End of the Circle Read online

  In that second, though, all Kazianna Hesh saw was Breetai, striding his personal domain—the domain of battle—like an icon come to life. The most illustrious and successful of Doha’s field commanders and, after the Old One himself, the biggest and strongest of the entire Zentraedi race.

  It was heresy to think this, but Kazianna did not care: He was like some higher being, some creature superior to other Zentraedi and even to the Robotech Masters.

  But the worship was not mutual; Breetai was still directing his raid and barely gave her a glance. “You! Consolidate your unit and stand by!”

  Then he was gone, and she was rushing to obey. Genders were usually strictly separated among the Zentraedi, where neither physical love nor natural birth were known; only the scope of the Tawkhan campaign had thrown them together so.

  Thus, Kazianna Hesh could not understand what was happening to her—why did his voice and his look obsess her so? Was it madness?

  She studied and admired him from afar, through an age of conflict and conquest. The closest she came to him was when he presided at an awards ceremony for Miriya Parina. Kazianna was only a few paces away, a company commander by then. Breetai did not even spare her a glance.

  By that time he wore the alloy half cowl as a result of his terrible wounds, suffered when Zor was slain. But to her he was only that much more imperial looking. In those days the Protoculture supply was dwindling, the galaxywide war running down like clockwork as both sides’ resources and infrastructures declined. The central mission of the Robotech Masters, and thus the Zentraedi, was to find Zor’s vanished super dimensional fortress and the last existing Protoculture matrix.

  At long last came the end of an epoch, when the terrible beauty of Minmei’s voice, along with human emotions, worked Armageddon upon the Zentraedi. The glories of their history turned out to be a tissue of lies concocted by the Robotech Masters. Kazianna and the rest were a pitiful handful of survivors.

  But for her, something in the human emotions had stirred dormant feelings. For Kazianna, the example of Miriya Parina and her love for Max Sterling pointed the way to an even more audacious thought. If Zentraedi could love human, why could not Zentraedi love Zentraedi?

  In the humble home on Fantoma where Breetai had dwelt as a simple miner an epoch ago, she went to him. And this time she did not permit him to ignore her.

  When death took him from her in combat, she was nearby and saw him sacrifice his life to slay the Regent, end the war. There were fools who looked at the relative size of the combatants—Breetai nearly three times the Regent’s height—and marveled that Breetai had not won outright. They understood nothing of the astounding power the Invid monarch had by then, the strength beyond mere size—or of the debilitating effects of Minmei’s voice, transmitting her torment, forced upon Breetai by the malevolent Edwards.

  Kazianna dismissed all fools. What Breetai had done with his dying breath, no one else who ever lived could have done. And he died in victorious combat, the highest Zentraedi fulfillment.

  Watching him perish in an explosion like the birth of a star, she had wept for the single time in her life.

  “Is anything wrong, Commander?”

  Kazianna’s executive officer’s voice shook her out of the strange reverie, and she realized that barely an instant had gone by. The falling kite-shaped leaf whirled down past her facebowl.

  “Negative. Resume sweep.”

  But something on the planet must have been probing her thoughts, scrutinizing her memories. If it was malign, she meant to destroy it, but for the moment she almost felt grateful to have had Breetai back again even for a few seconds.

  Then the reverie was wiped away by a burst of static. “All units, all units! Hold position! It’s back!”

  “I specifically told the bridge officer not to inform you unless you inquired about the children,” Segundo said. “I am aware that you’re dealing with other crises.”

  “Understood, Doctor,” Lisa acknowledged curtly. Even over the intercom screen he could see the strain on her face. “What is your assessment?”

  The pediatrician stepped aside and let the pickups focus in on Roy, Drannin, and the other children. Once again they sat in their uneven circle, the Zentraedi children towering over the human.

  But there was no doubt about their chant now. “Au-ro-ra, Au-ro-ra, Au-ro-ra …”

  Aurora the psi-child, the accelerated-growth sprite, the one who reached across interstellar distances. Lisa had always been sure she would be able to keep jittery mommy stuff separate from ship’s officer worries, but now she was less certain.

  “I don’t think this is a mental dysfunction or a behavioral aberration in the traditional sense,” Segundo was saying. “I believe that they are rational but that they are responding in a way that we don’t understand to a difficulty or necessity that we can’t perceive.”

  On the bridge, Lisa heard people conferring behind her; the search operation—something was up. “Inform me of any changes, Doctor.”

  She turned to Raul Forsythe. “They’ve found Gnea and Dante,” he said.

  Somewhere far away, Minmei was singing, his head on her lap, her hand stroking his brow. Rem knew it, as he knew that her warm tears were splashing on his cheek, but that was in some other universe …

  On Haydon IV, Zor saw no contradiction to what he had already learned, though Vard had not yet reached the same level of enlightenment. Living matter, inorganic matter, machine, Protoculture—they were all united by certain basics. The fundamental building blocks of Creation had nothing to do with quantum foam any more than they did with plant sap.

  The key understanding was that the universe was a result of the interaction of pure information. Information organized in a way that was so subtle, all-pervading, and elegant that in the end all the wise men, mystics, and scientists had missed it.

  It was not a jarring note, then, to Zor, to see that fact manifested in the from of an artificial planet.

  The expedition to Haydon IV had to be postponed twice while Zor gave his seeming obedience to the Masters and made secret preparations. By that time he was well along in his quiet rebellion.

  The Masters, drunk on the power of Protoculture, were so arrogant, so sure of their hold over him. What better way to fight them than to feed those monstrous egos? They understood no more about Protoculture than a child knew of an energy gun it might find and brandish about.

  But now at last he had come to Haydon IV in his super dimensional fortress, seeing that the preliminary surveys had not exaggerated its beauty, its magnificence. On his own urgings and from their hidden misgivings, the Robotech Masters spared the artifact world any visit from their Zentraedi giants; there was something about its storied Awareness that made the Elders cautious. Haydon IV rendered tribute to them from its apparently endless wealth and went about its enigmatic affairs.

  The Invid, for their own reasons, never made the planet a military target. Maybe they saw it as too desirable a prize to damage. Or perhaps they had heard the daunting stories of how the planet dealt with invaders.

  Zor was welcomed down by the inhabitants of Haydon IV with the kind of remote courtesy for which they were famous. And yet he felt their intense scrutiny. The confusions and mental fogs that plagued the survey team were no obstruction to Zor; where others had missed the looming presence and central importance of the Awareness, he had been attuned to it from the first.

  As for actually gaining access to the Awareness, it was like some absurd parable. Where the Haydonites had turned back all inquiries and all travelers before, they simply watched him. Facing a stupendous hatch that blocked his route to the lower reaches of the planet, he reached by habit for a handful of dried Flower petals from the pouch he carried at his belt.

  He chewed the petals and leaves frequently now—supposed his body was addicted to them, though the true craving stemmed from no physical need. As he tasted the little quid, he felt himself probed by sensor beams. A moment later the titanic door rolled
aside.

  The Haydonites who had flocked around him and kept him under surveillance since his arrival came no farther than the entrance, nor would he let even the faithful Vard accompany him. Zor passed into the lower depths alone.

  He made his way down through the labyrinthine underworld, sustained by it and accepting the paths it opened for him. At last he walked calmly and unhurriedly out into the yawning techno-cavern where the Awareness waited.

  It was a confusion of neon lines in strange patterns, a thing the size of a cruiser. By the time he came into its physical presence, he was quite well acquainted with it.

  When he bespoke it now, though, the Awareness refused to answer. He had the feeling that it was waiting for some final proof, some bona fide, before it lowered its last defenses with him.

  Zor reached into a pocket and drew forth an object he had prepared after long, hard pondering. It was an artificial jewel charged with Protoculture power, formulated from his studies of both the Haydonites’ dzentile and—even more important—the organic gemstones manifested by the Regess when she had assumed humanoid form.

  Zor lifted the jewel to his forehead in self-coronation. A bio-adhesive charge made it fast there. He willed a command, and a ray sprang forth to strike the resplendent cat’s cradle of the Awareness.

  There was a moment’s gravid silence. Then a billion scintillating motes leapt from the Awareness, the material world seemed to fall away, and it opened its fateful dialogue with Zor.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The will to power is disguised in a hundred thousand ways, on many worlds—as service to the public good, or defending the faith, or protecting the nest from outsiders. But at the core it is always the same; exposed to the light, its features are unchanging: a naked lust to dominate and control.

  Not surprising, then, that on that fateful night in a hidden place, the Three who had sworn obedience to the will of the people piled hands in an unholy ritual. Sotted on Protoculture, they put all sham aside and anointed themselves as Masters.

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

  The Robotech Elders stopped straining at the med machines that held them fast. Behind their respirator masks, their furious howls ceased. Haydon was coming, and they understood that there was no escaping.

  Like a mountain on the move, the figure in the gargantuan conduit approached them through the blinding light. With slitted eyes, the Elders watched it come. High above and all around, the Haydonites had ceased their mental hymn singing and fallen quiet.

  With coronas of crackling energy radiating from him and lightning bolts crashing all around the heights of his head and shoulders, Haydon emerged.

  Some of the intermittent transignal messages from their vassals—the Robotech Masters sent to ravage Earth—had told the Elders of the primitive religions of that blighted planet. Now a minor phrase came back to haunt Nimuul: created in God’s image.

  Small wonder the Haydonites were ready to swoon with adoration and ecstasy; before them was He in whose image they had been cast. The Elders used their resentment and irascibility to keep from yielding to the mesmeric spell the sight of Him cast.

  Haydon wore—or had perhaps simply donned the illusion of—a billowing, high-collared cloak like the Haydonites’. From beneath it, feet extended, and yet they floated free of the planet’s surface.

  The stupendous head was smooth and hairless, reminding the Elders of their onetime warlord, Dolza, but Haydon’s skull was higher-crowned and more finely shaped than that. His face was more defined than the Haydonites’; it was some countenance the Elders somehow half recognized but could not place. Where the Haydonites had been born without eyes, mouth, ears, nostrils, the face of Haydon gave the impression that it had once borne those features and they had atrophied from disuse.

  Haydon bore no dzentile, though. In the middle of His forehead pulsed a gland or organ unlike anything the Elders knew of, ridged and scalloped like some shell thing’s back, puckered closed like a sleeping blossom.

  Haydon’s blind cliff of a face panned His domain, drinking in the physical universe after His long hibernation. He became aware of the Elders—or perhaps He had been all along—and the cyclopean head tilted down. The mystic organ in His forehead bloomed open, and for an instant the Elders saw within—a shape and texture they could not discern that nevertheless paralyzed them with dread.

  A beam of searing brilliance burst from the organ to play over the captives. VERMIN, SPEAK!

  Nimuul answered with mindspeech: Look to your proud fleet, Ancient One! Your grand design is in jeopardy!

  There was a concerted moan from the Haydonites, like a low wind. Haydon turned His blank face to the sky, and the beam from His forehead played out across the spherical ships drifting powerless in space over the world He had made.

  The Haydonites and the Elders sensed swift communication between Haydon and His Awareness, like some deep-stratum perturbation. Plainly, Haydon understood then the enormity of what the Karbarrans, Ark Angel, and Louie Nichols’s cybernauts had done.

  From the organ on Haydon’s forehead a black beacon shone forth, swallowing up all the light in its path. The Haydonites wailed wordlessly, and the planet shook.

  Nimmul, Hepsis, and Fallagar united with even more desperation than they had in contacting the Awareness. No, stay your wrath! We’ve come to offer you a bargain, and Protoculture!

  That gave Haydon pause. He stood erect once more, gazing out over His handiwork. A nimbus grew up around him, so effulgent that the Elders had to close their eyes. When they opened them again, Haydon had worked another miracle.

  Where one had stood there was now a trio—a triumvirate, the Robotech Elders registered—shoulder to shoulder, facing outward in a circle. It was impossible to tell which, if any, was the original, but it was clear that while enormous, they were smaller than He who had levitated forth from the bowels of Haydon IV.

  Without any talk, one went back down the conduit from which Haydon had emerged, another floated off across the machine landscape, the Haydonite carpets making way for him, and the third turned back to the Elders. SAY ON.

  Nimuul responded: We know where there is Protoculture, new Protoculture that the Regess did not steal! Enough to power all your ships. We will lead you to it gladly.

  Gladly. It was pivotal that Haydon be given the means to leave spacetime.

  AND IN RETURN?

  In return you will provide us with the means to exert our will over the Local Group star systems and their inhabitants. You will grant us your authority to rule the planets you touched so long ago.

  DONE! The Awareness had already spoken to Haydon of the ships it had built and the single energy that must power them.

  Agreement came so readily that the Elders were tempted to ask for more concessions, but they dared not. It was manifest that Haydon—or the Haydons—wanted nothing more from the physical universe except the means to pass beyond it.

  Haydon raised one hand in a divine gesture. There was a psychic shuddering through the planet as the Awareness prepared to turn itself to new tasks; the Haydonites on their carpets came about in vast flocks to regroup and race away to all points of the compass, bent on missions Haydon had given them. First among those was completion of the unfinished sphere ships.

  Haydon turned back to the Elders. NAME OUR DESTINATION.

  Treacherous as they were, the Robotech Elders were loath to trust anyone. But before the might of Haydon they had no other choice, fearing that if they were uncooperative, he would snuff out their lives and go seeking Protoculture on his own.

  The Elders joined their minds to speak, practically fondling the words with their thoughts. Optera first—“New Praxis,” it is called now. Then … Tirol!

  SO BE IT.

  The planet shifted under them, already on the move. FIRST, WE MUST GATHER UP OUR SPHERE SHIPS. THEN IT WILL BE NECESSARY TO DIVERT TO LASKAR.

  The E
lders were puzzled even as they felt a certain lassitude stealing over them. Your planet’s primary? Why?

  FUEL IS NEEDED FOR SUCH A JOURNEY.

  As they grasped the enormity of that, they felt themselves losing consciousness. A trick! Stop! We demand—

  The Elders’ thoughts faded as the med machines’ sedation took hold. Haydon turned away from them disinterestedly as the carpet on which their thrones sat whisked them out of His presence.

  Haydon had already given His command to the Awareness. Like a worshiping slave, it strained itself to carry out His directions to the fullest.

  Haydon IV gathered in the sphere ships, finished and unfinished alike, holding them in readiness, then reabsorbed what it could of the factory tubes. Haydon saw that His discorporate hibernation had lasted longer than He had foreseen. That and the appearance of the Sentinels, plus the demands of producing the sphere ship fleet, had nearly exhausted the power reserves of the artificial planet.

  Eventually, of course, power could be brought back to full by other means, but there was not time for that. While the Haydonites raced to carry out the labors He had assigned them, the planet left orbit and began its descent toward Laskar, dying lesser sun of the Ranaath system.

  The star’s place in the arc of the sky grew and grew as Haydon IV rushed toward it. The artifact world hurtled past the orbit of the system’s innermost planet. At the same time a strange energy field polarized into existence, surrounding Haydon’s handiwork to protect it—and more.

  It was well within the reach of stellar prominences before it stopped. A preliminary beam licked out from Haydon IV, probing into the monstrous furnace of the star itself. Back poured a mammoth gush of naked power.

  For several long minutes Haydon IV hung there, tethered to its star, drawing in energy as it had drawn in raw materials from the asteroid. Within, its reserves were restored, then filled to repletion, with all the power the planet would need.