed into something that looked to me like an outsize pair of binoculars, and the next they attacked it with every toy in the place.”

  “Complete with sound effects,” Kazianna said. “Mecha flight sounds, explosions, death rattles, that sort of thing,” she added, sensing Lisa’s bafflement.

  “So it was all an elaborate game—building this thing, then wrecking it?”

  Segundo shrugged. “It would hardly explain the secrecy they attached to it.” He looked at Lisa. “And all this guarded behavior the staff claim they demonstrated.”

  “Oh, they did,” Lisa affirmed, recalling her confrontation with Roy and Drannin. “Trust me on that one, Doctor.”

  Lisa stepped closer to the one-way glass to peer down into the playroom. The children, cross-legged—human and Zentraedi alike—had formed an inward-facing circle on the floor. “Let’s have the audio again,” she said after a moment.

  Segunda activated a wall switch, and low-voiced chanting filled the balcony space. The chant sounded like some sort of monotone, three-syllable canine call: Ur-rur-ra, ur-rur-ra, ur-rur-ra …

  “They’ve been at it for close to fifteen minutes now,” Kazianna said.

  Lisa was about to respond when the intercom sounded. Segundo made a volume adjustment on the nursery mikes and hit the com-line ready stud. Raul Forsythe’s face appeared on-screen. “Go ahead, Raul,” Lisa said, positioning herself in front of the camera.

  “Message from below, Admiral,” Forsythe began. “Two members of the scouting party have disappeared.”

  Lisa’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh, no …”

  “Seems scanners detected the presence of a life-form just prior to the disappearances—enormous by the sound of it. But the thing vanished before the team could fix its location.”

  “Any confirmation from our onboards?” Lisa asked.

  “Not yet. But Admiral Hunter is requesting backup. They’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and it’s slow going.”

  “Was he specific?”

  “He wants two teams—one Sentinels, one Zentraedi.”

  Lisa turned to Kazianna to see if she was listening. The Zentraedi nodded, but Lisa noticed misgiving in her sad eyes.

  “What is it, Kazianna?” Lisa said after she and Raul had signed off. “If you have any concerns about going planetside, now’s the time to make them known.”

  Kazianna shook her head. “It’s not that, Commander, it’s the chant.”

  Lisa listened for a moment. The children seemed to have upped the tempo, if not the volume.

  “ ‘Ur-rur-ra,’ ” Kazianna mimicked. “I think they’re saying Aurora.”

  * * *

  Toggled out of machine mind, Louie Nichols sat palsied at his console in the Ark Angel’s data room, his own internal systems scrambled by Haydon’s security programs. That he had emerged with his personality intact was nothing less than miraculous, given what the Awareness had launched against the team. Gibley, however, had not been as fortunate. He was laid out like a rag doll on a table across the room, eyes wide but expression blank. Two med techs were working on him, but while they might succeed in keeping the body alive, Gibley was fried inside, a complete brainwipe.

  “You okay?” Louie heard Strucker ask behind him. He turned and nodded.

  “Command says Bernard’s VTs are closing on the ship.”

  Louie took a deep breath. “Then we’ve gotta go back in. But this time we steer clear of that central shaft,” he told his team. “Everybody got it? I think we bypassed command and control in the way up to Haydon’s cyber-sleep chamber.”

  “On the left as we cleared that tall logic column,” Stirson said.

  “Right, I saw it,” Shi-Ling agreed. “Green haze portal, like the one we developed back in Tokyo for Matushima.”

  Stirson grinned. “That’s the one.”

  “First one in goes straight to drive programming,” Louie instructed. “What we’re looking for is an override command that’ll allow Bernard’s team to get aboard the prototype and steer it clear of the artifact.” He thought briefly about Dana, moving against the factory’s drive production center now. “If we can deactivate the drives of the rest of those prototypes, so much the better,” he thought to add.

  “Haydon’s not going to like this one bit,” Stirson said.

  Louie had his fingers on the jump toggle. “Yeah, let’s just hope we never have to answer to them face to face.”

  He toggled back into machine mind.

  With crude shields and weapons raised, the four Sterlings emerged from the transport tube on level two, but all that greeted them was what remained of Glike’s debris-strewn main boulevard.

  “We must be on the surface,” suggested one of the Praxians who followed them out.

  The sky was a backlit haze, seemingly draped from the summits of Glike’s ruined onion domes and spires. Though tinged with odors of dust and smoke, the air smelled like Haydon IV’s saccharine-smelling own, but Max felt certain they were still subsurface. He thought it likely that the city had been lowered and moved inside during reconfiguration, that the overcast “sky” they were staring into concealed the ceiling of some cavernous hold.

  It was irrelevant in either case, and in short order the hastily formed team had reconned the immediate area and set off for the drive production area Exedore had located, distant explosions and plasma cannon reports shaking the streets at random intervals. The farther they got from the transport tube egress, the more Max’s hypothesis began to make sense. Glike’s borrowed and indigenous architecture—which had always seemed purely aesthetic in both function and design—had been transformed and incorporated into the workings of a massive assembly line.

  The robot masters in charge of production work barely acknowledged the humans as they followed Dana’s lead across once-green parks that had become staging areas, along avenues converted to parts conveyers, past monuments and obelisks truncated and metamorphosed into stanchions and pylons, and through buildings that housed the busy machines themselves—lathes, presses, extruders, and such. Ultimately, Dana brought them to a building Max thought he recognized as the former headquarters of the Haydonite Elite. The adamantine arches and gilded roots of its almost pre-Global Civil War Arabic look were still in evidence among the ultratech computer devices that crowded the entryway.

  “This is it,” Dana announced loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the production line, “the brains of the operation.” She was standing, arms akimbo, in that defiant superhero pose that had become something of a trademark.

  Max, too, recognized it from the schematics Exedore had called up on the monitor.

  Dana, scanning the power junction catwalks for Haydonites, snorted derisively. “Haydon wasn’t expecting anybody to get this far.” She aimed an index finger at a towering bank of apparently undefended data-control terminals. “We knock those out and production grinds to a halt in this entire section. Haydon’ll have his ships, but they won’t be able to take him anywhere.”

  One of the Praxians stepped forward, a broad-shouldered white-maned Amazon a foot and a ha
lf taller than Max. “We’ve come to silence this machine servant,” she said in thickly accented Tiresian. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Dana grinned and rubbed her hands together. She stooped to retrieve the table leg she had carried up from level four and said to Aurora, “Watch closely, kid. We’ll show you how it’s done.”

  Max received a gentle shove from Miriya and was about to join his daughter and the four Praxians when someone poured a bucketful of nitric acid into his head. That, at least, was how he decided it felt as he was dropping to his knees, hands pressed tightly to his ears. Dana and the rest were similarly felled, knees buckling, faces twisted up in pain.

  Only Aurora appeared unaffected.

  With effort, Max managed to lift his head and search the control room. Hovering fifteen feet above him was a group of four Haydonites, similar in aspect to the jailers who had patrolled level four’s confinement areas, their dzentile glowing with charge.

  Dana screamed and cursed, pounding the floor with a fist in an attempt to shake off the psychic force the Haydonites were directing against them. Through the mottled cloud her field of vision had become she spied Aurora and called to her in a pleading voice.

  Aurora made no response. She stood stiffly above her fallen companions—arms at her sides, eyes unfocused—as the Haydonites began a slow descent.

  But just when the four were reaching what would have been the Praxians’ headtop level, Max heard a loud swwooossh! at the building’s entrance and turned to see one of Glike’s fabulous flying carpets come streaking into the room on edge. It was an exquisitely textured specimen, vaguely rectangular in shape, as large as a ball court, and it was headed directly for the hovering Haydonites.