End of the Circle Read online

  K’rrk flashed his weapons officer a paw signal for restraint and patience. “Understood, Haydon IV,” he directed toward overhead audio pickups. “With whom are we speaking?”

  “You are in communication with Haydon IV’s Awareness. State your purpose, N’trpriz.”

  K’rrk glanced at his crew, then said, “We must be permitted to establish a docking orbit around Haydon IV for the purpose of extracting our citizens.”

  Ursine eyes fixed on the forward screen and speakers.

  “That cannot be permitted,” the Awareness replied at last. “Your citizens are in no danger. Do not, repeat, do not attempt an approach or your vessel will have to be destroyed.”

  K’rrk bared his fangs in a twisted smile. If the normally dour Karbarrans had learned anything from the Sentinels’ victorious campaigns, it was that fate, destiny, could be grasped as one would a prize piece of fruit. And just now Haydon IV was that prize, a conquest that would consolidate Karbarra’s power among the worlds of the Local Group and reward a certain commander with the dreadnought of his choosing for all subsequent sorties.

  “Nonsense,” K’rrk told the Awareness with a gurgling snarl. “Release your prisoners at once or suffer the consequences.” He hit the com-interrupt stud and swung to Lorek. “Do we still have a fix on the nerve center?”

  “Affirmative, Commander.”

  K’rrk struck the arm of the command chair with a huge fist, nonretractable claws finding their usual grooves. “Activate all electronic countermeasures and prepare for evasive action. Mav, prepare to secure us a counterrotational orbit at my command. Cano: target primary torpedoes ground zero on nerve center coordinates.”

  “We’re being warned away, sir,” Reeza said.

  “Engineering,” K’rrk growled across the com-line as the N’trpriz began to close on the accelerating sphere that was Haydon IV.

  “Engineering here, Commander,” a thickly accented Highlander’s voice returned.

  “We’re going to try a hit-and-run, Rash. Will your engines back us up?”

  “By Yirrbisst, you know they will, Commander.”

  K’rrk grinned. “All right, Cano, on my—”

  A blare of two-note warning horns overpowered his words.

  “Commander,” Lorek reported in an astonished voice. “Ship’s auto-destruct has been armed and is counting down!”

  K’rrk rose halfway out of the helm chair. “What?”

  “Auto-destruct set for thirty units, sir.”

  K’rrk spit a curse at Haydon IV’s on-screen image. “Toy with us, you will not! Mav, plot a course directly for the surface. I want us in this ship sitting right over the Awareness!”

  “Twenty units, sir.”

  K’rrk slammed a paw down on the chair’s control panel. “Ship’s computer,” he said, catching a whiff of his own muskiness. “Abort auto-destruct sequence. Priority override, K’rrk-two-K’rrk-one, cancel.”

  Lorek entered a similar verbal code, and the warning horns were silenced. “Auto-destruct sequence aborted,” Lorek updated.

  K’rrk grinned knowingly. “All engines full reverse, Mav.”

  The navigator tapped a flurry of commands into his console, then threw a wide-eyed look over his shoulder. “Sir, the ship isn’t responding!”

  “Rash!” K’rrk barked over the com-line. “Get your engines on-line!”

  The chief engineer’s reply was panicked. “By the Ur-Flower, we’re trying, sir!”

  K’rrk heard Lorek’s sharp intake of breath under the blare of reactivated warning horns. “Auto-destruct reinitiated, Commander. Counting down from thirty units.”

  “Haydon!” K’rrk bellowed. “Mav: Return to previous course heading, all ahead full!”

  “Twenty units, Commander.”

  “We’ve got full reverse, sir,” Rash said proudly from engineering.

  K’rrk’s muzzle fell open at the sight of Haydon IV dwindling on-screen. “Full ahead! Full ahead!”

  “No response, sir!” Mav said.

  “Ten units, Commander.”

  “Ship’s computer,” K’rrk sputtered. “Abort auto-destruct sequence. K’rrk-two-K’rrk-one.”

  “You forget to say ‘priority override’!” every officer on the bridge cried at the same time.

  “Five units, Commander.”

  “Ship’s computer,” K’rrk started again. “Priority override— No! I mean Abort K’rrk-two— No, I—”

  “Four units, Commander!”

  “Ship’s K’rrk! Computer sequence—”

  Mav and Cano had abandoned their duty stations and were approaching him with murder in their eyes.

  “Abort, K’rrk! Abort—”

  “Three units.”

  “Cancel priority—”

  “Two units.”

  Even Reeza had joined the mutiny, the claws of her hands poised over the helm chair.

  “Arrrggggg!”

  “One unit.”

  K’rrk was still butchering commands when the N’trpriz added its brief fireball to the heavenly sweep.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  One of the things I liked about having [Sean] Phillips around was that his relationship with Marie Crystal was even more confused than mine was with Karen [Penn]. But we were competitors from almost the first moment he set foot on Tirol. I had it figured then that the 15th thought they’d done the job the REF had been sent to do—cut the Robotech Masters down to size. After all, none of us [in the REF] had dealings with the Masters. As far as the Invid were concerned, the 15th had left Earth before their arrival and docked on Tirol after the Invid had already left. So of course I made a thing about talking up the Sentinels and what wed been through on Praxis and the rest. But who could blame me when the 15th had gotten a bigger reception in Tiresia than the Sentinels had gotten when we’d returned victorious from Optera.

  Jack Baker, Upwardly Mobile

  Jack was first out of the launch bay, nine Veritechs formed up on his tail. Newspace veteran Jack in his scarlet Alpha, out into the fog that was not.

  That was the real kicker, he told himself. That newspace, as Lang’s Robotechs were calling it, felt more like a state of mind than a state of matter. Extravehicular, immersed in vaporless white light, you got the feeling you were not so much “out there” as you were, well, inside something.

  Against the black star-strewn backdrop everyone was used to, you were occasionally overcome by the magnitude of it all. You could sense just how insignificant you were in the grand scheme, and it made for easy combat when one figured your single ship didn’t amount to squat. (But jeez, how it could bring on the night terrors afterward! That amoebalike sense of immersion, the loss of self …)

  That was where newspace was something else. Because in there—he might not say it, but he could not help but think it—one started to feel just too significant, as though every action one took set into motion a chain of immutable reactions.

  The “fireflies” found by the fortress’s bio-sensors were on-screen and closing on all sides. They winked light just like the real things, here one moment, gone the next, vaguely blue against the colorless, ambient glow of newspace.

  “Command to Red Team leader. Do you copy, Red leader? Repeat, do you copy?”

  The SDF-3 was a black slash at nine o’clock, the mecha constituting Red and Blue Teams circumferentially deployed like widely scattered paint flecks chipped from the ship’s hull.

  Jack chinned into the command frequency, opening a line to the Tactical Information Center. “Red One receiving you loud and clear, Command. What have you got for us?”

  A video image of Colonel Vallenskiy’s head and shoulders appeared on one of the Alpha heads-up display screens, strobing harsh light into the cockpit. “Nothing yet, Captain. Bio-scanners are still showing hot signatures but no profiles.”

  “Copy and confirm, Command,” Baker said. “Sorry to disappoint, Colonel, but our view doesn’t seem to be any better than yours.”

  “Roger tha
t, Red leader. TIC requests you maintain present position. Let’s see if they’re willing to come into the playground.”

  Terrific, Jack thought. Just hang us out here like fresh meat. “This is Baker,” he directed into the tactical net helmet pickup. “Maintain position. Lights alive at two thousand meters, all points and closing.”

  He could see them overhead, given false color and solidity by the cockpit canopy’s polarized tint. Only now he saw that the bogies were not spherical at all but the rounded, light-emitting tips of tendrillike forms. He flashed on the Sentinels’ encounter with Haydon IV’s antibody defenses, thinking: But no … No one at the briefing had been interested in hearing about that episode.

  “They’re onto me,” one of Marie Crystal’s wingmen blurted. “It’s like I’m looking at tentacles. B—but they’re not attached to anything!”

  “Hold your position,” Jack heard Marie tell the pilot.

  “Christ, Captain, they’re practically all over me!”

  “Blue Six, you are not to engage unless provoked,” Vallenskiy ordered over the com net. “Maintain position.”

  Jack felt something graze the Alpha’s radome and cockpit and realized that the VT was being probed and explored. Reflexively, he crouched down in his seat, suddenly feeling as though he were about to enter an old-fashioned car wash. But what would have been brush tips were flickering lights.

  Blue Six gave a panicked cry. “Holy shit, they passed right through me, Captain! The things just shot right through me!”

  Jack shuddered, chilled to his center, as one of the light tips pierced the hull and thudded wormlike against his “thinking cap.” It was incredible: The tendrils were not puncturing the hull but simply penetrating it! Some tore right through it, while others were whizzing lightning-quick recons around the cockpit. A few seemed to enter his body and course up and down his arms and legs; one even took a fast tour of his mind, leaving him dizzy and momentarily nauseated.

  The tac net was filled with the sound of gasps and near exultation as the lights penetrated one Veritech after another. No one was capable of responding to Command’s urgent requests for updates.

  Jack braced himself for the lights’ return the way one tightened up at the crest of a roller coaster drop. But at the last instant the tendrils that were headed for the Alpha divided and joined separate groups closing on Jack’s two wingmen. This time, however, they did not pierce the VTs but danced around them, forming dazzling nimbi of light. Then, almost simultaneously, the two fighters winked out of existence.

  Jack could not get his voice to work. When he did, he had difficulty reporting what he had just witnessed. Command, however, had apparently seen the two Veritechs disappear from the threat board.

  “Red and Blue leaders, we show two, make that four, missing spacecraft,” Vallenskiy said. “Can you confirm? Repeat, can you confirm?”

  “They’re gone!” Jack managed. “Atomized, dematerialized, disintegrated … I don’t know what. The lights surrounded them, then took them out.”

  “That’s affirmative,” Marie said, answering for the Blue Team.

  “Did you engage? Any of you?”

  “Negative,” Jack said, counting follow-up denials on the net: Dante, Crystal, Penn, Phillips …

  “Can you verify present UCT positions, Red leader?”

  Jack glanced at his displays and screens, tipping the Alpha starboard with a brief firing of the VT’s attitude jets. The lights had lost interest in the squadron. Beneath him, the tendrils were like spears gone ballistic, the SDF-3 soon to be pincushioned or worse.

  Jack said, “You’re the center of attention, Command.”

  “Then you are to engage, full teams,” Vallenskiy returned. “Stop those things from reaching the ship!”

  Rick stood on the TIC’s command balcony, listening to Vallenskiy relay commands to the mecha recon teams. Unless his eyes or the fortress’s exterior cams were lying, he had just seen four VTs dematerialized by an enemy light. And now he had ordered the squadron to counterattack. With the hope of accomplishing what? he asked himself. Punishing the light for its omnipotence? According to the available data, it was not even light they were facing but some animated form of electrical energy.

  Something like the synaptic firing of a neuron, Lang had explained.

  “Fortress defensive shields raised,” a tech announced from the command console. “Red and Blue Teams falling in to engage, sir.”

  Rick swung around to the monitors in time to see the Blue Team pilots imaging their VTs over to Battloid mode. Captains Baker and Penn and what remained of the Red Team were configured as Fighters or Guardians.

  Rick briefly considered what he would do if he was out there. He pictured himself strapped into the cockpit seat, one hand clasped on the Hotas, face bathed in display light, scalp tingling from contact with the helmet’s neural sensors, the smell of fuel and heated circuitry. No good to use heat-seekers, he thought. Go right to lasers.

  “Lasers fired, sir,” the same tech reported.

  Rick squinted at the monitor screens.

  And what he saw blinded him for the next ten seconds and left him with a dull ache in the back of his head he knew he would feel for a week.

  His eyes opened to the sight of men and women throughout the TIC bent over their consoles in postures of anguish.

  The lasers had only fed strength to the light.

  Succeeded in angering it.

  Sirens wailed: Brace for impact!

  Kami deliberately placed himself in the path of the first light tendril to penetrate the hold. It shook him with all the force of a baleful premonition, a minatory sending from the hin.

  And how like the hin it seemed—the source of this light!

  Garudan, Kami had an intimate knowledge of such nonordinary states of mind—that which Terrans considered nonordinary was the norm on Garuda. Credit Haydon or blame him, but his tamperings had resulted in a planet that was hell for those offworlders who chanced to breathe its rarefied atmosphere, a heaven for those fortunate enough to have been born into it. No, hell for the lupine Garudans was to be deprived of their homeworld’s atmosphere. And it was thanks only to treatments received on Haydon IV that Kami could function aboard the SDF-3 without the transpirator he had worn through the Sentinels’ perilous campaign.

  Credit Haydon again. Or blame him.

  Kami saw that Learna, his mate and partner those long years of war and tenuous peace, had discerned his intent and was also about to position herself under the full force of the teeming rain of crazed light. Her sendings were strong as she ventured forth from useless cover, the hin both guide and umbrella.

  From across the hold came shouts of concern from their Terran shipmates and Local Group brothers and sisters in arms. Gnea said something in Praxian neither Kami nor Learna could comprehend. Baldan, Lron, Crysta, and several other Karbarrans were nearby. There was barely a corner the light had overlooked by then, save for what some called “the Pit,” where Kazianna Hesh and a dozen or so Zentraedi were suiting up in power armor.

  And it was not until the tendrils found the warrior giants that the Garudans’ allies in the hin opened a portal to the truth.

  Kami realized at once that the SDF-3 was not dealing with some blindly malicious Luciferian strike force but the scouts and emissaries of a powerful but childlike superintelligence. His encounter was brief by necessity, for he could barely maintain his individual self in the suffocating intoxication of the experience. The portal had been opened into a realm unlike any he had ever visited in the hin, opened into a soul unlike anything met there. The call of life’s beyond, a siren song of such warmth and transcendence that Kami was tempted to surrender himself and be absorbed.

  It was only Learna’s presence that saved him, Learna, anchored firmly in the nonordinary and beckoning him back with her love.

  The light in the fortress’s belly was retreating, dazzling eye and mind with its speed and brilliance. It had discovered something in the Zentraedi that
filled it with fear, a fear that sent it screaming through the rest of the ship, as though desperate to find a route to its own safety.

  “Please, Rem, hurry,” Minmei said, tugging at the flared sleeve of the Tiresian’s tunic. “I don’t like this; I’m frightened of it!”

  Rem was standing in the center of the cabin, arms akimbo and face uplifted to the ceiling. He looked like a dreamy-eyed teen in love with the idea of being caught out in a spring shower.

  “You’re a child sometimes,” he told her with a laugh. “Something wondrous seeks us out, and you’d have me hide under the bed. What frightens you?”

  Minmei opened her mouth to speak but realized she had no response in mind. The truth was that she could not articulate what it was about the lights that frightened her, but all her instincts told her that Rem was in danger.

  That he was not listening to her came as no surprise, really, for who was she to tell Lord Protoculture anything? Oh, once he would have listened, when she was still the voice that had won the Robotech War, but it had been years since that voice had sung, and it was Rem’s star that had been on the ascendant since. Playing Johnny Appleseed on New Praxis with the Flowers of Life, conjuring Protoculture from them, fabricating the matrix Lang and the REF command worshiped like some sacrosanct icon.

  Rem suddenly took hold of her narrow wrist and pulled her close, encircling her shoulders with his right arm. “Let it find us together,” he said, still eyeing the ceiling expectantly. “Open your mind to it.”

  She tried not to quiver so in his embrace, but dread was sluicing through her veins like ice water. She wanted nothing more than to dig a deep dark hole for the two of them to hide in.

  The first lights passed through the cabinspace with scarcely a moment’s hesitation, piercing the room obliquely from ceiling to floor. A second group followed from the opposite direction. But the third and fourth entered through the starboard bulkhead and instead of exiting along their line of flight began to dart around the perimeter of the cabin, as if to fence the couple in.