End of the Circle

by Jack McKinney

  Maria Bartley-Rand, quoted in Xandu Reem’s A Stranger at Home: A Biography of Scott Bernard

  Scott breathed a sigh of relief as he felt the craft settle down, rubber tires chirping against the tarmac of a smooth but long disused stretch of Southlands highway. Mission priorities and the usual red tape had made it impossible for him to procure an old VTOL, much less an Alpha, so Scott was stuck with a forty-year-old air breather, a civilian five-passenger jet some group in G4 must have liberated from a pre-Wars museum. They’d blown the dust off the thing and fitted it with new rubber, but the cockpit had seen far better days, and the instruments were ancient. Scott’s biggest problem was refraining from trying to think the aircraft through mechamorph maneuvers. A lot of good that would have done, anyway; the thing wasn’t even equipped with a neural interface thinking cap!

  Priorities aside, though, there were good reasons for flying civilian and denying any military affiliation just then. Earth’s surface, the Southlands especially, had become a sorry place for soldiers. With the so-called fall of Reflex Point and the Invid abandonment of their hives, Flower of Life orchards, and POW camps, humankind was once more on the move. People were quite literally crawling out of the holes they had buried themselves in when the Invid had landed. Tens of thousands, many of whom had spent the past year or more in internment centers in what had once been called Canada, were migrating south from the ruined Northlands, lured to Brazilas by rumors of massive reconstruction efforts and the promise of a United Earth Government rising from the ashes of the Southern Cross apparat. At the same time thousands more had taken to the cracked and rutted roadways of the thrice-invaded world in search of lost friends and loved ones, while others busied themselves by exacting vengeance on spies, sympathizers, and any who had profited during the occupation.

  Soldiers of any army, private or otherwise, were often at the receiving end of the general wrath and blood lust, especially those unfortunates who had fancied themselves insurgents or freedom fighters. It was an accepted fact that insurgency had done more damage than good—Invid reprisals having far outweighed the dubious worth of destroying a handful of Shock Troopers or Pincer ships—and that the Regess had not really been defeated but had willingly abandoned the planet in search of richer hunting grounds. The returning REF consequently was not looked upon as some beneficent force of liberators but as yet another conquering army, a gang of thugs looking to resume control after a fifteen-year absence.

  Under the circumstances, Scott’s small jet was less a product of choice than of sheer necessity. And the same held true for his civilian attire.

  Mention of the Invid sister simulagents had dropped him right back into the lap of the REF’s intel people for two more weeks of memory probes and debriefings. Ultimately, however, Scott’s inquisitors had come to accept that Marlene’s present whereabouts were unknown and that Scott himself stood the best chance of finding her. That he had agreed to do, under the condition that he be given an opportunity to undertake the search alone and in his own fashion.

  G2 had acquiesced, figuring that it would prove a simple matter to assign a team of agents to the colonel, but Vince Grant had received word of the operation and vetoed it before a single operative had been assigned. Back on the surface, meanwhile, Scott had been quizzing migrants, bribing local officials, and bartering with foragers for a line on any one of his six former teammates—counting one for Lancer, and Marlene among them. He had concentrated on Rand, who months ago at Yellow Dancer’s final concert had said something about heading for the outskirts of Norristown, where he planned to write his memoirs.

  A downside week had gone by before Scott locked onto what seemed a worthy lead, and that lead had now brought him and the toy jet to Xochil, a pueblo not far off the route the team had taken through Trenchtown, in the heart of the Southlands.

  A tatterdemalion crowd of vacant-eyed townspeople and rough-trade foragers was gathered around the craft by the time Scott raised the canopy and climbed out. He answered a few questions about the state of things on the north coast in exchange for information on Rand and, for five hundred New Scrip (with a promise of that much again when he returned from town), enlisted the services of a couple of locals sporting turn-of-the-century military-issue projectile rifles to keep an eye on the jet.

  Twenty minutes later he was negotiating a narrow alley off Xochil’s earthen main street, zeroing in on the throaty revvings of what he took to be a fossil-fueled motorcycle engine.

  Rook Bartley was standing alongside the chopped machine, twisting the handlebar throttle with her right hand while her left ponytailed her long strawberry-blond hair. Seeing her, Scott smiled genuinely for the first time in weeks.

  She was dressed in mechanic’s coveralls, back and rolled-up sleeves emblazoned with motorcycle brand-name patches. She was also quite a few pounds heavier than when they had exchanged good-byes, her hands and one cheek smeared with grease and grime. Scott waited for the bike’s growling sounds to die down before he called her name.

  Someone’s metal-rock rendition of “Look Up” was blasting from stereo speakers. The song had become something of an anthem in the Southlands, much as Lynn-Minmei’s “We Will Win” had captured the spirit of the First Robotech War.

  Rook turned, startled, and regarded him quizzically for a good ten seconds before a smile split her freckled face. “Well, now maybe all this exhaust is getting to me, but I’d swear that’s Scott Bernard standing in the doorway.”

  “Hello, Rook,” he told her over the music and the rumbling sound of the idling machine.

  She shook her head in disbelief, wiped her hands on a scrap of towel, and sauntered over to embrace him, kissing him lightly on the mouth and then jabbing a fist into his upper arm.

  “I thought you were off looking for your friends, soldier boy. Figured you’d be halfway to Tirol by now.” Rook’s blue eyes gave him a quick once-over. “And look at you—what’d the REF boot you back into real life or something?”

  “You look great,” he said, beaming.

  Rook took a step back and pinched out the coveralls’ pants legs as though she were wearing a skirt. “You think so, huh?”

  Scott nodded. “Guess you’re eating better now.”

  Rook laughed. “Figures you’d notice, Scott. Fact is, I’m pregnant.”

  “Pregnant? Jeez, I thought there was something different, but—”

  “Six months,” she said. “She’s going to be a Virgo if I’ve computed it right. But then I figure it’s about time they changed the signs of the zodiac, don’t you?”

  “She?” Scott said.

  Rook smiled broadly. “Call it woman’s intuition. Rand’s skeptical, but I’ve even got her name picked out—Maria. Maria Bartley. What d’ you think?”

  Scott ran it through and nodded. “I like the sound of it. So this place is yours?” he asked after a pause. In the naked glare of generator-fed incandescents sat a score of partly restored bikes. There were perhaps a dozen engines resting on blocks, spoked wheels hanging from the rafters, rusted frames and spare parts piled in corners or littering the top of thick wooden worktables. The air reeked of solvents and exhaust fumes.

  “Will be someday,” Rook said, looking around. “Right now I’m only helping out.” She caressed her stomach. “Gotta keep the family fed.”

  “Why here, of all places?”

  Rook tugged at her lower lip. “Trenchtown, mostly.”

  Scott recalled something about rival motorcycle gangs in Rook’s past, the Blue Angels and the Red Snakes. “You’ve got family there, don’t you?”

  “Mom and a sister. Guess I’m thinking about mending fences one of these days.”

  Scott grinned. “What about Rand?”

  Rook screwed up her face. “The Great Commentator, you mean?” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “We found a place a couple clicks west of town. All he does is write—morning, noon, and night. Like there’s going to be an audience for his book or something.”

  “Have
you read any of it?”

  “Yeah, I have,” she said, moving back to the cycle she had been working on. “And it’s actually not bad. ’Course I have to straighten him out on a lot of the facts. To hear him tell it, you’d think he won the war single-handed.” Rook was quiet for a moment. “So what brings you around, Scott? I don’t figure you just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  “I’m not,” Scott confessed. “I’m looking for Marlene, Rook.”

  Rook appraised him silently. “Talk about mending fences … That oughta be some reunion, partner. You plan on selling tickets, or what?”

  Scott worked his jaw. “Have you heard from her, Rook?”

  Rook goosed the throttle, and the bike sent up a cloud of white smoke. “Think you better talk to Rand, soldier boy. I don’t want to get in the middle of this one.”

  Scott recognized examples of Rand’s handiwork in the dilapidated wooden cabin he and Rook called home. It was not much to look at on the outside, but the two main rooms were comfortable if Spartan and reflected Rand’s utilitarian nature. Scott also recognized the small notebooks stacked atop the writing desk, the ones Rand had guarded with his life during the journey to Reflex Point.

  “Here you go,” Rand said, handing over a tall mug of home-brewed beer and pulling a stool opposite Scott’s chair. “I bottled it when we first moved in.”

  Rand had already explained how Rook had enticed an REF Alpha pilot to fly them down to Norristown after Scott had taken off for the skies.

  “What’s weird is that I was just thinking about you,” Rand resumed. “I was reading in my notes about the day you and I met. The time I saved your ass from three blues.”

  Scott almost spewed his beer across the room. “You saved my—” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, deciding it didn’t merit an argument. “Right, I remember now.”

  “Yeah, those were the days,” Rand mused, shaking his shaggy mop of red hair. “Foraging, surviving on the road …” He looked up at Scott. “I’m going to call the book Notes on the Run.”

  “Your baby, is that it?”

  Rand’s thick eyebrows bobbed. “So Rook told you. She also give you that intuition crap about her being sure it’s a girl?”

  “Maria, I think she said.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t put scrip on it.” Rand sipped his grog. “Either way it goes, though, I’m going to make sure the kid is raised to appreciate books and movies and learning in general.” He gestured to the writing desk. “Maybe she’ll even end up a writer like her old man.”

  “You said ‘she,’ Rand,” Scott pointed out.

  They both laughed, but it was not long before an uncomfortable pause crept into their conversation. When Scott mentioned Marlene, Rand’s smile collapsed entirely.

  “What do want from her, Scott?” Rand asked.

  “I just need to talk to her. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

  “And I don’t suppose you can tell me anything about why most of the Cyclones have stopped working, either. Lot of unemployed ’Culture hounds wandering around out there all of a sudden, amigo.”

  “Sorry, Rand,” Scott told him. “We’re all in the same dark.”

  Rand smirked. “Same ole soldier. What is it—your REF people want to debrief her?”

  Scott shot to his feet. “Hey, you think this is easy for me? You think I want it? I look at her and I see the Marlene I loved. I look at her and I think about what the Invid did to us.”

  Rand rolled his eyes. “Oh, for chrissakes.”

  “The Regess planned to exterminate us, Rand,” Scott snarled. “You don’t remember that? The Flowers had hit their goddamned trigger point. If the fleet hadn’t returned, we’d all be dead.”

  Rand stood up. “Yeah, and if the Regess hadn’t decided to leave when she did, your precious fleet—” He pointed toward the ceiling, “—your precious fleet would have irradiated the lot of us!”

  “You’d rather let the Invid have this planet?”

  “I’d rather none of this happened, Scott. But I don’t see how dragging Marlene back into it’s going to serve any purpose now. She’s living a normal life, Scott. Let her be.”

  “Where is she, Rand?” Scott pressed. “It’s possible she knows where my friends are.”

  Rand regarded him. “The SDF-3? How do you figure?”

  Scott forced out his breath. “The ship didn’t emerge from hyperspace. Relatively speaking, it vanished at the same moment the Invid left Earth.”

  “So you figure what?”

  “That they may have ended up in the same place.” Scott held Rand’s gaze. “It’s possible Marlene is still in rapport with the Regess. That’s why I need to talk to her, Rand.”

  The smaller man shook his head. “You’re putting me between the proverbial rock and the hard place, mano.”

  “Just tell me where she is, Rand.”

  Rand took a long pull from his mug. “She’s with Lunk and Annie. They’re in Roca Negra.”

  Scott tried to place it.

  “Remember the book Lunk tried to deliver to Alfred Nader?”

  “Of course,” Scott said in sudden realization.

  “That’s where you’ll find them.”

  “Thanks, Rand.”

  Reluctantly, Rand accepted the proffered hand. “One thing, Scott,” he said when they were seated again. “Lunk’s not going to be as easy on you as I was.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  TO: NILES OBSTAT

  EYES ONLY

  FROM: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY DIRECTORATE

  RE: PROJECT STARCHILD

  DNA ANALYSIS OF BLOOD AND TISSUE SAMPLES TAKEN FROM INVID SIMULAGENT (A.K.A “MARLENE,” “ARIEL”) PROVE UNEQUIVOCAL MATCH TO ON-FILE DNA PROFILES OF MARS DIVISION E.R. TECH MARLENE RUSH (SEE APPENDED NOTES). SUGGEST THAT REGESS EXTRACTED RUSH TISSUE FROM WRECKAGE OF MARS GROUP AND USED FIND AS TEMPLATE FOR HER HUMANOID CREATIONS. IT IS YET TO BE LEARNED WHETHER USE OF RUSH TEMPLATE WAS DELIBERATE OR COINCIDENTAL. QUERY: IS COLONEL BERNARD TO BE INFORMED? SUGGESTION: WITHHOLD ALL KNOWLEDGE OF CLONING UNTIL FULL DISCLOSURE IS WARRANTED OR DEEMED ADVISABLE.

  G2 dispatch, quoted in, Sara Lemole’s Improper Council: An Analysis of the Plenipotentiary Council

  “She’s got the right dynamic for the New Frontier.”

  Twentieth-century song lyric

  Under reflex power, the Ark Angel left geosynch and inserted itself into orbit where the Robotech factory satellite had once played the role of Earth’s inner moon. The departure point for the trial jump to Luna’s far side was the very same spatial coordinates the SDF-3 had used in its fold to Fantomaspace.

  Vince had been elsewhere when the SDF-1 had jumped from Macross, but he was well acquainted with the accounts of that fateful day logged by Henry Gloval, Emil Lang, and countless others. The far side had been targeted for the position jump, but the fortress had missed the mark by what amounted to the radius of the solar system. Gloval had given the command, but Lang had borne the burden of the blame. Inexperience, pilot error … An official inquiry was never performed. Years later, though, while Breetai’s ship was undergoing its face-lift in the factory satellite’s null-g core, the then-micronized Zentraedi commander had shown Lang where he had gone wrong. Yet in spite of that, the feeling remained that Lang was innocent of any technical oversight or wrongdoing. Human control was considered a moot point where Protoculture was involved.

  So, cinched into the Ark Angel’s command chair—a well-padded motorized affair similar to the one he had had designed for the GRU a lifetime ago—Vince Grant had to ask himself just what Protoculture might have in mind for the day’s fold.

  Seated at duty stations to the left and right of him, techs and bridge officers were running through a final series of system checks as the ship counted down from double digits. Jean, steadfast in her refusal to remain planetside for the test, was with her med group elsewhere in the ship. Vince was on file as insisting on a skeleton crew for the test, but he was secretly thankful that the Plenipot
entiary Council members had overruled him. When it came right down to it, no one wanted to be left behind.

  Even if the Protoculture had a surprise destination already picked out.

  In truth, the Ark Angel’s drives were Sekiton-fueled—a peat derived from Karbarra’s abundant Ur-Flower crop. Vince supposed the distinction was a minor one, but that belief was not shared by the half dozen Karbarrans who headed up the ship’s engineering section. Protoculture, the ursinoids were fond of pointing out, could be handled by almost anyone, but Sekiton responded to Karbarrans only, a condition Haydon the Enigmatic had been responsible for, or so Vince had been given to understand.

  “Ten seconds and counting, General Grant,” a young female tech reported.

  Vince’s hand elongated the noble features of his broad brown face. He considered the recent transmission the ship had received from Cabell.

  “Seven … six …”

  Exedore, still on Haydon IV, was of the opinion that the Awareness held some key to the SDF-3’s disappearance.

  “Five … four …”

  Dr. Penn, Jean, and several others were of the same mind.

  “Three … two …”

  Now if the Ark Angel could only get there.

  “One. Fold generators engaged.”

  Vince sent a silent prayer to the ship’s drives and their Karbarran overseers.

  A lunar crescent suddenly filled the forward viewport.

  The bridge crew applauded wildly. Exuberant cheers filtered in from distant quarters of the ship.

  “Yirrbisst has blessed on us this day, Commander,” one of the ursinoids gutturally announced over the com-line, invoking the name of his homeworld’s primary. “Praise Haydon.”

  Vince thanked everyone for a job well done. Two or three Council members had suggested a second trial jump, to Mars perhaps, if the first succeeded, but Vince had renewed confidence in the ship and saw no need for further tests.

  Earth ascended into view as the Ark Angel’s attitude thrusters repositioned the ship for the return jump.