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  “We will reach Peryton,” Rick snapped. “And that’s the last I want to hear of that. You have our word that we’ll do everything we can to liberate Peryton—you’ve had our word from the onset.”

  “Your word,” Burak sneered, horns lowered, red eyes glaring at Rick. “Words mean nothing. We have tried words. And we have tried weapons. To no avail.” He swept his arm around the room. “You all know this. Words are useless. Weapons are useless. You think I am unaware of what transpires here? You think I am unaware of your secret plans to move against Optera and leave Peryton to fend for itself? Now that Spheris has been liberated, you see no need to delay, to involve yourself in my world’s insignificant dilemma. It is just as Tesla warned.”

  Teal pushed her way to the edge of the circle as the arguments recommenced. “If that were the case, we wouldn’t be here,” she told Burak, indicating her fellow Spherisian Baldan. “We would have stayed on our own world.”

  Burak only snorted a laugh. “A babe and a newborn warrior. How comforting.”

  Rick strode to the center, waving his arms and motioning everyone silent. “Peryton is our priority. Anyone who disagrees better step forward now and present a case, otherwise it’s settled, once and for all.”

  When no one moved to contradict him, he swung around to the Perytonians, showing them a determined look. “I’m as short of patience as this ship is of Protoculture, Burak. Tesla’s not around to feed you any more lies, so you’re going to have to begin dealing with us. You don’t seem to want to believe that he’s on his way to Optera, but there’s nothing we can do about that. What I want to know is what you need from us. Tesla has you convinced that it’s your destiny to save your world, and maybe that’s exactly the case. But you’ll need backup, and all we’re saying is that you’ll have our complete cooperation.”

  “Then squeeze the Zor-clone for all he’s worth,” Burak said menacingly. “Or, by Haydon, we will do it for you!”

  In his quarters an hour later, Rick positioned himself in front of a security camera to get a good look at himself in the monitor. He had been as thin as a ribbon since Haydon IV, and suspected that the Haydonite scientists must have tampered with his physiology when they were cleaning Garuda from his system, because he hadn’t been able to gain any of his weight back. Stepped up his metabolism or something. He turned profile for the camera and ran a forefinger along his larynx, which seemed to be, well, protruding lately. Could they have taken out his thyroid? No, that wouldn’t have done it. He thought about Veidt as he stared at his on-screen image, flexing the muscles in his arms and legs, thankful that Haydon IV had left him with those at least.

  There were other things to wonder about as well: whether Vince Grant, Wolfe, and Breetai had been successful in clearing the Sentinels of charges; how Max and Miriya were faring with their new girl-child; whether the ship under Major Carpenter’s command had been heard from; and just what the hell the Ark Angel was going to do when it arrived at Peryton.

  Despite the bold front he had displayed in the hold, he couldn’t deny that Burak’s remarks were not far off the mark. It was true that the Sentinels had given their word to the Perytonians, and certainly they would stick to it; but at the same time there was a kind of mutinous restlessness plaguing both crew and command—a feverish compulsion to push on to Optera and put an end to the war. They had had the Regent on the run ever since Haydon IV, and the side trip to Peryton—while an honorable undertaking—was only going to permit him to regroup his forces and fortify his homeworld stronghold. Rick could only hope that Tesla’s troopships were in pursuit of the Invid leader. From all reports, he had actually strangled the Regent’s simulagent onboard the SDF-3, and there had been that persuasive speech before the turnaround on Spheris. But who knew what Tesla had planned for the day after tomorrow? He was no longer the same being they had encountered on Tirol almost three years ago.

  Rick had no way of knowing Dr. Emil Lang was nursing similar thoughts about change and transformation clear across the seas and nebulae of the local group. He knew only that victory was no longer a guarantee of order; in fact, there seemed to be a measurable quantity of disorder attending the Sentinels’ liberation campaign. An entropic dispersal; a scattering and depletion that grew more pronounced with each world set free. Half his command returned to Tirol; the Praxians uprooted; Cabell, Max, and Miriya on Haydon IV; Janice Em and Tesla reconfigured; Burak crazed … And indeed his own image seemed to bear this out: his near–shoulder-length hair, the mismatched pieces of uniform and weaponry.

  Rick turned to glance at Lisa, busy at a terminal which by rights had no place in their bedroom. She was outfitted in knee-high boots, leggings, and a hide skirt the Praxian Zibyl had given her on Haydon IV. Her admiral’s jacket was worn over a Garudan fringe vest, a kind of techno headband kept her long hair back. There were Karbarran air rifles in one corner of the room, Badger assault pistols near the bed, clips and bandoliers, halberds and grappling hooks. And it wasn’t just this room but the whole Ark Angel that looked like this; not just Rick and Lisa Hunter but the entire crew. If they were not really the pirates the Plenipotentiary Council had branded them, they were certainly dressing the part!

  “What is it?” Lisa asked over her shoulder, catching Rick staring at her.

  Rick smiled and shook his head. “Nothing. I guess I was just daydreaming.”

  Lisa narrowed her eyes. “About?”

  “Maybe about the first time we met,” he said, coming over to her, taking her upraised hand, and kissing it. “You in civilian clothes. Kim, Vanessa, and Sammie.”

  Lisa laughed and leaned back to glimpse her reflection in the monitor screen. “And you and Roy all duded up, two hotshot fly-boys on the make. ‘Mr. Lingerie!’ ”

  “Macross,” Rick said, sighing.

  She squeezed his hand. “We’ve come a long way, baby.”

  “Yeah, look,” he said, gesturing to himself and laughing.

  She reached up to straighten the collar of his jacket. “I think you look terrific. I was proud of you today, Rick, the way you handled Burak.”

  “Even though you knew I was faking it.”

  “You weren’t faking it,” she countered. “We’re committed to Peryton—obligation or not. Nothing will change that. Burak has to be made to understand.”

  “Not even a chance for a quick end to the war.”

  Lisa tightened her lips. “Not even that.”

  Rick looked away from her.

  “Let me hear you say it, Rick,” she said, suddenly concerned.

  “Not even that,” he bit out.

  Elsewhere in the ship Burak was meeting in private with Garak and Pye, the two Invid scientists who had been with the Sentinels since the liberation of Garuda. The Perytonian had the two pinned up against the bulkhead of their quarters/jail cell, his hands at their throats. Behind him at the door stood two of his devilish cadre, who had neatly disposed of the rooms’ Karbarran guards.

  “Do I need to ask again?” Burak said in the lingua franca, his horns poised for a pass.

  “We know nothing!” Pye gasped, pleading for his life.

  “You had the clone on Garuda. Your scanners peered into his mind. What did they reveal? How is Peryton to be spared? Speak, or die by my hands!” Burak held their ophidian eyes in his gaze, willing the truth to surface. The two had been present when Tesla had first worked his magic; they had seen for themselves the transmogrification, the link the Invid had established with Burak that day in this very hold. “Speak!” he commanded them, trying to summon a similar psychic bolt from his depths.

  Just then the door to the hold slid open and Janice Em sidestepped in, her Badger in an upraised two-fisted grip.

  “Hold!” Burak ordered his companions.

  The two moved back.

  “Release them,” Janice said, gesturing to the Invid.

  Burak grinned and opened his powerful hands; the scientists slipped from his grip and fell gasping for breath to the floor.

  �
��They can’t tell you anything, Burak.”

  “You never know until you ask, changeling. And the Zor-clone was not available.”

  Janice moved toward a corner of the hold and brought the pistol to her shoulder, pointing it toward the ceiling. “I can tell you what you need to know about Peryton.”

  Burak traded looks with his cohorts and relaxed his stance some. “Speak to me from your true face, then. Unmask yourself.”

  Janice complied. Without visible effort, her skin lost color, becoming transparent and leaving the blood vessels and Human-made musculature of her face revealed. Her eyes emitted an eerie light, and what there was left of her expression became flat, unblinking and non-Human.

  “You would make Tesla a lovely bride.”

  Janice ignored the comment and said, “The Awareness opened my eyes to some things that bear on Peryton’s curse, some things that you are meant to understand. Zor believed he would be helping your world by seeding it with the Flowers of Life. If you seek someone to blame, you must go further back—to Haydon.”

  Burak made a disgruntled sound. “Haydon? Then I may as well blame the Great Shaper, the Great Geode …”

  “It would all mean the same,” Janice told him. “When the Invid came they sealed off Peryton’s one chance for salvation; but there is still time to rescue your world from the brink.”

  “But how?” Burak asked, eager now, captivated.

  “The hive is the key.”

  Burak took an anxious step forward. “The hive … But tell me, changeling, do I delude myself, am I to be the one?”

  The light from Janice’s eyes waned, then grew brilliant again. “You are the one.”

  Burak threw back his head and roared. “And Tesla,” he sneered after a moment. “Does he have a role to play in all this, or were his words empty?”

  “Tesla has a role,” Janice said, “an all-important one.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”

  Albert Einstein

  Is this what lay in store for kings and fathers? the Regent asked himself as he paced the floor of the Home Hive. Mismanagement at the lower levels and a son’s rebellion?

  It was inconceivable: Optera under assault—again! Not that much remained to waste; the Robotech Masters’ warrior giants have seen to that. Nevertheless the planet was still the Invid homeworld, and whether bountifully flowered or as barren as some rogue moon it would always remain so. Only this time it wasn’t Zentraedi—but Invid against Invid, with the renegade Tesla at the helm of the assault.

  The Regent whirled on his personal guards, a formidable dozen in full-body armor standing alert by the base of the hive’s bubble-chambered brain. On the floor in front of them in postures of genuflection were three barefoot Invid scientists in sashed jackets and white trousers suggestive of a martial arts gi.

  “You have wasted our most precious reserves,” the Regent told the three.

  He was referring to the hive’s recently transmuted Special Children, who were suffering heavy losses at the hands of the troops and Inorganics Tesla had mustered on Spheris. The Regent had been expecting much more from the egglike things the Regess had left behind on Optera, but his scientists had disappointed him—a mistake no being could make twice.

  “These were to be our grand warriors,” the Regent continued to rave, “and instead you feed them to Tesla as if they were but scraps of discarded fruit!”

  “We tried, Your Grace,” one of the three whimpered, risking a look up at his twenty-foot-tall judge and monarch. “But we dare not make demands of the Genesis Pits. I beg you to recall—”

  “Silence, slug!” With a slight downward motion of his four-finger hand, the Regent summoned a lieutenant forward.

  “My lord,” the soldier said, smartly snapping to.

  “To the Pits with them,” the Regent bellowed, his cobra hood puffed, suffused with violent color. “Devolve them and see that they are sent to the front.”

  As the scientists were dragged screaming from the chamber, the Regent turned his attention to the communication sphere, live images of battle strobing from within its cellular confines. Waves of Inorganics, Hellcats, Scrim, and Odeon clashed in the outlying districts, sterile hillsides and valleys that had once provided spiritual nourishment for a world and an inward-turning race. While overhead, through skies as pale as death, a battle raged to the very edge of space, ship against ship, Invid against Invid, locked in a war of like minds. And somewhere above the madness was death’s harbinger—a Special Child of his ex-wife’s own making, transfigured by the Fruits of half-a-dozen worlds into something beyond reckoning.

  “Is the link established?” the Regent demanded of a cowering tech at the controls of an instrumentality sphere. The screams of the scientists could still be heard, a hollow roar in the passways that led to the Genesis Pits.

  “Not quite—”

  “See to it!”

  Given a choice, the Regent would have opted for a long soak in the tub, a bit of wave-making in the Perytonian nutrient fluids of his bath. There had been too little of that lately, save for the occasion when Edwards had interrupted him with a somewhat panicked transmission from Tirol. Where was the one-eyed Human now? he wondered. He had presented Edwards with a way out of his difficulties in the hope of forging an alliance, but there had been no word from the general since. Nor any word from his lost queen, the Regess, for that matter. Off following one of her sensor nebulae, the Regent supposed, chasing the Protoculture matrix Zor had spirited out of the Quadrant.

  The Regent shut his liquid black eyes to the thought, only to find himself pursued by cruel memories of the Zor like things that had sent him scurrying from Haydon IV; his brief but painful stay on that diabolical world. The replayed psy scans of the clone, the sight of Tesla hunkered down in his new form …

  The Regent heard the tech announce that a comlink had been established between the Home Hive and Tesla’s troop-carrier flagship. Eyes opened now, he was brought face-to-face with the insurgent as he appeared in the communications sphere, and the image was even more gruesome than he had recalled. Tesla was huge and hairless, five-fingered and almost.… Human! Horrified, the Regent fell back from the sphere, eliciting an amused cackle from his opponent. Was this form some trick of the Fruits, or was Tesla consciously seeking the mutated path the Regess had followed? He refused to contemplate that there was something predestined here, a road not taken.

  “But that is exactly what you must contemplate,” Tesla said, discerning his thoughts. “You are the devolved, a dead end for our race, and it is my primal responsibility to remove you from rule.”

  “You, you are not one of us anymore, Tesla,” the Regent managed, his nasal antennae twitching convulsively. “Go join with my faithless wife on her metaphysical quest if it pleases you. Only leave me to my task here.”

  Tesla enjoyed a laugh, obviously pleased with his new grown mouth. “You are pathetic. The shadow our race casts across the Quadrant. And because of that I cannot allow you to live.”

  Tesla’s words sent a flame through the Regent’s heart, melting whatever fears had gathered there and steeling him. The bloodlust coursed through him like a fix of the finest Flowers, a madness that worked its own frightening transformations. Even Tesla could sense it where he sat sheltered in his ship, as the Regent vented his anger on the commo sphere.

  “Come and take me, then!” he screamed, frightening in his aspect. “Don your battle armor and settle this thing between us. I vow to see you live to face the Pits, to watch as all the fine stuff of your new self is drained from your being, sucked dry by the very powers I have sanctified in this place. Come to me, Tesla! I await you like an impassioned lover. Come and slip into death’s embrace!”

  With that, the Regent cut off the link and smashed his fists into the geodesiclike sphere, caving it in with hammer blow after blow. Spent then, he collapsed cross-legged to the floor, his cerulean robe falling about him
like a tent, and stared up at the eyeless, now agitated organ in the bubble chamber.

  We need a miracle, he told himself.

  “Entering the Tzuptum system, General Edwards,” a Ghost Rider tech reported from his duty station on the bridge. “Optera on-screen.”

  Edwards leaned forward in the command chair to gaze at the darkside disk, its single oblate moon. There was a thrill attached to the moment that cut through all his concerns. Three years ago the planet hadn’t meant anything to him; but in the time since, it had overtaken Tirol itself in importance. The world that had given the Quadrant the Flowers of Life, the Protoculture by extension; the focal point of a galactic war and in this sense—though the ship’s scanners might disagree—a kind of Earth-mate. A celestial twin or doppelgänger.

  “Any traffic?” Edwards asked.

  “Negative, sir. Heavy interference on all frequencies. Trying again.”

  Edwards steepled his fingers and brought his chin to rest on his thumbs. What the hell was going on now? Was this some sort of test the Regent had set up—a way to gauge his reactions to the unexpected, a way to appraise him? Edwards had in fact expected as much, coming in like a fugitive on the run with damned little to offer the partnership: a half-complete starship, a handful of loyal fighters, some mecha and weapons. But he wasn’t about to grovel. They had a common enemy and a similar lust for conquest, and that would have to count for something. And there was the section of living computer Edwards had taken from the nave of Tiresia’s Royal Hall—slumbering now with precious few Inorganics to direct, but programmed with all the Code Pyramid data Edwards had fed into it on Tirol. The strengths and weaknesses of the REF; psy profiles on the Expeditionary Force’s commanders and council members; research data on Lang’s delvings into Protoculture; schematics pinpointing the vulnerable places of the expedition’s new breed of dreadnought.

  If it came to that.

  Edwards threw a nervous look over his shoulder, certain he had glimpsed something sneaking up on Mm. But there was only a tech seated at his station, bent over his console, his back turned to Edwards. No one on the bridge had picked up On his turn, but Edwards made a covering move just in case. It had been happening more and more lately, this sense of peripheral threat, ever since he’d helped that Lynn-Kyle into the afterlife. The suicidal fool.