Without looking at her, he reached out to close his hand around her pale, slender forearm. “Now that I’ve found you again, nothing else matters to me.”
She said haltingly, “It’s very strange to me, but I feel the same way. And the odd yearning—that peculiar disquiet in me is no longer there when we are together.”
“We belong together.”
“I would be happy to remain this way for the rest of time, Bowie.”
He was about to reply in kind when a harsh voice cut through the peace. “Do not move, Micronian! Stand slowly!”
Bowie found himself gaping at Karno and two others more or less just like him, and the big dark muzzles of their guns.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
When the Robotech Masters first appeared, the Factory Satellite sent itself off on a far, SDF-style orbit. It went to Code Red and manned battle stations. It issued heartening war bulletins.
No wonder the situation got so crazy. Southern Cross had forgotten the lessons of terrestrial wars, and nobody had warned us that we might see the enemy as Human beings.
Louie Nichols, Tripping the Light Fantastic
“MUSICA, MOVE AWAY FROM THE ALIEN AT ONCE,” commanded Darsis. More guards with their guns leveled appeared from among the massive vines.
“He is an enemy of our people,” Karno stated. But Musica defied him, moving to stand between Bowie and the Guards, arms spread.
“You musn’t hurt him, Karno! I forbid it! He’s done you no harm!”
She forbids? The insanity of it boggled Karno’s brain.
Darsis frowned. “Anyone shielding an enemy of the state will be punished! Now, stand aside, Musica!”
The Guards were in a quandary, though; Musica was far too vital to the Robotech Masters and their hold over the population of the ships to simply shoot, and she knew it. It was a situation the Guards had never encountered before.
They were saved from the inconvenience of thinking by the revving of a van engine. Louie came hot-tailing at the Guards, yelling for Bowie to make a break. Karno and his men got a few rounds into the van, but then had no choice but to hit the dirt or scatter.
They were up again right away, firing into the vehicle’s stern, and it arced toward the ground leaking smoke into the distance. Louie managed to get out of the van and saw the Guards racing after him. He turned to go, but realized there was a beeping in his pocket.
He pulled forth one of his gadgets, studied it, smiled broadly, and raced off to make his escape.
Bowie, going for cover in the midst of a tangle of the colossal vine-roots, skidded to a stop. More guards emerged from it, hemming him in against those pursuing him.
Louie shook off his hunters and followed his gadget; it didn’t take very long to find what he had detected. Some sixth sense comprehension of systemry and Robotechnology led him to a vaulted compartment in what had to be the center of the flagship. To his amazement, it was unguarded. What he found there left him speechless.
In the center of the vastness was a device the size of an upright shuttlecraft. Top and bottom were sawtoothed halves, as if a cylinder of taffy had been sawn apart and stretched. What hung between them was—
Whaaa-at? Louie asked himself, dumbfounded. It looked like a single braided mass of fibrous tissue, red, black, pink, and yellow like some textbook illustration of a muscle. But pieces hung from it, curled and kinked in the way of sprung wires peeling from a cable, or fibers of steel wool.
The whole circular chamber was lined with instruments stretching up and up out of sight. The central device itself was orbited by slow-moving amoeboid shapes of pure blue-white light.
What an amazing creation! The flagship’s control nexus.
Louie still had the alien energy-burpgun he and Bowie had managed to steal. He worked it as if he had been using one all of his life, preparing to empty it in one blast, without regard to his own survival.
Destroy this, and the Robotech Masters are finished. And there wasn’t even anybody around to put him in for a posthumous medal, oh well….
He decided to start high and blast a vertical cut in the thing. No sooner had he opened fire than jagged lightning broke from one of the amoeboid shapes. The weapon was suddenly giving out heavy voltage. He managed to let go before his heart was stopped, and it was levitated away high into the air.
From the central tissue mass, a hundred ghostly ribbons of force, or ectoplasmic lariats, were dropped. They wound around Louie and squeezed his breath from him, sending an awful surge of energy through his body. He was lit up like a Christmas tree ornament. One of the less fortunate martyred saints.
Word went out that the Living Protoculture had captured its assailant. The search for the other raiders intensified.
Dana didn’t want to hear or see any more.
Latell had taken her past too many glassy spheres filled with bubbling fluid. In them, naked, wired-up clones wearing helmets floated, dead to the world. One of those clones was supposed to be the actual Latell the Stonecutter, or perhaps the embodiment of the triumvirate of Stonecutters, but then who was this talking to her?
This time, the guards who showed up didn’t do much talking. The doors parted and three charged in shooting. The first few rounds shattered the container of Latell’s “original body.” The Latell she had been talking to gave a grievous moan as she pulled him behind the other containers and apparatus for cover.
The clone-fetus, slick with fluids, looked at Dana. Then its eyes rolled up into its head and it expired there among the shards of its container.
Something in her snapped, and several objects on which she could vent her rage were right close to hand. The guards weren’t really much as soldiers; apparently all they had ever had to do was keep docile slaves in line and now and then round up some extraordinarily aberrant one. Invaders were all but unknown, and the upshot was that the guards’ combat skills weren’t nearly so well-honed as Dana’s.
She came flying at them from behind a pillar of support equipment, shrieking a ki-yi that froze them. She took out the first with the sword edge of her right foot, and that only fed her hatred. The second, too close to get clear, tried to swing the butt-plate of his weapon into her face. She ducked, and then broke his neck.
She bent down to pick up the weapon he had dropped, but the third had fallen back against the hatch to spray energy bolts in her direction, forcing her to throw herself back. Latell managed to find her among the disintegrating containers and sputtering power lines, and together they crawled off through a side hatch as still more guards appeared and converged on them.
The guards cornered them in the next compartment, a sort of nursery for infants. Why would the Masters need infants, it occurred to her, when they can grow clones to adulthood in vitro?
Latell palmed a tiny device to her. “This is a maintenance sensor; it will lead you to the control center. Destroy the center!”
Latell tried to push her to cover, tried to block the way. He was a dysrunctioning slave of no importance; the guards shot him down.
There was no place to run away. Dana cradled his head in her lap. He achieved a thin smile. “Please do not feel badly, Sister. You are Freedom, and my life was not worth the living.”
And so the clone Latell the Stonecutter died.
The firefight in the power-relay area was one of the more interesting fights of Angelo Dante’s life, although it did threaten to fix things so he would never collect any of his retirement pay.
Still, he and Sean had good cover. They had taken out a lot of guards already, and there was still some chance they could get free. Angelo stood and sprayed shots at the enemy. If the ATACs were pinned down, so were the guards, who had learned better than to try to rush the Human marksmen across the yards of open space.
Then the sergeant realized that Sean wasn’t firing. He was about to holler something suitably crude and insulting when he felt a tug at the sleeve of his stolen guard uniform.
Angelo whirled to see ten, eleven, p
erhaps a dozen of the runabouts in an arc behind him, all crowded with guards and officers who had drawn a bead on him and Sean.
“Don’t think I’ll forget your face, slimeball, ’cause I won’t!” Angelo growled as the guard thrust him headlong onto the detention cell floor. Sean, who had been more resigned and reasonable, disembarked from the elevator with his hands behind his neck. The elevator doors closed.
Dana, sitting on a sleeping shelf with her knees drawn up, simply looked at the two new arrivals. Louie didn’t even look. Bowie knelt by Angelo’s side. “You okay, Sarge?”
Angelo nodded, springing up and shrugging Bowie off, stretching and flexing his ample muscles. “Yeah. Gang’s all here, huh?”
Dana grunted. They were all there, stripped of weapons and disguises, dressed in their ATAC uniforms.
“And we failed our mission,” Angelo went on, as bitter at himself as at any of them or at fate. “We lost!”
Now Dana did look up, to fix him with her stare.
“Only round one,” she said.
Gazing down on the captive specimens through their Protoculture cap, the Robotech Masters were taken aback, in spite of the information and insights they had gained through Zor Prime.
“Most interesting,” Shaizan said. “They show no fear of their captivity, only anger that they have failed, and an illogical unwillingness to face reality.”
There was an unspoken consensus among them: there were terrible, unsuspected powers in the one-mindedness and emotions of the Micronians.
Powers upon which a universe could turn.
It didn’t take long, in a little bowl-shaped, inescapable confinement some fifteen feet across at floor level, for the ATACs to get on each other’s nerves.
A crack from Angelo about Zor’s spying. A hurt objection from Dana that she had no way of knowing. A blithe comment from Sean that love was blind, followed by Dana kicking Sean’s feet out from under him, then both of them ready to twist each other’s bones loose, and the others diving in to break it up.
“Fascinating. The Earthlings have a pronounced tendency to turn upon one another in confinement,” Shaizan remarked.
Dag said, “They are too primitive to comprehend that what we are doing will ensure their survival as well as our own.” It did not need to be added, of course, that that survival would be as a slave species. The Masters considered their slaves greatly honored, Chosen.
“If the Invid obtain the Protoculture Matrix before we do,” Bowkaz put to words what they all knew, “it will in all likelihood mean the eradication of the entire Human species.”
“The last part of that statement is not an entirely unpleasant prospect,” was Shaizan’s rejoinder.
“As to the prisoners,” Dag went on, “my suggestion is that the five of them should be reprocessed as new biogenetic material for our cloning vats straight away.”
“No—all but the female,” Dag corrected. “According to our measurements, her intellect and biogenetic traits are extremely contrary to Human norms. Dissection and analysis are in order.”
“I say it might be more efficient and safe simply to destroy them all,” Bowkaz said.
Jeddar, group leader of the Clonemasters—whose triumvirate floated nearby on its cap—took the extraordinary step of interjecting a comment. “Excuse me, my Masters, but we propose that you delay these actions until we’ve reprogrammed Zor Prime’s memory, restoring full awareness to him.”
Tinsta, the female of their triad, continued, “His experience on Earth has increased his bio-energy index above that of any other clone, even far above precious Zor clones.
“We believe it has something to do with his prolonged exposure to Human emotions. We think that these emotions maximize certain aspects of clone performance. But we cannot be certain until further—eh?”
A message was being broadcast over the ship’s annunciator system. “Attention, all sectors. This is Clone Control. Quadrant four reports that Zor Prime is missing. Repeat, Zor Prime has left his assigned sector. All guard units begin search pattern sigma. Security leaders contact Clone Control at once.”
Musica’s attempts to drown her grief in her songs were unsuccessful. Even the accompaniment of her sisters on spinet and lute couldn’t lift her spirits or erase the image of Bowie from her mind’s eye.
At last she hit a dissonant note and turned to them. “I am sorry, sisters, but there come upon me now times when I wish we weren’t always together—the Three-Who-Act-as-One. I find myself wondering what it was like before the time of the triumvirates, when each individual was able to act independently.”
Allegra and Octavia showed their revulsion, crying out at her to be still, but she went on. “A time when we were capable of feeling pleasure, pain, happiness, even loneliness! I wonder what it is like to love.”
She bent over her Cosmic Harp, face buried in her hands.
The words of three guards, making a sweep through the chamber, brought her up sharply. In answer to Allegra’s question, they explained about the escape of Zor Prime and their search.
I know what I must do now, Musica realized.
Zor Prime wandered aimlessly through the various districts of the flagship’s residential sector. He hadn’t evaded the search by any conscious effort; he was too disoriented for that.
The ancient stone buildings seemed to fade in and out, to be replaced by scenes of Monument City, so that part of the time he thought dazedly that he was back on Earth. The sun seemed too bright and hot, too intense, overhead. Often he saw Dana coming toward him, beckoning, laughing, so desirable….
A patrolling guard runabout failed to spot him because a veiled figure pulled him back into the darkness of an alley. Zor shook off his trance and saw Musica lower her veil and look up at him hopefully.
So many half images and confused memories assailed him that he lost balance and fell to his hands and knees on the gleaming terrazzo flooring. “Why is my mind so full of nightmares?”
“You are the clone of the original Zor,” she said. “In a way, it might be said that you are the only true Robotech Master.”
With her help, he found the strength to rise again. But just then a bright ray struck him from behind, and he fell once more. Standing behind him were guards, and the Clonemasters, on an antigrav platform.
“It was only a low-gain destabilizer,” Jeddar told Musica. “We need the clone for a little while longer.”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Dear Mom & Dad,
Everything here remains quiet, as always, and I don’t know why you two keep insisting there’s bad war news. Take it from me. As I wrote you before, I’m in a rear-echelon unit that hardly ever sees any action at all. So I hope you’ll excuse me for asking you both to kindly quit worrying. Especially with Pop in the condition he is in.
I’m sorry I missed Christmas. There’s always next year, after all. I think I might be able to pull a furlough soon, with things being so dull around here and all.
Thanks for the fruitcake; it was great.
Love,
Your son,
Angelo Dante
THE ORDER OF THE DAY WAS EXECUTION, AND THE CLONES with the rifles weren’t listening to any ATAC objections about the Geneva Convention. Dana and her squadmates had no room to try anything in the cell; they marched out with hands behind their heads, as per instructions.
Surrounded by guards, the troopers were marched through the detention center and into a side corridor. Without warning, the clones’ exacting schedule was interrupted.
A driverless runabout with its engine shrilling came zooming at the lead guards. The triad was knocked high in the air with bone-breaking force, Dana just barely managing to pull back out of the way. In a shower of sparks and metal fragments, the runabout overturned and shrieked to a stop upside down. The first guards were crunched to the floor as the troopers jumped the other three, who seemed paralyzed by what had happened.
It was a short fight, Sean ramming an elbow back into one
rear guard’s throat, Angelo crashing the heads of the other two together like cymbals. Even as the 15th was rearming itself from the selection of weapons lying around, Musica came running toward them. “Bowie!”
Louie was delighted to find that one of the guards was carrying the pulse-grenade that he himself had been carrying when he’d been captured. Okay, Living Protoculture; let’s just go another round, what d’ya say?
In the Memory Management complex, Zor rested, strapped to a padded slab, at an acute angle, nearly standing upright. He was still unconscious, his head encased in a helmet like a metal medusa.
Technician clones were moving precisely, ensuring that no mistake would be made. Zor’s original memories, as servant to the Masters, Bioroid warrior, battle lord of the fleet, must be restored to him and integrated with the memories of his time among the Humans. Then the totality of his memory would be comprehensible, and would be shifted to storage banks for further study. The lump of tissue that was the last Zor clone could be disposed of.
Jeddar watched the preparations with satisfaction. He would have been less happy had he seen what was transpiring on an upper tier of the chamber.
On a glass-walled observation deck, a big forearm locked around a guard clone’s throat, and the guard was silently removed from active duty. Angelo resisted the temptation to dust off his palms.
Dana and the 15th looked down on the demons’ workshop below. She saw what they were doing to Zor and almost gave out a yelp, but Louie shushed her, as he studied the instruments and machinery. He adjusted his tech goggles to detect energies on very subtle levels and looked the lab over like a sniper studying the landscape through a nightvision device.
“Screwy operation,” Sean said wryly.
“But convenient,” Louie countered. “See those gauges over there? When they hit the top, Zor’s memories will all be back in his brain.”
Louie indicated a bank of three stacked rectangles. The first was filled, all glowing blue; the second was filling, as if it were a resplendent blue thermostat marking a sudden, incredible heat wave.
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