End of the Circle Page 19

  They, too, swung around at the sound or presence of the thing and tried frantically to counterdirect it with last-moment sendings, but the carpet was already upon them, trapping them in a brilliantly executed broadside cigarette roll and propelling them clear across the control room.

  Max struggled to his feet and ran to check on Miriya and Dana. The pain was gone, but trouble was still on the scene in the form of two additional Haydonites who had followed the carpet into the building, one with a coppery skin tone and bulging cranium.

  Max was surprised to hear his name sent and shortly recognized the two as Veidt and Vowad.

  “The Awareness has mitigated the strength of its directives,” Veidt explained. “Several of us are now free to assist in your escape.”

  “We’ve got more than escape on our minds,” Dana muttered, wiping her hands on her pants. The Praxians voiced agreement.

  “Then it was you who sent the carpet,” Miriya said.

  The two Haydonites traded looks. “No,” one of them started to send, when Aurora said, “I called the carpet.”

  Veidt nodded perceptibly. “I believe she did,” he announced, nonplussed.

  Dana looked at her younger sister and laughed. “Damn kids nowadays. Can’t teach ’em a thing.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  It has been claimed that all laws of science, our very ability to predict future events, will break down upon reaching the singularity. That the black hole’s event horizon—trapped light’s desperate spacetime path—is but a one-way membrane, we are about to find out. If only Dr. Hawking were here to join us.

  Dr. Harold Penn, The Brief but Timeless Voyage of the Peter Pan

  Like laser light in a smoke-filled room, Louie’s cyber-self punched through the green haze security threshold leading to the Awareness’s higher function core and arrowed straight into a cluster of telemetry commands in charge of programming dimensional data into the sphere ships’ drives. The team was spread out in a V formation behind him, targeting ghosts against approaching strings of defense bytes.

  Strucker had found that some of them could actually be absorbed and turned against their own kind.

  Louie was a quarterback in that moment of stasis before the inevitable inrush of linemen and backs, searching through banks of data in a reckless effort to locate the prototype ship intel had indentified as nearly complete. The team was doing an incredible job of blocking the Awareness’s poisoned advances, but the line was beginning to weaken.

  Back aboard the Ark Angel, Louie’s fingers tattooed hunches and possibilities to his discorporate mind; his fingers danced on the directional cross, maneuvering him clear of circuit frying, brainwipe booby traps.

  Then, suddenly, he had it: an on-line ship designated by a perplexing series of emblematic icons and alphanumeric analogues. As expected, the ship had been safeguarded against entry, but no longer. Louie tapped the override program and keyed a new sequence of commands into the console.

  Neuron probes, meanwhile, were nipping at the perimeter of the envelope in which he had secreted himself. There was no time left to search out the space drive production commands; Dana would have to see to it on her own.

  “Toggle out!” Louie ordered as the first of the probes penetrated his defense net. “Toggle out!”

  Scott Bernard maneuvered the Alpha through a storm of annihilation discs launched from Haydon IV’s in-close plasma arrays. The planetoid’s big guns were still trained on the few ships that remained of the Karbarran battle group. The ursinoids’ fighter squadrons had been literally blown to pieces during counteroffensive impact runs by cloud after cloud of labor drones. Stray bits of those fighters drifted around the Alpha, touched by explosive glints, cyan and crimson.

  But Haydon IV had been taking a pounding as well. It was a twin-eyed monstrosity below him now, hemispheric surfaces scorched and molten, factory tubes holed and venting gouts of alloy debris.

  In the midground of the Alpha’s curved canopy view floated a hundred or more of Haydon’s sphere ships, temporarily abandoned in varying stages of readiness.

  Scott had not flown a space combat op in well over a year and felt rusty. As rusty as the first day he had piloted a Veritech through Earth’s atmosphere, a green VT Lunk had stashed away in an old barn. But no matter. The searing discs, the blue-green bolts, those swaths of agitated light were mild compared to his inner torment.

  Marlene was dying.

  Again!

  And this time he had killed her.

  “Able leader,” announced a female voice over the command net. “Target ship’s shields down and deactivated. You are go for boarding. You can take your team in, Colonel.”

  Scott acknowledged Ark Angel Command and went on the tac net to communicate with his wingmen. The squadron had lost only one mecha, a red Beta piloted by a Mars Base lieutenant Scott had known since childhood, who had gotten himself caught between Haydon IV’s main guns and the Karbarrans’ recently crippled flagship.

  Atomized, Scott thought.

  Released.

  “Colonel,” the command net voice squawked, “why are you delaying? Target’s shields are down, repeat, down.”

  Scott shook his head clear of thought and addressed himself to the Alpha, thinking the mecha through to Battloid mode.

  So reconfigured, the squadron began to follow him in.

  The sphere ship enlarged before him until it obscured all else. The surface was ball-bearing smooth save for the faint outline of a hexagonal hatch low down on the curve of its starboard side.

  There were no viewports, no visible weapons or scanner arrays. No way to see where they would be going and no way to protect themselves once they got there. But God willing, the hapless crew of the SDF-3 would be waiting for them.

  And with them the Invid Queen-Mother.

  Scott’s hope and salvation.

  “Just stay put,” Vince Grant advised after he had expressed how good it was to hear Max’s voice. “We’ll get some Alphas down there to pick you up as soon as we can.”

  “I don’t see that we have much choice, Vince,” Sterling told him.

  Outside the bridge viewports Haydon IV’s primary batteries were inactive; they of course had been silent throughout the duration of the Karbarran attack, but now they were shut down as well. Early on the assumption was that the Awareness had quieted the planetoid’s fire once the Karbarran flotilla had no longer been deemed a threat. But then Exedore had gotten word through to the Ark Angel that the entire superintelligence was temporarily shut down, probably as a result of the virus programs Nichols had infiltrated during the cyber-raid that had claimed the life of one of his team members.

  The Ark Angel was closing on the battered planetoid after a brief reflex burn, most of its mecha squadrons deployed on search and rescue operations among the remnants of the Karbarran battle group. The pirated sphere ship—under remote control by the Angel’s AI—would be meeting them halfway with Scott Bernard’s team safely inside.

  “What are your survivor estimates, Max?” Vince asked.

  “Probably two hundred or so Karbarrans,” Max responded after a moment. “A lot of them in bad shape. About two dozen Praxians and three or four Spherisians. Then there’s the seven of us.”

  “Seven?” Vince said.

  “Veidt and Vowad,” Max explained. “They helped us take out the production center, Vince. I’ve got no qualms about taking them along.”

  Vince mulled it over. “Guess they don’t want to be around when Haydon wakes up, huh?”

  “Neither do I,” Max affirmed. “Honeymoon’s over on this place.”

  A smile tugged the corners of Vince’s wide mouth. “See you soon, Commander,” he signed off.

  In newspace, fifteen Zentraedi Battlepods launched from the SDF-3’s forward mecha bay formed up on Kazianna’s Officer’s Pod and fell toward the vernal surface of an unknown world.

  An unseen, unforeseen something had been detected there and had since disappeared wit
h two members of Hunter’s scouting party. The admiral—perhaps still unconvinced that the fortress had been flung far from familiar shores—had requested reinforcement from two XT teams, probably in the hope that someone—Karbarran, Garudan, or what have you—would be able to communicate with the unseen thing.

  This unforeseen thing.

  Kazianna found herself thinking of Drannin and the sphere the children had assembled and destroyed. Were they really chanting Aurora? she wondered. Sending a telepathic call to the youngest Sterling the way she had once sent one to her older sister across a sea of stars?

  An SOS, Lisa had called it.

  And what of this strange planet that had brought the fortress here? For that was how she considered it, despite what Lang and the others were saying about intergalactic voids and patterning.

  No, this was more than a world; she was certain of that much. It was perhaps even an intelligence unto itself, with something to teach them all.

  The control consoles and acceleration couches, the general interior makeup of the sphere ship, had not been designed for human hands or eyes or posteriors, Scott had decided. Not, for that matter, with crystalline fingers, paw-mitts, or outsize limbs in mind.

  The ship was merely a spherical chamber of light-emitting metal divided into several levels by featureless decking, unconnected by ladders, stairways, or lift tubes. On what seemed to be the command level was a continuous circumferential bench four feet from the floor without so much as a screen or a function key to mar its smooth surface.

  It was only through Louie Nichols’s remote manipulation of the external hatch that Scott’s team had been permitted access to the ship at all, and only because of his deactivation of the ship’s artificial gravity that they had been able to explore.

  Then, just when Scott was thinking that no one outside of Haydon himself was ever going to be able to make use of the ship, the bench console came suddenly to life, banded in color like the planetary rings of some gaseous giant, and a huge projecbeam display of the Ark Angel’s bridge took shape in the center of the sphere.

  “Doctor Nichols assures me that you can see me, Colonel,” Vince Grant said, as though he were in the same ship. “Is that true?”

  Wondering for a moment where to direct his words, Scott finally shrugged and said to the projecbeam image, “Not only you, General, but the entire Angel bridge. Doctor Nichols, Mrs. Grant, Doctor Penn, Cabell, Exedore, the Sterlings, all of you, sir.” He thought about asking what the hell Veidt and Vowad were doing there but decided against it.

  Louie Nichols nodded in the background. “We’re going to begin ferrying some things over to you, Colonel,” he began in an uncharacteristically subdued manner. “Components of the Angel’s onboard AI, which will ultimately become our interface hardware with that ship’s power plant.”

  “Then we can make use of it?” Scott asked. “You can get us through the breach?”

  Louie’s face collapsed somewhat, and Scott recalled hearing about the teammate Nichols had lost.

  “I’m certain we can do that much, Colonel. I’m just not as certain about getting us back out again.”

  No one spoke to it.

  Vince cleared his throat. “We’ll commence transporting life support essentials, mecha, and personnel as soon as Doctor Nichols has his team in place.”

  “Well, there’s not much in the way of a welcome we can arrange,” Scott told him. “We haven’t found the liquor cabinet yet.”

  Polite laughter greeted the remark, principally from Scott’s own team members.

  Vince gestured behind him. “Cabell and Exedore won’t be joining us, Colonel. The Ark Angel will make for Tirol after disembarking her Karbarran passengers. And hopefully act as our beacon in this realm once we’ve, well, crossed over.”

  Scott gulped, thinking of Ranaath’s Star. “Who’ll be crewing this ship, then, sir?”

  “I’ve put it on a voluntary basis, Scott. Jean and I and Doctor Penn are coming over. And so far we’ve got three squadrons of mecha pilots and a sufficient number of technical assist crews.”

  “I hope you’ve already counted me in, Commander,” Scott said, sensing that Vince had left something dangling in the air.

  Vince nodded. “I have.”

  Scott folded his arms and stared at the floor. “There’s just one more thing, sir … The, ah, Invid simulagent. I was, you know, thinking it would help having her along.”

  “Marlene will accompany us, Scott.” Vince traded brief looks with Louie. “There doesn’t seem to be anything left for her in this realm.”

  Or much left of her, Scott kept to himself.

  The transfer of supplies and personnel took less than twelve hours, during which time Haydon IV did not so much as stir. But finally the moment arrived for the Ark Angel and the pirated ship to part company.

  Louie canceled the override and punched up the original commands the Awareness had programmed into the sphere’s drives, and the ship’s systems instantly came on-line.

  While Cabell and the rest watched from the Ark Angel bridge, the sphere’s massive drives flared once and hurled the ship toward the dark eye of Ranaath’s Star. The sphere seemed to hang suspended at the edge of the whirlpool for the briefest of moments before it vanished from space and time.

  Thousands of miles distant, the fey, aged crew of a second ship monitored the sphere ship’s protracted plunge into the black hole and the subsequent departure of the Ark Angel. They then turned their attention to the reconfigured Haydon IV and waited.

  PART III

  AWAKENINGS

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Survival recognizes and rewards anything that sustains life, and here was undeniable proof of that. No matter how noxious its central characteristic, it proved itself to have a stark value in what the Earthers call Darwinian terms—even a functional formidability.

  The Scribe Triumvirate of Aholt, Ulla, and Tussas, Nothing but Animus: A History of the Robotech Elders

  Death, their tireless enemy, had them cornered at last.

  It had pursued them for an age, ever since they’d cast off the bonds of a mortal life span and received unholy communion with the Protoculture a naïve Zor had fetched home to them from the stars. Death was the inevitable dark side of the bid they made, immediately, for eternal life. Not just longevity but immortality; anything less—prolonged years living in dread of the end—was nothing but a unique torment.

  For the Robotech Elders, death had become the greatest of fears, in some ways a Singularity of fear.

  Watching the sphere ship plunge into Ranaath’s Star, somehow surviving the deadly swirl of the accretion disc, the utter annihilation of the event horizon, the Robotech Elders had shuddered at the risk its passengers and crew were running. Foolish little subcreatures, so reckless with their brief lives!

  The Elders sat despondent, even their mindspeech silent, in their habitual circle. They arranged themselves in their triumvirate from habit—from reflex, by now. Between them was their darkened Protoculture cap, a mushroomlike console of instrumentality ten feet across, a hateful mockery of its former glorious self.

  Once it had bent worlds to their will. In the years since the Elders had fled Tirol—upon the arrival of the SDF-3—it had kept them alive, barely, through its residue of power. With the disappearance of all Protoculture in the Elevation of the Invid race, the cap had died, become nothing more than a burnt-out artifact.

  Their ship was a small prototype a Scientist triumvirate had been working on when the Invid onslaught had finally reached Tirol. The vessel was considerably smaller than the assault ships that had once carried the Robotech Masters’ colossal Bioroids into combat, smaller than the tri-thrusters their Zentraedi giants had flown in battle in an age now vanished forever.

  They had languished in it for years with little to behold but one another, each coming to hate the others and yet incapable of surviving without them.

  Some of the craft’s systems had been altered over t
he intervening years to run on more conventional power sources. Thus, it could still provide life support and had marginal maneuvering capability. But nothing could power the cap except Protoculture itself; after all this time the Elders were looking death in the face as they never had since that first, transmogrifying taste of the Essence of the Flower of Life, so long ago.

  The SDF-3 had first shown up near Tirol to establish contact with them, to seek a peace, but the Elders had never really considered that idea seriously; they had presumed it was their onetime Zentraedi slave-warriors come home for final vengeance. Besides, when SDF-3 unfolded, the moon of Fantoma was already under genocidal attack by the forces of the Invid Regent.

  Terrified as they were of abandoning their seat of power, lust as they might for the Protoculture the warring armies carried, the Elders had fled. There was too great a risk of death on Tirol, and their fear of oblivion outweighed any other impulse.

  Learning the REF’s true intentions, the Elders still shrank from any contact. Masters of deceit and treachery, they were incapable of trusting anyone else.

  Their little prototype ship, with its superluminal drive, had made a few planetfalls over the years since (the Elders dared not show their faces near any of the advanced Local Group worlds they had once ground under their heel, of course). There were species sufficiently organized and domitable to be of some minor help—retrofitting the craft under the Elders’ supervision, installing conventional power systems to minimize the drain on their Protoculture supply.

  But the very act of dominating a population used up Protoculture at an agonizing rate, and the Elders feared detection by their former subjects, who were sallying out among the stars on their own. More than anything, however, the last Robotech Masters lusted for a return to their former power.