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by Jack McKinney

  He stumbled through, and was stunned to find himself on the edge of what had once been a natural setting of sandstone cliffs and barren terrain, its thousand-foot-high apexed roof now the curving inner surface of the hive itself. And in the center, hewn from a monolithic volcanic plume, stood the truncated remains of a massive statue—Peryton’s shrine to Haydon.

  Tesla took a quick look around, puzzling over flashes of light radiating from the statue’s circular base. He tapped the Fruits in his pockets and smiled to himself.

  Down there, he thought. Down there’s where I’ll reshape myself one last time.

  Breetai could almost appreciate Edwards’s use of Minmei against them. Almost. But he was too busy defending himself against Inorganics to dwell for long on the irony of the situation.

  Battlepods were stumbling and going down all around him; Hellcats leaping in to claw away at plastron shields or gnaw at the war machines’ armored limbs. Ahead of him, squads of Scrim and Crann were moving into flanking positions, hoping to sweep the stragglers up into their kill zone. Breetai had ordered the nets shut down, but that did nothing to mitigate the effect of Edwards’s subtle stroke. Minmei’s song seemed to be attacking them from all sides—from the hive complex and its surrounding broadcast antennae, from the etiolated high ground of the planet itself.

  Breetai’s flagship had been spared the paralyzing effects of the voice during Dolza’s attack on Earth. Exedore had cut them a deal. Breetai and his crew, like sailors saved from the sirens’ call; and traitors, too, to their commander-in-chief, to the Masters and the Imperative. But even though the voice had missed Breetai’s Zentraedi on that occasion, it had infiltrated and traumatized their collective psyche as sure as any archetype. And the effect of hearing it now reawakened memories of their genocide, just as Fantoma’s mines had reawakened memories of their bio-genetically engineered birth. Breetai experienced what it must have been like to be on any one of those five million doomed ships. To hear those sounds for the first time and experience the tumult they stirred; to find oneself suddenly stripped of meaning and purpose, set adrift in a black tide of indifference. To recognize that the truths one had pledged to honor and die for were no more than the engrammed fears of a demented circle of madmen.

  Breetai remembered the first time he had seen Minmei—Miss Macross, then—and her movie role he would take to heart. He tried to convince himself that he wasn’t the being who had succumbed to those transvid images; that he had outgrown his conditioning. Hadn’t he found himself on Fantoma? Found love there, a sense of new beginnings? But the voice made it clear that the Zentraedi had played host to the Masters’ Imperative for far too long to simply outgrow it; and Breetai understood that death was at hand …

  He opened all the Power Suit’s communications frequencies and boosted the gain to maximum volume, reveling in the sheer insanity of the moment. Back thrusters engaged, he shook two lockjawed Hellcats from his legs and hopped himself over a skirmish line of Odeons, twisting around as he landed to bring the suit’s chest-mounted impact cannon into play. He ruined the line, then jumped again, flattening a Hellcat and its huntmate, grinding them to grit under the suit’s massive, metalshod feet. Some of the Pods nearby caught the maneuver and commenced a fire-breathing rally of their own, plastron cannons blazing as they moved in to reengage the hive’s Inorganic defenders. But the rally came too late. Shock Troopers and Enforcer Ships were already in the skies, streams of blinding annihilation disks launched against the Zentraedi advance.

  Breetai saw the Regent among them and went after him. The Invid was suited up in Power Armor—a bulky, bipedal affair of component-intensification pods and articulated guards, propelled by triple-ported foot thrusters and a single rear thruster located in the center of the suit’s flare-shoulder torso cape. The Regent’s thick neck and tubercle-ridge were protected by a transparent sheath; but the helmet left his face and sensor antennae exposed. His black eyes seemed to find Breetai and summon him into personal combat.

  Breetai shut down his weapons and diverted full power to the suit’s propulsion systems. Two elongated leaps brought him within striking range; he was bounding into a third when the Regent launched. They met in midair with a riotous clang of body parts, head-to-head, arms and legs flailing. They sprung back and went at it again, attacking each other like wrestling-ring gorillas. The Regent was less than half Breetai’s size, but with Minmei’s faltering voice still screaming into his helmet—just sound now without discernible words, an agonized cry—the Zentraedi had to use all his strength to keep from collapsing.

  And the Regent was quick and powerful besides; he came up under Breetai’s arms, lifted, and slammed him to the ground. He fought to get to his feet, but the Regent had moved in for an arm and leg and was hoisting him up into a centrifugal spin. Released, Breetai struck the ground like a skipping stone, skittering over the scabrous land the Zentraedis’ own ships had bleached of life. He rolled and bounced, plowing up a mound of dirt before he came to a stop; then the Regent was all over him again, slamming away at him with shoulders and forearms, a tackle at a practice sled.

  A well-aimed kick sent the Power Suit’s helmet winging from Breetai’s head; but he managed to skip out from under the Invid’s suddenly engaged foot thrusters.

  “You’re mine, Zentraedi!” the Regent seethed, in a stomping sumo advance now. “I’ll have the pleasure of tearing you to pieces with my bare hands. For what your Zor did to my wife! For what your Masters ordered you to do to my world!”

  Breetai saw the inevitability of it. And the lightness. But in that same instant of revelation, he had a glimpse of something else as well—a look at the full circle he and his defeated hundredfold had come to close. There was a point at which the Zentraedi and Invid were meant to achieve a kind of karmic balance. Breetai couldn’t really make sense of it, but he did understand that the two races had been moving toward a common end from the moment Zor unleashed Protoculture on the Quadrant. And perhaps even before that, although he could scarcely contemplate by what agency or design. And the Humans entered into the equation as well; all three—Optera, Tirol, Earth—wedded to a supreme event still in the making. An event that would not only redress the wrong done Optera, but one that would have a transcendent impact on the fabric of the universe they shared.

  The Regent seemed aware of the serene look on Breetai’s face, and showed a puzzled one in return. Breetai lunged forward into that momentary lapse and shoved his fists deep into the recesses of the Invid’s torso armor. Clamping his arms around the Regent’s waist and deploying all the Power Suit’s waldos and grappling devices, he locked him in a power-assisted embrace.

  The Regent’s black eyes went wide, Breetai’s cowled visage reflected there. “We go to death together, Invid,” Breetai told him.

  The Regent struggled to free himself, arching his neck and using his snout to pound away at Breetai’s face. But the die was cast. Breetai launched the two of them up, oddly-sized lovers in a vertical pas de deux, and armed the Power Suit’s self-destruct system.

  Alert lights flashed across the Suit’s pectoral displays. The Regent let out a strangled cry and tried again to twist free, breaking both of Breetai’s arms in the process. “Breetai—no!” he screamed. “It is not the Zentraedi way! Accept your defeat! Let me live!”

  Breetai glanced down at the embattled figures below him, dwindling now as the thrusters carried them high into Optera’s war-torn sky. “It will never be over until you and I are dead, Invid. You have known this all along.”

  The Regent attempted to answer him, but could not. The Zentraedi’s words were more binding than his hold. Thoughts streaked through his mind like storm-tossed leaves. A vision of his wife in the midst of her journey to the stars’ other side. A transformation so intense it burned away all doubt …

  The two faced each other with a look beyond words, waiting for the world to end.

  Optera shuddered when it came; a manger star above the hive.

  A dozen Battlep
ods were in retreat from Optera’s ravaged surface, riding blue flames toward the orbiting Valivarre. Kazianna Hesh was among them, derringer arms amputated from her officer’s craft. Minmei’s song had ended in a long shriek, then quit entirely; but the battle was lost nonetheless. Kazianna had followed Breetai’s selfless ascent, witnessed the shooting star that was his fiery demise, and could feel nothing now, save for the course of her tears.

  And the faint stirrings of the life she carried inside her.

  Tesla ducked through the arched entrance to the generator and pressed himself fiat against the wall, squinting into the face of the circular chamber’s unharnessed light—bolts of radiant energy crackling toward a centrally located transparent globe, a smell of ozone and trouble.

  But all this was of little concern. He pulled one of the vermilion Fruits from his pocket and regarded it at eye level, as one might a golden orb or a world ripe for conquest. He inhaled its fragrance and smiled, savoring the moment and gloating over his escape and the trail of victories that had led him here. Turning the Fruit about in his hand, he thought of Burak and wondered what had become of him. He had his mouth opened for a bite of the pulp and juice of this scarlet-red sacrament, when the Macassar’s face took shape in the globe and the curse repeated itself. Tesla listened, stunned by what he heard, and congratulated himself for releasing Burak when he did.

  “Two fools is more like it,” he muttered. Again he raised the Fruit to his lips, suddenly aware of a small sense of misgiving that had scrambled out from under his thoughts.

  “I knew you would come,” Burak said from across the room, stepping into view from the shadows.

  Tesla stuttered a surprised sound and took a step back, reflexively pocketing the Fruit. “Burak! How … pleasant to see you, my friend.”

  The Perytonian stared up at him. “I knew you would come.”

  Janice and Rem had been watching from the sidelines; but they chose to show themselves now, Hansel and Gretei when the tables turned.

  “What shows up when you’re least expecting it,” Tesla said.

  “The Macassar awaits us, Tesla.”

  Tesla glanced over at the globe, where a kind of portal had appeared; then he turned back to Burak with a derisive snort. “Have you lost your mind? Do you really believe I came here to martyr myself for this hellish place?” He showed the three Sentinels the Fruit. “I came for this. And in a moment you’ll forget all about curses and tricks of time. You will have Tesla to worship! Tesla the Transformed!”

  With that he took an enormous bite out of the Fruit; then another and another, wolfing it down like a ravenous beast, red rivulets of juice running down his chin. He pulled a second Fruit out of his pocket and began to attack it likewise, but stopped after a bite or two, his hands and body trembling uncontrollably. He dropped the Fruit and went as rigid as a board.

  Janice and Rem shielded their eyes as an egg-shaped aura of light formed itself around Tesla, brighter than the generator’s own inner life. A turbulent sound welled up from the egg—whether from Tesla or the light itself the Sentinels couldn’t be certain—and the aura started to gyrate in a swirl of prismatic color.

  Then it collapsed.

  Cocooned inside, Tesla first experienced a rush of expansive power; but the power left him as the aura began to contract, and he suddenly realized that he was contracting along with it. The Fruit was returning him to his previous size and form—it was devolving him! Rapidly. Back through all the stages the Fruits had helped him attain; back to the figure of a lowly Invid scientist, draped now in a robe that hung off him like a circus tent.

  But simultaneous with that slide back to his former self came insight—an understanding of just where he had gone wrong.

  Peryton! he recalled now, his memory opening onto forgotten vistas. The first world found to harbor the Flowers of Life after Optera’s defoliation. And the Regess had gone there to harvest them … She had returned some to Optera, offered them to the Regent as a kind of appeasement for her transgression with Zor. But in place of spiritual comfort and nourishment came hatred! The Regent was devolved by them. Beyond even her powers to control. So she had beseeched him to abandon their use to wait until some other world’s Flowers revealed themselves. She couldn’t have known what the Regent had found in those mutated specimens: a love thing to replace what he had lost with her. A way to mount armies and mecha; a power to rival her own. A vision of war and the vengeance he could wreak on the Masters and their warrior clones.

  From Peryton and its cursed soil!

  Tesla noticed that only Rem, the Zor-clone, seemed overwhelmed by the transformation. Burak’s faith in destiny had carried him through—the faith Tesla himself had helped to implant. And who knew to what degree Haydon IV’s Awareness had altered the mind of the android Janice? Tesla looked from Burak to the gererator portal and experienced a moment of lucid thought: of the Invid race on the threshold of a magnificent journey toward noncorporeal existence. Of a blue-white world where the final stage would be set, and a great winged creature of mindstuff that would rise up from its celestial shores …

  “You told me it was fate,” Burak was saying to him. “Why struggle against our destiny?”

  Tesla radiated an accepting smile, even though his face was no longer capable of exhibiting one. He stepped naked from the neck of the robe and put his four-fingered hand out to Burak’s.

  Their thoughts aligned, they entered the portal together.

  To bring peace to a troubled world.

  Oblivious to the fact that a particle beam had erased all trace of his enemy (along with about fifty other warriors), the Perytonian was continuing across the plaza at break neck speed, his horns lowered for the kill. Jack could see from where he stood that Karen was unaware of the alien’s blind charge. She had her back turned to the plaza, one hand clutching the bloodied swath of sackcloth she had wrapped herself in, the other gripping a length of wooden doorjamb she was using to fend off blows by a riot-baton–wielding war-painted Perytonian. Jack calculated the distances and decided to go for it. He had been performing olés and coups de grace for the better part of an hour now, and considered himself well up to handling a bit of impromptu rescuing. Unfortunately, though, he had lost both his rapier and cape to the last assailant who had come his way; so this was one he would have to take by the horns. Either that or engage in some of that Minoan bull-jumping he remembered from a past life.

  He hoped.

  He got himself between Karen and the Perytonian with about five seconds to spare. They bumped butts and she swung around; screamed at finding him standing there, a two-horned conehead in an irreversible charge not ten feet away. She didn’t know that Jack’s eyes were closed at the time; but they both agreed later that he had actually yelled torol at the last moment.

  Just as the battle evanesced around them.

  One minute it was there, and the next it was not.

  Jack was still waiting for the impact, eyes closed, reciting a simple prayer to himself when he heard Karen say something inexplicable.

  “They’ve gone! It’s gone!”

  He opened one eye, then the other; swung around in a panicked rush expecting to find the Perytonian coming at him from some other direction. But the warriors were gone. It was just the five of them—Jack, Karen, Gnea, Baldan, and Lisa—standing confused amid the destruction the battle had left behind. Some distance away, a handful of Perytonian survivors were picking themselves up off the newly ruined streets; elsewhere, horned heads were poking cautiously from doorways and windows, wondering what had gone wrong. Or right.

  The piece of doorjamb dropped from Karen’s upraised hand to the street with a hollow thud. She stared blankly at Jack for a long moment, then without warning threw a roundhouse kick at his head. He had seen the light change behind her eyes and ducked in the nick of time.

  “Don’t you ever, ever try anything like that again, Baker! Do you hear me?!” She reached out, grabbed him by the shirtfront, and gave him a forceful backwa
rd shove, seemingly unconcerned that her sackcloth garment had slipped down around her waist. “Leave me thinking about what a wonderful guy you were to save my life, you … you goddamned—”

  She collapsed crying into his arms, holding him so tightly it brought a pleasurable pain to his still-healing gut. Jack thought about the kiss she had used to free him from Tesla’s spell on Spheris, and was wondering whether he might not attempt to do the same for her right now, when Rick’s Battloid came lumbering onto the scene, dangling wires and servos and emitting a symphony of unhealthy sounds. Lron’s limped in behind, blackened along its entire right side.

  “Everyone in one piece down there?” Rick asked over the mecha externals.

  Lisa waved him an okay, while Gnea and Karen hiked their sacks back into place. “Any word from the ship?”

  Rick told her that Veidt had just contacted him. The Ark Angel had destroyed the Invid troop carrier with all personnel aboard. Veritech reinforcements were en route to Peryton’s surface, even if they were a little late.

  “But what the hell happened?” Jack shouted. “Where’d the battle go?” Umbra was still hours away from zenith, let alone descent.

  “Maybe Janice and Rem reprogrammed the Haydon’s generator,” Rick ventured. “The hive’s a ruin.”

  Everyone glanced toward the Invid-built mountain, trying to imagine Rick’s view from the Battloid cockpit. Fire and smoke were about the only things visible from the street.

  But even with all the smoke, there was something different about Peryton’s air. Lisa inhaled it, watching as the pall that had overhung LaTumb all morning began to lift.

  “I think someone ended the curse,” she announced.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT