End of the Circle Read online

  No decisions had been reached by the time Scott was shuttled up to the Ark Angel to attend a prelaunch briefing. Justine Huxley, Longchamps, and the rest, backed by several squadrons of functioning mecha, remained on-world to press the REF’s case. A select few were apprised of the fact that the Ark Angel would soon be leaving Earthspace.

  The briefing was held in a dungeonlike cabinspace located on the starship’s engineering level that had come to be called the Sentinels Bay, for it was there that campaign strategies had been hammered out. Scott arrived in the company of the Grants’ adjutants and aides; Vince and Jean were already positioned at the compartment’s horseshoe-shaped table, along with Dr. Penn, Niles Obstat, and a dozen or so of the ship’s command and intel officers. But the briefing did not get under way until the table’s remaining seats were occupied by five of the most bizarre-looking civilians Scott had encountered in quite some time. Dressed alike in tight-fitting black jumpsuits studded with what looked like chrome stars, the five sported round mirror-lensed goggles and hairstyles that made the outlandish razor cuts and permtints of the century’s first decade seem tame by comparison.

  “Professor, I believe you’re acquainted with everyone here,” Harry Penn said by way of welcome. “With the possible exception of Colonel Bernard.” Turning to Scott, he added: “Colonel Bernard, Professor Nichols, and his team from Cyber-Research, Doctors Stirson, Gibley, Strucker, and Shi-Ling.”

  The five Penn had addressed as doctors nodded in unison; they might have been clones or biogenetically engineered quadruplets. Of their apparent leader, a short, lantern-jawed man with an enormous pompadour of henna-colored hair, Scott asked, “Nichols, as in Louie Nichols, creator of the Syncron drive?”

  “Adapter of the Syncron device, Colonel,” the professor said, adjusting his glasses as if to sharpen their focus. “But yes, one and the same.”

  “I’m honored, sir,” Scott said in obvious awe. The Nichols drive, as it was sometimes called, had been responsible for assuring the nearly instantaneous return of the REF fleet from Tirol. “Your reputation has reached clear across the Quadrant.”

  Nichols smiled tolerantly. “And we’ve heard about you, too, Colonel.”

  Scott’s face flushed; Nichols’s tone of voice left it unclear whether he had been complimented or insulted. His assistants, meanwhile, had begun to set up some sort of computer station off to one side of the table. Scott had never seen decks or consoles quite like the ones they were unpacking.

  “Dr. Penn informs me you have some news for us, Professor,” Vince was saying.

  “Yes,” Nichols said after a moment, “thanks to the colonel’s capture of the simulagent.”

  Vince appraised Scott with a quick look. “ ‘Capture’ might be too strong a word, Professor. As I understand it, the Invid, er, operative voluntarily turned herself over to REF custody.”

  Nichols made a dismissive gesture. “File it where you want, General. The important thing is that the simulagent gave us the go- to we needed on the Protoculture. Based on what we managed to access from it—”

  “It has a name, Professor,” Scott cut in angrily. “We called her … Marlene.”

  Nichols stared at him from behind the mirrored goggles. “Sorry about that, Colonel. I screened it but misfiled it somehow. Well, this Marlene, then, gave us a solid return on our investments. The Regess did in fact wed her race to all existing Protoculture at the moment of transubstantiation—the incident that gave rise to the ‘phoenix vision’ some of your own ship’s crew have confessed to experiencing, Doctor.”

  Penn leaned back in his chair, stroking his chin as muttered questions and exclamations were exchanged around the table. “But Professor,” he queried at last, “you said all existing Protoculture. And yet dozens of mecha remain fully functional, to say nothing of the Ark Angel herself.”

  Nichols traded amused looks with his associates. Scott noticed that the four had linked their terminals together, employing cables of peculiar design. From each console dangled equally strange-looking umbilical jacks.

  “A valid prompt, Doctor, but you don’t need a simul—er, a Marlene to run it. What I should have said was all the first-generation Protoculture—the pure strain that came from Zor’s original matrix, along with the home brew the Regess was concocting from the orchards here.”

  “As distinct from what?” Penn asked.

  Nichols let out an exasperated sigh. “As distinct, Doctor, from the Flower stuff the REF cooked down in this facsimile matrix Lang and the Tiresian—what’s his name?”

  “Rem,” Gibley said.

  “Rem. What Lang and Rem cobbled together on Tirol.”

  Penn and the REF staffers mulled it over for a noisy moment.

  “That would account for the fact that certain mecha are still functioning,” Vince offered. “But of course we’d have to do a complete craft-by-craft accounting. As far as the Ark Angel is concerned—”

  “It is Sekiton-fueled,” Nichols completed.

  Penn’s ruddy face registered astonishment. “My God. You’re saying that the SDF-3 …”

  Nichols nodded encouragement. “The fold generators of the SDF-3 were taken from Breetai’s flagship and the Robotech factory satellite, both of which were fueled with first-generation Protoculture.”

  “And that Protoculture,” Penn said, “was caught up in the Invid transformation that occurred here, on Earth.”

  “You’ve got it,” Nichols told him. “If we can learn where the Invid went, we’ll find the SDF-3.”

  “But how can we do that?” Jean Grant asked.

  “Folding for Haydon IV is a good way to start,” Nichols said. “The more I hear about Haydon and this ‘Awareness,’ the more I’m convinced there’s a lead there. Second, we can take the Invid … woman along. Some part of her is still on-line with the Invid group-mind, wherever it is, in this dimension or some other.”

  Some other dimension? Scott wanted to ask him. Wrinkled foreheads and bobbing Adam’s apples suggested that he was not alone in his concern. Nichols’s group, however, seemed to be taking the revelations in stride. Scott watched the one named Gibley. He had one of the umbilicals in hand and seemed to be applying some sort of spray lubricant to the jack.

  “ ‘We,’ Professor,” Vince said. “Can I take that to mean that you and your associates have agreed to accompany us?”

  Nichols nodded. “But not for the reasons you probably imagine, General,” he was quick to add. “Like most of you, we have friends on that ship who are important to us. But as for viewing Protoculture as a necessity in shaping Earth’s future, we couldn’t disagree with you more.”

  Scott’s mouth dropped open as he saw Gibley part his long tail of bleached hair and insert the multipronged jack directly into the base of his skull.

  Nichols caught Scott’s expression. “They’re called cyber-ports,” he told Scott, fingering aside the hair on the right side of his cranium to reveal a similar alloy receptacle.

  Jean Grant blanched as the rest of Nichols’s team began to follow Gibley’s lead.

  “And we call this headlocking,” Nichols explained, regarding the table for a moment. “You see, despite what you may think, Protoculture’s reign is finished. Robotechnology is dead.

  “It worked its final shapings in the Quadrant when it merged with the Invid. I suspect, in fact, that that was its raison d’être all along—to be both mate and propellant for the Invid transformation.

  “But I repeat: It has no place in the world it reshaped in the process.” Nichols shook his head, his eyes a mystery behind mirrors. “No. From this point on it will be up to us to shape our destiny as a race, and we will have to look to superintelligences to help us define and design our course.”

  He motioned to his headlocked associates, their activated consoles and rapt expressions. “ ‘Machine mind’ holds the answers. Through it we will accomplish all that we have failed to accomplish in the past. Through it we will achieve where we have failed. Through it we will journey
where we have never been.”

  The table waited in silence.

  “Not out among the stars, either,” Louie said with a grin. “But in a reality we will create. Using the power of our own enhanced intellects and the immortal machine bodies we will someday soon fashion for ourselves.”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  During the cruel reign of the Robotech Masters, Karbarra had exported its revolution (along with tens of thousands of its pneumatic projectile rifles) to several Local Group worlds, including Garuda, Praxis, and Spheris. During the Invid occupation, Karbarra had seen its very future (i.e., the Karbarran childcubs) held hostage. The origin of the planet’s subsequent turn to dreams of empire is most often traced to its solid defeat over the (T. R.) Edwards-controlled Invid on Optera (see La Paz, Mizner, London, et al.). But who if not Haydon himself [sic] was Karbarra rising up against—Haydon and the curse of his [sic] Ur-Flower.

  Noki Rammas, Karbarra

  Dana was ready to jump the first Haydonite that glided across the laser-barred threshold to the Sterlings’ plush level-four lockup. But when that visitor turned out to be Veidt, all she could do was quietly lay aside the Praxian hardwood war club she had fashioned from a table leg, try to ease unnoticed from her place of concealment behind the couch, and join her parents and Exedore in questioning the being who had been like family to all of them in their time on-world.

  She was encouraged to hear Veidt address everyone as “my friends.”

  Exedore made his relief known with a slow exhalation of breath. “What is going on, Veidt?” he asked, staring up into the hovering figure’s bilaterally symmetrical suggestion of facial features. “I certainly can’t tell anything from your expression.”

  “Would that you had learned to discern our nuances,” Veidt sent to everyone. “You would have undoubtedly noticed alterations in my countenance since the initial stirrings of the Awareness some months ago. Our inner states are as much on display as your own, you know.”

  “Tell us what’s happening to you,” Exedore said.

  A dull, pulsating glow lit Veidt’s dzentile. “Thoughts come not without great difficulty now, Lord Exedore.”

  “Try, Veidt,” Miriya said, “please.”

  Veidt’s hairless head rolled briefly within the high collar of the robe. “One might compare it to the Compulsion the Robotech Masters used to extract unfailing allegiance from the Zentraedi.” The Haydonite regarded Max. “I have found nothing in Terran history that invites comparison, although my intuition tells me otherwise.

  “We Haydonites nevertheless have as a world been forced to respond to a type of behavioral programming that up until recently has lain dormant within us. But it appears that those of us who have had continued contact with offworlders can exercise intermittent control over the programming.”

  Exedore and the Sterlings could sense Veidt’s musings. Alone among his planetary companions, Veidt had shed tears on the occasion of the death of Sarna, his mate in captivity, whose body had been delivered into the cupped hands of Haydon IV’s towering shrine to its creator.

  “The process is somewhat analogous to the defenses your bodies utilize in the resisting of biological contamination or infection,” Veidt continued.

  “I guess Anad and Llan haven’t got the hang of it yet,” Dana said.

  Veidt rotated to face her. “They were probably more helpful than you realize, child.”

  Exedore spoke up before Dana could respond. “But what brought this about, Veidt? Surely it has something to do with the Invid’s departure. Only a believer in coincidence would fail to see the connection.”

  Veidt’s sendings ceased for a moment. “The Event has occurred, Lord Exedore. I can offer little more data than that. From the deepest center of my being arises an understanding that this world itself has been waiting and preparing for the Event for countless millennia, and yet I cannot speak of it. I know only that the waiting is complete.”

  “You’re telling us you’ve no idea what you’ve been waiting for?” Dana said.

  “I am. Nor do I know what to expect.”

  “Why have we been arrested, Veidt?” Max demanded.

  The Haydonite glided to the center of the room and back. “Arrest is not the appropriate term. You’ve done nothing illegal, nothing to warrant imprisonment.”

  Dana pointed to the laser-barred threshold. “In case you haven’t noticed, Veidt, we’re not exactly free to come and go as we choose.”

  “Protective custody is the term I would use,” Veidt offered, as though he had been scrolling through a phrase file. “As I’m certain Lord Exedore has already informed you, Haydon IV has left orbit and is accelerating even now. Surely you accept the fact that you never would have been able to survive on the surface.”

  “Granted, Veidt,” Miriya said. “We were brought down here for our own good; we’ve accepted that much. But does that mean we’ll be released when we reach wherever it is we’re going?”

  Veidt’s forehead pulsed with subdued light. “Not exactly. You see, it is important that you not be permitted to interfere with the successful completion of the secondary and tertiary stages. Therefore, you are to remain in protective custody until all post-Event phases have been carried out.”

  “But how long are we talking about?” Dana managed.

  “As long as the operation requires,” Veidt sent.

  Max and Miriya stared at each other aghast. Exedore and Aurora assimilated the disclosure silently. Dana considered lunging for the hardwood war club she had stashed behind the couch.

  “Violence should not be considered an option,” the Haydonite said without facing anyone directly. “I should add that I have sought audience with Vowad.”

  Father of a sort to Sarna, Vowad was a high-ranking member of Haydon IV’s Elite.

  “And?” Exedore asked.

  “He can do nothing. Offworlder contact has mitigated the impact of the Compulsion on Vowad as an entity, but he is still obliged to answer to the Elite, who have thus far remained fully responsive to the programming.”

  Dana felt her anger rising again.

  “Perhaps I should remind you that one incident of violence has already been answered in kind,” Veidt sent in her direction.

  “The Karbarran vessel,” Exedore said.

  “Vessels, unfortunately. One Spherisian ship did, however, escape the acceleration unscathed.”

  “Has Karbarra been informed of the incident?” Max asked out of genuine concern.

  “Yes, by the Spherisians themselves,” Veidt sent. “In fact, there is some reason to believe that a Karbarran battle group is en route to Haydon IV at this very moment.”

  Max shot to his feet. “But you just said that interference couldn’t be permitted! You’ve got to see that they’re warned away.”

  Veidt grew quiet, as though accessing some remote mainframe. “I’m sorry, all of you. But it is apparently too late for that now.”

  At Admiral-Elect Lron’s urgings, the Karbarran dreadnought had been named N’trpriz in honor of some Terran ship of primitive design. And while Commander K’rrk had not been against the idea at the time, he would have preferred a different vessel to call his own, a Sekiton-powered ship-of-the-line with a proper Karbarran name. The Tracialle, if he had had a choice or, failing that, the battlewagon Yirrbisst.

  K’rrk sat in the command chair of the N’trpriz, shaking out the lingering effects of spacefold as his bridge crew fed him updates on the ship’s position and readiness.

  “Haydon IV coming into view, Commander,” Mav reported from one of the forward duty stations. “All cruisers accounted for. Establishing matching velocity with the planet in three point seven units, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mav,” K’rrk said from the helm chair. “Let’s have a look at it.”

  The artificial planet resolved on the bridge’s forward screen, variegated, rotating, but atmosphereless. A celestial wanderer no longer, but more the starship it was. Parsecs distant from that which it
had called its home star for a time, and still accelerating.

  K’rrk cupped a paw around his muzzle in a contemplative gesture. Off to one side of the helm chair stood an enormous wooden wheel, a vestigial adornment overruled by Tiresian-made astrogational computers buried deep in the ship’s heart but left in place out of respect for the Sentinels’ “steamship,” Farrago.

  K’rrk turned to regard his science officer. “Could they be preparing to fold, Lorek?”

  “A distinct possibility, Commander.”

  “What do scanners show?”

  “Areas of extensive surface damage,” Lorek responded after a moment. By Karbarran standards, he was tall and lean, with mottled fur and a curious cant to the diminutive, mushroom-shaped horns set between his ears. “Glike appears to be completely deserted, sir, although bio-indicators are registering life signs in several subsurface chambers.”

  “Do we have a fix on whatever’s powering the thing?” K’rrk asked.

  “Affirmative. All drive systems are controlled from a central AI nexus concealed under what used to be a system of reservoirs and interlinked canals. It has apparently been given the name Awareness, Commander.”

  “Defenses, Lorek. Shields? Antiparticle fields?”

  “None that scanners can discern, Commander.”

  K’rrk growled with pleasure as he turned to the ship’s communications officer. “Reeza, inform all battle group commanders to hold their positions.”

  “Done, Commander,” she responded almost immediately.

  K’rrk made an approving sound. “Open up a hailing frequency, Lieutenant.”

  “Frequency opened to all traffic,” Reeza told him.

  K’rrk cleared his throat and slapped a paw down on the chair’s translator stud. “This is the Karbarran starship N’trpriz. We wish to make contact with whomever is presently in control of Haydon IV.” He repeated the request twice more.

  “Incoming, sir,” Reeza said as a synthesized voice speaking formal Karbarran began to issue from the bridge’s communication ports.

  “Attention, N’trpriz,” the voice began. “Your vessel is being scanned. Do not, repeat, do not attempt to arm or deploy any weapons.”