End of the Circle Page 7

  Lang swung back to the tablescreen. “Oh, I’ll admit there’s something to this afterlife speculation that’s worth pursuing,” he said abruptly, “but for the present there are more tangible enigmas to grapple with.” He motioned to the displays. “These are the latest readouts.”

  Rem leaned over the table.

  “Either this void has yet to decide which set of physical laws it plans to subscribe to, or our scanners are in over their artificial heads.” The Terran scientist’s voice was a mixture of apprehension and excitement. “I haven’t seen anything like it since my supercollider days thirty years ago. But at least I knew then that our accelerators were manufacturing all those weakly interacting massive particles. Here, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. One could almost believe we’ve entered a kind of dark-matter universe.”

  “I doubt we could exist in such a place, Lang.”

  “Precisely my point. The findings are more consistent with fold anomalies than anything else.”

  Rem nodded. “Then the real question we should be asking ourselves is whether the ship is still on its way to somewhere or whether it has in fact arrived.”

  Lang threw him a skeptical look. “I don’t see how we can possibly be on our way to something without the fold drives.”

  Rem made a dismissive motion with his hand. “The Protoculture is only essential for initiating a fold, Lang; it has little to do with destination.”

  “But how are we to emerge, then?”

  Rem’s gaze grew unfocused. “You fail to see the potential, Doctor.”

  “Perhaps I do, Rem, but—”

  “When all you need do is think back to your experiences inside the ship you called SDF-1 when it crash-landed on Earth.”

  Lang’s face went blank.

  “Your own notes state that you were at a loss to explain the time deplacement you and your team experienced inside the ship.”

  “Yes …”

  “And so you postulated that some ‘quantum’—your word, Doctor—some quantum of hyperspace had adhered to the ship.”

  “And the team was actually walking through a kind of hyperspace dimension,” Lang finished in a rush. “Yes, of course, I remember now.”

  Rem laughed. “Ah, what tricks the overmind plays with us!” He offered Lang a tight-lipped smile. “Listen to your words, Doctor: ‘I remember now.’ That’s what the SDF-3 is doing. Zor’s ship captured a quantum of hyperspace and conveyed it into the world of time. Our ship has captured a quantum of time and carried it into hyperspace.”

  Lang glanced at the mathematical constructs assembling themselves on the tablescreen as if to confirm something.

  “I don’t know why the Protoculture chose this particular moment to abandon us,” Rem resumed, “or just what Shapings are to be inferred from it. But I do know that the SDF-3 is remembering now—now, Lang.” He gestured toward the exterior bulkheads. “And what I think we’re seeing out there is a universe in the making.”

  * * *

  “Remember when he was just learning to walk?” Rick asked, regarding his five-year-old raven-haired son from the transparent side of the nursery’s one-way mirror. “It was like he wanted to start off running. Always in a hurry to get somewhere.”

  Lisa’s eyes narrowed somewhat. “No thanks to you. Walking must have seemed awfully tame after all the aerial acrobatics you put him through.”

  Rick laughed. “Guilty as charged. But I didn’t have anything to do with turning him into a whiz kid. That’s gotta be your doing.”

  Lisa patted the bun of gray-streaked hair at the back of her head and laughed with him.

  In meeting at the nursery, the two proud parents had agreed to call a moratorium on discussing the fortress’s present circumstance, at least until Lang and Rem could sort out whether they had punched themselves into some misty uncharted corner of hyperspace or were simply on line in limbo, waiting for judgment. Morale was low in all sections, and so Lisa had ordered most of the ship to secure from battle stations.

  She returned her eyes to Roy and to the transformable puzzle block one of the ship’s child-care specialists had handed him. Silently, as she watched Roy rotate the alloy block in his tiny hand, she applauded his analytical powers: the way he seemed to size it up before making a move, the way the expression on his sweet face mirrored his intense concentration. At the same time she marveled at the dexterity he demonstrated as he began to expose one after another of the block’s hidden forms, nimble fingers prying open doors, separating sections, twisting others, extending telescoping parts.

  And just as silently she worried.

  Up until a few months ago Roy had seemed just an ordinary child to her, perhaps too ordinary, if anything. For all her efforts at keeping him as far from the SDF-3 as she could manage, at seeking to raise him as someone other than the son of two career officers, Roy had been going through the same action/adventure stages as his peers aboard the fortress. One could take the child away from Earth, but one apparently could not take Earth away from the child. Airplanes, action figures, toy guns … even an invisible friend who still showed up every so often.

  But things had changed once she and Rick had completed their transfer to the SDF-3. Suddenly it was puzzles that fascinated him, both manual and computer-generated. And then there was the look he would give her sometimes, as if to say: I know exactly what you’re thinking. To hear Kazianna tell it, her son Drannin and some of the other Zentraedi children were behaving likewise, and there had been occasions when Lisa had had to drag Roy screaming from his outsize “playmates.” She still didn’t know whether to feel comforted by all the youthful bonding or even more worried than she already was. More than anything she wished Miriya were there to tell her what it was like to nurture a genius, what the Praxians sometimes called a Wyrdling.

  And how much of it, Lisa wondered, could be traced to the ship itself?

  She felt Rick’s arm go around her shoulder, and she rested her head against his.

  “We’ve had some good days, haven’t we?” Rick said softly. “Especially these past few years.”

  She knew what he meant: how good it had been to absent themselves from the endless tasks they had overseen during Reconstruction and again after the destruction of New Macross.

  Rick turned to face her. “I’ve been missing them lately. Really feeling at a loss.”

  Lisa recalled her postfold malaise and shot him a look. “You, too, Rick? Like you’ve lost something important?”

  He nodded. “First I thought it was just leaving Tirol, but it’s more than that. Lately I’ve been thinking about Pop’s air circus, Macross Island, even the Mockingbird.”

  “But it’s pervasive, isn’t it?” Lisa said. “Like you can’t pin it down.”

  Rick bit his lower lip. “I think I know what it is now,” he began with a nervous laugh. “I’m willing to lay odds it’s the Proto—”

  “Begging your pardon, sirs,” Rick’s adjutant interrupted, stepping through the observation room hatch. “Tactical Center requests the admiral’s immediate presence.”

  “What is it?” Lisa asked, hurrying to the room’s intercom.

  “We’ve got a screenful of bogies, sir.”

  “Signatures?” Rick said.

  “Not yet, sir. Radar’s silent. The ship’s bio-sensors made the call.”

  Rick and Lisa traded looks. “Bio-sensors?”

  “TIC patched the system into IFF, sir, but couldn’t raise a signature or profile.”

  “Invid?” Lisa said, cocking her head to one side. “Some self-mutated form?”

  Rick met his adjutant at the hatch. “Maybe someone’s shown up to lead us home,” he suggested, and was gone.

  Belowdecks in one of the fortress’s mecha bays, Captain Jack Baker gave a downward tug to his flight jacket as he paced back and forth in front of his small audience of veteran pilots and mechamorph aces.

  And not one of them had soared where he had now.

  “You may think the background stuff’
s unimportant, Captain Phillips,” Jack was continuing after a bothersome interruption, “but what I’m trying to do is give you a sense of the experience.”

  Sean Phillips threw an imploring look to the high ceiling. “No offense, Baker, but I think we’ve all heard about what happened when you piloted the VT down to Haydon IV. I just don’t see the relevance.”

  Jack’s innocent face reddened. With so many heavy hitters to choose from, he still could not figure out why the admiral had singled him out for the void recon. He hoped, of course, that Hunter’s finger had simply gone right to the top of the list, but then, he supposed that list could have been alphabetical. Jack nevertheless was determined to make the most of the distinction while it lasted.

  “I’m talking about the unknown, Captain,” he told Sean. “The importance of state of mind.”

  “Like going against the Robotech Masters was a given?” Sean asked.

  Jack grew flustered. “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that what Haydon IV threw at us was totally unlike anything we’d faced.”

  “Did we ever tell you about the spade fortress that put down just outside of Monument City?” Sergeant Angelo Dante asked in a conversational tone, the only one of the group who had refused to accept a commission. He swung around to face everyone, elbows flared, large hands on widespread knees. “The Fifteenth ATAC was ordered to recon the ship, see. So we tank out there and—”

  “Now who’s being irrelevant?” Jack cut in. “I mean, why don’t we just invite some of the Karbarrans in here to entertain us with their war stories? Or how ’bout getting Gnea in here to talk about hand-to-hand.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you’d enjoy that, Jack,” Marie Crystal laughed, affectionately nudging Karen Penn with an elbow. Black Lion leader during the Second Robotech War, she was just another officer here. Sean, who had been her fiancé three times over the past year, was being his usual arrogant self, and while she rarely approved of his teasing sarcasm, Baker was so easy to put off balance. “What d’ you think, Karen? Shall we call the Praxians in?” she contributed.

  Karen smiled and regarded Jack from her seat. Lithesome and honey-blond, she appeared to be every bit Marie’s opposite, but in fact the two had grown to be close friends. “That’s up to Captain Baker,” she said. “It’s his show.”

  “Jeez,” Jack muttered, brushing back a recently styled silver-tinted pompadour, “et tu?” He spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “All right, for cryin’ out loud, I’ll get on with it.”

  The pilots applauded wildly as Jack called up memories of his brief EVA.

  “It’s like flying through a cloud,” he began on a serious note. “Only there’s no vapor around you, no droplets streaking your canopy. Other times it’s like moving toward a cloud you can’t seem to reach. I had a hard time looking forward, because everything started to go solid on me. But watching your displays doesn’t help, because there’s absolutely nothing happening on-screen. I kept feeling like I was close to punching through it, but it just went on and on. And it never changed, no matter which heading I took. The SDF-3 is your whole world, the only game in town.”

  He blew out his breath and shook his head. “I don’t know what more to tell you, really. The VT performed well, no glitches in any of the systems. I thought it through a couple of reconfigurations, and there were no problems. Weapons systems seemed to be fully operational, but I was under orders not to enable. Dr. Lang’s thinking is that missile propulsion isn’t affected.”

  “When do we get a crack at it?” Sean said, rising to his feet for added effect.

  As soon as Admiral Hunter figures you’re ready, Jack was about to tell him, when hooters drowned out the thought. The ship was returning to full-alert status. A female voice boomed from the flight bay’s overhead speakers:

  “We have uncorrelated targets closing on the fortress in all sectors. Captains Baker, Phillips, Penn, and Crystal report with your teams to assigned launch bays immediately. Substations November, Romeo, Tango, Zebra, prepare for …”

  Jack let the rest of it pass right through him. Phillips and his 15th cohorts were already up and hurrying toward their VTs, pale-faced but eager wingmen—combat virgins the lot of them—falling in behind.

  Jack stepped down from the missile pallet that had been his temporary stage, Karen was waiting for him, a grin forming.

  “Cheer up, flyboy,” she said, linking arms with him as he approached. “For what it’s worth, you’ll still go on file as being the first out.”

  Jack snorted sullenly. “Fame’s a damned fleeting thing these days.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  The elderly spokesperson for what remained of the planetside contingent of the Army of the Southern Cross introduced herself to me as ‘Regina Newhope.’ The woman’s associate—as facially scarred and ghoulish-looking a creature as I have ever encountered—went simply by the name ‘Farnham.’ I recall thinking at the time that there was something strangely familiar about the pair of them, something I wanted to connect to the deceased Lazlo Zand. Then, when I subsequently learned that Newhope’s real name—her pre-Invid name—was Millicent Edgewick, I realized that the Zand connection was a sound one. And even now I’m certain that ‘Farnham’ was none other than the First Robotech War’s most wanted political criminal, Senator Alfonse Napoleon Russo.

  Dr. Harold Penn, quoted in Justine Huxley’s I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party

  The REF pilots who had escorted Scott Bernard to New York were ordered to return the colonel and his alien charge directly to Norristown rather than to the launch pad in Venezuela. The Southlands city—where tech crews ferried down from the orbiting Ark Angel had been working overtime to clear a landing zone for the soon-to-be-arriving dignitaries—had been selected as the temporary site of the reunited Earth governments.

  No sooner had the VT set down than Marlene was whisked away to the REF’s planetside HQ by three sinister-looking men from G2 dressed in dark suits and opaque glasses. Scott, too, was hurried off to yet another debriefing, but this time at the hands of the intel directorate chief himself, former Plenipotentiary Councilman Niles Obstat, the balding and stoop-shouldered old-guard ally of Emil Lang. Unlike the neurometric specialists whose job it had been to evaluate Scott’s psychological state, Obstat was interested in learning all he could about the political climate of the Southlands. Which towns had impressed Scott most? Who seemed to be in charge? Who controlled the wealth, the distribution of goods, the private armies and fringe groups? Who had been partisans, and who had been sympathizers? And who headed up the quasi-religious movements like the Church of Recurrent Tragedy or the so-called Interstellar Retributionists?

  Scott answered as best as he could, covering much of the same ground he had covered months earlier. Obstat pursued oblique lines of questioning, ever on the alert for nuance, personal impressions, the recollection of some seemingly trivial episode.

  The sessions continued for two days. Scott was asked to thumb-print oaths and papers and was instructed not to discuss anything about the SDF-3 or the returning REF with “downsiders,” which he understood to mean planet-bound Terrans of all varieties.

  Afterward he was left pretty much to himself, and more than a week slipped by. Marlene was kept incommunicado; as far as anyone in G2 was concerned, the Invid simulagent was military property. Besides, as someone had suggested to Scott, she was a lot better off than she would have been on the streets, where if word of her background got out she wouldn’t have lasted a day.

  He didn’t fully understand the reasons for all the secrecy about the missing flagship and the sudden inactivation of much of Earth’s Protoculture-driven mecha until Vince Grant invited him to attend an introductory summit held in Norristown’s city hall, a castlelike affair that had served as an Invid Protoculture storage facility during the occupation.

  The REF was represented by the Plenipotentiary senators Penn, Huxley, Stinson, and Longchamps. The latter two, still in some sense allied with the ol
d Southern Cross apparat, were a faction in their own right, hoping to reconnect with whoever was currently representing the interests of the demolished government of Wyatt “Patty” Moran, General Anatole Leonard, and Dr. Lazlo Zand. And while all three men had died during the final days of the Second Robotech War, a small group recently released from an Invid internment camp did step forward to speak on their behalf.

  Planetside Earth had numerous secondary spokespersons as well, several of whom Scott recognized by sight and a few of whom he knew by reputation. Donald and Carla Maxwell, for example, from Deguello; and Terri Woods, one of Lancer’s contacts in the resistance, who now headed up a diverse but vocal contingent of REF supporters. Then there were the two women Obstat had told Scott to keep an eye out for: ex-GMP lieutenant Nova Satori, the charismatic leader of the Homunculi Movement, and Jan Morris, Corporeal Fundamentalist, whose large following advocated a return to agrarian and religious primitivism.

  Loyalists, separatists, cultists … each group took its turn at the podium, and each stirred argument, debate, in some cases violence among the gathered crowds. Scott could see that Huxley was bent on reaching accommodations with one and all, even though her patience was wearing thin. The Council’s principal aim was the restabilization of humankind’s understandably paranoid mind-set in the hope that Earth could avoid a return to the feudal mentality that had prevailed during the Masters War and the occupation. It was obvious that the REF figured to achieve that with the promise of advanced technologies in exchange for a large piece of the planet’s geopolitical pie.

  No mention was made of the missing SDF-3, nor was any attempt made to explain mecha failure or Earth’s sudden energy crisis. The Council not only acted as though the situation were easily reversible but suggested that they had even had a hand in bringing it about!