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by Jack McKinney

  A Del Rey Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1987, 1988, by HARMONY GOLD U.S.A., INC. and TATSUNOKO PRODUCTION CO. LTD. All Rights Reserved. ROBOTECH is a trademark owned and licensed by HARMONY GOLD U.S.A., INC.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 87-91874

  ISBN 0-345-35305-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-82395-3

  First Edition: August 1988

  Sixth Printing: July 1990

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Appendix

  Robotech Chronology

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  Don’t talk to me of Science! The only reference work I consult is the Encyclopedia of Ignorance. All Science has done is force us to narrow our definitions, categorize our thinking. It offers us false security at the expense of true adventure; a logical worldview at the expense of spontaneity. I have no use for it. I create my world and change its rules and guidelines as I see fit. I am the only god this dimension has ever known; the only one it will ever know!

  T. R. Edwards, as quoted in Constance Wildman’s

  When Evil Had Its Day: A Biography of T. R. Edwards

  “At least I won’t be pirating it this time,” Jonathan Wolfe told Lang as the retrofitted SDF-7–class cruiser nosed into view. The venom in his voice was palpable, but the scientist either misunderstood or refused to acknowledge it.

  “Engineering and astrogation have already been briefed on our modifications to the Reflex drives and spacefold generators. Improvements, I should say,” Lang added, turning around to face Wolfe.

  Wolfe tried to take a reading of the man’s transformed eyes, but staring into them only made him think of black holes, unfathomable singularities. He let his gaze linger on the starship instead, his ticket home, whatever that meant.

  “We’ve moved away from reliance on the Ur-Flower peat toward a more conventional dialogue between the monopole ore and the Protoculture itself. Your ship has a bit of the SDF-3 in her, Colonel.”

  Wolfe smirked. “Then maybe it’ll find a way back to Earth on its own, Lang. A milk run.”

  The scientist cocked his head to one side, offering an appraising look. “It wouldn’t be the oddest thing, Commander.”

  Major Carpenter, whose ship had left Fantomaspace more than six months ago, had not been heard from. Lang’s Robotechs were attributing this to malfunctions in the ship’s deepspace transceivers—a wedding of Tiresian and Karbarran systemry—but privately Lang had confessed to misgivings about the very nature of the ship’s drives. Not so with this ship, Wolfe had been assured. This was the one the R&D people were puffed up about. This was the one that would give Wolfe the edge; spirit him through space-time in the blinking of an eye, overtaking en route the Earth-bound spade fortresses of the Robotech Masters.

  Wolfe continued to regard the ship from the SDF-3’s observation blister without much thought to Lang’s reassurances, or to what might or might not lie at mission’s end. To him, the ship—this sleek and substantially scaled-down version of the superdimensional fortress—was simply a way out. There had been flashes of renewed faith these past few weeks, moments when he saw himself as reborn—on Haydon IV, for instance, or at seeing the look on T. R. Edwards’s face when his treachery was revealed to the council—but all that had been emptied from him on the bridge of the Valivarre. Minmei’s words still rang in his ears like a curse; her marriage to Edwards, that sick and sinister ceremony, replayed itself in dreams and every other waking thought. I’ve found happiness at last, she had shrieked from that black altar. Go back to the family you deserted … make amends with them!

  As if it were possible.

  He had convinced himself that it wasn’t Minmei who was sending him away—not any flesh-and-blood Minmei at least. He had succeeded in depersonalizing her, divesting her of the power to inflict such grief. She was a symbol of the world gone wrong and Jonathan Wolfe’s false steps through it; a symbol of hope’s turn toward evil. A symbol of transformed love, of broken promise. A world had once turned on her voice, and now that voice raged against what it had redeemed.

  “The ship’s databanks contain a complete record of the mission,” Lang was saying, “along with updated material covering the recent events on Tirol.”

  Wolfe abandoned his dark musings and registered surprise.

  “Longchamps and Stinson, and the others who backed Edwards, are holding their ground. But we’ve won the battle, as it goes.”

  “Edwards is halfway to Optera and they’re still not convinced,” Wolfe seethed. “They’re hedging their bets. They figure he’ll be coming back here with whatever’s left of the Invid fleet.”

  “Possibly that,” Lang was willing to concede. “But I think it has more to do with Earth than Tirol. We can’t be certain, but there’s some chance that the Southern Cross apparat has gained the upper hand. That would place Edwards in a strong position there, despite what has transpired here.”

  Lang was downplaying things considerably, Wolfe realized. Some chance meant sure thing, no matter how Lang chose to deliver it. An awareness of the Shapings—Protoculture had left him that talent when it drained the hazel from his eyes.

  “Field Marshall Leonard. Zand, Moran …”

  Lang nodded. “Exactly. Longchamps wants them to know where the lines were drawn.”

  Wolfe muttered a curse. “So we could end up dealing with Edwards all over again. On Earth this time.”

  “Which is why I want you to hand-deliver a special report to Major Rolf Emerson.”

  Wolfe’s pencil-thin eyebrows arched. “Emerson?”

  “He’s the only member of the general staff we can trust. We don’t know what Edwards’s next move will be. Perhaps he’ll attempt to convince the Regent to move against Earth. It’s clear now that the two of them have been in collusion for some time—at least as far back as the assassination of the Invid’s simulagent. If Carpenter’s ship made it back safely, the tale of our schism has already been told. But who knows how strong Leonard has become in the interim, how he might respond to reports of indecision among the council members …”

  “Earth would welcome Edwards with open arms.”

  “Edwards and the Regent. He could conquer the planet without loosing a beam.”

  Wolfe glanced at the ship, then uttered a short laugh as he swung around to Lang. “The goddamn frying pan to the fire.”

  “Not if we can hold Edwards here,” Lang told him. “The Zentraedi have volunteered to spearhead an invasion.”

  Wolfe was aghast. “Against Optera?”

  “Breetai’s forces are our only hope. Hunter and the Sentinels have only just left Spheris, and their destination is Peryton, not Optera.”

  “That’s lunacy! Show Hunter the transvids of Minmei’s wedding if you want to light a fire under him! He’ll say to hell with Peryton.”

  Lang made a calming gesture with his hands. “I think you’re mistaken, Colonel. B
ut we’re trying just that in any event. The Tokugawa under General Grant’s command will launch for Haydon IV shortly after your departure. There he’ll rendezvous with a Karbarran force and proceed to Peryton.”

  Wolfe felt of wave of anticipation wash through him. What chance could his one lone ship have against a combined enemy force in Earthspace? But to have a chance to stop Edwards from leaving the Quadrant, to go to guns with him on Optera, put a personal end to his evil reign—

  “So you understand just how critical your mission is,” Lang said, as though reading his mind. “It is imperative that the Defense Force on Earth be fully apprised of the situation—even if the result is further factionalism. I trust you follow me, Colonel.”

  Wolfe bit back a half-formed argument on the merits of his remaining on Tirol and nodded, tight-lipped and near-spellbound in Lang’s gaze.

  The starship was fully visible now, gleaming in the light of Fantoma’s primary, an arrow in the unseen wind.

  “There’s one more thing, Wolfe,” Lang said after a moment. “Your ship has the capacity for a round-trip.”

  “In case I change my mind.”

  Lang folded his arms. “If you should fail to make contact with us, we want you to return. We must be informed of the situation.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to ask, Lang. Especially when nobody was figuring on the Expeditionary mission ending up a one-way ticket.”

  Lang seemed to consider it, then said, “It’s not a request, Colonel. It’s an order.”

  Lang attended the Wolfe Pack’s final briefing and shuttled down to Tirol while the starship was being readied for launch. After a protracted exit from the Fantoma system, the ship would initiate the first of more than a dozen spacefold jumps that would eventually land it in Earthspace, clear across the galaxy. Wolfe was to communicate with the SDF-3 after each defold operation, and the fortress could thereby monitor the ship’s progress. The Robotech teams had taken no such precautions with Major Carpenter’s ship, which was to have completed the same trip in two jumps, dematerializing once some seventy-five light-years out from Tirol before it remanifested in Earthspace. But the sensor probes of the abandoned but still functioning Robotech fortress there had relayed no indications of the ship’s emergence or passage. For all intents and purposes, Carpenter was lost in space.

  Tiresia, in the wake of Edwards’s embattled departure, brought to mind the city as Lang had first seen it shortly after the Invid conquest. Much of what Robotechnology had rebuilt had been damaged by the awakened Inorganics, and vast areas near the pyramidal Royal Hall where the fighting had been thickest were leveled. And yet Lang couldn’t help but think that Tiresia had never seemed so at peace with itself. Certainly the native populace felt it, and—as his limo whisked him through the city’s evercrete streets—Lang believed he could detect the same sense of release on the face of the cleanup crews. Those Hellcats and Scrim Edwards had left behind had been destroyed; skirmish ships and Terror Weapons brought to the ground. But more important, the Invid brain was gone—that slumbering malignancy Longchamps and the rest had let Edwards keep to himself.

  Lang’s last face-to-face with Edwards was still strong in his thoughts, stronger still in his hands, which curled now at the very recollection. He had to ask himself why he hadn’t killed Edwards then; it was just the two of them in the lab together, and who would have been the wiser? At the time he had told himself that humiliation would be a greater indignity than death; but in truth it was the Shaping that had persuaded him to ease his hold on the man’s throat. An overriding signal sent to his hands that was meant to save Edwards for some other fate. No good or evil attached to any of it; simply a kind of desolate awareness of the appropriate. God knew Lang himself hadn’t given it any shape. Nor did it spring from any vestige of Humanity. He and Edwards both were long past that now. As they all were—a mission of men and women beyond Human in any primary meaning of the term. Warped, reshaped, and transfigured by wars that spilled across the galaxy, contact with a dozen life-forms from as many star systems, and the urgings of Protoculture itself, the Flower’s bad seed.

  “How did he react?” Exedore asked when Lang entered the lab.

  The Zentraedi stood poised beside one of the room’s numerous consoles, a Tiresian data card in one hand. Lang recounted his conversation with Jonathan Wolfe. “I had the feeling he would just as soon mount his own mutiny as return to Tirolspace.”

  “But he understands how critical it is that we learn of the Earth government’s evaluation?”

  Lang nodded vacantly. “At this point I’m more concerned with the spacefold generators. We could be sending Wolfe off to his death. If only there were time to experiment with these monopole drives—”

  “There is no time, Doctor,” Exedore interrupted him. “The Robotech Masters have been traveling at superluminal speeds for thirteen Earth-standard years now. Cabell himself thought the journey from Tirol to Earth might require as little as fifteen. That leaves us two years at best. Two years to ready a fleet for our return. Two years to arm those ships with sufficient firepower to defeat the Masters’ fortresses.” Exedore shook his head. “No, Doctor, there is no time. Wolfe must leave as planned.”

  Lang waved a hand. “I know all this. I’m asking for assurances where none exist.”

  “Here, or anywhere.”

  Lang paced for a moment, hands locked behind his back. “There is a chance we’ve overlooked something. Some way to conjure the Protoculture we need.” He crossed the lab to a window in a partitioned-off section of the room and pressed his fingertips to the permaplas, gazing in on the shaggy creatures held captive there.

  “Cabell has told us all he knows,” Exedore said, joining Lang at the window.

  The creatures bore a resemblance to terrestrial moptop dogs, save for their knob-ended horns and unearthly eyes. They were the Flowers’ pollinators—Lang understood as much—indigenous to Optera, which had been stripped of their presence when the Flowers were stolen. They subsisted on a farinaceous mix Cabell claimed to be composed of crushed stems and leaves from the Flowers themselves.

  “Suppose we were to bring them into contact with the Flowers Zor planted—on Karbarra, say, or Garuda; it makes no difference.”

  Exedore thought a moment and said, “We would perhaps succeed in raising a viable crop. But we would have only flowers, Doctor, not the matrix in which to contain them. And I’m afraid Zor took that knowledge with him to his grave.”

  The Pollinators, who were most often heaped together in a corner of the small chamber, were on their feet now, watching the two scientists with a mixture of curiosity and expectation.

  “Perhaps not,” Lang mused.

  “Lang?” Exedore said, the way he once called Breetai Commander.

  Lang turned and put his hands on the Zentraedi’s shoulders, still misshapen under the concealing cut of the REF jacket. “If we can believe our reports from Janice …”

  Exedore raised an eyebrow. “The Zor-clone.”

  “Rem,” Lang said. “We must learn what he knows.”

  “Go ahead, question the Zor-clone if it’s an explanation you seek!” Burak pointed an accusing taloned finger at Rem. “It was his seeding of our world that drew the Invid into our midst! Make him speak!”

  The Perytonian contingent rallied behind their self-appointed savior, raising fists and tapered forehorns, a gathering of demons in medallioned black robes.

  The Sentinels’ ship, the Ark Angel, was approaching superluminal speeds in the outer limits of the Spherisian system. Blaze was behind them, off in Earth’s direction, a cool white and distant disk. Beroth was restructuring itself without the Sentinels’ assistance, a refulgent city in the works under the guidance of Tiffa and the planet’s crystalline elite.

  Rem felt Burak’s hatred clear across the ship’s hold, and looked at Jack Baker, who was still recuperating from an encounter with the Perytonian’s horns. Burak was thought to have been under Tesla’s spell at the time, as both Jack a
nd Gnea had been; but Jack’s clenched fist told Rem that all was not yet forgiven.

  Nonetheless, Rem wished that he had something to offer Burak. A clone of Zor, it was possible that some data regarding Peryton could be called up from his neurons, just as the Regent’s scientists had used the Garudan atmosphere to prompt memories of prelapsarian Optera, Optera before the fall. Those memories, though, were but half-remembered dreams now, isolated parts of some other’s thoughts and deeds, and Rem considered himself a mere conduit for their emergence. It weighed on him like an unshakable burden—the very fact that he had been cloned, instilled like a Zentraedi warrior with a false past, lied to by the man who been father as well as mentor, creator, more like it. He and Cabell hadn’t had occasion to discuss the matter of his laboratory birth; the old man had been successful in avoiding him after the battle on Haydon IV, and Rem thought that Cabell’s decision to remain there was more personal than anyone on the Ark Angel was aware. Only Janice seemed to understand this; and it was she who came to his defense now—this not-quite Human, who had revealed her true face to the Sentinels in the depths of Haydon IV’s inner workings.

  “He knows nothing!” she told Burak, pointing a finger of her own. “You confuse Zor with his offspring.”

  “Then let him speak for himself, Wyrdling,” Burak shot back, using the Praxian term. Janice was in her lavender-haired Human guise, but it was the artificial person most of the Sentinels chose to see.

  “We have told you all we can.”

  “Enough!” Rick said, loud enough to cut through an eruption of separate discussions and arguments, Perytonians and Praxians hurling insults at one another, ursine Karbarrans muttering to themselves. “This isn’t helping anything, Burak. We understand that Peryton has been in a state of perpetual warfare. But you’ve got to give us more background on this supposed curse if you expect us to intercede.”

  “ ‘Supposed’ curse?” Burak mimicked, repeating it for his camp, who shrieked a kind of angry laugh in response. “There is nothing supposed about it, Human. You will see for yourselves if we ever reach Peryton.”