End of the Circle Read online

  Then he quailed a bit as tentacles of astral malignance curled and quested overhead, the Regess trying to reach the children again. But Minmei’s song kept them at bay.

  Rick realized that his son was tugging at his arm. “Daddy, we found them. We looked across time, ’n’ we looked across space.”

  “What? Buddy, you’re beautiful!” Rick didn’t know if he was laughing or crying. “Can you bring ’em back?”

  As an answer, Roy pointed. Outlines were appearing, an enormous containment casing coming into existence. Cheers began around the compartment.

  Rick came to his feet, ready to start lending a hand hooking up the fold drives. He was going to give a cheer himself until he realized that something was not right.

  Others were beginning to see it, too, especially engineering types. The casing took on more and more substance, and one by one people in the drive section understood what they were looking at. Rick had never actually seen the object he now beheld, but he had certainly seen enough holographs, schematics, tapes, and such.

  “Christ,” he whispered.

  “We got them, Daddy!” Roy squealed delightedly.

  “Y-you sure did, old-timer.” And solved—and created—one of the great mysteries of the Robotech Age.

  We will win!

  Minmei’s song hit a crescendo and stopped.

  The original fold drives from SDF-1 sat there, big as ten diesel locomotives and just as solid. Lisa was staring at them, speechless, as techs approached them tentatively. Then she blurted, “Careful! They may still be hot.”

  She meant thermal energy, not hard radiation, but the heat was quite minimal. Not bad, she decided, seeing that as far as the drives themselves were concerned, they had just finished taking the SDF-1 on a jump from Earthspace to the orbit of Pluto.

  They’d been snatched from that instant directly to this one, though decades had passed in the interim.

  “Oke—” Vince Grant finished gulping, and tried again. “Okay! A fold drive’s a fold drive. Let’s get ’em hot-wired.” People hopped to it.

  Pursued by the Zentraedi, the SDF-1 had attempted a fold jump to hide in the lee of Earth’s moon. A miscalculation—or so it was said—had sent the ship to the edge of the Sol system, where the drives immediately vanished, leaving behind only a few winking luminous particles. Then SDF-1 had begun her years-long odyssey homeward.

  Lisa wondered what Henry Gloval would think of all this. Maybe he already knew.

  The design of the SDF-3’s drives was based on that of the original Super Dimensional Fortress. There was no time for niceties, and there was every possibility the ship would be blown to nothingness, but the drives were connected. There was a residue of First Generation Protoculture left in them in the wake of the Pluto jump, but the instruments showed that trace vanishing—melding with the Regess and newspace, apparently—even as techs were charging into action.

  The psi-fog the Regess had manifested, along with its squall effects, had retreated, though the children had broken their circle and Minmei was no longer singing. “But that don’t mean the dame is gonna leave us alone for long,” Angie said, frowning.

  “Has she gone?” Miriya asked Aurora.

  Aurora’s brows met. “Something else is placing demands on her attention.”

  “Haydon,” someone said, and they realized that Louie Nichols was standing there, looking like he had been through hell.

  There wasn’t even time to comment on his exposed bionics. “Are you sure?” Vince demanded.

  His team, who had stayed in the background through the Regess’s appearance, closed ranks behind Louie. “Ask Marlene.”

  She nodded her head unwillingly. “My instincts tell me the same thing.”

  “And what’s going to happen here in newspace has nothing to do with us anymore,” Louie added.

  “All the more reason to haul anchor,” Angie snorted.

  Indeed, there was nothing the contingent from realtime could do in a collision between such entities. But while the preparations for the jump were rushed to completion—with Louie and his team quickly becoming key players—Lisa turned to something else she had to do.

  Minmei still stood with Rem’s arm around her. Lisa went to her and took both Minmei’s hands in hers. “Thank you for what you did. Thank you for saving my son, Minmei.”

  Minmei stood away from Rem. She and Lisa held each other, Lisa patting Minmei’s shoulder. “I heard the children’s voices, and I knew my place was here.” Rick and others, mostly parents, closed in to thank Musica and Allegra; the Muses smiled timidly. Bowie was already in a clinch with his parents.

  “Ahem. Isn’t anybody gonna thank the furniture movers?” Jack Baker hinted.

  The idea to get the siren music to the drive section had been Minmei’s, of course, but if he and the Penns had not happened upon her and the Muses and Bowie—drawn by Minmei’s a capella singing—as they struggled along with the harp, things would have gone very differently.

  Karen gave Jack an elbow in the ribs. “You’re not really going to be happy until you’re an eighth-dan schmuck, are you?”

  But Harry Penn, having gotten his breath back, gave Jack a clap on the back. “I’ll say this much for you, Baker: You hold up your end.” That made Karen’s eyes go large; she had assumed that her father’s loathing of Jack was set in permacrete. Jack looked dumbstruck.

  “This is no time for a whoopee,” Vince Grant reminded everybody loudly. He turned to Lisa. “Replacement fold drives on-line, Admiral.”

  Pull pin and throw, Rick thought.

  Lisa keyed an intercom. There was still static, as there were still muted sound and light phenomena loose in the ship. Raul Forsythe responded from the bridge. “Navigation has worked out algorithms that should be what we need to find our way out,” he reported, “but there’s no way to check ’em.”

  “There’s one,” Lisa replied. “Exec—”

  All of newspace seemed to go through a paroxysm, an expand-and-contact feeling that made everyone cry out, as if the warp and weft of it were caught in some unthinkable contest of forces.

  “—ute fold jump, Captain!” Lisa finished.

  Everything around them seemed to be dissolving into distortion. Rick heard screams and orders, reports and moans. He whirled and yelled his son’s name, but all sane perception seemed to have fallen away to nothingness.

  Then the fold drives hummed, building power, and coherent reality rezzed up again. Rick took no chances but snatched Roy up into his arms again, other parents following suit—including the Zentraedi, which was quite a sight. Lisa faced the fact that she could not command her ship by intercom and let Raul concentrate on running the bridge.

  Vince had been holding his breath, not knowing how the SDF-1’s drives would take to Second Gen Protoculture—hell, he hadn’t even known how the SDF-3’s would. Now he found out, as the smooth fold sequence stuttered, the sound of the drives falling off.

  “Run start-up sequence again,” he’d just said, when everything around him dissipated into perceptual chaos again, making him feel he was going mad.

  In a place with no real existence in space or time, the onrushing Haydon, with all the accumulated energies of his crossing, rushed headlong at the Regess, who was determined to defend this, her last domain.

  The rift between the domain of newspace and realspace widened, all things flowing together at the cusp. The very end of the Shapings had come.

  With the residue of the expanded senses he had been given by exposure to Lang’s discorporation, Louie Nichols perceived the settling of that single snowflake on the endless winter landscape of the Shapings. It took its place, losing itself in the whole. But its very arrival generated the movement of those beneath it, and they imparted infinitesimal shifting to those farther down. There was mass movement.

  Aboard the SDF-3, the start-up sequence ran again and the fold drives raved to life. This time the process caught, and everyone aboard could feel the generation of the fold jump fiel
d as it sprang out from the ship. Once more they were passing into the unknowable.

  For Haydon there could be no going back; for the Regess there was no retreat. Collision was inevitable, and only one entity could survive.

  Both beings registered the jump of SDF-3, though the Regess could spare no attention for it and Haydon saw no reason to; the cosmos for which it was bound would soon be destroyed, anyway. They charged upon each other to do ultimate combat.

  Then both near deities let out silent emanations of shock, wonder, fear, and awe.

  The Shapings were shifting in a way unique in all their long history.

  In that intersection, Haydon suddenly had access to a wider mental vista, a fuller historical perspective, than he had ever had. The Regess, meanwhile, was opened to a total vision of all that had taken place and all that would. Both knew humbling and unprecedented sensations of acceptance, resignation—and peace.

  It was as if all continua and all probabilities were rotating on infinite axes beneath them. Once again the Regess was transformed into a phoenix of racial essence, about to take flight for a final destination. But Haydon turned, in the eternal instant when the rift in spacetime still yawned wide, and reached into the SDF-3, searching.

  At the moment of Intersection, as a side effect miracle, the perceptual blindfolds fell away from the eyes of the SDFers, and they gazed across time.

  Kazianna Hesh clutched Drannin while the Super Dimensional Fortress plunged into the eye of the continua hurricane. If death rose up to claim her at last, she knew how to greet it; she was Zentraedi.

  But instead, what she thought at first to be a hallucination manifested itself before her. She saw mighty Breetai as she had first seen him, unscarred and unbeatable, leading the legions of the Zentraedi to victory.

  As she saw and heard her love again, watched him leave his mark, huge and unique, on galactic history, Kazianna came to realize that it was no dream or specter. Somehow she was seeing across the conventional boundaries to points on the timestream where he still existed.

  She witnessed again the terrible battle in which Zor died, the great slaughter of Dolza’s fleet, Breetai’s triumphs in the Malcontent Uprisings and the Sentinels War.

  She saw herself again, toq, as she went to him on Fantoma and awakened love in him as he already unknowingly had in her. She saw how he had become truly happy for the first time then.

  There was no hard and fast linearity to the scenes. She was seeing many times and places where Breetai was in effect alive still and would always be so—as Lang had intended, though Kazianna knew nothing of that at the moment.

  She saw him presiding like some war god at the postbattle revels of the Zentraedi, proud of his conquests and yet weighted, always, by the burden of his leadership. Nevertheless, Kazianna knew a fierce joy that some part of him would preside forever in the halls of victory.

  And she saw him brooding, about to enter his final contest against the Invid Regent, and knowing that this time the Shapings had a different outcome in store for him.

  She felt Drannin stir in her arms. “Is that man my father?”

  Is. That was the right word. She understood now that he was no more lost to her than if he were on some far shore. She was still with him in many times and places and knew a certainty that she would be again.

  “Yes. That is Great Breetai.”

  The child was silent for a long moment, then his voice rang out across the barrier between them. “Hail, Breetai!”

  At that moment Breetai’s head rose from his preoccupations, and one of his very rare smiles touched his lips. He had known, going to his death, that his wife carried his son. Now Kazianna had no doubt that somehow he had heard the boy’s voice across time.

  She held herself very erect. “Yes, hail, Breetai.” But she said it with a lover’s softness.

  For Lisa, it was Karl Riber: the love of an older man—all of nineteen!—for an introverted sixteen-year-old. She was the daughter of a military family, he a gentle thinker and dreamer.

  She saw that his lonely life at Sara Base on Mars was not as horrible as serving in the RDF would have been. When he met death in the Sara Base raid, she did not turn her eyes from it, and she saw a vast calm in him then. Karl had never feared dying; he understood life too well. He had only shrunk from killing, and in the end the life he’d left behind was the kind of monument to peace that would have pleased him.

  For Lisa, other faces and scenes rose up from the timestream, too: the mother she’d remembered dimly but now saw afresh and more fully; her father, in his good moments and bad, making her even more grateful that she and he had become friends once more, at the end.

  She had lost many friends and now saw glimpses of those who’d been closest to her.

  Sammie, Kim, and Vanessa made her smile with their bewildering mixture of high spirits and dead-calm combat savvy. She let the tears come as she saw Claudia Grant once more, in all her best friend’s moods and moments, and blessed whatever agency it was that gave her this interlude of insight and remembrance.

  And of course Lisa beheld Captain Henry J. Gloval across the gulf of years—in his assorted tempers and aspects, the emphatic humanity he hid under a gruff exterior. She had long ago recognized that he was her father in the truest sense; she considered herself fortunate that that had been so.

  Lisa saw the bridge crew formed up on the day when she had been promoted to captain, rendering their salute. She saluted them back, happy that that day was still alive and eternal somewhere.

  All through the ship, the SDFers cast their gazes across space and time. Human and XT alike, Vowad and Veidt no less than the rest, growing even closer in their contemplation of Sarna. The Muses glimpsed their sister Octavia and heard for the last time their original, perfect harmony.

  Bowie’s soul played a haunting martial blues for General Rolf Emerson. Scott Bernard saw outtakes of Marlene Rush meld with those of the simulagent Ariel/Marlene, the two now being one; he blinked mentally in surprise, compelled to think through the implications of that.

  As for Marlene, she saw the timescenes of Marlene Rush as well as those of Ariel, and that completed her long self-healing.

  Dana was overjoyed to see the three Zentraedi spies—Konda, Bron, and Rico—once more, though she had kept them so alive in her heart all along that she never doubted for a moment that they existed somewhere. She, too, looked upon Rolf Emerson with fond acknowledgment. But then the image of Zor Prime came to her.

  She tried to drive it out at first, thought of the images of Intersection as a kind of torture. She found that she had to watch, though, and the more she saw of Zor Prime’s tormented life, the more she understood.

  Dana cried out as she saw the things to which the Robotech Masters had subjected him, the ways in which his personality, his will, his very soul were mauled and marred—the way in which he fought a ceaseless struggle against the memories of his past incarnations.

  At a certain moment, overcoming her own resistance, she felt herself send out an unspoken forgiveness. That deliberate act somehow shook her loose from the worst of the bitterness that had racked and entrapped her since the explosion of the Masters’ ship that day high over the Mounds. In the end it was a cleansing, not easy to endure but one that saved her.

  Rick was glad he had Roy in his arms. For some reason, like Kazianna, he and his child communed in the glimpses across time. “That’s my father, your granddad, and our flying circus.” Roy giggled and oohed at the aerobatics but took in the old man’s crusty, smiling face and barnstorming joie de vivre silently, with great attention.

  Rick, too, knew enormous gratitude that this experience, whatever it was, had come his way.

  Ben Dixon came into the timescenes later, not the first time Rick had seen his image since the big VT flier had tuned out, but it was always good to see him. Claudia Grant and the Bridge Bunnies, Gloval, and the rest made him feel he had led a very charmed life indeed.

  And a long time later, so it seemed, he t
old his son, “That man there is Roy Fokker, and your mother and I named you after him.”

  Roy II put his head on his father’s shoulder and took it all in wordlessly, saw his father as a much younger man, too. At length he said, “Was he really your big brother, Daddy?”

  “No. He was a lot more than a brother.”

  “Will you teach me to fly?”

  “Yes. I will.”

  For Minmei, as for many others, there was a certain relief in the faces she did not see in the timestream. Her parents and cousin were absent, and so she felt she could hope they were still well back on Earth. She feared at first that she would be forced to review the terrible things she’d seen, people and creatures she’d encountered, but this side effect of Lang’s final act was not connected to that sort of thing. Of Edwards there was no sign. Surely the evil moments endured in time, too, but the point seemed to her to be that, abandoned to themselves, they lost much or all of their power.

  Mad Khyron and Azonia, the Regent, and all of that stamp—let them stay encysted, shunned, and unvisited in their various pigeonholes of time. She turned her eyes elsewhere.

  It hurt to look at the painful parts of Lynn-Kyle’s life, but she also saw the fine parts, the heroic and idealistic side. She saw again that he had died trying to save her and end the war; the love for him that she had suppressed was free to find its rightful place in her now, with no power to do her harm.

  She renewed her affection for Janice Em. Android or no, Lang-agent or no, Jan had perhaps been her truest friend and best song-soulmate.

  Looking in on the SDF-3, Haydon found what he had been searching for.

  Minmei had no idea how long she had been watching the flow of scenes when another voice reached her, and somehow she knew it was not a part of her Intersection-generated views of time. It was Rem.

  She turned, somehow breaking the trance, to see that he was being swallowed up in white translucent banners of force.

  She tried to move, rooted to the spot. “No!” He began to fade from her sight.

  She cried the word like a plaintive song—“No-ooo!”—and somehow its power, the power her voice had always had, overcame whatever was immobilizing her.