Dana’s efforts to contact Zor with the capsule’s little commo unit had drawn no response. Now she blinked at the bright sunlight, as the hatch opened and the fragrant air of Earth drifted in.
The capsule had landed at the crest of a low foothill across the plain, just within view of the SDF-1’s gravesite. She already knew from the capsule’s crude monitoring equipment that the mother ship had followed her down through the atmosphere, headed for the mounds.
Dana drew herself out of the capsule and saw the five-mile length of the Masters’ last starship come in to hover over the resting place of the SDF-1. “Zor. Don’t—please!”
There is no other way.
Zor’s red raised its discus pistol. The destruction of the mother ship directly over the mounds would ensure that the Flowers of Life and their spores would be completely obliterated, and spare the Human race the slaughter and ruin of an Invid invasion.
Some spores had already drifted free of the mound, though instruments weren’t clear as to why that hadn’t happened before; there were completely unique and unprecedented Protoculture aberrations down there, and no time to analyze them. But that didn’t matter now. The radius of the blast would get all of them.
Now!
The red fired its pistol at carefully selected targets; it was easy for him to find the vulnerable points in the systemry the original Zor had conceived. In moments the entire ship was a daisy chain of ever increasing explosions, ripping open its hull, gathering toward that final, utter detonation.
He thought he would be swallowed up by grief in those last moments, to see only the ghosts of the victims, and the shadows of the suffering he had caused. Unexpectedly, though, Zor Prime’s last thoughts were of the thing that had made this last incarnation so different from the rest, and let him free himself.
Dana, I love you!
Dana shrieked at the exploding ship, knowing it would do no good, until the explosions reached a crescendo. “Stop! Zor, there must be a better way—”
Then she threw herself to shelter behind the grounded, armored capsule and wept, face buried in her arms.
In the mounds, the wraiths gathered all their remaining energy, and contained the explosive force of the mother ship.
Zor’s calculations were entirely correct, insofar as they went. The self-destruction should have vaporized the mounds and wiped out the curse that was the blooming Flowers, the drifting spores.
But the Shaping of the Robotech Wars had been set long before. Earth was to be saved from destroying itself in a Global Civil War and, at the same time, serve as the focal point that would let a tremendous wrong be righted. The time for the righting of that wrong had not yet come to pass, though the stage was now set.
And so the wraiths dampened the blast of the exploding starship. The Matrix flared like a nova, sang a single piercing note, and released all its power upward. The wraiths used it to muffle the blast in an unimaginable contest of warring forces, and won.
Still, the mother ship was blown to fragments and, even as Zor Prime soared to a higher plane of existence, freed at last of the cycle of crime and guilt in which he had been caught since his first terrible transgression, the fragments began to fall.
Even a small piece of the mother ship was enormous, and not all of the explosive force had been contained. Housings and armor and structural members pelted the plain and the mounds, raising huge puffs of dust, opening the mound even further; the explosive force caught the rising spores and sent them high and wide, to ride the winds of the world. Ripping down into the garden that had been the last Matrix, the blasts freed a hundred thousand times as many more, and sent them wafting, lifting petals and even whole plants, gusting them forth.
The winds that came from the Protoculture detonation behaved unlike normal air currents. It was as if they had been given a purpose, dispersing the spores, sowing them, taking many into upper airstreams that would bear them far—would seed the face of the planet with them.
The wraiths looked upon their work and upon the Earth that the Shaping had made their home for so long. They had been given life, of a sort, by the Protoculture, taking power from the masses within the wreckage of SDF-1, SDF-2, and Khyron’s downed battlecruiser.
But now their part in the Shaping was over, and the Matrix’s last energy was used up; it was gone forever. They began their return to nothingness, making sure that the residual Protoculture around them underwent conversion to the Flowers of Life.
Dana watched the drifting pink petals, the swirling spores. The Invid are coming! Her parents’ warning was right, and nothing could stop this species that even the Masters held in dread.
Three shadows loomed up out of the mounds, growing, but becoming more and more tenuous as they did. Dana, her senses expanded by her exposure to the Matrix and even more so by the jolt from the canister containing the Masters’ last mass, knew that the phantasms would do her no harm.
She was so preoccupied, thinking about her family, about the Masters’ words and Zor’s, that she didn’t hear the stealthy footsteps behind her, covered as they were by the moan of the winds. The projectile took her at the base of the skull, where her armor offered no protection. She went down.
“You saw them!” an eerie voice said. It sounded Human but had some of the sepulchral emotionlessness of a Robotech Master’s. “Without instruments or sensors, you saw the Guardians of the Mounds!”
She lay on her side, dazed, unable to move though she was fully conscious. She realized she had been shot with some kind of paralyzing agent. A moment later, two peculiar men came into view.
One she recognized, and the sight of him almost stopped her heart. Zand, heir to Dr. Lang’s secrets. He was wearing gleaming angelic robes, shiny metallic stuff, cut somewhat in the fashion of the Robotech Masters’ monkish ones, and his collar was shaped like the Flower of Life. That alone told Dana what was happening, and the danger she was in.
Zand had gone completely insane and saw her as his passport to divine powers.
Along with Zand was a stout, vacant-faced little man with a pencil mustache, so different from the pictures in the history books that Dana didn’t recognize him until Zand turned to say, “Russo! Bring the equipment.” The scientist tossed aside the tranquillizer gun indifferently.
Russo scuttled away. Dana knew there was no aircraft or surface vehicle around; she had seen none on landing. Had they simply been sitting out here, waiting? She couldn’t figure out how Zand had foreseen that she would be where she was. Perhaps his powers were already greater than hers.
Russo returned with devices like nothing either Earth’s Robotechnology or the Masters’ had ever produced. It seemed to be all crystal nimbuses and rainbow whorls, humming faintly like the Matrix.
Zand smiled like a fiend. “Much more compact than anything you’ll have seen even in the mother ships, I’ll bet. Those were crude toys compared to this.”
He was assembling it in some fashion she couldn’t quite follow. “I’ve had plenty of time to study the Matrix, you see. Years!” The apparatus seemed to shift and fold, as if it were moving among dimensions. Its aura had a fractal look to it.
Zand laughed a bit. “The Masters and the Human race, destroying each other over a mere Matrix! When the real crux of the matter is you, Dana—and your Destiny, which is to yield up your powers to me!”
He reached out to touch something like a node of pure light against her forehead. It clung there, and she felt an utter cold, even through the numbness. “Your powers will grow. They will see beyond the Protoculture! They will be matchless! But,” his mouth flattened grimly, “they’ll do all that as mine, once I’ve taken them from you.”
He looked around. “Where is the Protoculture cell?”
When Russo gave him a blank look, Zand lashed out and sent him sprawling. Russo crawled and flopped away, whimpering like a whipped hound, to return with a prism perhaps a foot long, slender and glowing.
Dana fought against her paralysis, but couldn’t shake it
or defy it. Zand had planned it well. He had foreseen this day with powers of his own. As he took the Protoculture cell and prepared to shift Dana’s gifts to himself, she had a moment to wonder: what, then, of her Vision, the Phoenix?
Her own life, she knew, was over. Zand was about to take something that was so much her essence that she would die like a withered husk without it.
He had mated the prism with the rest of his strange device. “So much Protoculture in one place,” he smiled. “It took a long time to gather, even for me, diverting military supplies. But it’s the power I need to draw your powers from you to me.”
The device shone brighter, Russo was groveling, crouched with his face in the sand. Zand’s strange voice was exalted. “First the power of the Protoculture fills me, then the powers of Dana Sterling! The Masters promised me that I would be wed to the power of the Flower, and I shall!” The light was unbearable.
Zand seemed to swell and grow. Dana feared what the Universe was in for, with Zand striding across it like a god.
Just then she heard a bark.
Polly! In her paralysis, she couldn’t even say it.
The Pollinator came traipsing up and sat down, head canted to one side, tongue lolling, to consider Zand. He barely registered the XT creature, though, because something was terribly wrong with him.
His enlarged form was vibrating. Soon he was contorting, convulsing, his device flashing like a lighthouse in an earthquake. Russo had thrown himself flat, covering his head with his hands, wailing.
Dana had a sense that the last of the wraiths was vanishing away. And with them, the last of the Matrix, as well as the last of the Protoculture in the area, was being transformed.
Zand voiced a howl of agony and fright so ghastly that she was to remember it all her days. The light engulfed him. Still the Pollinator sat and watched. The Protoculture in the Matrix had been changed to the Rowers of Life….
Perhaps it was the discharge of so much Protoculture. In any case, Dana felt the world slipping away, and saw the old Vision once again, the Phoenix. Only, this time she saw Zor, too. It was given to her, in that trance, to know why the Robotech Wars had come to be, and what the ultimate outcome was—just what the Phoenix was.
Just as the blinding light faded, Dana found that she could move a little. Either Zand had underestimated the dosage or her expanded powers were helping. Dana, Polly and the whining Russo gazed on what had appeared in Zand’s place.
In a way, he got his wish, was Dana’s first coherent thought.
There had never been, nor ever would be again, one to match it, the biggest Rower of Life that ever was. It stood rooted in the sand, spreading its petals, a coral-colored tripartite beauty. Of Zand there was no sign except, perhaps, in the shape and detail of the central blossom; it might only be her imagination, or it might be that she saw his face there.
Of his fantastic device, nothing remained.
She found she had the strength to rise, but came only to her knees, swaying. She heard a cry and looked up to see Russo, shrieking and screaming, running off down the hill like a crazed ape. He was headed directly out into the wastelands; she let him go.
Dana dragged one foot to her, until she was on one knee, the spores drifting about her. The odd thought struck her that perhaps Zand’s fate was some lesson from the Protoculture, some chastening, to balance the power she had been granted.
She found herself humming, then realized it was a seventeenth-century hymn her father had loved and her Zentraedi mother had approved of as holding much and proper wisdom; so Rolf Emerson had told her, when Emerson taught it to Bowie and Dana. As a little girl she had taught it to Konda, Bron, and Rico, and they had insisted that what was in the words and the tune was nothing less than universal truth:
Lead kindly, Light,
Amid the encircling gloom
Lead Thou me on,
The night is dark and I am far from home
Lead Thou me on,
Keep Thou my feet
I do not ask to see the distant scene
One step enough for me
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Now our slaves, the Robotech Masters, are passed away
Now all our Protoculture balefires burn low
Now the Shapings turn; we surrender the stage to Invid and Human
Our cold light leaves the Universe
We see at the last that
Those who remain behind know no fear of the darkness
And we ourselves learn What it is to weep
Death song of the Robotech Elders
DANA GATHERED POLLY UNDER ONE ARM AND WALKED tiredly back to the escape capsule. Russo, already a mile away, was barely visible as a mad figure capering and lurching into the wastes. The Pollinator licked her face.
A thin whine of engines caught her attention, and she looked up to see an assault ship coming in at her, flying unsteadily, seemingly about to go into a nosedive.
She threw herself flat, expecting the worst, but somehow the vessel righted itself enough for a jouncing set-down right near her. She remembered that she was unarmed, but she had no place to run and was too tired and battered to feel fear—thought that, perhaps, she would never know it again.
But when the assault craft’s hatches opened, instead of letting forth attack teams of Triumviroids, it yielded her own 15th squad, along with Nova, Musica, and a bunch of clones.
“Damn it, Phillips!” Angelo Dante was seething. “I’d like to see you make a better landing with an XT ship! We walked away from it, didn’t we?”
“All I said was,” Sean replied in a blasé voice, “that I could do better with boxing gloves on. Hey, Dana! You made it!”
The refugees stayed back, but her squadmates and Musica and Nova clustered around her, along with Marie Crystal and Dennis Brown. She blinked at him. “How did you find me?”
“Picked up your voice transmissions from the escape capsule,” Angelo said. “But then, all of a sudden, the engines and all the systems quit. We had to land on emergency power.”
“Ya shoulda let Marie and Dennis take over,” Sean snorted.
But Dana was shaking her head. “No, Angie couldn’t help what happened. It’s the Protoculture—there was nothing he could do.” Angelo looked at her strangely, not used to having her defend him.
There was still Protoculture power supplies on Earth, she knew, outside the radius of effect of the wraiths’ transformation. Enough to animate mecha for a transition period. But there would be no new Matrices, no new sources.
“The war’s over, Lieutenant,” Bowie told her happily. “The enemy mecha stopped fighting, and the clones just want peace.”
“That’s … that’s great, Bowie.” He didn’t understand why she sounded like she was about to start bawling. People noticed the Pollinator, but hesitated to ask about it. They saw the huge Flower that had been Zand, but they were used to seeing the triad plants by now, and even such a huge one was far down on the list of topics of discussion.
“Where’s Zor?” Musica inquired timidly, fearing to hear the answer.
Dana pointed to where the mushroom cloud of spores and petals still rose up and up, tunneled into the higher atmosphere, sent on their appointed way by those strange winds. “He died trying to save Earth.”
Musica was shaking her head slowly, looking at the pink petals and tiny spores that filled the sky like a blizzard. “But in vain. Now the Invid come. Oh poor, poor Zor!” Bowie slipped his armored arm around her.
Nova drew a deep breath and declared, “Well, then! We’ve got to get back and report to whoever’s in interim command! We have defenses to set up, plans to make—” She looked a little funny acting military with the infant still in her arms.
But Dana was shaking her head, too. “You do what you have to. I’m through with war.” She already saw where her new course lay.
She had beheld something greater than herself, greater than the Human race or any other corporeal race. She understood at last the V
ision that had filled her dreams all her life. She knew that there was no way to oppose or derail the Shaping, though there was much more suffering and strife ahead. She recalled that magnificent, infinitely sad Phoenix of racial transfiguration, and the recollection took away some of her sorrow.
“What d’you mean? You think you can hide from what’s coming?” Nova snapped. “There’s nowhere to run, Dana.” The 15th and the others were looking at her worriedly, too, afraid that what she had been through had pushed her over the edge.
“What’s going to happen on Earth will go beyond armies, beyond Protoculture,” she told them calmly. “The next Robotech War will be the last, but I’ve had enough. I’m going to find my parents, and my sister. They’re with a group that includes Admiral Hunter and Admiral Hayes, who’ve parted ways with the original SDF-3 expedition. They’re trying to establish a new, positive force, the Sentinels. I’m joining them.”
Everybody was babbling at once, but Angelo Dante held stage center by dint of his overwhelming voice. “Even if you weren’t crazy, Dana, there’s no way to get there! All the Robotech Masters’ starships were blown to smithereens, and Earth ain’t got no more.” He looked toward the flaming remains of Monument City and Fokker Base. “And ain’t likely to for a long, long time.”
The Pollinator let out a playful yip and he reached out unconsciously to pet the thing, barely aware that Polly was there.
Dana puzzled for a microsecond, but her new powers offered up the answer at once, like some unfailing databank. “Before too long, another expedition will arrive, carrying word from the SDF-3, like Major Carpenter’s ships did.
“By then, I’ll be ready with the fuel and charts and everything else I need to take one of his ships and find my family and the others. Any of you who want to come are welcome.”
They didn’t have to ask if she meant to get the starship by legal means; the world was in ruins and all chains of command shattered. All the military certainties were swept away.
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