The Final Nightmare

by Jack McKinney

  "Well," he managed at last, "they've appointed a new commander to take charge of ALUCE and open the second front."

  Sean stared at him. "Yeah, so? Who is it?"

  Louie worked himself up to answer. "Leonard's sending General Emerson!"

  Bowie had been playing softly. Now he brought his fingers down hard in discord. The Robotech Masters seemed to have some kind of pipeline into Southern Cross plans, and everyone knew how high the casualties would probably run at ALUCE.

  Emerson was supervising the organization of a new expedition to

  ALUCE. With the original reinforcing group fortifying the lunar base, it was time to get more personnel, combat units, and equipment up there, to expand preparations for the second front.

  He heard a scuffle behind him, and his name being called. He turned from his contemplation of the intense activity all across Fokker Base, the readying of the strikeforce he now commanded. His adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rochelle, was struggling to hold back Lieutenant Dennis Brown, a TASC Veritech pilot who had once served as aide to Emerson.

  "Brown, we've heard enough out of you!" Rochelle was yelling.

  Brown thrashed, trying to break loose. "But it's a suicide mission, General Emerson! They're trying to get rid of you!"

  "As you were!" Emerson hollered, and Brown and Rochelle subsided. Emerson went on, "It's not for me to second-guess my orders, Lieutenant, nor is it for you. We give orders and see that they're obeyed; we obey the orders that are given us. We see to it that we don't violate the oath we've sworn, not for any personal loyalty or preference. There's no other way an army can function. Thank you for your concern, but if you don't return to your post at once, I'll have no choice but to have you placed under arrest."

  Rochelle and Brown had released one another. The lieutenant saluted. "Yes, sir."

  "One more thing," Emerson snapped. "No operation under my command has ever been or will ever be a suicide mission. I'd have thought you knew me better than that. Dismissed."

  Dana found that Bowie simply refused to talk about his godfather being posted to ALUCE. Bowie seemed determined to have the world think he cared nothing about General Emerson.

  It was Emerson who had insisted Bowie serve time in the Southern Cross Army, as Bowie's parents had wished it, Emerson claiming that it had nothing to do with personal feelings or his affection for Bowie. Now it was Bowie's chance to hide behind a soldier's code, and the rest of it, to shield his sorrow. Dana, with little choice, let it be so.

  At the Global Military Police headquarters, a round-the-clock screening program consumed everyone's time, especially Nova's. The high command was determined to plug the leak in its system. Endless computer reviews and field reports were the order of the day. Anyone who had access to classified information and particularly those had access to long-range communications gear were being scrutinized.

  After all, how else could an espionage agent get the word across tens of thousands of miles of empty space?

  Zor got off the shuttle bus across the street from GMP headquarters only to find Angelo Dante standing next to a jeep, waiting for him.

  "I keep asking myself, 'Now, why's ole Zor-O so eager to see Nova?"' Angelo said, blocking his way. "And what d'you think crossed my mind? Why, Nova's with GMP! Maybe that's why you're bringing her a present, hey?"

  Angelo reached to grab the object Zor had tucked under one arm. It turned out to be a classified looseleaf binder whose title sent Angelo's eyebrows high. "An Intelligence Overview on the ALUCE Base?"

  Angelo grabbed Zor's torso harness again, just as he heard a Hovercycle flare to a stop at curbside behind him. He heard Dana yell, "Sergeant Dante! Let him go!"

  Angelo did, as she stalked over to him. "Now hold on a minute, Lieutenant-"

  She yanked the binder out of his hands. "You will stop harassing this trooper, Sergeant! Grow up and quit playing GMP spy! Now, get lost!"

  Angelo's face was a purple-red. He cared passionately about his world and its people and their survival, of course, and his duty. But there was more to it than that.

  Why should I care if this guy uses Dana and wrecks her life? It's her own fault and she's just a snotty, pushy teenage know-it-all anyway! Okay, so she's proved she's got what it takes to lead the 15th, but why should I care

  if she gets what she's got comin' for getting this weird crush on Zor-O?

  He thought all that looking down into the pug-nosed, freckled face and regretted making such a jackass of himself at the movie. Without warning, he found himself wondering what it would feel like to hold her tenderly, the way Sean had embraced Marie Crystal the other day. Then Angelo Dante violently suppressed the thought.

  "Yes, ma'am," he said through clenched teeth. He saluted, about-faced and marched to the jeep. Tires chirped as he accelerated away from the curb.

  Dana handed the binder back to Zor without even looking at the cover. "Here. Sorry about that, but Angie's such a-"

  "Thank you." Zor took the classified book, turned and went up the steps toward the main entrance, barely having registered her presence.

  "Hey!" She started after him, but just then a hand closed around her elbow.

  If she had been only a little hotter under her high military collar, she would have turned around swinging. But she reconnoitered first, and saw who it was. "Captain Komodo!" she said in bewilderment. "What's the matter, sir?"

  Komodo was a man of about five-ten, with a powerful build, of Nisei descent. Just now, he was sweating and a little wild-eyed. "Lieutenant, I need a favor!"

  Most people in the Southern Cross knew who Komodo was. After the Robotech Masters' first attack on Moon Base One, Komodo had violated Emerson's ironclad wait-and-see orders to launch missiles at them, ending Emerson's hopes for negotiations.

  Emerson had wanted him court-martialed for firing the goading shot in a war nobody wanted, but Leonard, ever the alien-hater, had had Komodo decorated for prompt and brave use of personal initiative, and transferred to fire control on a battlecruiser. Still, the word on the scuttlebutt grid was that Komodo regretted what he had done and he had made mention of his wish to redeem himself.

  Now Dana let herself be pulled off to one side by the captain, not sure how anything fit together with anything else anymore.

  In a small park near GMP headquarters, Komodo finished, "So I thought you could help me, Lieutenant."

  Dana looked him over carefully. "And Nova's the one for you, huh?" According to the captain's story, he had only talked to her a few times, and always in the line of duty. But when did love ever let reality stand in its way? she sighed to herself.

  Captain Komodo chuckled self-consciously. "I'm assigned to go with General Emerson to ALUCE," he explained.

  "And you figure you might not make it back, so you want her to at least know you exist before you go?" Dana said with a blunt, uncharacteristic need to hear his answer.

  She paced a few steps up and back while Komodo gave a sighing laugh and admitted, "I suppose she could never want me. "

  "Let's have no defeatist talk, Captain!" Dana responded.

  Maybe Komodo could serve as a distraction and pry Nova and Zor apart-and maybe not. Still, it was the only card she had to play, short of letting Angelo-who seemed to despise the alien for reasons she couldn't understand-put Zor in Intensive Care.

  She took Komodo's arm. "You can't give up the ship before you've fired your first salvo, Captain." They both laughed, walking back toward the GMP HQ.

  They left the trees just in time to see Sean Phillips go racing by at the wheel of a jeep, at breakneck speed. He was roaring with laughter, and Marie Crystal, in the ninety-percent seat, was laughing, too, one arm around his shoulders. He turned a corner on two wheels.

  "There's living proof, Captain," Dana said, frowning. "If that sorry sack can win a female heart, anybody can." Her words didn't seem to fortify Komodo.

  The appalling workload at GMP and the presence of Colonel Fredericks, her CO, had kept Nova from seeing Zor when he
showed up to return the ALUCE documents. So, Zor had left the binder for her, wrapped in plain paper, and she had claimed it when at last she knocked off for a few hours' sleep.

  Somehow, she couldn't see what she was doing as compromising Southern Cross secrets. She did not even think of Zor as a security risk. She could only think of those huge, oblique, elfin eyes, the face like a classical sculpture's, the tumbling lavender locks of hair that fell past his shoulders, the hypnotic fascination he held for her.

  At the door of her billet in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters, she found a lush bouquet of pink, black, and red roses, wrapped in silver-and-black striped metallic paper. The sight of them took all her fatigue away.

  Nova Satori pulled them close to her body, inhaled them, and carried them into her billet. That scent-she drew it in deeply and wished she could lose herself in it, could live in the Heart of the Rose forever. To be with Zor, somehow, someday, seemed so hopeless.

  I thought love was supposed to make you happy?

  In the dimness of a bend in the hallway, Dana patted the sweating Komodo's shoulder, as they watched Nova's door close from their concealment.

  "That completes the first part of the operation, Captain: the softening-up process!"

  Inside her rooms, Nova set down the ALUCE binder and the roses side by side. There was a note in the flowers, printed in block letters: FROM AN ADMIRER.

  She held up the other note she had gotten that day, the one Zor had tucked into the ALUCE book. I can't begin to thank you, Nova. Every bit of information you give me restores more of my memory, more of me.

  Then she realized all at once that she had violated the regulations she

  was sworn to enforce. What have I done?

  So the screwball contredanse continued. Dana tried to convince Komodo that his flowers were the cause of the lovesickness he saw on Nova's glum face. Meanwhile, Nova determinedly snubbed Zor and resisted his every effort to get in touch-yet she felt dangerously drawn to him.

  It had Nova so distracted that she screwed up, and flagged a VT pilot named Dennis Brown-a former aide of Emerson's, yet!-who had been scheduled to go to ALUCE and was now held back as a security risk.

  She hunted the lieutenant down out on the flight line to apologize. He merely shrugged it off. He looked her over for a few moments and decided she could be trusted to hear the truth.

  "Maybe it's all for the good. You have the computers and you aren't blind, Nova. Leonard's weeding out all the officers who aren't loyal to him personally, like some Roman emperor sending all his rivals off to distant provinces. Thanks to you, though, at least one of us'll be here to keep an eye on things: me."

  He really was thanking her! Nova summoned up a grateful smile and resolved to bury Brown's name and file where few in the GMP would ever notice it.

  At the far end of the flight line Dana, watching from behind a shuttle's huge tire, whistled. "Man, that Nova knows how to play the field!" Captain Komodo fought off an attack of terminal disheartenment.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SPECIAL PROTOCULTURE OBSERVATIONS AND OPERATIONS KOMMANDATURA

  (DESIGNATION-"JAMES" PERSONNEL ONLY)

  In view of the adverse relationship between Major General Emerson and certain members of this unit, the transfer of the Singularity Effect-generating equipment to his flagship will be effected in such a way as to preclude all mention of or reference to the origins of the aforementioned equipment.

  (signed) Zand, Commanding

  The 15th's ready-room was dark. Most of the troopers were out on pass or on ATAC guard duty or dozing. A few, like Robotechnofreak-another term for it was "mechie"-Louie Nichols, were taking care of maintenance or tinkering with their Hovertanks down on the motorstable levels.

  Bowie Grant sat playing the piano softly. Sometimes he went into the melodies he had played for Musica, and the ones she had played for him. But tonight he kept coming back again and again to the ones Emerson had taught him as a child, when the General introduced him to the piano and fostered Bowie's love of music. Bowie played his own compositions, the early ones that had made Emerson so proud. There was no one in the dimness of the ready-room to hear the music, or to see his tears.

  Below, though, in a long, black military limousine parked under the open windows of the ready-room, there was an audience.

  Major General Rolf Emerson sat in the back seat with the window down, listening. He didn't recognize the alien tunes, though he suspected what they meant; he knew each note that Bowie played from their shared past, however, and understood those completely.

  Emerson's efforts to contact his ward had been rebuffed, and the general respected Bowie's right to be left alone.

  Perhaps I never should have made him enlist; perhaps he shouldn't

  have had to serve, Emerson reflected. But then, it would be a better Universe if none of us had to. But it's just not that kind of Universe.

  "That's enough. Take me back," he told his chauffeur, hitting the button that raised the window.

  Take me back...

  This time it was a cascade of roses, tumbling down one Nova in a fragrant red avalanche the moment she opener the closet in her billet to hang up her cloak. Suddenly she wasn't bone-tired anymore, not even with the liftoff of Emerson's strikeforce less than forty-eight hours away.

  She let the roses shower around her, giggling and gasping, and tried forlornly to understand alt the conflicting emotions and impulses that were starting her own private war. She was knee-deep in flowers.

  There was a-note taped to the shelf: Depot 7 at 2100.

  At the elegant Pavilion du Lac, Marie Crystal pushed away her fourth sidecar. If Prince Charming doesn't get here with the carriage soon, Cinderella's gonna be too stinko to care!

  Might even serve him right, she thought. She had blown half her savings on a drop-dead white satin evening gown, and the most expensive perfume she could find. Her walk was very different than it was when she was in uniform; she had seen men panting, admiring. And rather than cut a swath through the local male wildlife, here she sat, waiting for her Romeo.

  She went out onto the balcony to get a little fresh air, sighing in the moonlight, thinking of Sean, smelling the orchids there.

  She had been shot out of the sky and he had mechamorphosed his Hovertank, risen up in Battloid mode to catch her burning, falling Veritech. He had sworn he would love her, and no one else, evermore. Had held her to him as his Battloid had held her VT to it. Had made her love him.

  You beast! You toad! I've never been in love before...

  Below, hiding behind a column on the portico, Sean grinned and got ready to go surprise her.

  Marie had shown up early for their dinner date, and she had decided to see how long it would take her to lose patience. It hadn't taken long; he was barely late at all. But I've kept her waiting long enough, he thought guiltily, and got ready to run up the steps to her.

  A voice behind him called, "Seanie?"

  It was Jill Norton, an old flame, all decked out like a green-sequined sea goddess, throwing herself at him to hug him. "It is you!"

  She locked her lips to his, and he had to wrestle her in order to crane his head around and look up at the balcony. Marie was giving him the kind of stare that preceded homicides.

  Just like Cinderella, Marie lost a glass slipper on the winding stairs. In fact, she lost both of them. She pushed her way in between Sean and his latest trollop, about to leave, but spun around suddenly and grabbed him by the front of his suit.

  Before he could move, she kissed him as hard as she could-she put all her love and all her wanting and all her hurt into it. Sean was starting to think he might survive the encounter when she pushed him away and rocked him with a slap that almost took his head off.

  In the poorly lit corner of Depot 7, Dana practically had to put an arm-bar on Komodo to get him to show himself and approach Nova. As he walked over, he kept turning around to make sure Dana was still in the shadows for moral support.

  However, his
worst fears came true when he turned to Nova and got a backhanded fist, knuckles cocked, that sent him whirling onto the cold duracrete facedown.

  "Stay away from me, Zor!" she shrilled. "You hear me, Zor?" But inside, she feared that she might really have hurt him.

  Komodo pushed himself up partway. "Lieutenant Satori, I hear you." He wiped blood from his mouth.

  "Oh my god! Captain Komodo!"

  He levered himself up. "Zor, eh? Now I get it!" He lurched off into the

  blackness, sobbing, running nearly doubled over, as if she had given him some eviscerating wound.

  She looked around and saw Dana standing, a small pale figure, under a nearby worklight. "I might've guessed, Sterling. Now do I have to part that little blond puffball hairdo with a loading hook, or are you going to tell me-" She was interrupted by her own wrist comset. The only way she had been able to get some time to herself for the depot rendezvous had been to sign out for a purported tour of the GMP patrols, to check up. So she was on

  duty.

  "Lieutenant Satori, we have a report of an individual, thought to be a woman, driving very erratically and recklessly in a military jeep."

  Nova was on her Hovercycle and away before Dana could get a word in edgewise. Dana went and vaulted into the getaway jeep that was waiting, Lieutenant Brown behind the wheel. Dana knew Brown from his brief instructor days at the Academy, and Brown was an old close friend of Kbmodo's.

  Accosted by Komodo, Brown had explained why Nova had come to see him: not a matter of passion, but rather of apology. Then, he joined in on the plot to get Komodo and Nova together, and volunteered to act as chauffeur.