Rubicon

by Jack McKinney

  Rick heard Lisa’s neck snap back as she fell spread eagled to the floor. He threw his body into a twist and caught hold of Edwards’s legs, but Edwards reversed the sweep and tagged him in the gut and groin with his boot tips. Rick moaned and rolled over, crawling after him as he closed on Lisa.

  She saw Edwards in time and threw her legs up into a scissors lock around his neck. Rick hit him from behind at the same moment, slamming at kidneys and ribs. Edwards collapsed forward, prying Lisa’s legs apart as he fell, then adroitly turned out from under Rick’s rain of blows. Lisa clawed him, going for his good eye. But Edwards was up in a flash, a handful of her hair in his right hand. She screamed as he yanked her backward, hands flailing at his grip, boot heels banging against the floor.

  Rick stopped short when he saw the pain in her eyes.

  “Okay,” he told Edwards, panting, all but doubled over.

  “I was hoping you’d go for me,” Edwards said, breathing hard himself, his cheek gashed by Lisa’s fingernails.

  “All right, so you got your wish. Now let her go.”

  Edwards tightened his grip instead. “I could easily break her neck, Hunter. The brain’s given me a lot more than you realize.”

  Rick checked an impulse to rush him again and be done with it. But by this time Edwards had pulled Lisa over to where the Badger had fallen and had the weapon in his hand. He threw Lisa roughly aside.

  “I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for this,” he rasped.

  Rick went to Lisa’s side and helped her up. “Why, Edwards? What’s it all been about? Is it Fokker? I mean, Roy told me you were a fascist from way back when—all your Neasian merc work. You wanted an army of automatons, is that it? And you saw your chance with the Invid. So why single us out?”

  Edwards readjusted the headband. A look of misgiving swept across his face, but a grin was forthcoming. “It was Fokker in the beginning, Hunter. I’ll grant you that. Fokker and all you SDF-1 heroes. You and your Zentraedi pals almost ended things for all of us.”

  “Come on, Edwards,” Rick sneered. “It was the UEDC, you know that. Russo and …”

  Edwards laughed. “Go ahead, say it: Russo and who?”

  Rick looked over at Lisa. “I’m sorry.”

  “Russo and Hayes,” Edwards filled in. “Let’s not forget your wife’s old man, Hunter. It was his idea as much as anyone else’s to use the Cannon.”

  “Then why blame us? Gloval was against it—we all were.”

  Edwards winced and put a hand to the headband. Behind him the Genesis Pit loosed a flash of unharnessed energy.

  It’s coming apart, Rick thought. Baldan and Teal must have made it to the brain.

  Edwards glared at him and ripped away his faceplate, revealing a dead eye at the apex of two hideous diagonal scars. “This is why!” he screamed, gesturing to his face. “This is why I hate the two of you.”

  Rick and Lisa exchanged baffled looks.

  “No, of course you don’t understand,” Edwards continued. “But maybe if I told you how this happened you’d begin to get the picture. You see, I was there that day, Hunter. I was at Alaska Base.”

  Lisa inhaled sharply. “But … but that’s impossible.”

  Another flash of energy escaped the Pit, but Edwards ignored it. “Oh, no,” he assured her. “Not impossible. You remember where you were?”

  Lisa did. She had been ordered to see about a glitch in a shielded commo relay substation. There were sights and smells she didn’t want to recall … amber light … barely enough fallback power to keep her console functioning. Then her screen had come alive momentarily: multicolored lines of static and an image of her father’s face, broken by interference. And she could see he was still in the command center, a few figures moving behind him in the gloom, lit by occasional flashes of static or electrical shorts—

  “I was there,” Edwards was saying. “I was there when you and your father said your last good-byes.”

  Lisa looked terrified by the revelation. “But I thought … I saw the screen go dark. I was sure—”

  “But you never bothered to check!” Edwards seethed. “Neither of you!”

  Rick, too, was recalling that day. He remembered maneuvering his Skull Veritech through a confining space of exploding power ducts and ruptured energy mains; using the Guardian’s phased-array laser to burn a circular hatch through a thick shield door; Lisa rushing into his arms from the end of a short interconnecting passageway.

  “Edwards,” Rick said quietly. “I—”

  “You what, Hunter? I saw the two of you leave … She was on your lap, wasn’t she? Such a cute pair. Meant for each other.” Edwards’s face contorted as the headband drove something unseen into his mind. He wedged his fingers underneath it, as though to keep it from constricting his scalp. The Pit belched a mad torrent of flames.

  “Edwards!”

  “I called out to you, Hunter … I crawled across that molten glass terrain on my belly praying for you to hear me.” Edwards tore the sensor band from his head and collapsed to his knees in pain. He turned to glance at the Pit and motioned to it with the Badger. “You left me in hell up there, and I’m going to do the same for you. Now move, both of you.”

  “Don’t do this, Edwards,” Rick said. “I’m the one who left you behind. Let Lisa go.”

  Edwards laughed in spite of the pain that was radiating through him. “The hero right to the end, huh? Well, save it. The only thing that kept me alive was thinking about how I was going to pay you back. There’s nothing you can say now that’ll change that.”

  Rick was about to give it another shot when a voice behind him said: “Maybe there’s something I can say, T.R.” He and Lisa turned around to find Minmei standing there. She was bruised and battered, more naked than dressed.

  “Let them go, T.R.,” she said, walking toward the rim of the Pit. “You’ve lost everything you worked for. But you can still have me if you let them live. I’ll do whatever you ask.”

  “Minmei, no!” Lisa screamed.

  Edwards roared a laugh. “Oh, what a day for heroism! And what a sweet thing is revenge!” He extended his right arm to her. “Come to me, my pet.”

  Minmei nuzzled into his open arm and wrapped her own arms around his waist. “You’ll let them go, then?”

  Edwards looked down at her and smiled. “Sorry, love, but you know how it is: I have to do what I have to do.”

  Minmei smiled back and said, “And so do I, T.R.”

  Edwards blanched and tried to pull away from her, catching sight of something in her eyes more evil than in his own. Then he let out a long, agonized groan of pain and terror as Minmei tightened her hold on him.

  Rick and Lisa were too stunned to utter a sound.

  It was Janice they saw now, Janice in android guise, lifting Edwards off his feet and carrying him toward the crater. He was howling loud enough to be heard over the Pit’s fiery welcome, the chords of his neck stretched like cables, his face as red as the world awaiting him.

  Janice’s steps were measured and precise along the gentle incline. At the top she turned to look back at Rick and Lisa, and readjusted her load so that Edwards sat in her arms like a bride about to be carried over the threshold. Then she commenced her walk into the fire, Edwards’s screams accompanying them down.

  Lisa had her face buried in her hands.

  Rick watched the flames lick at Edwards’s blond hair and Janice’s artificial flesh. Soon the fire and smoke engulfed them and the Pit let out a wailing deathsound of its own. The hive seemed to shut down around them, as though Optera itself had died, blinded by light and staked through its very heart.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  The mop-up operation on Optera was carried out in an orderly fashion; but even so it required the better part of two Standard Months to complete. Outlying areas of the Invid Home Hive had been destroyed by the Karbarran assault, and the inner domes that comprised the central complex had sustained heavy damage from the Ark Angel�
��s runs. The so-called living computer, which had choreographed the Regent’s, then General Edwards’s mad designs, had ultimately surrendered to the Spherisians’ damming action and was in complete ruin when I saw it. Jack and Karen had pulled Baldan to safety before the explosion, but Teal had died there. The Genesis Pit, too, had succumbed, and was little more than a slumbering pool of genetic waste when the Ark Angel departed Opteraspace. In fact, it struck me at the time that our actions had to some extent catapulted the entire planet into a state of suspended animation; but I came to see this as a kind of healing retreat, a gathering-in that would allow for a healthy reawakening. We would do the same, both individually and collectively, although the irony of that escaped me.

  There were no true spoils to claim after our years-long campaign; not that the war had ever been waged with such ends in mind. Optera was barren, devoid of the very Flowers it had brought into the world. Left to us was the task of dismantling the devices the Invid had fashioned to seek out and resecure their stolen grail. The Inorganics—the Hellcats, Odeon, Scrim, and Crann—were destroyed; the Shock Troopers and Pincers and Enforcers drained of nutrient and slagged by Tzuptum’s own heat. As for the Invid survivors themselves, the remaining scientists and soldiers—a pitiful, seemingly mindless group—they were kept under what amounted to house arrest by a garrison the Karbarrans left behind. The more I learned of Optera’s sad tale, the more sympathetic I grew. But my sorrow was hardly confined to Optera and the Invid; it stretched clear across the Quadrant to Earth and the host of injustices we had all suffered directly or indirectly at the Masters’ hands.

  The Tracialle would eventually return to Karbarra, putting in at Spheris, Garuda, and Haydon IV along the way. Baldan confessed to me that he would have preferred accompanying us to Tirol; but at the same time he was homesick for Beroth, a city he remembered as one would a dream. And, with Teal lost to him, homesick for Tiffa—the mother, or grandmother, or halfmother he hardly knew at all. Teal’s death weighed heavy on him, as it did on all of us.

  It was the same for Kami and Learna and the other Garudans: Tirol was a temptation, but an easy one to resist when the hin beckoned.

  Saying good-bye to Gnea and Bela was the most difficult thing I had to do. I have all that I could want in Rick and Roy now; but there were bonds formed between the Praxians and me that will know no equal in my life. If I did not exactly come of age alongside them, I certainly came to womanhood. The Tracialle would return them to Haydon IV, along with Veidt, where Bela would assume leadership of the Sisterhood.

  The Ark Angel and Valivarre limped back to Tirol. Both ships’ superluminal drives had been damaged in the battle and it was nearly a year before we entered the Valivarre system. The journey itself was uneventful, save for the birth of Kazianna’s son, which we all took to be a wondrous and hopeful sign. Jean, especially—the Quadrant’s most diminutive midwife. It goes without saying that the Zentraedi were overjoyed, and someone aboard the Ark Angel pointed out that we were witnessing the rebirth of a race, the Valivarre an ark of its own all of a sudden. There were three more pregnancies among them before we made planetfall.

  Hearing news of this reawakening, and seeing young Drannin for the first time—all one hundred pounds of him—was, I think, at least partly responsible for Rick’s and my decision. Not to mention Aurora and the fact that almost everyone onboard the Ark Angel seemed to be pairing up—Karen and Jack, Rem and Minmei, and so many others. But I’m also convinced that my lingering sense of confusion about the war, my grief over the deaths of Teal and Arla-non, Sarna and Janice, played an important part. Besides, I remember deciding that a child would be a birthday present to myself on my fortieth. (Strange to recall that first pregnancies so “late” in life were not very long ago regarded as dangerous for mother and child.) Rick turned out to be more than just supportive but positively enthusiastic. I’m certain he was guided by thoughts and feelings similar to my own, although he never articulated this to me.

  I remember my first glimpse of the SDF-3 upon entering Fantomaspace, the fortress amid a string of pearly moons, silhouetted against the inconstant face of that ringed giant. For a moment it felt as though no time had passed; but tangible evidence of those intervening years soon presented itself to us in a most baffling way: in the form of a fleet of partially readied warships caught up in Tirol’s hold like some school of deadly fish. I suppose our puzzlement had something to do with the long trip home and the nature of the peaceful thoughts that had begun to overtake us. Perhaps we were foolish to be so hopeful; foolish after all we’d been through that quarter-century to believe that wars were something that could be laid to rest.

  We were also shocked to see the changes and transformations that had taken place on Tirol in our absence—which for some of us had amounted to almost five Earth-standard years. Tiresia had not only been rebuilt but expanded; so much so that its industrial sections now encompassed the very foothills that had witnessed our first land confrontation with the Invid. The city was a thrill to behold, with its phantasmagorical mix of Greco-Roman and ultratech architecture. Robotechnology had worked the same miracles on Tirol we had all grown to take for granted in Macross and Monument; and the REF saw to it that we were paraded through Tiresia’s reconfigured city scape—Sentinels, Zentraedi, and Tokugawa squadrons alike—and given a hero’s welcome.

  Then, after a week or so of reunions and festivities, the Plenipotentiary Council lowered the boom on us. The council had convened in special session aboard the SDF-3 for the disclosures, while in Tiresia at the same time the surviving members of Edwards’s Ghost Riders were being court-martialed. I sometimes wonder just who Professor Lang and the others thought they were protecting by withholding the results of their findings for over a year. And I have often asked myself how my own choices might have been affected had I known on the Ark Angel what the council was soon to make public.

  That neither Carpenter nor Wolfe had been heard from.

  That “the year” was not 2027 but 2030.

  That the Invid Regess had learned of Earth.

  That all at once we were all several years older, and sadder if not wiser.

  Lang’s teams had yet to perfect the Reflex drives that would enable us to fold instantaneously to Earthspace. Carpenter and Wolfe were somewhere in the middle of their “five-year journeys”; and even if the SDF-3 could have been folded on that very afternoon, our arrival would come years after the Masters’ own. It was incredible: the idea that we would have to retrace our tracks across the Quadrant to wage the same campaign all over again—Masters, Invid, and Protoculture. In effect, the REF and the Masters had simply swapped worlds!

  * * *

  Actually the REF had little choice but to relive its past—part of it, at any rate. For six years we had endeavored to assemble a mission of peace; now we had to plot a mission of war; complete the armada T. R. Edwards had begun, and launch it across the galaxy against Earth itself. Short of that we needed a time-travel device—something to spirit us to Earth ahead of the Tiresians.

  We might as well have prayed for divine intervention.

  But we were nothing if not equal to the task, our destinies reshaped so often that even these latest realities came as no lasting shock. Callous, stoic, resigned, blindly faithful beneath all our godlessness? I hardly knew how to characterize us any longer. Would the Earth we left behind even recognize us any longer as its own children?

  Work commenced in earnest; but we still lacked sufficient quantities of the one commodity that could guarantee victory—Protoculture. There was enough to equip perhaps a dozen ships, several hundred Veritechs; but Reinhardt and Forsythe and the rest of the general staff were talking about hundreds of warships, thousands of Veritechs. Enough to defeat the Masters’ spade fortresses, with enough in reserve to promise the Invid Regess a costly defeat. In search of a new matrix, Lang and Cabell threw themselves into the task of replicating Zor’s original experiments with the Flowers of Life. Lang, especially, had been counting on Re
m’s cooperation; but Rem took an unexpected path. The events of the past four years had indeed brought Zor’s genius to the fore, but Rem was only interested in completing what his genetic donor had begun. So while Lang’s Robotechnicians sat scratching their heads, Rem was returning to Optera to supervise its reseeding.

  The events of those post-war years in Tiresia are well documented, and it is not my aim here to recount what has already been set down by hands more gifted than my own. Roy is my lasting memory and joy from that time. He was born at the height of that frenetic Robotech surge that swept over Tirol, but I had promised myself to keep him insulated from it for as long as I could, and by and large I was successful. Rick and I made a conscious choice to withdraw for a time; and I think the council was secretly pleased by this development. Heroes to some, we were at the same time symbols of the schism, the wounds that had not yet healed.

  So we went on a honeymoon, and remembered what it was like to live without weapons. Rick had convinced someone over at R&D to build us a facsimile of a Fokker E-3 Eindecker—the plane his father had flown in the circus—and Rick had Roy airborne before his first birthday.

  We saw a lot of Vince and Jean then, and Karen and Jack—who were always on the edge of engaged. Minmei seemed the most changed among us. She was hospitalized for much of that first year, and was silent and reclusive when she emerged. She used to speak of Lynn-Kyle as though she had seen him only yesterday; had it not been for Rem, I shudder to think what might have become of her. We heard from Max and Miriya periodically; but years would pass before we would see them again.

  It was a happy time, in spite of everything—where we were, and just what it was we were assembling above Tirol’s pale skies.

  Then events began a subtle slide …

  Rem returned from reseeded Optera and supplied Lang with the data his teams needed to complete the matrix. And suddenly the REF had Protoculture and the war machine was on the roll once more. By the end of that same year, Lang had found a way to reduce the time required for spacefold to Earthspace to two years, and already the first attack wing, the so-called Mars Group, was being readied for launch. (It was the Plenipotentiary Council’s idea to subdivide the REF into groups whose namesakes were Sol’s very own children. This, to instill a new generation of warriors with an allegiance to the world they had left behind and were perhaps about to die for. Lang’s own godson and onetime assistant, Scott Bernard, and his girlfriend, Marlene Rush, were slated for the group. The Jupiter Group would launch some months later. Lang’s own group, the R&D teams and such—known collectively as the Saturn Group—were to be included in the final wave, along with the SDF-3 itself.)