End of the Circle Page 31

  He got on the tac net to the guards posted back at the landing zone. “Hold Doctors Lang and Nichols under close arrest until I get there—and keep ’em away from each other!”

  He had time to repeat the message for clarity’s sake, with the guard detail commander acknowledging, before Lisa caught up.

  “Rick, Marlene says everything’s starting to unglue or melt down. Something’s trying to change even the Regess’s plans.”

  Marlene was nodding. “I can feel it, even though my connection with the Protoculture isn’t as strong anymore. I believe that the Regess and something else are about to lock in some tremendous struggle.”

  “Haydon?”

  Lisa nodded, “It sounds like a good bet. I wanted to hear what Aurora had to say, but she’s gone, too—she and Miriya and Kazianna.”

  She pointed to a disappearing Quadrano armored suit, vanishing in the direction Max and the Black Knight had taken. “Something about that black mecha, and none of them would take the time to explain.”

  Rick wanted to wait until they were all back aboard the SDF-3 to clear things up, but he understood that there might not even be that much time. “What do Roy and the other kids say?”

  “They’re too upset to make a lot of sense, but they obviously think something very dangerous is about to happen.”

  “That’s it, then; we get everybody back to the ship before we do anything else.” As he said it, they heard the sound of heavy engines, and one of the two shuttles lifted off. Rick got the group moving as fast as he thought they could stand. Luckily, Kazianna had left her Zentraedi behind to help maintain security.

  Just before the party reached the landing zone there was another roar, and an Alpha went leaping away after the shuttle.

  When the group got to the remaining shuttle, they found dazed security people dealing with their own wounded. “I—I’m not sure how it happened, sir,” a rattled commander told Rick. “We had Doctor Lang and Doctor Nichols in custody—and then suddenly Lang had knocked out three of my best people, and the shuttle hatch opened all by itself to let him in.

  “Everybody piled on Nichols to make sure he didn’t get away. We had ’im held down pretty good until one of the Battloids just knelt down, without anybody even at the controls, to get him loose. Then he boarded and flew off after Lang.”

  “The new age of miracles,” Vince muttered.

  Rick didn’t answer. Lisa had already sent someone to see if the remaining shuttle was working; it was, as were the mecha.

  “Various people have had their mental powers expanded in one fashion or another,” Jean Grant observed. “It seems that, at least in some cases, those expanded powers are now growing.”

  Rick heard a thoughtful note in her voice and turned to her to see her looking at the SDF-3 children. Lisa blurted, “Jean, what are you saying?”

  For a moment Rick feared the same thing his wife did: that Jean’s point was that the children were now to be considered a threat, that it had at last come down to war within families.

  But instead, Jean Grant showed the first hint of a smile they had seen from her in a long time. “What I’m saying is, the children think it’d be a good idea to get out of newspace—and the Regess is somewhat occupied all of a sudden—and somewhere not too far away, our spacefold drives are sitting there waiting for us.”

  In the moment’s silence that followed Rick heard the strange cries and stridulations of Omphalos’s wildlife. Vince threw an arm around his wife and kissed her. “You’re one of a kind, kid.”

  Rick was already giving hand signals. “Okay, get ready to board. We’ll all have to squeeze onto one shuttle.”

  “Are we going home, Daddy?”

  He reached down and gathered up his son. “Yes, we are.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  How hot a pilot was Max Sterling? Perhaps this simple observation makes the point best: Among the VT fighter jocks, his modest, upbeat middle-American manner of speech replaced the Chuck Yeager drawl that had dominated among pilots for decades and sifted down among other fliers as well.

  If you don’t understand how very much that meant, go ask any old stick-and-rudder hand.

  Theresa Duvall, Wingmates: The Story of Max and Miriya Sterling

  All his training, experience, and remarkable skills came to nothing in that critical moment after Max was struck by the Black Knight.

  But blind chance stepped in to fill the gap, if only for a half instant. A springy hawser of vine had become looped around his Battloid’s foot, and it served the dual purpose of swinging him around to where he could get a grip on the immense tree trunk from which he was suspended and allowing him to lash out with his foot.

  But most importantly, it bobbed him out of the line of fire of his foe’s dory-shaped hand weapon. The purple lightning snapped and discharged, blowing a distant limb to vapor; before the enemy could correct its aim, the massive metal battering ram that was the Battloid’s foot connected. The Battloid-scale hand weapon went flying.

  At the same time, Max was firing thrusters, righting himself. He rose on full back and leg blasts to grapple with his enemy, pounding the weapon out of its fist. Locked together, they fell to bend down a stout branch that, even though it cracked somewhat, sprang back like a diving board to flip them into empty air. They left behind a trail of smoldering foliage and a few fires, but the vegetation was too wet to burn easily.

  Again they fell, but this time Max had both hands fast at the Black Knight’s right wrist. Both fired thrusters, heaving this way and that, kicking and flailing. Max saw the ground coming at him and twisted to cushion his landing with blaring power bursts. The black mecha wasn’t as alert, and he managed to land on top of it.

  They had come down in a large clearing, branches and leaves and lengths of vine raining down after them, along with burning bits of debris.

  The enemy lay there stunned and partially staved in, shorted power leads crackling and throwing off sparks. Max seized a hold, planted his feet, twisted, and pulled with all the might he could focus through the thinking cap. With a shower of sparks and the tearing loose of strangely designed linkages, the right arm came off.

  While the foe thrashed and bounced about the clearing in spasms, Max jumped clear to lay the globe aside carefully. He wanted more than anything to make sure Dana was all right, but there was no time. The living demon that was the black mecha might come at him again at any moment.

  There wasn’t even time to answer as, amazingly, he heard Kazianna Hesh’s voice come over the net, though he thought his com equipment had been knocked out. “Max! Where are you?”

  Even more strangely, he thought he heard Miriya’s voice, too, and strangest of all, Aurora’s—for Aurora seemed to be speaking directly into his mind.

  Father, no! No!

  It was no time to give in to hallucinatory voices, though; the Black Knight was back on its feet, coming his way in a tottering run that covered a dozen yards at a time. Max imaged, and his rifle/cannon slid into his grip; the thought that his daughter might even now be lying there dead made it that much easier to draw a bead.

  “Max! Freeze!”

  He had no idea why Kazianna would be yelling that in his ear, and so in the end it was confusion rather than discipline that made him hesitate for the telling split second. In that moment the Quadrano powered armor suit came barreling through a curtain of thick-leaved branches and interwoven vegetation, throwing itself on the Black Knight from the left.

  Max held his fire and watched, astounded, as Kazianna sought not to terminate the enemy but to subdue it without harming the occupant and to shield it from Max’s fire.

  The Black Knight fought wildly, but Miriya had come into battle fresh and uninjured, armor operating at peak levels, with the advantage of surprise. Moreover, the viragos of the elite powered armor units in effect fought exclusively in what the REF would term Battloid mode; the contest was on Kazianna’s chosen turf.

  Kazianna called into play a
ll the tricks of close-in mecha brawling that she had picked up in a long Quadrano career. Though the interloper was clever and savage, in the end Kazianna held it immobilized and forced it to one knee, standing behind and maintaining a complicated arm-bar hold on it.

  Max expected her to deliver the coup de grace or at least disable the thing utterly. But to his shock, Kazianna freed one hand for a moment, made a quick move, and dropped a hand weapon of her own onto the forest floor, almost within reach.

  Max made a decision and raised the rifle/cannon again, hoping he could avoid hitting Kazianna but determined to blow away the black mecha. His Battloid’s finger was squeezing the trigger when Miriya’s voice came to him again. “Max, don’t shoot!”

  And Aurora’s voice spoke in his mind: We have to break the spell, Father! Don’t you see what’s happened? She sent a vivid image into his mind, the clearest mental link he was ever to have with his confounding younger daughter.

  “Oh, my God,” he whispered.

  His Battloid’s hand lowered, the rifle/cannon falling from its lax grip. He waited as Kazianna slowly released her hold on the Black Knight. The thing reached out slowly, almost unwillingly, taking up the gun Kazianna had thrown down, and began to come to its feet.

  The war queen of the Quadranos waited, tensed, to pounce on the strange mecha again if it seemed about to fire on Max, but such a contest might come out either way. The thing was moving uncertainly, as if in a trance.

  Max could feel Aurora’s thoughts pouring toward it. Miriya’s voice came over the com net to it. “This isn’t what you want. Come back to us.”

  Max stood looking into the weapon’s muzzle, arms hung at his sides, in the profoundest torment he had ever known. “Whatever happens, please—always, always know that … that I love you. We’ve always loved you with our whole hearts.” Then he stood up straight, the gun barrel centered on him, waiting.

  The Black Knight’s aim wavered, and after what seemed like a lifetime it dropped the weapon with a cry of utter misery in a voice they all knew. The mecha staggered, and Kazianna caught it, already working at the unfamiliar lock-downs to crack it open.

  Max dashed to them, reconfiguring as he went so that he sprang down from a kneeling Guardian whose huge metallic hands helped keep the supine Black Knight steady. As he got down, Aurora and Miriya were emerging from Kazianna’s open helmet, Miriya helping Aurora lower herself to the ground. They had ridden in the powered suit, which had been retrofitted back during the monopole mining operations on Fantoma to carry Micronian observers.

  Kazianna had gotten the soot-black, alien-contoured chest plate open. Max, Miriya, and Aurora scrambled up and raced to gather around the pilot’s seat, Max fumbling to remove from her a thinking cap that looked more like an instrument of torture.

  Dana, coming out of whatever spell it was the Regess had used to throw open her dark side, blinked up at them. “Dad, I—uhhh! Don’t hate me; I didn’t want to—”

  “Shh! We know; everything’s all right.”

  “Dana, we love you; oh, sister …”

  Then all four Sterlings were weeping, trying to talk at once, hugging and kissing each other. At the same time they struggled to get Dana out of the pilot’s seat/iron maiden into which she had been transferred somehow from the globular prison out at the end of the Black Knight’s arm. Aurora’s emanations of grief and joy bathed them all, Kazianna included.

  Kazianna eased back a bit once Dana was down on solid ground again to give the four some room and privacy. She thought of the strange interludes that had come upon the newspace castaways, and some abrupt instinct made her look straight up into the sky.

  Framed by the hole the descending mecha had made in the forest canopy, a single gargantuan eye that Kazianna knew now for the Regess’s gazed back.

  The giantess murmured, “You never learned this from Zor, did you? No, nor from the Great Work, or your Genesis Pits, or even the transcendence itself.”

  But the Regess made no answer, and there was no sign what the new data would mean to her race/self.

  Then that last, separated part of her attention was gone, reunited with the rest of her, as the Regess addressed herself to the threat she sensed from Haydon.

  People were used to deferring to Lang, to obeying without question the driving force of the SDFs, RDF, and REF. Even when he landed in a shuttle whose jamming gear was fouling up communications with the planet below, even when he emerged alone and gave orders to seal all flight decks and air locks, even when he walked away without a word of explanation or authorization, they automatically moved to obey. Even Xien knew his authority lay, in reality, somewhere far below Lang’s.

  Perhaps every human’s did.

  Niles Obstat attempted to get into the shuttle, to shut down the countermeasures and jamming gear so that the SDF-3 could contact the ground party, but the shuttle refused to open no matter what he tried.

  Lang was already racing to his sanctum sanctorum back near Engineering when he heard the PA chatter about an unauthorized air lock opening and the arrival of an Alpha. He was too busy thinking about other things to curse, but his lips curved a bit in a cold smile. Nichols the cyber-master; what an unexpectedly worthy opponent!

  Louie emerged from the VT to find the people waiting for him looking like the victims of some psychic plague: dazed and unfocussed, not sure who or what to trust, least of all their own senses. At least Xien and Niles Obstat summoned up the resolve to confront Louie and try to intervene.

  Louie swept them with his black, bug-goggled gaze. “I can’t explain; follow me if you like. Lang has to be stopped.”

  Xien stepped in his way. “Admiral Hunter hasn’t given any orders.”

  “The Hunters and the rest are all right, I think. Ask them yourself.”

  Louie had glanced to where Lang’s abandoned shuttle was carelessly parked. Crew members were swinging a heavy-duty cutting unit into place for forced entry. At Louie’s glance, various nearby sensors registered a change, and somebody from the TIC reported that the jamming had stopped.

  Xien’s mouth became a thin, resolute line, and he pulled his sidearm, training it on Louie. “You stand fast until the admiral says differently.”

  He had just turned to muster a security detail to bring Lang to ground, when they all heard the grinding of mecha.

  All over the hangar deck war machines were moving, mechamorphosing, rousing up like wakened fairy-tale monsters. Xien was brushed back by a Guardian’s careful hand, unhurt but helpless to interfere. The would-be security detail found themselves boxed in by a Battloid and the single functioning second-generation Destroid aboard. Similarly, other personnel moved out of Louie’s way or were moved from it.

  Louie showed a bit of harried delight as three figures stood forth from the shadows to regard him. Strucker, Shi-Ling, and Stirson had to maintain their concentration with so many mecha to remote-control.

  “Keep them all here,” Louie ordered his men. “Same goes for the Hunters and the rest.”

  “Listen, you need us with you,” Shi-Ling began.

  “Uh uh; I’ve got Lang’s number, but he’d just burn you out.”

  The unplugged people present heard the toccatas and rondos of data only as dim sounds from control panels and computer units. To Louie and his disciples it was a symphony and light show that surrounded them and validated Louie’s assertion with hard proof: Only he, with his augmentations, could hope to survive a clash with Lang. Stirson conceded, “We understand. Wipe ’im, man.”

  Louie ran on his way. He never knew if he found the passages empty by some doing of Lang or as a result of the Regess or sheer coincidence. He got to Lang’s sanctum sanctorum to find the heavy hatch of the armored vault module hanging open.

  Emil Lang was poised on a stool within, contemplating the apparatus taken so long ago from Zor’s quarters. Now it was radiant with Protoculture.

  Lang spoke casually, without looking at him. “I think you’ll find this interesting, Doctor. Do come in.�
��

  Louie shrugged out of his jacket. Where his black turtleneck was torn, the bionics and chip technology that had become parts of his body could be seen, along with the cyberport at the back of his neck.

  Lang glanced at him. “Don’t be frightened; it’s too late for you to do me any harm, so I’ve no need to harm you.”

  Louie was not ready to put money on that yet, but it was certain that Lang was on his own playing field. Oh, maybe there was something Louie could do about the door servos or the conventional light fixtures, but everything of any significance was Protoculture, and Lang had already proved who was top dog in that particular arena.

  Louie gulped but entered. What else was there to do? “Doctor, look: I know what you’re thinking, but you can’t control the Shapings. Remember what happened to Zand?”

  Lang’s voice cut like razor wire. “You impertinent little cyborg Pinocchio! Do you think you’ve risen so high that you can look down on me in that fashion?”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  Lang eyed him and grudgingly believed him. “Doctor Nichols, if what we are observing were allowed to come to pass—if real spacetime were drawn into newspace and the whole re-formed along lines chosen by the Regess—I believe that your somewhat unorthodox intellect and talents would make you the new template for the nature of Protoculture.

  “And I do not find that an easy thing to concede.”

  Louie swallowed. “I just—”

  “Please. Allow me to finish. As glorious a thing as that new universe would be—that fresh start, that shining correction, perhaps, of all that’s gone wrong with our old one—there is much that would inevitably pass away. Maybe most, or virtually all, of everything we have known.

  “I don’t celebrate evil or pain, oh, no! But all that’s happened means something, perhaps gives some irreducible validity to existence itself. Or maybe the struggle of evolution against entropy, of ferment against mere sameness.

  “And I find that I cannot let the past die, for all its shortcomings. There are too many precious things in our spacetime, preserved in amber, as it were. I won’t let them perish.”