Robotech

by Jack McKinney

  Zor put on a sardonic look, but what she had said went through him like a dagger of ice.

  Nova got her troops ready, and they went through the door of Dana’s quarters in a SWAT-style rush, guns ready. The balcony door was open, the curtain wafting gently on the night breeze.

  The Gimps searched the place just to be sure, but it was easy to see their hearts weren’t in it; they hardly even busted anything up.

  Dana stood looking out at the night and wondered where Bowie and Musica could possibly find refuge in such a world.

  Bowie got them over a compound wall and across a road, yanking her into the bushes out of the sudden glare of a GMP patrol’s headlights. They plunged deeper into the forest.

  They ran through the darkness hand in hand; her feet were cut and bruised, branches and rocks seemed to he in wait for her. But she didn’t complain; Bowie had enough to worry about as it was.

  Musica had lived her entire life in the confined structures of the Robotech Masters and she fought back the agoraphobia that beset her now. The darkness made that a little easier, but she wondered how she would cope when the sun came up again.

  An abrupt glare turned the whole world black and harsh white. A sound like the end of the Universe, coming with a concussion that shook the ground, made her lose balance again. She was sure that the GMP had used some sort of ultimate Robotech weapon, that the final battle with the Masters had come, or that the Earthlings were willing to wipe out an entire region of their planet to make sure she was dead.

  Bowie helped her up. “Just thunder and lightning,” he said. “Harmless electric discharge.” Unless it hits us, or a tree near us, he amended to himself, but there was no point in worrying her. They ran on.

  A winged creature of some sort gave a hateful caw and took to the air on the next lightning strike. And then, astoundingly, droplets of freezing-cold water were falling on Musica from out of the sky. She knew about condensation in a cerebral way, but this was her first experience with it.

  It seemed a planet that was infinitely cruel; it seemed she had followed Bowie Grant into hell. But her hand was in his, and she recalled how bleak and pointless life without him had been. She steeled herself and went on.

  “Don’t expect us to do your dirty work for you,” Dana told Zor in the unit ready-room, as the torrential rain struck the windows. “If you want to be punished, go do it yourself.”

  She didn’t know what to feel about him anymore. There was still, somewhere, the love she felt for him, the yearning to stand by him and to take away the pain. But he had shown that he was just too good at keeping anyone from doing that. Dana wasn’t quite ready to let him have the victory of making her hate him, but she despaired, feeling that soon he would win.

  “At least he remembered his duty, Lieutenant,” Nova said as she entered, shaking rainwater off her cloak. Her Gimps were still beating the bushes for the two fugitives, but she knew it was in vain; this called for more extreme measures.

  Zor took advantage of the distraction to wander out, as Dana and Nova faced off. Dana was mounting some good arguments on Musica’s behalf, but Nova cut through it with the news that the ATAC commanding general had granted Nova temporary operational control of the 15th.

  “At first light, you and your unit will begin search operations, apprehend Grant and the alien, and place them under close arrest, is that clear enough for you, Sterling? In the meantime, I will consult with the Judge Advocate General’s office with regard to court-martial proceedings against you and your men.”

  Just when Musica had resigned herself to dying at Bowie’s side in the endless forest, lights appeared ahead—an outlying army equipment storage facility. Bowie left her for a moment, disappeared into the rain, and came back mounted on a Hovercycle.

  He pulled her on, and they jetted off through the driving rain, headlights coming alight behind them as jeeps took up a pursuit. It was a mad chase over benighted roads that even the cycle’s headlights couldn’t seem to light. Bowie’s major advantage was that mud and slick road conditions didn’t matter much to a surface-effect vehicle.

  But Musica was unused to riding and couldn’t help him by leaning correctly on the turns. They got a lead on the posse, staying ahead by one or two bends in the road, but just about the time he was assuring her that he was a past master at Hovercycle racing, he snagged a branch and almost rammed a tree.

  As it was, they slewed through a screen of bushes, and he laid the sky-scooter down in a not-quite-controlled fall that sent them both tumbling.

  It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the pursuing jeeps roared on by. Bowie crept over to where Musica lay and couldn’t breathe until he saw that she was all right.

  He got her under the shelter of a tree, the lightning having stopped. The rain was letting up a bit; he drew her to him, opening his jacket, trying to warm her.

  “Bowie …” She sounded so exhausted. “Lying here like this, I can feel your heart beating against mine. It’s such beautiful music; I wish we could stay like this forever.”

  He felt such fear for her, such apprehension about the future, the pain of the fall, and the cold and damp of the night. It astounded him how much of that suffering and unhappiness she took away with a kiss.

  “Zand, I haven’t the time for—”

  “Yes, you have, Mr. Chairman.” Zand didn’t move out of Moran’s way. “I’ll be brief.”

  Even with the flock of squawking flacks and bureaucrats trailing him, waiting for the chance to get the ear of the chairman of the UEG, Moran didn’t brush Zand aside.

  He saw by the look in Zand’s strange, liquid-black eyes that the Robotech genius wouldn’t stand for it. Moran made a casual-seeming gesture of the hand; in seconds, his security people had the followers fended back, and Moran, Zand, and Zand’s aide were ushered into an empty conference room.

  Zand saw no reason for preamble. “There’s word that an alien woman has been smuggled back to Earth and that your people are looking for her so that you can use her as a peace envoy. Don’t do that, Mr. Chairman.”

  Chairman Moran—white haired, white-mustached, kind old Uncle Pat, as some commentators called him—frowned. “That’s not for you to say.”

  Zand’s vacuous-faced, unobtrusive aide had taken a seat off to one side. Now Zand shot him a look. Russo leapt to his feet. Suddenly, instead of a vacant-eyed hound, he was once more the senator, the kingmaker and wheeler-dealer he had been back in the days of the old UEDC, despite the persona that fooled younger people.

  “’Lo, Patrick,” he said. “You know what the boss, here, wants.” It was as if he were still wearing pinky rings, and carrying a long Havana cigar. “Listen: You’ve gotta start following that party line, fella.”

  Zand concealed his own fascination with Russo’s transformation. In the wake of the terrible attack of Dolza, at the end of the war with the Zentraedi (but before the attack of Khyron), Russo had simply been listed as missing and presumed dead.

  It was Zand’s good luck to discover him in a refugee center: the man who knew most of the secrets of the Earth’s government, and had leverage against so many rulers and would-be rulers. Zand’s Protoculture powers put Russo under his control with a mere pulse of thought.

  Russo was still talking in that back-room-boys voice. “Paddy! Patto! We’re not asking you not to make the offer, fella! We’re just asking you, man to man, to hold off a while.”

  “We don’t have a while—” Moran began.

  “There’s time.” Russo said, a little more sternly. “Time for Doc Zand, here, to get a better deal! But if you wanna play hardball, we can play hardball.”

  Moran was looking at him, but not saying anything. Russo went on, “Those fingerprints are probably still on file in the vaults down in Rio, Pat; I think they survived the war. And what about that prosecutor? D’you think his skeleton is still there?”

  Zand silently congratulated himself on having salvaged what was left of Russo’s brain and the body it came in. Th
e kingpin of prewar politics was a henchman devoutly to be grateful for.

  “How wouldja like the opposition party to force a confidence vote?” Russo hinted darkly. Zand was pleased with the look on Moran’s face.

  “Not now. We could have peace, I think—”

  Russo almost pounced at Moran. “You still can, Pat! We’re not saying you can’t! We’re just saying: Give us until tomorrow. Is that so much to ask? The peace you make could be better than anything you ever imagined! My friend, if you want your place in the hist’ry books, this is the time to be brave!” Russo subsided just the right amount. “But you gotta play along.”

  Moran was lost in thought for a second; his opposition would certainly be able to call for a vote of confidence if Russo’s secrets were made known. Now, of all times! How did I get involved in such terrible things, Moran wondered a little dazedly, trying to do good? “Very well, but only twenty-four hours.”

  He touched a timer function on his watch; the twenty-four hours began.

  “You’ll never regret it, Paddy,” Russo said. Moran made a noncommittal sound and moved for the door.

  With his hand on the knob, he swung around to Zand, indicating Russo. “Keep that thing away from me, is that understood?”

  Zand snapped his fingers, but more importantly, sent out a mental signal. The thing that had been Senator Russo went blank-faced again and sat down in the nearest chair.

  Moran gave a fatigued, grudging nod, and went off to stick his finger, his head, his body into the hole in the dike.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Little Protoculture Leaf,

  Waiting for our palates,

  Where will you take us?

  Flower of Life!

  Treat us well!

  Ancient song of the autotones of Optera

  HOVERTANKS WERE NOT THE SORT OF TRANSPORTATION APPROPRIATE to stalking fugitives in the wilds, so the 15th took out two jeeps and got ready to go afield.

  There was something like a picnic air to it; any break from combat and combat alert was to be enjoyed, and nobody really thought Dana was going to hand Bowie and Musica over to the GMP, although no one was sure what she would do. So they loaded up the jeeps with weapons, field gear, rations, detection equipment, commo apparatus, and the rest.

  At Louie Nichols’s tentative inquiry as to whether or not she had any idea where Bowie might go, Dana hedged. But she declared, “We play this one by the book. Isn’t that what we’ve always done?”

  Well, no, it wasn’t—her words didn’t reassure them, but her sly wink did. The ATACs were a lot happier—except for Angelo—as they set off, just as the sun came above the horizon.

  Above them, Zor watched their departure from the ready-room. At the command of the SCA brass, he was ordered not to accompany the hunters. He thought about the wording of the order, as the jeeps disappeared.

  From her vantage point nearby, Nova Satori studied the route the 15th was taking, and revved her Hovercycle.

  * * *

  Protoculture was accessible to the Masters only through the Matrices and the power-supplying masses the Matrices produced. The germinal stage of the Flower of Life was contained in a balance something like that between fusion and gravity in the core of a star.

  But eventually, the urge of the Flower of Life to bloom overcame any means of prevention ever devised, and that was happening now. Making matters far worse was the disaster of the loss of the flagship and its Protoculture mass.

  The Robotech Masters’ options had all been used up; they would have to strike, all-out, at once, or lose the means to strike at all.

  “And that is my decision, approved by the council,” Supreme Commander Leonard was saying. “We’ll launch a final, no-quarter offensive against the alien fleet commencing at thirteen hundred hours today.”

  All preparations had been made in secret. No one pointed out any of the hundred strategic inadequacies in the plan; at Moon Base ALUCE, Emerson heard the news through a direct commo link to the command center, but made no comment.

  “We will drive them from our skies forever or die trying,” Leonard finished.

  Long, slanting rays of sunlight wakened Musica. She shivered a bit, lying on Bowie’s jacket with her own dew-covered one over her, but the day was already becoming warm.

  She heard a melodious sound and opened her eyes. On a large open area of water nearby—a smallish lake, but much bigger than anything she had ever seen before—an egret swept in low for a landing. Smaller birds trilled to one another in a natural symphony that delighted and amazed her.

  Bowie wasn’t next to her. Rubbing her eyes drowsily, she looked around for him and saw the tree under which they had taken shelter the night before. A thrill ran through her as she remembered what had happened between them then, the most beautiful music of all.

  The clouds were all gone, making way for a clear blue sky; moisture dripped from the leaves and the air was filled with the scent of renewal. How could I have thought this planet so awful? It’s beautiful, it’s magic—oh, I have so much to learn!

  Then she spied him and heard him. Bowie was working on the Hovercycle with tools from its small kit. “Just about ready to go,” he said when she called out to him, then he stopped, taking a longer look at her. “You’re even more wonderful to look at in the morning than you are at night.”

  “So are you, Bowie.”

  In another few minutes they were on the cycle and racing down the road. Musica had never felt so free, so deliriously happy.

  Bowie got his bearings, and turned his course for his objective. Soon, the mound that was the burial cairn of SDF-1 came into sight.

  Veritechs were launched from Fokker Base while A-JACs were trundled into the transports for the assault. Hatches were run back from missile silos as ground armored and artillery units deployed to defensive positions against enemy counterattack.

  “General Emerson, you are aware that the enemy is on the move with his entire fleet, preparing to attack Earth?”

  Emerson looked at Leonard’s sweating face on the screen. “Yes, sir.” Was aware of it, had expected it, and had marshaled all the moon’s forces to try to help cope with it.

  “You will move at once with all units under your command and engage the enemy, blunting his attack and otherwise bringing your total force to bear against him,” Leonard ordered. “You will under no circumstances break off contact or withdraw; you and your contingent are totally committed, do I make myself clear?”

  A death warrant wasn’t too hard to read. “Yes, sir.”

  When Leonard signed off, Emerson turned to Colonel Green. “Find Rochelle, please—oh, and Lieutenants Crystal and Brown—and meet me in my office. Pass the word to stand ready; we’ll be launching in ten minutes.”

  Sean was at the wheel, Dana in the 90% seat, lost in thought.

  Louie pulled up even with them so that Angelo could yell, “You can stop worrying about what you wanna do with them when you find ’em!”

  He was holding a pair of compu-binoculars and he jerked a thumb toward the road behind. “We got a little tail with GMP plates on it. Hovercycle.”

  “Nova!”

  Sean didn’t seem disturbed. “Want to lose her? Fasten your seatbelt, ma’am.” He tromped the accelerator, and Louie did the same.

  * * *

  At the base of the mound, Musica said, “Are you sure this is the right one? The one where you saw the Flowers of Life?”

  There were two others. Under one rested the SDF-2, and under the other the remains of the battlecruiser of Khyron the Backstabber.

  “This is the one, I’m certain,” Bowie said. Somewhere deep within were the remains of Admiral Henry Gloval, enlisted-rating techs Kim Young, Sammie Porter, and Vanessa Leeds, and Bowie’s aunt, Commander Claudia Grant—five names that rang in Earth history.

  “Bowie, this place frightens me.” The mound was a high, Human-made butte scraped together from the surrounding countryside to cover the radioactive remains of Eart
h’s onetime defender. The short half-life radiation was safer than it had been fifteen years before, but it still wasn’t a place in which to linger long. Still, they had to do what must be done.

  “Trust me,” he said, taking her hand again. They entered the cave-tunnel he and Dana had found some weeks before.

  A few yards in, they made their way over a rock and into an underground corridor. It was a prefab walkway that had been dropped in along with so many tons of rubble and building materials in the frantic effort to seal up the radiation.

  It took several reassurances from Bowie to make her believe the bats, spiders, and other creatures rustling around her or scuttling overhead wouldn’t hurt her.

  The burial material that had been piled here so long ago had been originally slated for installation in a new government building. Ageless, round Buddha-like faces gazed out at the explorers from each pour-formed block. Mushrooms, moss, and fungus were in abundance. Water seeped from the ceiling and walls, to form brackish, vile-smelling pools.

  Bowie felt his way along one wall, fingertips brushing through the slime, as Musica clung to his elbow. In time, they spied a light ahead and quickly went toward it.

  It was an exit to the space in the center of the mound. Just as they were about to go through, a gust of golden dust, fine as fog, hit them.

  “Wha—” Bowie’s head reeled and he went to one knee.

  “Bowie! What’s wrong?” She knelt next to him.

  He shook his head, clearing it. “Just dizzy for a second.”

  “The Flowers! It must be the Rowers of Life!” She looked out at the open space in the center of the mound. “Bowie, we’ve come too late!”

  Something was strobing and gleaming up ahead; she ran toward it, leaving it for him to catch up. He tottered through the doorway and stood reeling as if he had taken a punch.

  Above them glowed something that reminded him of a kid’s diagram of an atom—a complex assemblage of ring orbits that glistened in rainbow colors. It was two hundred feet across, hanging unsupported near the ceiling of the place; it seemed to be playing notes like a delicate carillon.