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  “Well, let’s hope so. Otherwise we have to talk about getting a larger bed.”

  As the trio set off into the city’s maze of streets and alleyways, Rem kept expecting the mist to lift; but he soon realized that what he had mistaken for ground fog was a permanent pall of wretched smoke. An acrid stench of unclean energy hung in the air—of fossil fuels and smoldering plastics, of burning hair and decay, of garbage, filth, and feces.

  With a kind of ritualistic cruelty, Perytonians were hurrying for the safety of buildings and shelters as bells, sirens, and warning klaxons blared out dawn’s approach. Pushing and shoving one another, trampling the small and weak underfoot, tossing horns and launching fists and curses at large. Burak led them through it all like an old hand, engaging in as few scuffles as possible and getting them to the Invid perimeter in just under an hour. Umbra was up now, throwing long and threatening shadows of the ruins against the organic face of the conical hive itself.

  Squads of armored Invid soldiers were positioned about, lifting the elongated snouts of their helmets, as though testing the air for signs of trouble. Scout and Pincer ships were coming and going, one group chaperoning a small transport vehicle, perhaps fresh from the latest Flower or Fruit harvest.

  The three Sentinels secreted themselves behind a length of fissured wall, a balcony at one time, hunkering down like the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion at the door to the Wicked Witch’s castle.

  “Now what?” Rem demanded of either of them.

  “We go inside,” Janice announced evenly.

  “Yes. Destiny awaits—”

  “Whoa! Hold it!” Rem said, struggling to pull Burak back behind the wall. “Shouldn’t we discuss a plan?”

  Janice abandoned her holo-projection and said, “You’re my prisoners.”

  “Huh?” From Rem and Burak together.

  But they could already see the image of a white-robed Invid scientist taking shape beside them.

  “Can’t we get any more velocity out of this ship?” Tesla screamed at his helmsman.

  The tech thumped its chest in salute. “I’m sorry, m’lord. The living computer shows us at maximum thrust.”

  Tesla could see for himself that it was true. The troopship brain looked like a knot of worms in a bottle of agitated sodawater. A few more demands on his part and the ship would be nonfunctional, dead in space far short of its planetary goal.

  Edwards’s fortress had opened fire on a count of thirty—so much for promises—and Tesla had been forced to flee Opteraspace with scarcely half the ship’s complement of Terror Weapons and mecha. The rest, along with the two other troopships he had pirated from Spheris, had been left to fend for themselves against the Humans’ dreadnought and Veritech teams. The outcome all too predictable, Tesla thought. Edwards’s voice was still in his ears: Go make yourself useful … engage the Sentinels.

  “With one measly ship—ha!” Tesla said out loud as he paced the floor of the ship’s nerve center.

  He could see his mistake now; it was, well, as clear as the nose on his face. He paused a moment to regard his reflection in the bubble-chamber, then stormed back into motion, muttering to himself all the while.

  In his haste to dispatch the Regent, he had overlooked the Fruit of Peryton—perhaps the most important of the lot, and surely the Fruit that would complete his evolution and render him the omnipotent being he was destined to become. What an oversight for one so close to apotheosis! He had tasted of Optera, Karbarra, and Praxis, of Garuda, Haydon IV, and Spheris. To neglect Peryton—it was inconceivable!

  The very planet where the grand quest began.

  Optera defoliated at the hands of the Zentraedi, Zor folding himself back to Tirol with all the world’s Pollinators and seedlings. The Invid left to fall back on bodily reserves; left in the rule of a Queen-Mother who had transfigured herself to serve the needs of the Tiresian traitor; and the husband her misdeeds had driven mad. The Dark Ages … An interminable period of waiting, praying, while the emerging Lords of Tirol—the Robotech Masters—spread their evil throughout the local group.

  But something inexplicable had occurred: a sensor nebula sent out to scout the Quadrant for any sign of the precious Flowers of Life had detected a newly grown crop on a nearby world—a world known to its inhabitants as Peryton. Not even the Queen-Mother could puzzle it out. Were they spaceborne spores that had seeded that world; or was someone making an attempt at recompense?

  The Queen-Mother had undertaken the journey in a ship fashioned for that express purpose. A ship unlike theirs, but modeled after it nonetheless, as she herself was modeled after them. The Flowers she returned with were not equal to those that had once graced Optera’s hillsides, but they were enough to rescue the Invid race from oblivion. To provide them with nourishment if not spiritual sustenance; to provide them with the will to push deeper into the void. To Garuda and Spheris …

  There was more, but Tesla couldn’t bring all of it to mind. Something about Peryton’s Flowers, something about the schism that had developed between husband and wife …

  But what did it matter? he decided. Soon the first and seventh Flower would be his, and the cycle would complete itself. He would be able to return, invincible, to Optera—a transfigured presence both the Regent and the Sentinels would gaze upon in fear and wonder.

  It struck him as odd how all this time he had been working at cross-purposes with pitiful Burak, within whom he had kindled a messianic fire. But such were the contours of the Shaping.

  “Faster!” he commanded the living computer. “Onward to Peryton! Onward to glory!”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  The evolution of the Invid was initially adduced to support the theory of punctuated equilibrium, or punk-e—a challenge to Darwin’s reworking of the doctrine that Natura non facit saltum: nature makes no leaps. But it was later demonstrated that the Regess had been somehow empowered to direct the evolutionary course of her species. The Invid, it appeared, had nothing to do with nature!

  Simon Kujawa, Against All Worlds: A Biography of Tesla The Infamous

  Breetai sat alone in his quarters, the lights dimmed and the squawkboxes adjusted down. By rights he should have been on the bridge, what with the Valivarre only two million miles out from Optera; but something larger than the moment had ordered this brief retreat and he had obeyed.

  Who was he the last time he journeyed into this sector? he asked himself. A warrior, to be sure. A warrior under Dolza’s command, engrammed like the rest to believe it had always been thus: war! Wars of conquest, wars of vengeance and retribution. Wars to secure the Masters’ empire, wars to forge the Imperative. No memories of Fantoma then, save a counterfeit few to reinforce a collective recall of Zarkopolis, the warriors’ city. He and Exedore were the only ones left from those days; Miriya Parina, Kazianna Hesh, the rest of the Valivarre’s hundred strong crew, they had all come later on. Birthed in the vats and sizing chambers on Fantoma and Tirol; engrammed there and turned loose on the Quadrant.

  Zor, deep in the throes of the Masters’ Compulsion, had led the mission to Optera. It was a time before Protoculture, when Reflex furnaces were the order of the day. A slow and tedious voyage, Breetai recalled. Initially, there was a kind of joy attached to his return; but oh how soon those beings grew to rue the day they had embraced his visit. How shocked they were to see him return into their midst only to steal away their precious Flowers.

  The Old One, Dolza, had given the orders to fire. A rain of death so complete that even now, a virtually submerged part of Breetai’s being was exhilarated by the thought. Nothing close to what would follow when Protoculture fueled their arsenal, but intense for its time. Hardly a glamorous campaign; a bloodbath, really. Their baptism.

  Soon, it seemed, they had more warships at their disposal than they could count; more, eventually, than they could even imagine. And as their numbers grew, their victories increased. The Zentraedi. The Zentraedi!

  And yet … hardly a recollection he c
ould pinpoint. Generations of warfare and hardly a specific memory. Who was he then?

  Breetai brought his fingers to the cool, unfeeling surface of his skullcap. That day he remembered, the day Zor died.

  The naive straightforwardness of the Zentraedi could be your downfall some day, he could hear Zor warning Dolza. Old Watchdog, he had called him.

  All things are so simple to you: the eye sees the target, the hands aim the weapon, a finger pulls the trigger, an energy bolt slays the enemy. You therefore conclude that if the eye sees clearly, the hand is steady, and the weapon functions properly, all will be well.

  But you never see the subtlety of the myriad little events in that train of action. What of the brain that directs the eye and the aim? What of the nerves that steady the hand? Of the very decision to shoot? What of the motives that make the Zentraedi obey their military Imperative?

  Ah, you call all of this sophistry! But I tell you: there are vulnerabilities to which you are blind …

  Prescient. As were all his utterances. Had he also foreseen this return? Breetai wondered, disturbed by the possibility. Breetai had described it to Exedore as the closing of a circle, the most poetic image he had ever summoned. But did closing the circle entail finishing what had begun on Optera countless years ago; or was there some other closing in the works even now?

  “I am sorry to disturb you, Breetai.”

  He swung around to find Kazianna standing there, her battle armor reflecting some of the room’s pale light. He hadn’t heard the hatch hiss open. Lost in thought—another first so late in the game.

  “It’s time I returned to the bridge, anyway.”

  “Edwards’s ship has not been found.”

  “Hiding on the darkside?”

  “Doubtful, my lord.”

  He showed her a wry smile. “Yes, doubtful. They must have taken the ship down. Edwards is baiting us.”

  “You have been there, have you not?”

  He considered it. “In thought, perhaps.”

  Kazianna took hold of his arm as he stepped past her into the corridor. “A moment, Breetai. I would walk by your side if you would have me.”

  He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “Now, and always.”

  On the Tokugawa bound for Haydon IV, Commander Vince Grant also had his thoughts set on review. It was the holo-photo that had touched things off: a shot of Bowie and Dana caught by the official photographer at the Hunters’ wedding. Dana with a smirk; Bowie with a heartbroken look, eyes shining out from his dark brown face. He had Vince’s coloring, Vince’s curls; but those were Jean’s deep-set eyes.

  He didn’t stare at it for long—couldn’t; his hand was already shaking by the time he had set it aside, his chest hollowed out with a longing that was closer to grief. He had moved to the letters next—a collection of things he and Jean had left behind in Tiresia when they first signed on with the Sentinels, gone offworld on the Farrago. Something made him decide to carry them with him to Haydon IV, to pull one randomly from the batch and read through it.

  It was from Claudia, handwritten near Christmas, 2012.

  These letters pile up, Vince dear, it began, perhaps to be read by you someday or perhaps not, but today especially I have to set down how full my heart is—more so than at any time since Roy was killed.

  I heard Gloval murmuring something astounding while he was sitting in his command chair: “Capulets and Montagues.” I thought he was going soft; heaven knows the rest of us have. But when I looked at the clipboard he had been studying, it was an intel rundown on books Miriya had screened from the Central Data Band while she was here—when she was hunting Max. Shakespeare was there, of course.

  I don’t know what to think, except—damn it! We’ve got to change the ending this time!

  He let himself cry; just sit there and let it flood out of him. No one to judge him, no one to comfort him. It had been years, he realized in a moment of split awareness—one Vince sitting on the edge of his chair crying his heart out, another observing the man himself. Oh, good God, he stammered, overtaken by a second paroxysm. It welled up from somewhere too deep to locate, and left him utterly spent a minute later.

  We’ve got to change the ending this time!

  But was that viable anymore? Hadn’t the Expeditionary mission tried to accomplish just that by going to Tirol? Who would have blamed them for simply chalking up any ideas of peace to a bad dream? Something you ate. A virus.

  But elsewhere on the Tokugawa, Lord Exedore was baby-sitting a heap of shaggy, muffin-footed creatures Lang had called Pollinators. And locked away in Vince’s carrycase was a vid-disk of the Plenipotentiary Council’s outline for a peace proposal to be relayed to the Invid Regent. Providing it met with Cabell and Veidt’s approval, and, to a lesser extent, the Sentinels themselves. An offer to seed Optera, if that was possible, and return to the Invid the Flower that promised salvation.

  Would that he was not too late!

  Lisa knew full well why Carl Riber was on her mind. She had seen the look on Rick’s face when Minmei’s name had been mentioned in the transmission from Tirol. That look. One she remembered wearing herself when the SDF-1 had first approached Mars and her heart had leaped at the thought of finding Carl alive. When she had her near brush with death in what had been Riber’s Base Sara quarters.

  The memory made her glance over at Rick now, lifting himself out of the Alpha’s cockpit, with his determined, take-charge look. Handsome, she thought.

  The recon group, some dozen Alphas in all, had tracked the course of the lone Veritech to Peryton’s surface, and had located it where the three Sentinels had stashed it earlier on. Rick, Karen, Jack, Gnea, Baldan, and Crysta were already out of their mecha, moving toward the grassy rise that overlooked LaTumb.

  “I want a perimeter secured around the LZ,” Rick was telling the rest of the VT pilots, most of whom had already reconfigured their ships to Battloid mode.

  There were no indications that the Invid had monitored their drop from the orbiting Ark Angel; but that didn’t necessarily mean that the hive was unaware of their presence. Umbra was just rising, a dull red disk through the conifers at their back. On the other side of Peryton, the forever-war had an hour left to rage before sunset.

  Lisa kept her eyes on Rick as she and Bela climbed down out of their fighter. He had come to her rescue that day in Base Sara, a guardian angel to be sure, and again a year later at Alaska Base, the site of the ill-fated Grand Cannon. So Minmei really didn’t have anything on her in the way of rescues. But it was undeniable that she had been Rick’s first love, and if those memories of Riber had taught Lisa anything, it was that first loves die hard.

  Rick’s voice came to her over her personal channel. “I want everybody to stay alert. The less resistance we meet, the worse it gets later. Which puts us at an all-time low this time around.”

  The idea was to run a quick recon of the area, then return to the ship to coordinate an airborne assault against the hive—a towering, conical thing dominating the city like some sacred mount. And at the same time, find out just what Burak, Janice, and Rem were up to. Everyone was dressed for the part in jumpsuits and helmets; but individual choices had been made in terms of weapons and accessories. The Praxians had turned the jumpsuits into sleeveless, short-skirted battle costumes; and of course they carried their halberds, shields, and crossbows. Karen wore a Garudan ceremonial fringed shirt and had armed herself with a Spherisian grappler along with Wolverine and Badger. As for Baldan, he was outfitted in an REF long-tailed cutaway vest and what appeared to be a Haydonite metal-flake sensor belt. Learna, tufts of fur showing at her neck and cuffs, had disguised her breathing apparatus as a kind of streamlined faceshield; and the Karbarrans had daubed their elephantine feet with war paint. Lisa herself was dressed down today, except for the helmet feathers and naginata. Only the Perytonians, Rick, and the still-not-up-to-par Baker, looked strac; but Lisa didn’t hold it against them.

  The Battloids were reporting in now, a
nd Rick was waving the recon party forward toward the crest of the rise. LaTumb’s warning system was sounding every fifteen minutes, and Lisa guessed that would go on right until word was received that Umbra was setting over the battle. According to Veidt and Burak’s premission briefings, Peryton had no centralized government as such; but the planet maintained a communication system that was constantly monitoring the battle’s outbreak and demise, and radioing that information to population centers worldwide.

  Lisa thought the city looked like it had been planned and raised by some satanic construction company. She had never seen such a hodgepodge of order and catastrophe, of the primitive and ultratech. Watching the mostly black-robed populace scurrying back and forth through the streets, focusing in on back-alley rituals and street-corner scenarios, Lisa found herself remembering a book of paintings her father had kept in his study—hellish visions by a painter named Bosch, whose unusual first name she couldn’t recall. From the rise, LaTumb seemed a Bosch miniature come to life.

  “Most business negotiations are transacted during the night,” one of the Perytonians was explaining over the tac net. “It is the only safe time on Peryton. The citizens are returning to homes and shelters now. The outbreak must be close at hand.”

  Lisa imagined Rick calling up the hour on his faceshield display. “Fifteen minutes,” he announced a moment later.

  “An all-clear will be sounded when it is learned where the battle has appeared. Coded bursts will indicate how much time remains until Umbra’s set on that part of the world.”

  To live under this! Lisa said to herself. But as she thought about it, she began to wonder if Earth, too, hadn’t been under a kind of similar curse. Wars breaking out one place or another every few years, every few months or weeks. Her second reason for dwelling on Riber, the only honest-to-God pacifist she had ever known. He had volunteered for a nonmilitary position at Base Sara during the protracted conclusion of the Global Civil War. And died there during an unannounced and senseless raid; a misunderstanding of the worst sort.