This sudden shifting of focus, from Matrix to Muse—and Zor Prime—is bewildering only to those who haven’t familiarized themselves with the subtler powers of Protoculture.
From a distance, we can see it, of course, and feel smug in our overview. If the players on stage that day were mystified and even illogical, who can fairly blame them? The Shaping of the Protoculture had the world in its teeth and was shaking it.
S. J. Fischer, Legion of Light:
A History of the Army of the Southern Cross
The captives could see that it was a very high space. The multicolored invader lightstructure, as faceted as a stained glass chandelier and as big as a Hovertank, was hanging unsupported very high above them.
It looks like—radioactive diamond; a crystallized thought—I dunno, Emerson thought woozily, as Brown and Marie tried surreptitiously to hold him upright on the couch.
“Well?” Dag repeated. “Will you make your species see reason, and surrender?”
Emerson took a breath and looked again at the three strange beings who floated before him on the Protoculture cap’s small standing platforms. Would Leonard have gone insane right on the spot? It was intriguing to consider, but not very helpful.
“ ‘Surrender’?” Emerson repeated the word tiredly, feeling the wounds on his face and neck, and in his side. “Haven’t you arrogant ghouls learned anything about the Human race yet? Your Zentraedi came after us, and now you come after us—sss—”
Emerson hissed in pain, going a little faint but coming around almost at once. Lieutenant Crystal wedged up against him, propping him up so that Emerson hadn’t teetered. Good soldier!
“—after us,” Emerson resumed, stiffening his spine. “But you don’t seem to realize: It doesn’t make us weaker; it makes us stronger!”
Dag looked down on him. “A great pity; our information led us to hope that you are seeking the same peaceful settlement as we—that our goal was the same.”
Emerson shook off his fatigue and pain. How old were these apparitions, these seeming Grim Reapers before him? How many Protoculture-grown Dorian Gray portraits in the old closet? he speculated, then pulled himself together. It was no time for whimsy.
“Nice try,” Emerson shot back, “but you know as well as I do that you opened fire on us first. You never tried to negotiate.”
“Regrettable,” Dag parried, “but we respect you as we do other intelligent beings who have the same Human form as we, the same biogenetic structure—even a kindred intellect.”
“That so?” Marie glowered up at the Master from beneath her long black brows. “Then why haven’t you called off your Bioroids?”
“You’re liars, the whole pack of you,” Emerson told the Masters.
Shaizan’s eyes opened wide with his surprise and displeasure. “Truly, you are stupid creatures!”
Emerson smiled mirthlessly. “Map reference point SX point eighty three; that’s where you intend to make your initial landing, right? That’s how stupid we are. And you’re going to see more mecha and more fighting-mad Human beings than you could’ve dreamed of in your worst nightmares!”
It was only a wild guess on his part, based on repeated alien activity there, and those last transmissions from Leonard’s staff before commo was knocked out on Tristar. The gambit was worth a try, Emerson had decided. Earth’s defenses were nearly finished, but perhaps the Masters didn’t know that, and Emerson’s words would throw them off balance for a bit.
And, terrible as the aliens’ new beam weapon was, they would not use it on the mounds, that much was obvious; they didn’t want to destroy the mounds, didn’t dare to, or they would have done so long ago. It was tragic irony that, now that the Human race finally knew something about the Masters’ original, bewildering demand, the Masters had upped the ante. Emerson saw, just as Leonard had, that there was no way to evacuate the Earth, and no place to go even if such a thing were possible.
“And we know about the Protoculture,” Marie was saying, even though the intelligence report on the 15th’s discoveries inside the flagship, and analysis of the Masters’ transmission to Leonard, had been very sketchy.
“We know that if you don’t get it, you die,” Brown added.
That gave the Masters pause again, and the captives had the impression the invaders were in silent conference once more. After a moment, Bowkaz said, “Tell us just how much you people know of us, of our history.”
“We know about your weak points,” Emerson answered. “The Earth is ours, and nobody’s taking it away from us or making us leave it! But if you’ll agree to a ceasefire, then perhaps we can help each other. We can stop this war.”
“The Invid are coming, do you not understand what that means?” Shaizan demanded. “You will all be wiped out!”
“We cannot allow your stubbornness or the fate of one tiny world to endanger the establishment of our Robotech Universe,” Dag said.
“Your small-mindedness merely illustrates how primitive you are,” Bowkaz added.
Emerson laughed madly, so that Marie and Brown feared for a moment that he had snapped. Then the general met the Masters’ glares with one of his own. “Then, so be it.”
An area of mottling on the mushroomlike cap grew bright, and Bowkaz put his palm to it. The cap spoke so that the Humans could hear as well, “I am receiving information on Zor Prime.
“Zor and the Human military unit in which he served are now at the site of the buried Protoculture Matrix. Musica is with him, but she is no longer connected to the Cosmic Harp; she has given her loyalty to Zor and the Humans.”
“Bowie!” Emerson murmured. “I knew you were no deserter, son.”
Shaizan turned back to Emerson. “Our reprieve is withdrawn! Your Earth has just run out of time!”
Sean and the others had simply slipped back to their concealed jeeps, put on combat gear, then made their way back through the GMP lines as if they were a recon unit going to the rear to make a report. Passwords given to them by Nova made it easy. No one thought to question them with the Masters’ attacks and the chaotic situation in Southern Cross HQ.
The return trip was in some ways easier, the piloted mecha lifting the unpiloted ones over the GMP perimeter. The Gimps were hesitant to shoot at friendly forces without specific orders, until it was too late.
Now the 15th stood around their Hovertanks, watching smoke rise from the blasted Monument City, which had taken scattered beam hits but not the sort of all-out, fused-earth attack that had claimed Newton.
“Bowie, I’m so ashamed,” Musica said, tears wetting her cheeks, as they saw the ragged lines of survivors making their way from the city.
“It’s not your fault,” Bowie told her, holding her to comfort her.
She looked up at him, trying to smile. “The harmony is strong, between you and me. I feel your joys and sorrows; they are my own.” Being close to him was so wonderful, a divine gift of happiness that shored her up in the horror that was around them.
Off to one side, Dana asked Nova quietly, “Do you think Zor knows what’s going to happen next? That he sees the future?” It was no time to voice a more personal question to herself, And, have I? All her dreams and Visions crowded so close about her.
Nova considered that. “What are you saying?” The results of her interrogations and observations were inconclusive but—if Zor did have some sort of precog powers, perhaps the Human race could turn them to good use.
Dana was looking at Zor, who stood alone, watching the pyre that was Monument City. “He doesn’t want to help Musica,” Dana faced the truth. “He wants revenge, and he wants to die more than he wants to live, I think.” Her voice caught a little; she still loved him.
Zor studied the destruction and suffering before him, standing near the Three-In-One; Dana had supposed he named his tank that because of its three configurations, but understood now that it was some deeper memory that had moved him to do so. Zor was repeating the silent vow as if it were a mantra, This time they’ll pay! This time I’ll stop them!
That was when he heard the crackle of Shaizan’s voice over the cockpit speaker of Sean’s Hovertank, the Bad News. “Zor! Traitor! Are you there?” Sean nearly jumped out of the tank like an ejecting pilot.
Zor was in the cockpit of his Three-In-One in an instant, hands on the control yoke grips. “I hear you.”
Somehow, the Masters had contrived to send their image over the tank’s display screen. “You are aware that the Protoculture Matrix is undergoing degradation, as the Flowers bloom.” It wasn’t a question. “And by now, the Sensor Nebula has surely alerted the Invid.”
Zor looked at his onetime Masters. The words made bits of memory and realization fall into place. “I—yes. But I also know that I control the key to this planet’s survival. I dictate the terms.”
“We are of the opinion that you are mistaken,” Shaizan replied. “Watch closely, and you will see.”
The other ATACs were watching on their own screens, with Musica looking over Bowie’s shoulder and Nova over Dana’s. They saw Rolf Emerson, teeth locked in pain, with Marie and Brown trying to comfort him.
“Emerson,” Bowie said numbly, while Sean whispered Marie’s name like a hopeless prayer, and Dana heard Nova breathe, “Dennis.”
Then the Masters were onscreen again. “These three men will be released when you return Musica and remove your troops from this area.”
Men? Sean Phillips found a second to think, wondering if they had gotten a good look at Marie. I suppose everybody in armor looks the same to them but—maybe these vampires aren’t as smart as everybody keeps tellin’ me they are. Anyway, if that’s what it’s like to be immortal, they can keep it!
“Do you find this acceptable?” Shaizan continued. “We trust that we need not mention the alternative.”
Zor fought down his fury long enough to ask, “What are your conditions?”
“You will be picked up, and we will exchange prisoners onboard our mother ship.” The Masters disappeared from the screen.
Zor lowered himself from his tank wearily and had barely begun, “I do not wish for the rest of you to be invol—” Bowie hit him with a shoulder block, driving the bigger Zor up against the armored side of Three-In-One, trying to choke the life out of him.
“They’re not getting Musica! I’ll kill you!”
Zor grimaced, trying to twist free, but didn’t strike out at him. “Then stay here and do nothing, and watch your good friend be killed! The techniques of the Masters can be more cruel than anything you can conceive of!”
Dana was dashing to intervene, but somehow Musica got there first. “Stop it, Bowie!” He had no choice but to risk harming her or back off. He let go his grip on Zor.
“I will not permit you all to suffer because of me,” she told Nova and the 15th. “I will go back.”
Before Bowie could object, Dana said, “She’s right. Saddle up, Fifteenth! C’mon, what’re you all gaping at?”
Nova was the one among them most distanced from Emerson’s predicament. The fate of a few Human beings, even a flag-rank officer and two TASC fliers, was insignificant against the survival of the Human race and its homeworld; everyone who took the Southern Cross oath understood that. Shaping strategy and policy on the basis of hostages and emotional responses led to disaster; it had been one of the major contributing factors to the Global Civil War.
Nova thought about her pistol again, but realized that events had gone too far for that, and that she must see things through along with Dana’s ATACs. Protoculture seemed to have some barely hinted-at power to shape events, and she could only hope that the benign side of that mystical force was working now, because Fate had the bit in its teeth.
“There’s no telling what’ll happen,” Dana was telling her men. “We’ll have to play it by ear. But this thing isn’t about Southern Cross or the UEG anymore. I don’t think even the mound, here, is as important now. This thing is between us and the Robotech Masters.”
In the wake of her experiences on the flagship and her exposure to the spores, pollen, and Flowers below, and to Musica’s song, something in her was coming fully to life—was flexing its powers like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon and pumping out its wings.
Dana didn’t know exactly how, but she knew the words were true. “Maybe this was always meant to be, right from the start.”
The contact broken, the Masters easily reached an unspoken consensus: Musica was critical to their plans, and there was no longer any need for the others—not even Zor. Furthermore, there were disturbing things about the halfbreed lieutenant, Sterling; some genetic throw of the dice had embued her with insights and an affinity for the Protoculture that made her dangerous. It was best that she and her unit be terminated as soon as possible; the Masters could tolerate no rival in the matter of the Protoculture.
The units encircling the mounds simply held their fire as a flotilla of a dozen assault ships came low to pick up the Hovertanks. Hopelessly outgunned, the GMP troops breathed a universal sigh of relief when the invader craft lifted away.
In due course the 15th came forth to form a spearhead on the huge hangar deck: Dana’s Valkyrie, Angelo’s Trojan Horse, Bowie’s replacement tank, the Re-Tread, which had taken the place of his Diddy-Wa-Diddy, abandoned on an earlier sortie aboard a mother ship. Sean’s Bad News and Louie Nichols’s Livewire completed the roster.
There were ranks of clone guards with rifles aimed at them, rabbits policing the wolves. But the ATACs only watched and waited, the tanks’ headlights and downswept hoods making them appear to be glowering.
When Dana had looked the place over, she switched her mike to an external speaker and announced, “First of all, we want to see Chief of Staff Emerson.”
There was some conferring among the invaders. Finally they opened ranks and the Hovertanks fell in to follow a guard runabout, moving into the vaulted passageways of the residential district, so much like those of the Masters’ original flagship.
Guards stood on ledges all along the way. Dana wondered if they realized they were scarcely more than so many pop-up targets before the armor and firepower of the Hovertanks. They didn’t seem worried, and that worried her.
But while she didn’t have words to explain it, something told her that what she was doing was right, that against all logic, what she was doing was what she should be doing. Again she felt connected to something much greater than herself, and breathed a quick prayer that it wasn’t some kind of self-delusion. It was nothing but faith, really, but if she had understood her Academy philosophy courses, what cognitive process wasn’t?
The guard runabout stopped at a bulkhead hatchway as big as a hangar door, and the tanks settled in behind it, idling.
“From this point, Musica and two others may continue, but no more. The exchange will be made at once.”
Dana stood in her cockpit-turret, taking up her tanker’s carbine and slinging it over her armored pauldron. Her winged helmet, with its crest of bright metal, and her flashing armor seemed to daunt the guards a little. “That’s you and me, Bowie.” She couldn’t figure out why the Masters weren’t luring Zor in, too.
“Right.” Behind Bowie, Musica rose to her feet, to show that she was ready.
Valkyrie and Re-Tread were escorted among more of those stone-faced corridors Dana remembered so well, and through more technological-looking passageways as well. At last the runabout leading them stopped, and the tanks settled to a halt. At Dana’s signal, Bowie and Musica dismounted to join her, both ATACs carrying their carbines. They were led to a triskelion hatch that rotated open.
Emerson looked up with a resigned smile. “It’s you.” Dana knew some of it was for her, but most of the general’s warmth was for Bowie.
“Rolf,” Bowie said simply.
“General Emerson!” Dana strode over to him, carbine still at sling-arms, as Dennis Brown and Marie Crystal helped him to his feet. “You’re wounded.”
She could see there wasn’t much she could do with her combat med kit that Brown and Crystal hadn’t already done with theirs. “It’s nothing serious,” the general told her, a lie and they both knew it. “I’m glad you’re here, Dana.”
Then he turned to Bowie, who stood rooted. “Good to see you, soldier.”
Bowie inclined his head to his guardian. “Pleasure to be here, General.” But his eyes danced behind his helmet visor, and Dana took an instant from her scheming and calculating to be glad. Whatever had gone wrong between the two had somehow been made right again.
Dana was figuring the best order of march, meaning to use Musica as insurance—something Musica had already agreed to—when there was a muffled cry. Dana whipped around, the carbine slung down off her shoulder butt first and the muzzle coming up, to see Musica being borne back, wrenched from Bowie’s grasp, and carried through two firing ranks of clone guards. The guards had appeared from nowhere, their backs to what she had assumed was a solid wall—she had fallen for an old trick. The ranks closed, and the guards assumed firing stances.
“Dana!”
Sean had never quite heard that tone in Angelo’s voice before, but there wasn’t much time to stop and reflect on it. Sean himself had been preoccupied, worrying about Marie.
But Dana had left her mike open, and there was no mistaking the sound of a firefight or the lieutenant’s yell for reinforcements.
“I’ll come with you!” Angelo roared, as the tanks’ thrusters blared. Nova, riding with him, was all for that, thinking of Dennis Brown.
Sean automatically reverted to a command voice, even though the big sergeant now outranked him.
“You know your orders! Hold this position! And you, too, Louie; you’ve got to secure the escape route!” Sean fired up Bad News and bashed through the hatch before him while Angelo was still making strangled objections.
It wasn’t too hard to find the way; Dana and Louie each had a transponder in their armor’s torso-instrumentation pack. Then, Dana’s vanished from the display screen.
But Bowie’s still functioned, even though Sean couldn’t raise him or the lieutenant over the radio. Sean had clones ducking low every which way, indifferent to their puny small arms fire, laying out an occasional burst just to keep them discouraged.
The race to get there seemed to take forever. Dana’s signal was dead and she might be, too; and Marie was in there, along with the others.…
He bashed through a final hatch like an iron fist through rice paper, holding fire because he didn’t know where friend or foe might be. Energy bolts began coming his way at once.
Still he held fire, trying to get his bearings. It was a singular piece of discipline; as someone in an earlier war had remarked, you would shoot your own mother if she happened to charge across your field of fire in battle.
Bad News settled in for a low hover, as a triad of guards concentrated their fire on it. Sean would wonder later if the clones had any real idea of warfare, would feel as though he had simply executed them. But in the heat of the moment, seeing there were no friendlies near, he laid out a single bolt from the cannon and was on the move even while the immolated bodies were turning to ash.
He was too zoned-up for combat to feel sorry for them; there was only one thing he cared about, and the voice Sean heard then sent waves of relief and joy pushing through him, remarkable in their intensity.
“You took your time getting here!” Marie scolded from behind a fluted column, snapping off judicious shots with a fallen guard’s rifle.
“But my heart was with you all the while. Believe me, my little pigeon!”
The romance had started, for him, as just one more conquest. When did she come to mean everything to me? Sean couldn’t help wondering, even while trying to keep his mind on business.
Maybe it was because Marie Crystal wasn’t dazzled by him, having more than enough medals and decorations of her own; or maybe it was bound up in that spooky destiny stuff Dana kept yammering about and Sean refused to accept. Most likely, if he and Marie lived to be together again and spent their whole lives that way, they would still never figure it out, he decided.
He thought all that in a tiny slice of time, pivoting the Bad News and laying out heavy suppressive fire, blowing beautiful friezes to cinders and fountaining tiles from the deck to keep the enemy’s head down.
The clones didn’t seem to care about their own lives. Some stood right up into the fire and shrapnel; their small arms counterfire was radiant dotted lines running at every angle across the compartment.