“Take me to the Masters!” he commanded. “I mean you no harm; my business is only with them.”
He saw Karno, standing to one side, drop his arm in signal. Zor’s Bioroid’s external sound pickup caught the shouted order, “Fire!”
Zor’s red ducked aside, as the blasts volleyed in all directions, ricocheted from bulkheads or penetrated them, lanced through the deck and overhead. A secondary explosion from a weakened power routing system knocked the mecha sideways.
He was momentarily in the cover of the hatchway frame, rolling and about to surge to his feet again, his red’s armor striking rooster tails of sparks from the deckplates.
Karno reached out to pull a long lever nearby. “We knew you would come.”
There were carefully planned explosions, and the overhead gave way; tons of metal and conduits and organic-looking Protoculture systemry landed on him like a cave-in, pinning him. At the same time, the bulkhead collapsed, tearing aside, leaving him exposed to his enemies’ fire.
Karno looked down on Zor, not with the dispassion of a cloned slave, but rather with the cold hatred he had felt since losing Musica. Emotions were seeping throughout the servants of the Masters, unstoppable and often unrecognized.
“You’re a fool, Zor,” Karno snarled, “if you believe you have the power to stand against us! Now that this lunatic quest of yours has failed, I am instructed to offer you one final chance to repent, and rejoin us.” The tone of his voice made it clear that Karno offered reconciliation unwillingly. He would much rather give the order to fire again.
Zor’s red managed to lever itself up. But despite all its immense strength, it still couldn’t fight its way clear of the pinning wreckage.
Zor looked into the muzzles that had been brought to bear on him, his red’s gleaming black visor panning slowly, and said, putting weight behind each word, “Never. I won’t stop until I end the Masters’ tyranny or they end me.”
Karno nodded, not unhappy with that pronouncement. “It shall be as you wish it.” He raised his hand again to give the signal to resume firing, and the fetal clones curled in each Triumviroid’s control sphere sent out commands of readiness, preparing to shoot Zor’s mecha to incandescent bits.
“And so passes the very last of Zor.” Karno hissed out the words, looking like a handsome young demigod turned angel of death, signal arm ready to fall.
But like a wash of pure light, an enormous bolt from a Gladiator’s main battery came through another gap in the bulkheads, sending one Triumviroid leaping off the firing ledge in a volcanic blast. The Gladiator, standing in the smoking breach, traversed its great gun to blast another enemy, and then another, like clay pipes in a shooting gallery.
The lack of Musica’s harmonics and the decline in Protoculture energy had the clone operators at a level of functioning that was near failure. Instead of firing back, they awaited orders, or turned and collided with each other, or merely stood waiting to die—except for the one or two who shot, inaccurately. Karno was enough of a realist to flee through a side hatchway, seething with the need to slay, to avenge himself—reverting to a level as primitive as that of any primate, without realizing it, because his intellect fed him justifications.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
When I was a little kid, after my parents left in SDF-3, I had three godfathers for a while. Maybe you heard about them, the ex-Zentraedi spies—Konda and Bron and Rico.
They knew I was half Zentraedi and that I had no close family after my folks went, so—they appointed themselves.
What I’m getting at is, they were kinder to me than anyone ever was. They had loved three female techs who were killed in the SDF-1, and I suppose to some extent I was the Zentraedi-Human kid they never had.
And when I was—I don’t know, twelve or so, I guess—they got very ill. I found out later that the doctors said it was something that came from being reduced to our size in the Protoculture chambers. What I didn’t know was that there was a possible cure, but it would only work on a full-size Zentraedi. But they stayed Human-size, so they could look after me.
They died on the factory satellite within weeks of each other. So what I’m saying is, don’t ever ask me if I’m ashamed of being half alien, or ask why I’m willing to grant Zor the benefit of the doubt. A lot of people think courage is something you can only prove on the battlefield, and love is something noisy and—what’s the word I’m looking for? Demonstrative.
But aliens taught me differently.
Dana Sterling, in a remark recorded by Nova Satori
DANA FIRED AGAIN, THEN SAW THAT THE TRIUMVIROIDS were making no meaningful resistance, and ceased fire; her war wasn’t with mind-enthralled, blameless clones anymore.
She operated controls and imaged with her winged, crested helmet. Valkyrie pivoted end for end, changing, rearing up, and in an instant she was an armored Goliath, holding a rifle the size of a field piece.
Something about the mechamorphosis made some of the reds react, it seemed; they were in motion again. She laid out a few rounds to keep their heads down, but suddenly they moved with more purpose. Dana leapt to crouch by Zor’s red Bioroid, partly shielding it with her own Battloid, pouring out covering fire.
“Zor, stay down!” She shot from the hip, and a red that had been about to nail Zor went down in a subsidence of ripped armor and glowing components. But others stirred, raising their discus pistols shakily.
More reds were being brought back under control, getting ready to take up the attack once more. Valkyrie swung its weapon back and forth, Dana was well aware that so many Triumviroids, even hindered as they were, would shortly prevail unless she did something. She fired with one hand, trying to drag Zor free with the other. A red tromped over to a point on the ledge behind her, ready to shoot directly down.
Zor’s red’s arm pulled free and swung its weapon; fierce artificial lightning crashed, and the red above toppled from the ledge, even while others staggered to move into positions of advantage.
“Thank you for saving my life, Dana,” Zor said, a little numbly. “But I must go on alone.”
Dana dismissed the matter of who had saved whom from what in the time since she had first seen him. Each had spared the other in combat; did that count as a higher form of rescue?
Anyway, there would be better times to sort all that out; the problem was living to see them. “No way, trooper!” She was helping his mecha to its feet, pulling wreckage off it, supporting it. “It’s my fight, too.”
It is, in some ways I can explain, and others that—I just can’t yet.
Then he was up, and the red Bioroid and the blue-and-white Battloid were pounding along the passageway shoulder to shoulder, so that the deck alloy gonged. “Be warned: I mean to confront the Robotech Masters and destroy them,” he said.
“Long as you don’t destroy yourself at the same time. Or me,” she cautioned. He heard her concern for him in her tone; and in the midst of his killing wrath, he felt a calm, clear sanity flowing from her to himself.
But a hatchway loomed up before them just then. “Look sharp, now,” she said.
They took it ATAC style, poised to either side with their backs against it, like infantry in house-to-house fighting, or SWAT cops going in. Another red’s shots fireballed through the hatchway past them.
Zor waited for the right moment, went through the hatchway firing, bent low, and rammed his foe shoulder-on. Dana followed, waiting for a clear shot.
“There are my people! Oh no, no …”
Musica was nearly collapsed against a crystal concavity of a viewport taller than herself, seemingly close to a faint. Bowie, Angelo, and the others halted in some confusion, not sure what she meant and thoroughly spooked by the abandoned residential district around them.
The Humans had been forced to leave their tanks behind, to pass through the tight confines of the Human-scale areas. They were armed and armored, though.
The other troopers set up security and fingered their rifles
, as Bowie caught Musica just before she slumped. She was again wearing the ceremonial vestments of her office—the blue tights and torso-wrapping, the cold alloy ring around her neck with its arrowheadlike emblem.
She had found the clothes in an empty guard command center and, for some reason, insisted on changing into them while the ATACs searched nearby. But there had been no sign of her sisters and her people.
Bowie couldn’t help worrying about the ceremonial clothing. The Masters had brought it with them from their other flagship and held it ready. Zor had been compelled to turn traitor; must Bowie fear such a thing from Musica?
Now, though, the riddle of the missing clones was answered, and the answers made a horrifying sense. “They are outside the ship!” Musica added in a small, forlorn voice. She had sensed it, but the enormity of such a thing, the sheer incomprehensibility of it, had kept her from considering it seriously.
The troopers gathered around Musica and saw what was going on. There were many ships, drifting close by because the Masters’ new flagship hadn’t finished its waste disposal yet; every viewport and dome in the inert combat vessels out there was crammed with motionless, seemingly sleeping clones.
Louie Nichols looked out at it all and thought, as his stomach turned, of an animal gnawing its own leg off to escape a trap’s iron teeth. What the Masters had done was infinitely worse. God, it’s all stripped away! Compassion … mercy.
The pure intellect and the rational organization of society—this is where they point. Dana was right. He teetered a little, then caught his balance, and looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. But they were all transfixed.
Nova Satori looked out at the sight, rocked with surprise at herself because, until this awful moment, she had never really been able to bring herself to think of the aliens as Human beings. She had never thought of them as creatures with souls, all Zor’s appeal and powers of persuasion aside. But she gazed upon genocide and knew she had been blinding herself. It hadn’t taken so very much ordi-psych indoctrination or so very many pep talks from Supreme Commander Leonard and Colonel Fredericks to set her attitudes in concrete.
Now, though, those were wiped away. There were people out there who needed rescue.
There were other castaways, set adrift in spacesuits and smaller craft. Now why didn’t those Masters just space’em? a practical side of Angelo wondered. Why leave ’em safe and sound, as it were? Maybe the Masters meant to come back and reclaim their slaves, if the Masters won.
But the ATACs intended to see to it that the Masters didn’t win. “Are they alive?” Bowie asked, gripping Musica by the shoulders.
“Yes, but doomed. Cut off from the Protoculture and the Masters’ will.”
And from the music of the Cosmic Harp, she admitted to herself. The Cosmic Harp was nowhere to be found; perhaps it had been destroyed in the first flagship. She was cut off from it forever, a pain as sharp as any physical wound.
“A rescue mission would be just about impossible,” Louie said in his best mechie, noncommittal voice. But within, he was plotting his own personal vector along new grids, and changing parallax. There were more spacecraft in the mother ship. Maybe, sometimes, trying the impossible is the whole point. “Maybe we can—”
Musica cut him off. “Allegra! Octavia! My sisters are nearby!” Her eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed, and Bowie had to bear her up.
He held her close, so that he breathed her sweet breath, almost tasted it. “Are they alive?”
Blue-haired Allegra, sundered from the harmonies upon which she and her Muse sisters had lived as upon food, drink, and the air they breathed, found a troubling and yet comforting new orchestration in ministering to those around her who were suffering. She hadn’t known she knew how to do it, and yet the harmonies assured her, conducted her through every movement.
Now she was cooling the brow of a feverish stonemason clone with a damp cloth, feeling Octavia’s gaze upon her.
Allegra, kneeling there by the stone bench that had been made a sickbed, said, “His bio-index has fallen too low, and his own reserves are gone. I’m afraid there is no hope for him.” The clone was pale white, sweat slick along his face and neck, long hair damp and clinging, and yet his skin was cold.
But Octavia told Allegra, “There is always hope!” and wondered where the certainty, the rightness of the words that made them a new harmony, had come from. All the old certainties had been burnt away, but in the ashes she was finding bright, warming determination that had yet to find its form.
Allegra looked at her dubiously. “I wish Musica would come.” They sensed that she was near, ever the centerpiece and the wellspring of their power.
“Without the eternal Song of Musica’s Harp,” the stonemason clone who rested under Octavia’s dove-gentle hand said, “I have no will left to live.”
How much harder do you think it is for me? she thought.
“You must not say that!” Octavia found that her voice had become harsh, a commanding note a Clonemaster might use, or even a Robotech Master. “We must learn to live on our own.”
The words and the very wisdom of them had come unbidden. Suddenly there was a current of awareness in the big holding chamber, which lifted the clones’ lassitude and fed power back to her. Some shackle she had never felt, even though it had confined her life and her art, had been broken. But the lightness of what she had said was a clarity that she couldn’t deny or stifle, a pureness of a profound inner music she had never heard before.
A tech clone stood up next to his pallet, nearby. Weaving as he stood, he got out, “We know nothing of the Dead Life, the Life of the One. We only know the triumvirates, and now the triumvirates are no more.”
Octavia didn’t realize she was moving, as she stood up and gathered her half-shawl, the words flowing to her as notes from some new, unsuspected song. “Then it’s time for us all to learn a new way to live. Musica is willing to stand on her own two feet and survive.”
Whence come these thoughts? she belabored herself, brain roiling. Perhaps some had been transferred to her by the link with Musica, and there was the breakdown of the Masters’ power, the depletion of the Protoculture, and the silence of the Cosmic Harp. The suspect sources were many.
But the central melody of it, Octavia somehow knew, came from within: a music long subsumed by the narrow, repetitive themes the Masters had forced the Muses to play.
“We still may be rescued, or save ourselves,” Allegra added. Octavia was shocked at first, but then felt more sisterly to her than she ever had.
But Allegra’s patient hiked himself up on his elbows, feverish, to say as if in some fortune-telling trance, “Even if we are rescued, who among us could live a life so forlorn? A life where the triumvirates are broken apart? We are parts, we are not whole!”
Octavia didn’t know how to answer that, exactly; she hadn’t the right words in her vocabulary, or the right notes in her music.
And yet, bringing all her will to bear, she knew in a revelation as bright as a mountain sunrise that he was wrong.
From Earth rose every remnant of its military striking power. Nothing that could conceivably reach the approaching Masters was left behind; men and women readied for battle and took strength from a source greater than the Protoculture.
They were willing to die for their families and children and planet, if that be the price, so long as the Masters died as well. And if the Masters meant to end life on the planet then all, invader and defender, would die alike.
The beings who had ruled galaxies, and meant to rule all the Universe, wouldn’t have understood that sense of fatalism no matter how it was phrased.
Again, that terrible Human advantage had come into play. The Masters proceeded, as they always had, upon logical conclusions; the creatures Earth had bred rose up, in a manner that swept those calculations away, to stand and fight.
Just then a minor sub-subentity, an artificial intelligence construct of the Protoculture cap, reported to the M
asters that there was no rational explanation as to why these creatures had not either totally destroyed themselves, or become a slave culture (a stagnant one, the subentity would have pointed out, if the Masters had created it to be more candid) like the Robotech Masters’ clones. The concept of a third alternative had simply never been considered before.
Zor, Zor … you sent your dimensional fortress to no random world! Earth was a deliberate choice for the centerpiece of this great War, wasn’t it? Some least-constrained part of the Master’s unified consciousness whispered the insight, a death-dry croak that sent panic all through them and made the cap pulse like an alarm beacon.
Then they had it back under control again, and themselves as well. “The Micronian fleet is advancing, m’lords.” Jeddar said, head bowed low, frightened by his own boldness in interrupting them but frightened even more by the long barracuda shapes of the Terran warships.
Then Shaizan, Dag, and Bowkaz were alert once more, eyes so bright that it seemed rays of divine wrath might shoot forth. The Masters had shaken off or put down every misgiving. If there was some small voice within their communal mind that persisted in faint, tormented murmurs of mortality, it was altogether drowned out in their drumming mental din of conquest.
Or at least, almost altogether; none of the three would dare admit he heard it.
Shaizan sent out the command, “Let half of our remaining attack forces go forth to engage this enemy fleet. The remainder will descend to the planet and retrieve the Protoculture Matrix.”
The other mother ships were all but useless, as were the combat craft and clones and mecha remaining to them. But the Protoculture cap told them the resources still available to the Masters in their flagship would more than suffice.
As long as the Matrix was recovered, any and all losses suffered would be negligible. But if the mission failed, such sacrifices would be immaterial: the Robotech Masters themselves would have no hope of survival.
Shaizan touched the Protoculture cap again, so that the Masters were gazing down on a scene of the three mounds near Monument City. Sensors indicated that the aura of protection generated by the guardian wraiths below was weakening. As the energy of the last Matrix began to fail, the powers of the wraiths diminished. There was yet a tiny, unique window of opportunity. The Protoculture cap had already gotten a precise fix on the Matrix’s location, like seeking out like, across the negligible distance between planet and space.
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