The Final Nightmare

by Jack McKinney

  We love you very, very much, daughter, her parents added, as the voices faded.

  "Oh, I-I love you, too! And I miss you so!"

  Them the shadow figures were gone, and she was left to hope they had

  heard her, as the pink petals of the Flower of Life drifted around her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I lie down at night with my children safely asleep and my dear wife beside me and send up a-one hopes, modest-prayer to the One. And the prayer is thanks.

  But, oh! Those days! How I would love to have lived them, even if it were only to be slain on the first!

  Isaac Mandelbrot, Movers and Shakers: The Heritage of the Second Robotech War

  Zor crouched near Dana's body, glaring up at the images of the two surviving Robotech Masters.

  He still held his weapon, but it would do him little good; Shaizan and Bowkaz had struck in the moment Zor turned aside to shoot down the android shock troopers they had summoned. That had been the work of mere seconds, but in that time, as Zor stood straddling the unconscious Dana, the Masters had recovered the last Protoculture mass and made their escape, protected by the powers of the cap.

  But they had sent back their mind-projected simulacra to deliver their death warrant. Zor heard Dana begin to stir, but felt little relief; his hatred of the Masters was too all-consuming for him to feel any gentler emotion.

  Dana raised her head groggily, hearing the one called Shaizan saying, "All those who stand against us shall perish! Soon we will have the Matrix, and be all-powerful once more. Therefore, surrender to us and be spared, Zor."

  She saw the two Masters, but realized that she could see through them, as though they were made of stained glass.

  Zor threw his head back and spat, "Your perversion of the Protoculture only proves how little you truly know about it. Do you think such things can go unpunished? No! And I'll never rest until there has been vengeance."

  Dana had hauled herself to her feet, mind still whirling with the things

  she had seen and heard in her trance. But she drew a deep breath and said, "I'll be right behind you, Zor."

  That seemed to bring him out of his seizure of blind rage. He turned and put his hand on her shoulder. "Thank you. Thank you many times over, Dana. For showing me kindness and...for caring for me. For helping me become whole again, and free myself."

  He smiled, but it was bittersweet, as he shouldered his weapon. "I only wish you were safely out of here."

  He indicated the compartment's hatch. "That's one barrier we could never burn through with hand weapons, and the Masters have sealed us in-given the ship's systemry an order through their Protoculture cap. We're trapped."

  "Are you sure? It's worth a try, anyhow." She crossed to it. "Maybe we can short-circuit it, or something."

  He was about to tell her that the Protoculture didn't work that way. That there was no hope of countermanding the Masters' instruction to it, when the hatch opened to their touch at the controls.

  Zor Prime looked at her, open-mouthed. "By the Protoculture!" he whispered. "Who are you?"

  She shrugged. I'm only beginning to find out. In a lot of ways, we're the same. Now, how do we find those two and stop them?"

  He had the rifle off his shoulder again. "Rest assured: we will find them."

  "Musica's come!" Octavia rose from her ministrations to a dying clone, and Allegra did the same. Already, in the Muses' minds, there were the unheard harmonies of their triumvirate.

  Musica appeared a moment later, leading the ATACs and Nova Satori and Dennis Brown. The Muses were reunited in a three-cornered embrace. "I'm so happy you both are still alive!" Musica said. "Many of our people have been set adrift in space."

  Bowie had come up behind her. "We've got to get out of here. The

  guards are headed this way!"

  The Muses turned to their people, the three voices raised in urgent singsong, beseeching them to get up, to follow and escape.

  The phlegmatic clones didn't seem to hear, at first, but in moments the 15th troopers were tugging them upright. Dante's voice came in a roaring counterpoint, getting more of the clones moving the way only an experienced NCO could; he was perfectly happy frightening and intimidating people, if it was for their own good.

  Nova, too, helped roust the Masters' slaves. She no longer looked on them as the enemy or soulless biological units; she had changed, just as the others had changed in this last stage of the Second Robotech War. Coming across the tiny infant clone that Dana had seen on the 15th's last foray aboard a Master ship, she saw no one else was looking after it and so gathered it up in her arms, calling on the adults to follow her lead.

  In seconds, scores of clones who had been resigned to death were up and active. Hope, and the example of Musica and her sisters, filled the emptiness that had afflicted the clones when the Masters discarded them.

  The patchwork Terran attack fleet moved in, deploying its combat forces, and opened fire. A-JACs, VTs, and other combat craft raked the mother ships with energy weapons and all the ordnance they could carry. Triumviroids swept out to meet them, fighting with a furious disregard for their own survival.

  The Human battlecruisers let loose their volleys; missiles and cannon blasts lit the scene. Warheads blossomed in hideous orange-red eruptions. The Robotech Masters' Flower budshaped guns answered, filling that volume of the void with their eerie green electric-arc effects and white-hot volleys.

  With power so low, though, the Masters couldn't afford to generate their snowflakelike defensive fields, and so the battle was a slugging match. The four remaining mother ships, drained of their Protoculture reserves, were sitting ducks for the Human gunners. Pass after pass by the mecha and

  broadsides from the heavier craft inflicted heavy damage on the mightiest machines of the Masters' Robotechnology. But what the Humans didn't realize was that they were wasting valuable time and effort on targets of no importance-on targets that contained only a few barely functioning zombies.

  The Masters' flagship was far more effective, taking a heavy toll on its attackers and sustaining little damage. The Southern Cross forces, unaware that they had been outflanked, decided to concentrate on eliminating the other mother ships first. They would deal with the flagship once the rest of the invasion fleet had been destroyed.

  One mother ship flared, and minutes later, another, their power systems rupturing and yielding up their remaining energy in explosions that expanded them and rent them apart.

  Another mother ship, drifting, began the long crashplunge into the Earth's atmosphere. Mecha and heavy craft raced after, trying desperately to shoot it to bits. The impact of an object that large could work more damage than any other blow the Masters had yet struck; Humanity had learned that with the SDF-1s crash, so long ago.

  It was then that the first reports came through of the massive, renewed attack on Earth itself.

  The Triumviroids dropped in waves on Monument City, Fokker Base, and a half-dozen other strategic objectives in the region of the mounds. Southern Cross mecha and defense forces barely had time to brace themselves before the countryside became a ghastly killing ground.

  Reds whirled and swooped on their Hovercraft, strafing and spreading death and destruction. Outnumbered, the Humans fought grimly to make every death count, but still the uneven score mounted in the enemy's favor. All the volunteers and final reserves went into action. The death toll mounted and mounted.

  Triumviroids met their end, too, in staggering numbers; it mattered little to the Masters if their mecha-slaves were wiped out to the last one. The

  Matrix was the only important thing now. Neither side gave quarter or asked it.

  In his office high up in the Southern Cross headquarters, Supreme Commander Leonard looked down on the Taming graveyard that was Monument City.

  Colonel Seward implored again, "Sir, the defense forces are simply outgunned and outnumbered! Monument City's doomed! We have no choice but to evacuate!"

  Seward kne
w there was at that moment another flight of assault ships coming in at the city from the north. It might already be too late. For some reason, the enemy hadn't seemed to have understood that the slim white towers were the nerve center of the Terran military. But with the enormous volume of communications traffic now being channeled directly there, and the obvious disposition of surviving forces to protect it, even the aliens would realize it was a prize target.

  Seward fidgeted, wanting to run. Good career moves might justify a certain recklessness, but all the threat-evaluation computers agreed that staying in the HQ was suicide. And Seward had no desire for a posthumous medal, no matter how high.

  But Leonard didn't seem to see things that way. He stood, bulky and stolid as a stone, his back to the staff officer, watching as the city burned.

  Even as Seward was begging for Leonard to see reason, alien sights were ranging on the white towers. Slim, gleaming pillars suggesting Crusaders' pennons and medieval ramparts, the HQ structures were an easy target to spot. Targeting computer gunlock was established almost instantly.

  "Go if you want," Leonard said brusquely. "I'm staying here until this battle is over."

  It wasn't an act of bravery or loyalty. He knew he had made a terrible

  blunder, answering the alien feint with the bulk of his forces. His hatred of all things unearthly, the loathing burn in The terrible injuries he hall taken in combat against the Zentraedi, had blinded him to everything but the chance for revenge.

  He seemed bigger than life to the people around him, but the damage done him-to his body and thus to his spirit, his mind-that day of Dolza's holocaust attack, almost eighteen years before, was beyond any healing.

  From the moment when Leonard had overridden Emerson's wait-and-see policy, when the Masters first showed up, things had gone from bad to worse. Leonard had long since admitted to himself that Rolf Emerson was the better strategist and tactician by far, the better general even in terms of commanding his troops' loyalty. But-dammit! The man had no true appreciation of the danger of these aliens, of all aliens!

  Seward saw further argument was useless, and started for the door. His rationalization was that he was carrying Leonard's last dispatch, but in fact he was deserting his doomed post. The Southern Cross was finished.

  Leonard let him go, waiting to die. Better that way, rather than to live, being known as the man who had lost Earth to obscene monsters from another star.

  Leonard didn't have long to wait; the first salvoes hit while Seward was still in the doorway, a massive strike that lit the sky and shook the ground. The proud white towers of the Southern Cross were blackened, as concrete went to powder and structural alloys melted at the peripheries. At the centers of the hits, there was complete destruction. For Leonard, it was the end of an inner agony that had lasted some seventeen years; for the Human race, his death came too late.

  The 15th had picked up more of the refugee clones, hundreds of them, until Angelo Dante began wishing somebody a little more suited to the mass escape was in charge-say, somebody who could part the Red Sea, for instance.

  But there wasn't; even Lieutenant Satori was less qualified than he to

  lead a combat operation like this. Just a big, dumb career sergeant waiting around for his pension, he thought, who happened to get his turn in the barrel at the wrong time. Just bad luck; drive on, ATACs!

  Going back for the tanks was out of the question. The 15th had to move onward, as fast as possible, and give their trust to luck.

  "This hatch leads to an assault ship docking area," the clone who was guiding him said, crouched on the ladderway under an oblong metal slab. "I think it is the one you wanted."

  Dante was hunkered own next to him, studying the hatch. Spread out behind him on the ladderway and the drawbridgelike catwalks leading to it were the murmuring, frightened clones marked by the Masters for mass extermination. Nova and the rest of the 15th were spread out through the crowd, trying desperately to keep the people from panicking.

  People, Dante sighed to himself. Hell, no denying it: that was the way the ATACs had come to think of them. And ATAC-15's line of work was not letting innocent people be slaughtered.

  Angelo gripped his idle and awkwardly changed places with the clone, then eased the hatch up for a look. The place was empty, as far as he could see; more to the point, there were three or four of the whiskbroom-shaped assault ships waiting there, parked in a row. The hatchway was in a passageway leading to the hangar deck, which was at a slightly lower level.

  He couldn't believe the ships hadn't been committed to the battle, but he didn't have time to question the gift from above. What he didn't realize was that the combat craft ferried in from the other, abandoned mother ships were so many that the Masters couldn't man them all with the functioning clones and mecha left to them. Not much choice; this's the only chance we're gonna get.

  He couldn't see Sean Phillips around anywhere, though. Maybe this wasn't the right hangar. Nevertheless, it would have to do.

  Angelo knelt in firing position by the open hatch, waiting for the snipers to smoke him. But when that didn't happen, he turned to face the anxious clone looking up at him.

  "Get 'em all up here now, and start boarding 'em. Tell 'em to hurry, but keep the noise down."

  The word was passed. The first of the refugees began pouring up out of the hatch and making their way, at Angelo's direction, down the passageway, gathering in it and awaiting the run for the ships.

  He looked this way and that constantly, swinging his rifle's muzzle, even though he knew an ambush at this point would probably be the end of it. And it would save the army at least one pension, goddammit all!

  But as he tried to help people up through the hatch with one hand and guard at all points at the same time, help arrived. Louie Nichols came up, dark-goggled and very matter-of-fact, taking up a kneeling firing stance at the other side of the hatch. Bowie, having sealed the lower hatches behind them, was next, covering another field of fire, with Musica and her sister Muses flocking after. Angelo began to feel better.

  Still the clones poured in, filling the area between the deck-level hatch and the much bigger one through which they would have to race for the assault ships. Nova Satori emerged, still clutching the baby, but with her pistol in the hand that held it, the other hand free to grip the ladder-well railing. Dennis was right behind, with one of the short two-hand weapons.

  Hundreds came up; Angelo was sweating not just for the time when he could kick the hatch shut and seal it with a few shots, and get the hell out of the mother ship, but for the moment when he could turn his problems over to some brass hat. Anybody who wanted responsibility for this many lives had to be some sorta egomaniacal helmet case.

  He was just thinking that when he heard the mewing of alien small arms, in the direction of the large hatch at the end of the passageway.

  There wasn't much room for a stealthy approach in the bleating press of the frightened mob, but Angelo went bulling through them, holding his weapon high in the hope that it wouldn't be jostled and torn from his grip. Forging his way to the front of the crowd, he noticed that Louie and the others were doing their best to follow, but lacked his size and sheer strength.

  The bodies of three clone refugees, two males and a female, lay dead on the deck.

  There were huge containers and crates at that end, and ledges near the hatch. Now clone guard riflemen stood all along those, as the lights came up. "Stay where you are!" a clone voice was saying, in that trembling single-sideband quaver of the true Masters' slave.

  Angelo heard somebody say, "Huh?" beside him, and realized that Louie Nichols was there, somehow, swinging the sights of his rifle to cover the left, leaving the right to Angelo, just like a drill.

  "Make no move, or you will be shot." The lights brightened. A triad of clones marched in lockstep from behind one pile of cottage-sized crates, and Angelo couldn't even tell which one was talking-or maybe they all were-when they right-faced and glared at the esca
pees. "Everyone in this room, go back or be exterminated."

  "Karno," Bowie heard Musica say. And Allegra added, "We're trapped here."

  The Muses looked at their selected mates: Karno, Darsis, and Sookol, as alike as they could be without being one person. Musica said, "Karno, how can you do this? We all have a right to live!"

  Darsis spat, "How dare you speak of rights, you who have betrayed the triumvirate? Traitors to our society and our way of life! All of you will return to your appointed places immediately, or be shot down where you stand!"

  The crowd let out a concerted moan at that, but they didn't withdraw. They were creatures who knew logic-at least-thoroughly, and they saw that there was no survival in that direction, either. The ATACs and Nova were moved by something less subject to rational analysis, but they all stood shoulder to shoulder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Alpha! Tact'l Armored! Corps! Yo' ain't goin' home no more!

  Yo' want comforts, yo' want millions? Shoulda stayed wit' the civilians!

  ATAC marching cadence

  "No one will be leaving here," Nova pronounced the words slowly and carefully. Bowie noticed how open the words were to several different interpretations.

  Nova patted the small bundle of the clone infant. She had tucked her sidearm in its holster, turning her hip away from the clones' sight, but was ready to grab it out if things came to that. Dennis was edging her way.

  She was also drawing the guards' attention. She had noted that Louie Nichols was holding a shock grenade behind his back, fiddling with it by feel while he watched Karno and the rest, readying to toss it. Nova readied herself to dive for cover, taking into account the fact that no harm must come to the baby if she could help it.