They give you clothes, they’re free with guns,
And trainin’, food and lodgin’,
But tell me: what career moves
Can come from bullet dodgin’?
Bowie Grant, “Nervous in the Service”
“Sarge, we’re picking up some kinda ejection capsule launch from the mother ship,” Louie Nichols reported, sitting beside Angelo at the controls of the liberated assault ship.
Behind them, refugee clones were crowded in tightly, frightened, but used to the discipline of the Masters and so obediently quiet. Angelo, sweating over the controls, snapped, “So what? Maybe it’s somebody makin’ their own getaway. It sure ain’t a raidin’ party or a Bioroid.”
That was true, and it was unlikely that there were many combat forces left in the mother ship, or that they would do the Masters much good even if they could get to the Earth’s surface. For some reason, the Bioroid-pilot clones and other fighters of the Masters’ invasion force had, according to the transmissions the escapees were monitoring, suddenly become almost totally ineffective. The attacking enemies’ ability to fight, their very will to fight, seemed to have simply vanished, and Earth’s ragtag defenders were counterattacking everywhere, a complete rout.
Something occurred to Angelo. “Get on the military freqs and find somebody who’s in charge,” he told Louie. “Tell ’em we got an airlift of refugees comin’ down, and to hold their fire. Tell ’em … tell ’em these people here ain’t the enemy.”
Louie threw him a strange smile. “Hear, hear, Angie.”
He felt Bowie, who stood behind him, clap him on the back, and felt Musica’s light touch at his shoulder. Then Angelo pronounced a few choice army obscenities, the ship having wandered off course. He was no fly-boy and even the coaching of experienced clone pilots didn’t make it much easier to herd the alien craft along.
“Everybody keep still and lemme drive,” Angelo Dante growled.
Within the mother ship, Zor’s red Bioroid stomped back toward the command center, its discus pistol clutched in its gargantuan metal fist. Below the ship, the mounds hove into view.
I cannot undo the damage I’ve done. Across a hundred reincarnations; across a hundred million light-years. And yet: I’ll make what restitution I can.
The Invid would not have Earth.
Below, the Protoculture wraiths sensed Zor Prime’s coming, all in accordance with the Shaping that had given the original Zor his vision and set the course of the Robotech Wars, so long ago and far away.
The wraiths summoned up the strength that was left to them, for their final deed. The rainbow-rings of the Matrix were dimmer now, but still dazzling, still playing their haunting song. As the wraiths tapped its power, the Matrix flared brighter.
Dana’s efforts to contact Zor with the capsule’s little commo unit had drawn no response. Now she blinked at the bright sunlight, as the hatch opened and the fragrant air of Earth drifted in.
The capsule had landed at the crest of a low foothill across the plain, just within view of the SDF-1’s gravesite. She already knew from the capsule’s crude monitoring equipment that the mother ship had followed her down through the atmosphere, headed for the mounds.
Dana drew herself out of the capsule and saw the five-mile length of the Masters’ last starship come in to hover over the resting place of the SDF-1. “Zor. Don’t—please!”
There is no other way.
Zor’s red raised its discus pistol. The destruction of the mother ship directly over the mounds would ensure that the Flowers of Life and their spores would be completely obliterated, and spare the Human race the slaughter and ruin of an Invid invasion.
Some spores had already drifted free of the mound, though instruments weren’t clear as to why that hadn’t happened before; there were completely unique and unprecedented Protoculture aberrations down there, and no time to analyze them. But that didn’t matter now. The radius of the blast would get all of them.
Now!
The red fired its pistol at carefully selected targets; it was easy for him to find the vulnerable points in the systemry the original Zor had conceived. In moments the entire ship was a daisy chain of ever increasing explosions, ripping open its hull, gathering toward that final, utter detonation.
He thought he would be swallowed up by grief in those last moments, to see only the ghosts of the victims, and the shadows of the suffering he had caused. Unexpectedly, though, Zor Prime’s last thoughts were of the thing that had made this last incarnation so different from the rest, and let him free himself.
Dana, I love you!
Dana shrieked at the exploding ship, knowing it would do no good, until the explosions reached a crescendo. “Stop! Zor, there must be a better way—”
Then she threw herself to shelter behind the grounded, armored capsule and wept, face buried in her arms.
In the mounds, the wraiths gathered all their remaining energy, and contained the explosive force of the mother ship.
Zor’s calculations were entirely correct, insofar as they went. The self-destruction should have vaporized the mounds and wiped out the curse that was the blooming Flowers, the drifting spores.
But the Shaping of the Robotech Wars had been set long before. Earth was to be saved from destroying itself in a Global Civil War and, at the same time, serve as the focal point that would let a tremendous wrong be righted. The time for the righting of that wrong had not yet come to pass, though the stage was now set.
And so the wraiths dampened the blast of the exploding starship. The Matrix flared like a nova, sang a single piercing note, and released all its power upward. The wraiths used it to muffle the blast in an unimaginable contest of warring forces, and won.
Still, the mother ship was blown to fragments and, even as Zor Prime soared to a higher plane of existence, freed at last of the cycle of crime and guilt in which he had been caught since his first terrible transgression, the fragments began to fall.
Even a small piece of the mother ship was enormous, and not all of the explosive force had been contained. Housings and armor and structural members pelted the plain and the mounds, raising huge puffs of dust, opening the mound even further; the explosive force caught the rising spores and sent them high and wide, to ride the winds of the world. Ripping down into the garden that had been the last Matrix, the blasts freed a hundred thousand times as many more, and sent them wafting, lifting petals and even whole plants, gusting them forth.
The winds that came from the Protoculture detonation behaved unlike normal air currents. It was as if they had been given a purpose, dispersing the spores, sowing them, taking many into upper airstreams that would bear them far—would seed the face of the planet with them.
The wraiths looked upon their work and upon the Earth that the Shaping had made their home for so long. They had been given life, of a sort, by the Protoculture, taking power from the masses within the wreckage of SDF-1, SDF-2, and Khyron’s downed battlecruiser.
But now their part in the Shaping was over, and the Matrix’s last energy was used up; it was gone forever. They began their return to nothingness, making sure that the residual Protoculture around them underwent conversion to the Flowers of Life.
Dana watched the drifting pink petals, the swirling spores. The Invid are coming! Her parents’ warning was right, and nothing could stop this species that even the Masters held in dread.
Three shadows loomed up out of the mounds, growing, but becoming more and more tenuous as they did. Dana, her senses expanded by her exposure to the Matrix and even more so by the jolt from the canister containing the Masters’ last mass, knew that the phantasms would do her no harm.
She was so preoccupied, thinking about her family, about the Masters’ words and Zor’s, that she didn’t hear the stealthy footsteps behind her, covered as they were by the moan of the winds. The projectile took her at the base of the skull, where her armor offered no protection. She went down.
“You saw them!” an eerie voice said. It sounded Human but had some of the sepulchral emotionlessness of a Robotech Master’s. “Without instruments or sensors, you saw the Guardians of the Mounds!”
She lay on her side, dazed, unable to move though she was fully conscious. She realized she had been shot with some kind of paralyzing agent. A moment later, two peculiar men came into view.
One she recognized, and the sight of him almost stopped her heart. Zand, heir to Dr. Lang’s secrets. He was wearing gleaming angelic robes, shiny metallic stuff, cut somewhat in the fashion of the Robotech Masters’ monkish ones, and his collar was shaped like the Flower of Life. That alone told Dana what was happening, and the danger she was in.
Zand had gone completely insane and saw her as his passport to divine powers.
Along with Zand was a stout, vacant-faced little man with a pencil mustache, so different from the pictures in the history books that Dana didn’t recognize him until Zand turned to say, “Russo! Bring the equipment.” The scientist tossed aside the tranquillizer gun indifferently.
Russo scuttled away. Dana knew there was no aircraft or surface vehicle around; she had seen none on landing. Had they simply been sitting out here, waiting? She couldn’t figure out how Zand had foreseen that she would be where she was. Perhaps his powers were already greater than hers.
Russo returned with devices like nothing either Earth’s Robotechnology or the Masters’ had ever produced. It seemed to be all crystal nimbuses and rainbow whorls, humming faintly like the Matrix.
Zand smiled like a fiend. “Much more compact than anything you’ll have seen even in the mother ships, I’ll bet. Those were crude toys compared to this.”
He was assembling it in some fashion she couldn’t quite follow. “I’ve had plenty of time to study the Matrix, you see. Years!” The apparatus seemed to shift and fold, as if it were moving among dimensions. Its aura had a fractal look to it.
Zand laughed a bit. “The Masters and the Human race, destroying each other over a mere Matrix! When the real crux of the matter is you, Dana—and your Destiny, which is to yield up your powers to me!”
He reached out to touch something like a node of pure light against her forehead. It clung there, and she felt an utter cold, even through the numbness. “Your powers will grow. They will see beyond the Protoculture! They will be matchless! But,” his mouth flattened grimly, “they’ll do all that as mine, once I’ve taken them from you.”
He looked around. “Where is the Protoculture cell?”
When Russo gave him a blank look, Zand lashed out and sent him sprawling. Russo crawled and flopped away, whimpering like a whipped hound, to return with a prism perhaps a foot long, slender and glowing.
Dana fought against her paralysis, but couldn’t shake it or defy it. Zand had planned it well. He had foreseen this day with powers of his own. As he took the Protoculture cell and prepared to shift Dana’s gifts to himself, she had a moment to wonder: what, then, of her Vision, the Phoenix?
Her own life, she knew, was over. Zand was about to take something that was so much her essence that she would die like a withered husk without it.
He had mated the prism with the rest of his strange device. “So much Protoculture in one place,” he smiled. “It took a long time to gather, even for me, diverting military supplies. But it’s the power I need to draw your powers from you to me.”
The device shone brighter, Russo was groveling, crouched with his face in the sand. Zand’s strange voice was exalted. “First the power of the Protoculture fills me, then the powers of Dana Sterling! The Masters promised me that I would be wed to the power of the Flower, and I shall!” The light was unbearable.
Zand seemed to swell and grow. Dana feared what the Universe was in for, with Zand striding across it like a god.
Just then she heard a bark.
Polly! In her paralysis, she couldn’t even say it.
The Pollinator came traipsing up and sat down, head canted to one side, tongue lolling, to consider Zand. He barely registered the XT creature, though, because something was terribly wrong with him.
His enlarged form was vibrating. Soon he was contorting, convulsing, his device flashing like a lighthouse in an earthquake. Russo had thrown himself flat, covering his head with his hands, wailing.
Dana had a sense that the last of the wraiths was vanishing away. And with them, the last of the Matrix, as well as the last of the Protoculture in the area, was being transformed.
Zand voiced a howl of agony and fright so ghastly that she was to remember it all her days. The light engulfed him. Still the Pollinator sat and watched. The Protoculture in the Matrix had been changed to the Rowers of Life.…
Perhaps it was the discharge of so much Protoculture. In any case, Dana felt the world slipping away, and saw the old Vision once again, the Phoenix. Only, this time she saw Zor, too. It was given to her, in that trance, to know why the Robotech Wars had come to be, and what the ultimate outcome was—just what the Phoenix was.
Just as the blinding light faded, Dana found that she could move a little. Either Zand had underestimated the dosage or her expanded powers were helping. Dana, Polly and the whining Russo gazed on what had appeared in Zand’s place.
In a way, he got his wish, was Dana’s first coherent thought.
There had never been, nor ever would be again, one to match it, the biggest Rower of Life that ever was. It stood rooted in the sand, spreading its petals, a coral-colored tripartite beauty. Of Zand there was no sign except, perhaps, in the shape and detail of the central blossom; it might only be her imagination, or it might be that she saw his face there.
Of his fantastic device, nothing remained.
She found she had the strength to rise, but came only to her knees, swaying. She heard a cry and looked up to see Russo, shrieking and screaming, running off down the hill like a crazed ape. He was headed directly out into the wastelands; she let him go.
Dana dragged one foot to her, until she was on one knee, the spores drifting about her. The odd thought struck her that perhaps Zand’s fate was some lesson from the Protoculture, some chastening, to balance the power she had been granted.
She found herself humming, then realized it was a seventeenth-century hymn her father had loved and her Zentraedi mother had approved of as holding much and proper wisdom; so Rolf Emerson had told her, when Emerson taught it to Bowie and Dana. As a little girl she had taught it to Konda, Bron, and Rico, and they had insisted that what was in the words and the tune was nothing less than universal truth:
Lead kindly, Light,
Amid the encircling gloom
Lead Thou me on,
The night is dark and I am far from home
Lead Thou me on,
Keep Thou my feet
I do not ask to see the distant scene
One step enough for me