End of the Circle Read online

  In the middle of the confusion another escort VT, an Alpha, appeared, called back from its CAP flight, requesting instructions. As boss of the SDF-3’s fighter command, Max got on the net.

  “Get down here right now.”

  “But Commander Sterling, shouldn’t I—”

  “I said land!”

  With a dozen different matters vying for his attention—guarding against further attack, counting heads to see if anyone else had been taken, checking whether the Beta pilot was still alive, raising the dimensional fortress for reinforcements and to arrange a safe pullback—Rick didn’t realize what Max was doing until it was too late.

  Max was gone, the second-generation Alpha shrieking away in Fighter mode, going supersonic in its ballistic climb, its sonic booms shaking the ground of Omphalos. The VT’s pilot was standing there bareheaded—Max having appropriated his thinking cap helmet—staring after his departing craft.

  He saw Rick. “Sir, he didn’t even stop to call for reinforcements.”

  “I know; it’s being done.”

  Of course, it would be precious minutes before more VTs could get there from the low-orbiting SDF-3. The fighter jock nodded. “No way was he gonna wait, sir.”

  Rick, watching the spot where Max had disappeared in the distance, agreed. “No, the gauntlet’s been thrown, Lieutenant.”

  The Alpha was one of the best in the SDF-3 inventory, a souped-up new armored Alpha version of a second-generation VT—that was why Max had assigned it to fly security for the ground party—but it was all he could do to keep the Black Knight in view.

  “Black Knight” was the way he had come to think of his antagonist. Supposedly, that made him the White Knight, but he felt a poor excuse for one.

  And a despicable failure as a father.

  He had worried about Miriya from the first, always apprehensive because she had gone through the sizing chamber, had been subjected to so many dangers, had nearly died in battle and childbirth alike—he himself had nearly killed her! And for Aurora, otherworldly entity from the very start, with her mind powers and unnatural maturation rate, Max had had constant concern.

  But Dana, Dana … what malign brilliance for the being that ruled newspace to test him this way! He had left Dana behind on Earth against his own better judgment when the SDF-3 set forth. No one but Miriya—except perhaps Aurora—knew how bitterly he’d condemned himself when he’d heard about the suffering and hardship she had had to bear.

  Never knowing a true home, growing up in war, her heart wounded terribly by Zor Prime and her very essence nearly raped by the madman Zand—Max could barely bring himself to think of those things, for when he did, he wished he had never been born.

  His love of his family and the sense of calm Miriya and Aurora gave him were the things that had made Earth’s greatest Robotech fighter gradually put aside combat over the years. So of course, what better way to draw him back into war in all earnest than this? And again it was Dana, poor Dana, suffering because of Max.

  What pitiless genius! The Regess would have her fight.

  Max realized he’d been rasping an endless string of soft, monotonic obscenities and stopped. He monitored the fighter ops and tac nets only to discover that none of the other VTs could get a fix on the Black Knight. Nor could the SDF-3, even though the bandit was making a paint as big as a house on his scopes.

  He was not surprised.

  With his burners wide open, he gained slowly on the grotesque mecha. It was not going at multimach—which it certainly seemed capable of doing—and it was staying at low altitude. He prayed that that meant Dana was still unharmed.

  The Black Knight went all the way down to the deck, and Max lost it in terrain obstructions and ground scatter. He brought up a detailed topo display from the SDF-3’s orbital mapping memory but couldn’t guess what the kidnapper’s next move would be.

  He was so intent on it that he almost died; the night-dark mecha came howling out of a mountain rift, firing a spread of missiles at him from the bulbous pods under its strangely articulated arms.

  Max reacted instantly, plying the Hotas but, more important, imaging through his thinking cap. The uncanny instincts and nearly instantaneous reflexes that had made him a living legend were as sharp, as apt, as ever. The Alpha rolled vertical, two missiles boiling by just beneath his overturned canopy, then rolled again into a power dive, narrowly avoiding another spike-snouted killer.

  Max banked, nearly tearing the VT’s wings off, as the enemy came charging straight for him. The fist that had held Dana was enclosed now, a smooth armored globe; there was no way to tell whether she was alive or dead in there.

  The Veritech dodged the Black Knight, then Max went ballistic and poured on full emergency military power as his antagonist launched another spread at him. He twisted and jinked, cutting in his jamming and countermeasures gear as missiles seared by and left their fiery corkscrews all around him.

  Swathed in their trails, he mechamorphosed on the fly, went to Battloid, turning and coming to bay with his rifle/cannon in his mecha’s alloy fist as the enemy came howling up after him.

  Max was about to open up with the heavy pulsed laser battery but stopped himself at the sight of the globed fist. The famed top ace reflexes failed him, and he froze, unable to use his weapons.

  The Black Knight opened up with a mecha hand weapon of its own, an affair shaped like a dory, from which purple lightning broke. Max feinted, jetted the other way, and nearly eluded the shot. But a snapping tongue of discharge caught the Battloid’s left leg, blasting a rent in the armor there.

  But in the interim, the distance between the two had closed. Max gathered himself and kicked in all thrusters, pouncing on the enemy rather than avoiding it. The Black Knight caught him with terrifying strength.

  The two mecha fell through the sky, locked together in mortal combat.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  And so these equations expose a long-hidden truth: We now know the nature of the heretofore unimaginable energies that existed in the first, irreducible instant after the creation of the universe. That the last vestige of them is to be found in the distilled essence of a Flower is something to ponder, were there time.

  But there is none.

  From Exedore’s notes, written in the Royal Hall during the approach of Haydon IV

  By the time Cabell returned to the observation/command post high atop the Royal Hall pyramid, the drives of the departing evac ships were mere sparks—there were a dozen or so of them, containing a few thousand clones, human holdouts, a handful of XTs, and a pet or two.

  Exedore noted the smudges and stains on the old savant’s robes. “There was violence.”

  Cabell nodded wearily. “I did what I could, but yes. Less, though, than I’d feared, given the fact that there was only room for a relative few to escape. All dread the sphere ships’ coming.”

  Exedore grunted. Valivarre lay dead in space undergoing repairs; the ore ship might have lifted the entire populace of Tiresia to safety. But then, there had been no time to organize a large-scale evacuation; those who had escaped on the few ships at the spaceport were essentially those who had been there or nearby when the disastrous battle demolished the Local Group fleet.

  “At least the wait will not be long,” he added. The flock of a hundred-odd ominous metallic bubbles was even then entering the upper atmosphere. “The rest will go underground to shelters, I suppose, or perhaps break into the bistros for a final toast to life.”

  “That’s more than the Haydonites got, or the Local Group fleet crews, either,” Cabell observed. There was no sign of Haydonite life aboard the sphere ships, and it was presumed that the artificial race had perished when Haydon IV had been destroyed. Neither was there any sign of the Awareness’s survival, and that was of some comfort to the two savants; the Awareness had been perhaps Haydon’s greatest weapon.

  “Come,” Cabell bade. “We’ve not much time.”

  Not having caught his br
eath, he was huffing again within a few steps. Exedore caught up and lent a supporting arm; he was physically younger, though he was the older of the two.

  They went to the pinnacle of the Royal Hall, which they’d polarized to transparency, so that it seemed open to the sky. In it was the facsimile Protoculture matrix.

  They had both seen the original and now considered this Second Generation manifestation. Lang had once observed how it resembled an old-time representation of an atom: a complex interlinking of ring orbits some two hundred feet across, suspended in midair by its own internal forces.

  However, where the original matrix glistened in rainbow colors, this fabrication was harsh white and gold, and the musical sound coming from its gleaming nucleus seemed more strident, more ominous, than that produced by Zor’s original creation.

  Now, though, the two observed in the matrix certain anomalies and instabilities that hadn’t been there a short time before. Their research told them that, indeed, the Shapings were reaching some climactic point, a cusp or crux in events even more important than the conversion of the original matrix years ago in the mound where the SDF-1 lay buried.

  “Come,” Cabell bade Exedore. “We haven’t much time.”

  They went to where a new piece of apparatus had been set up. It suggested a kind of elaborate laser drill or boring unit, heavy with magnetic bottling fields and insulator rings.

  “The buildup of Anti-Protoculture energy is still below what the job may require,” Cabell said, “but it will have to suffice.”

  Exedore drew a deep breath, running both hands through his unruly red thatch. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” Once it was done, there would be no backing out, not to mention the danger to Tiresia and perhaps to all of Tirol.

  “The matrix mustn’t fall into Haydon’s hands!” Cabell insisted. “Otherwise, he’ll reduce all that remains of the universe to mere fuel and raw materials for his mad ambitions.”

  Exedore sighed. Cabell was right; it was just that the first matrix had been the Holy Grail for so long, and the second had required such extraordinary striving and genius. To destroy this last vestige of the power of Protoculture seemed to run counter to everything the long wars and researches had been about.

  “You’re correct, of course.” Exedore clapped Cabell on the back tiredly. Strange and sad that things should end this way.

  And an end it would be, since neither of them could survive this last-ditch effort to thwart Haydon’s scheme. Exedore thought of the Micronian stories: Sampson in the temple, Horatio at the bridge. Exedore and Cabell at the Second Gen matrix would outdo all of those.

  Cabell had brought forth two protective faceplates, handing one to Exedore. “Here you are, my dear fellow.”

  Exedore accepted his, slipping it on. “You know, Cabell, I still maintain that one of us can in all likelihood carry out this, er, procedure. There is thus no reason for you to make this sacrifice.”

  “Now, now. We’ve been all over this, old friend. There’s no guarantee that one operator could balance the induction field and simultaneously calibrate the integration mixture. And it’s far too late to automate the process. No, that just won’t do—otherwise I’d have insisted you leave.”

  Exedore shook his head, settling the faceplate into place. Strange how, so late in his long years, he had become friends with such an odd assortment of beings: Micronians, Sentinels, even a clone of Zor himself. And Cabell, who was a companion and kindred soul, rather than the master his position would once have required him to be.

  Both of them were working as fast as they could even while they were musing. Surveillance satellites gave word that the sphere ships were making planetary approach at much higher speed than had been foreseen.

  Still, Exedore saw calmly, he and Cabell would have time to carry out their last act. The special magnetic bottling fields began to come into existence, and in another few minutes Protoculture and Anti-Protoculture would mix in mutual annihilation.

  There was another warning tone from the surveillance satellites. “An energy plexus of unknown type has been detected, originating from the sphere fleet, moving in the direction of Tiresia.”

  The two companions stopped their work and looked at the speaker. “Describe its nature.”

  “It is nonmaterial,” came the reply, “a webwork of mental energy in some ways resembling the Awareness and yet unlike it.”

  Cabell was horrified. “That is because it is no longer linked to the instrumentality of Haydon IV. We’ve been caught unawares!”

  He leapt to his controls, Exedore doing the same, and they prepared to fire the Anti-Protoculture infusion device, ready or not. But even as they did, the computer voice from the satellite net announced, “Calculations show that there is no time to complete your current endeavor. The Awareness has raced ahead of the sphere ships and now encompasses the Royal Hall.”

  But by then Cabell and Exedore didn’t need the computer to tell them something was wrong. A sparkling network, like a highway system of strobing luminescence in the sky, had sprung into being all around the hall—not the Awareness itself but a side effect of the Awareness’s presence, an exertion of its artificial mind powers.

  The inside of the grand pyramidal chamber holding the matrix became like an aquarium filled with strange, insubstantial waters, shimmering air showing colors to which neither Exedore nor Cabell could put a name. It made the facsimile matrix’s music turn ominous and caused it to glimmer in a new and sinister fashion.

  Cabell, suffused with light, felt his consciousness slipping away. “Fire! Do not wait!” He held his grip on his senses for an extra moment, contriving to fall against the control panel and hook one arm over the ignition release, dragging the lever down with him.

  Exedore, seeing what he had done, stabbed with the last of his strength for the firing button, even though he thought the charge was too low to accomplish the full destruction of the matrix. As his finger descended, he saw that the firing unit was aglow with the Awareness’s light.

  It all made such chilling sense; the Awareness had been removed from its instrumentality—Haydon IV itself—and yet maintained in a coherent state. So Haydon has disembodied his AI construct and sent it here to fuse with the matrix—its new instrumentality.

  The firing unit failed to function, of course. The device built by Exedore and Cabell to destroy the matrix began to die, its fields falling silent, its Anti-Protoculture beginning to decompose at once, returning to the quantum foam from which it had been extracted with such enormous effort.

  The light effects of the Awareness’s merging with the matrix showed some of the cat’s-cradle patterning that had been observed within Haydon IV. Exedore slumped in his place at the controls.

  All across Tiresia, those who were brave, curious, or fatalistic enough to want to bear witness to the end peeked forth from their concealment. Out of the Royal Hall’s peak rose a swirling nebula, showing some characteristics of the Awareness, some of the facsimile matrix, and some that were totally unfamiliar.

  The nebula lit the city as it ascended higher into the night toward the waiting sphere ships. Tiresia was spared a last and utter destruction. Exedore and Cabell roused themselves from the paralysis of the Awareness’s visit and watched the nebula of force rise up into the blackness to rejoin Haydon.

  Max had hoped to score a quick victory in hand-to-hand combat with the black mecha, but the enemy machine was tremendously strong and agile, at least a match for his Alpha and maybe more.

  He held his own against it, though, his own lightning reflexes being relayed through the “thinking cap” and a lifetime’s training in unarmed combat coming to his aid.

  Above all, he clung to the thing’s globular right fist, terrified that if he released it for even an instant, the black mecha would harm or kill Dana, perhaps even by smashing it against Max’s own Battloid.

  The two war machines wrestled and struck at each other as they fell from the sky, neither one’s thrusters able to
stop it or give it the upper hand. Max tried to force the foe’s right arm around to gain leverage with his Battloid’s legs and rip loose the all-important right arm. But the enemy was fiendishly clever and nearly managed to kick his Battloid’s head off.

  In all the confusion, though, the two managed to get their foot thrusters under them and cushion their fall somewhat. They crashed into the top tier of a three-layer forest canopy, breaking off limbs and sending wildlife flapping and skittering.

  They hung up in the second tier layer, entangled in more branches and networks of heavy vines. Max thought he saw a chance to pin his antagonist where one of the great trunks divided, immobilizing the black mecha and giving him the chance he needed to rescue Dana.

  But the foe seemed to read his mind and struck at the Battloid’s head with the globe at the end of its right arm. Max dodged desperately to avoid harming his daughter and lost his balance. The Black Knight brought its huge left fist down on the Alpha where a human’s collarbone would be.

  The Battloid reeled, falling …

  Rick dashed to catch up with Louie, who in turn was hotfooting it so as not to fall behind Lang. “Halt, goddammit!”

  If anybody could shed some light on what was happening, it was the two Protoculture hotshots, but neither seemed inclined to stop. Finally Louie, younger and fleeter of foot, caught up with Lang and hauled him around by one shoulder. “Doctor! Listen to me!”

  “Let go!” Lang shoved Louie with that strange strength Rick had seen him exhibit on one or two rare occasions. But though Louie was hurled back with extreme force, taking an impact against a tree that made Rick wince, he bounced back for more, taking up the chase again.

  “Rick!” It was Lisa; perhaps no other voice could have made him stop and turn around just then. She was coming along at a run, too, with Scott Bernard and Marlene. The children and most of the others were following more slowly in good order, but Rick noticed that Kazianna was nowhere to be seen.