End of the Circle Page 3
“Another atmospheric cleansing?” the Zentraedi asked in a quavering voice. “A seasonal change? An internal overhaul, the upwelling of a new lake or the damming of a stream—send something, will you!”
Veidt had glided back to his station by the central data pillar, his high-collared cape a screen for projecbeam schematics, a dizzying light show of flashing alphanumeric analogues and equational abstracts.
“An intruder, perhaps,” Exedore continued, his stubby hands spread atop leaping sheets of hard copy like some Ouija board reader. “An unannounced ship—”
“I heard you,” Veidt sent with a sting. “It is none of those things. Something novel, unprecedented.”
Exedore ceased his futile efforts to steady his work and with some difficulty swiveled to regard the strobing databanks of the Awareness, data scrolls and cards tattooing to the floor at his feet. The information traffic displayed was enough to render the Invid leave-taking a minor itch.
“What is it, Veidt?” Exedore pressed, a note of alarm in his voice. A deep-space view of Haydon IV advanced through the 3-D field of a projecbeam, a variegated ball in time-lapse motion. “Veidt,” he repeated.
“Primary activation sequences have commenced,” the Haydonite sent with curious detachment. “Atmospheric integrity is constant for the moment. Surface damage is projected to be well within accepted parameters. Casualties among offworlders are not expected to exceed a thousand.”
“Casualties?” Exedore said, up on shaky legs, bulging eyes darting between Veidt and the projecbeam field.
Veidt rotated to face him, a lavender brightness pulsating from the center of his smooth forehead. “The crossing is achieved. The Event is occurred. Praise Haydon.”
Careful not to be too literal, Exedore reminded himself. Praise Haydon could mean almost anything. “The Event?” he asked cautiously.
Veidt nodded. “Haydon IV is leaving orbit. Shortly, we will depart the Briz’dziki system entirely.”
Exedore’s mouth fell open. “Haydon,” he muttered. “He has returned to our world.”
CHAPTER
THREE
The motion to leave Earth irradiated rather than leave it to the Invid Regess was carried by a narrow margin. Balloting was kept secret, and there has yet to be discovered a person-by-person breakdown of the vote. Of the ten members of the [Plenipotentiary] Council, there are believed to have been two abstentions—from Stinson and Longchamps. Obstat, Huxley, and others have elsewhere indicated the basis of their individual decisions. Of the participating members of the REF command staff, seven voted in favor of using the Neutron-S missiles, five against. It is altogether ironic that the decision to irradiate Earth was arrived at in Tiresia, where, centuries before, the Robotech Masters had sentenced Optera to suffer a similar fate.
Ahmed Rashona, That Pass in the Night: The SDF-3 and the Mission to Tirol
Lisa dreamed a tunnel in the sky, a radiant corridor stretching timeless across the heavens. Warm to her hands and bare feet, secure and enfolding, redolent with aromas of spring and summer. At one end her father waved good-bye, a smashing figure in his United Earth Government tunic with its breast salad of ribbons and braid; at the other end was a patch of scudded sky that could have belonged only to once-upon-a-time Earth.
It occurred to her that she could not have been more than seventeen, returning to Macross Island after her first real leave. Was this carpeting below her, then? The warm glow the lights of some airport concourse or jetway?
But where were the flight attendants, then; where were her guides? And how could she hope to find her seat without a boarding pass?
She slapped the pockets of her long coat as she walked, panic gaining on her. The light ahead was almost too intense to behold, like the sun itself on a cloudless south Pacific afternoon when there was not a breeze in the world.
The hot sand was making her hurry along, but it was the voice she was responding to now. The panic evaporated, trailing behind her ghostly and diffuse, and the warmth returned. Her mother’s voice, her arthritic hand waving in the light at the end of the corridor. Her guide, to be sure, a smile broadening as Lisa outran the years; the deaths and disappearances that ruined her garden. A child as she approached the light, Earth too remote to touch …
I’m dead! she thought—
—as noise filled her up and air swelled her lungs, bringing renewed life to her pounding heart. A dream, she told herself, the recurrent one her mind reserved for hyperspace folds.
Everyone had them, those nightmares and visions, brief excursions to private heavens or hells. Space lace, some of the crew called it. With an ever-present out-of-body component, an after-life accompaniment.
Only this time she had died, and that had never happened before. Grief coursed through her, a profound sense of loss, a kind of terminal nostalgia. Had it been stirred by the dream? Or did it emanate from the nurturing other she had discovered within herself?
Roy was suddenly on her mind, her bright center in the universe, her barely five-year-old hero. The thought of having to open her eyes filled her with fear. But open them she would.
And the grief propagated.
The SDF-3 bridge was as dark and silent as a tomb. Sweat burst from her palms like splinters of ice.
“Lieutenant Toler,” she said. “Mister Hakawa?”
“Here, sir,” someone answered from a duty station behind the command chair. She called to the rest—Williamson, Price, Martino—and one by one they responded, reborn from dreams. Lisa flathanded the com-line stud built into the arm of the chair and called for Dr. Lang in engineering.
“All systems are down, sir,” said a voice in the darkness—Price, Lisa ventured correctly. “No response from any of the backups. It’s like we’re unplugged.”
“Nonsense,” Lisa returned. “We’re obviously not weightless, Mister Price. And unless we’ve somehow defolded on Earth’s surface, I’d hazard a guess some systems are operational.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Doesn’t anyone keep a damn flashlight up here?” she said, cautiously feeling her way out of the chair. Off to her right she heard a pneumatic hiss, a tear of Velcro. “Everyone stay put,” she called toward the sound. “We’re still on full alert, gentlemen. Besides, I don’t want anyone walking into a bulkhead.” She directed her voice starboard, toward Toler’s station beneath the threat board. “Mister Toler, you’re the youngest among us. How’s your vision?”
“Better than perfect, sir,” Toler told her, a crack in his voice on the last word.
“Do you think you can make your way to the hatch and engage the override?”
“With my eyes closed, sir.”
Everyone laughed, and the tension eased somewhat. “Yes, well, you can keep your eyes open, Lieutenant. This isn’t a test of your agility. I just want to know if the whole ship’s in this fix.”
“I understand, sir.”
Lisa heard Toler’s chair swivel. A few moments later came the low thud of retracting bolts. The air stirred as the hatch slid open and the sound of half a dozen voices drifted in from the operations room. Toler and someone else made startled sounds.
“What happened?” Lisa asked.
A man’s voice growled: “Who is that?”
“Lieutenant Toler. Who’s that?”
“Commander Forsythe, Lieutenant. Stand aside.”
“Sir!” Toler snapped.
Lisa heard a hollow meeting of flesh and bone and a follow-up wince of pain. “Damn, boy,” her bald-headed exec said, “you don’t have to salute me!”
Just then the emergency lights came up, banks at a time, red and somber throughout the bridge. A slight shudder swept through the ship, and Klaxons wailed midnote, signaling battle stations.
“That’s more like it,” Lisa enthused. “Showing up crippled would send one hell of a message to the Regess.”
Forsythe stepped through the hatch, throwing Toler a hard look before joining Price at one of the forward heads-up display screens.
“Can we determine our position?” Forsythe asked.
“Negative, sir. Guidance, telemetry, and astrogation are still down.”
Lisa traded frowns with Forsythe and glanced over her shoulder at the watch officer. “Well, we can at least take a look outside, can’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Raise the forward cowl, Mister Hakawa,” Forsythe said impatiently.
Lisa could barely contain herself. It was almost as though she could dismiss this latest snafu the way a cyclist might shrug off a punctured tire after a thousand-mile journey. Earth, after close to fifteen years. With nothing unforeseen in store for them this time: no accidental jumps to Pluto, no fold hitchhikers to rescue, no surprise attacks by alien cruisers. The REF knew who and what they had come for: the Regess and the world they had lost to her. They knew, too, the Shock Troopers and Pincers they would be facing, and they knew how to engage them.
And best of all, they knew they would succeed.
Six years of effort had gone into this one day, and the fleet that was the result of that labor would be spread out before them, weapons arrays and combat mecha targeted for Reflex Point. Earth, Lisa said to herself again as the forward viewport shields retracted. Earth!
Light of a sort began to filter onto the bridge, only it was neither the welcome warmth of Sol nor the reflected brilliance of their blue-white homeworld.
It was the alien light at the end of Lisa’s tunnel in the sky. It was death light.
On the command balcony of the fortress’s cavernous Tactical Information Center, Rick Hunter stared uncomprehendingly at the monitors affixed to the portside bulkhead.
“I’m sorry, sir,” an enlisted-rating tech stationed at a nearby console repeated, “but the opticals are on-line. This is the external view. Sir.”
In the phasing, satanic illumination of the emergency lights the room could have been a corner of hell. Rick would have taken odds that it was just that: the hell of his space lace given shape during the fold. But unlike Lisa’s recurrent tunnel, Rick’s nightmare vision did not require a jump to ignite it. The set, the setting, the thousand separate elements that composed it could all be traced back to the Genesis Pits on Optera. Walk away from it you might, but turn around and the fear would be there, waiting for you, beckoning you back into its sinister embrace.
An intercom buzzed insistently at Rick’s back. “Command One,” he heard his adjutant say at last. “Doctor Lang, Admiral,” the colonel continued, conveying the mobile over to him.
“What the hell’s going on?” Rick shouted into the mouthpiece. “Where are we?” He glanced at the monitors once more before proceeding. “It looks like fog out there, Lang. Is that possible?”
“I would like to humor you, Admiral,” Lang said, “but, unfortunately, there is little humor in the situation. And if it is indeed a ‘fog,’ as you suggest, it is of the quantum sort. We have life support, but little else, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
Rick’s boot continued to tap the floor long after Lang had finished. The two men had grown distant from each other on Tirol, Lang like some Prometheus with his facsimile Protoculture matrix, and Rick busy with Roy more often than not. The wizard of Robotechnology kept getting stranger while Rick just kept getting grayer.
“How long before you can return power to the drives?” Rick demanded.
It was to be the REF’s final battle, he thought, the one that was to decide their fate, return to them their homeworld or send them back to Tirol, an irradiated Earth in their wake.
Lang launched his patented maniacal laugh through the earpiece. “Perhaps you should abandon your post for a moment and come below, Admiral. There’s something I’d like you to see.”
“I don’t have time for this, Lang,” Rick told him. “Just tell me where we are.” He heard the urgency in his voice and noted that his adjutant was fixing him with a concerned look.
Lang’s laugh trailed off as he cleared his throat. “You may not like the answer, Admiral.”
Rick’s hold on the phone became viselike. “You let me be the judge of that.”
Lang was quiet a moment, then said: “Nowhere.”
In whispered voices behind cupped hands it was often suggested that Dr. Emil Lang ran the ship. Not that he had much to do with command decisions or actual hands-on astrogation, but that he ran the ship in the sense of driving the ship, fueling it. Word was passed in those same engineering huddles that the Reflex furnaces and Protoculture drives were nothing but pretense—mock-ups constructed to put the uninitiated at ease—when in fact Lang himself was the drives. Lang folded space; Lang jumped the fortress from realm to realm.
Lang was aware of all the rumors but did little to discourage them. Myths concerning his powers and prowess had been in the making since the first day he had set foot inside the grounded SDF-1. No one had seen him take the Protoculture mindboost that had altered the direction of his life, but they had read the change in his reshaped eyes. And had his eyes not betrayed him, even had he not taken the boost, they would have invented it for the myth, witnessed that he alone among Earthers was destined to see deeper and clearer than the rest, that the Protoculture had a natural affinity for him.
But that was just the sort of thinking that pointed out how great a distance he had yet to travel. The ship’s drive, he sniggered to himself. Hardly. The ship’s driven, perhaps; the SDF-3’s preconscious libidinal urge …
Lang lifted his eyes to regard the displays once more. Onscreen were remote views into the heart of the fortress’s power plant, safely rendered for a mortal’s eyes, for one did not look long into the naked eye of God and live to describe it. But there was no burning bush now, no ten thousand stars or golden heavens, simply the absence of those things. What Lang saw instead was a reflection of his own pride, the hubris that had dominated him for the past five years. He and Cabell and the Zor-clone, Rem, havesting the Flower of Life from Optera’s regrown fields, coaxing the secret of the Shapings from its trifoliate core, creating a matrix of their own design.
And now this.
Lang saw his face in the display screen and laughed out loud. The Shapings were teaching him a lesson.
He was still laughing when Rick Hunter rushed in, threading his way through the chaos, techs and their bewildered assistants moving frantically from station to station.
“What’d you get me down here for, Lang?” Rick barked, pacing behind Lang’s chair and glaring down at him.
Lang’s upturned look was unreadable as he indicated the displays. His humanity as well as his age seemed to have been arrested by continual contact with the Protoculture.
“See for yourself, Admiral.”
Rick spread his hands atop the console and leaned toward an on-screen computer-enhanced translation of the engines’ subatomic fire. He held the pose for a moment, then glanced at Lang in annoyance. “I don’t see anything wrong, Doctor.”
Lang snorted. “No, of course you wouldn’t, Admiral.”
Rick was used to the condescending tone. “Explain.”
The Roboscientist sighed and blanked the monitor with a tap of a crooked forefinger. “It has vanished, Admiral—the Protoculture. Disappeared.”
Rick’s dark brows beetled. He reached out to reactivate the screen, but Lang’s powerful hand restrained him.
“Take my word for it, Admiral, the Protoculture has vanished.” It would have been senseless to talk about the shadowy presence of the black-robed wraiths Rem had taught him to recognize. “Yes, exactly as it disappeared from the SDF-1,” he added, discerning Rick’s thoughts.
“But how?” Rick began. “Why?”
“To teach us a lesson, I think.”
Rick shook his head. “A lesson?” He swept his arm through an all-encompassing gesture. “Listen to me, Lang. Rheinhardt and the rest of the fleet a
re out there waiting for us. Do you understand what that means?”
The scientist gave him a pitying look. “I assure you, Admiral, the fleet is not out there.”
“Then where the hell are we?” Rick said, at the end of his rope. “And don’t tell me nowhere.”
Lang folded his arms and met the intensity of Rick’s gaze. “All right. It’s possible that we’re still in hyperspace, although there is no evidence to support the hypothesis. It’s also possible that we have died, as some of the ship’s personnel are suggesting. Or that we have somehow jumped to a void in intergalactic space, perhaps jumped beyond the expansion wave of the big bang itself.”
Rick went wide-eyed. “You mean we’ve jumped outside the galaxy?”
Lang shrugged. “It’s simply one theory among many. A jump beyond time could perhaps explain how and why the Protoculture vanished, although our own continued existence would seem to contraindicate it.”
Rick staggered backward into a chair adjacent to Lang’s. “But—but there has to be something out there.”
Lang shook his head. “Not according to our instruments. We are nowhere, Admiral. Not even a when that I can determine. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to put it.”
Rick turned to face him. “Then get us somewhere, Doctor.”
Lang rubbed his chin. “What would you have me do, fashion a world for you out of nothingness?”
Rick forced out his breath. “Yes, damn it. Fashion us a world if you have to.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
“It’s absolutely true. Mom really did have a look, a different grimace for every occasion. But I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone before: The strangest of all Mom’s looks was the one she reserved for any mention of Scott Bernard. Seriously. For the longest time I was convinced that they’d had an affair or something. But then one day Mom told me about the time he stopped by looking for Marlene. There was that look again, the whole time she told the story. And I suddenly realized that I wasn’t seeing one of those what-might-have-been looks but one that was saying what-never-should-have-been.