Lisa's mouth tightened. "If you'd kindly let me finish," she grated.

Rick was about to interrupt again when the intercom sounded. He punched the talk-stud and barked, "Admiral Hunter!"

"This is security, Admiral," a deep base voice answered. "Colonel Xien."

"Go ahead, Colonel."

"It concerns, Rem, sir. He's been released from med lab and is now on his way back to rec deck."

"And Minmei?"

"The same, sir. She's with the two Tiresian women.

Rick rubbed the stubble on his jaw. "All right, Colonel. Maintain surveillance and notify me immediately if there are any new developments."

Lisa was staring at him when he signed off. "What's this about Minmei and Rem? Did you order surveillance on them? "

Rick snorted. "I thought you were being kept apprised of things, Lisa. Maybe if you hadn't been spending your time in the nursery "Rick!" Lisa said. "What right do you have to question my actions?"

"Every right, when you disappear from the bridge to attend to some ... child-care problem! "

"Child care? If that's what you think-"

"Please, please," Lang said, stepping between them with hands raised. "We're wasting valuable time. "

Rick and Lisa glared at each other over Lang's shoulder. "Carry on, Doctor," Lisa said through clenched teeth. Lang bowed his head. "About the scouting party, Admiral. You were about to say-"

"Pass the order to ready a party, at once," Rick replied before Lang could finish. "And inform them that I will be accompanying them."

He was holding Lisa's gaze as he said it.

Minmei recalled how she had sung for her parents as a child, leaned Yokohama and trips to Kyle's house, where she would invariably be asked to perform, to entertain. It had been years later on Macross Island that singing had grown to mean something else to her. She still lived then for the chance to perform, lived for the response, the adulation, but singing had come to represent a kind of power game. More than the power to inch closer to wealth and popularity, though; singing was power over people: a means to move, stir, control.

To conquer.

The problem was, there were people who sought to make in power their own. To twist it this way and that to suit their own purposes. Gloval and the SDF-1 command had iced her; Kyle had tried to remake her; T. R. Edwards had tried to possess her.

And now Rem needed the voice-not Minmei but the voice. He was not out to conquer audience or enemy or to build an empire founded on his own lust and greed. He needed the voice to position himself on a road to selfdiscovery. A road to redemption for a father/self he was just beginning to understand.

So she had been willing to help him, even willing to let him go on believing that by so doing he was helping her. To confront her fear, he had told her. To give full reign to her vocal prowess.

How she had been tempted to confront him on that one! To embrace him, really, and confess that she would sing simply because he needed her to sing, nothing more. But that could wait until Rem's inner quest was concluded. And then she would confess, and thank him, too. Oh, yes, thank him for allowing her to re-experience how wonderful it felt to liberate that voice within. For what had she been but selfcontained the past five years, imprisoned, like matrixed Flowers of Life? Her voice: the Protoculture denied . . .

Musica and Allegra had played no small part in that sense of rebirth. For with them she harmonized with equals. She had come closest to such transcendent purity with Janice Em, human-made, but at the time neither she nor Janice was possessed of the songs themselves.

Ancient psalms that predated Tirol's Grand Transition and the coming to power of the Robotech Masters.

Minmei was in the company of the sister clones now, preparing her voice for the difficult parts Bowie's keyboards had taught her. Musica and Allegra had seemed pleased with her contributions thus far, to say nothing of Bowie, who was beside himself. A dream come true, he kept telling her, a dream come true.

She kept to herself that she was wearing a transmitting device, that Rem had wired her for sound, to use an old Earth phrase. In some sense it made her feel as though Rem were present in the music room, pressed close to her warm breast like the device itself.

Her hand brushed it through the soft weave of her tunic, then went to her belly, where it lingered a moment longer. And she began to sing.

Not far away, Rem would be listening.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Certain parallels are suggested by the fact that both the Masters' clone (Zor Prime) and the Invid Regis's simulagent (Ariel, aka "Marlene') were corrupted by their contact with Terran humankind. Those commentators who advance the view usually offer the Zentraedi as further proof to bolster their claim. Corruption, then, is equated with emotion, for it was human passion above all else that turned the tide time and time again during the Robotech Wars. Terran humankind has been singled out and in some sense denigrated. But were the pre-Robotech Tiresians any more in control of their passions? One need only look to Zor and the corruption his actions worked on the Invid QueenMother. Was this not in fact the original corruption?

Gitta Hopkins, Queen Bee: A Biography of the Invid Regis

Outside the Ark Angel's viewport spun a dark maelstrom of stolen matter, a grave whirlpool of cosmic stuff, black as evil in its singular heart.

"My God," Vince said in utter astonishment.

"Let us hope not," Cabell offered, turning his back to the view and helping himself to food recently delivered to the situation room.

"Stellar Transylvania," one of Louie Nichols's data junkies said without bothering to explain. "Give me two pints of protons," he added, affecting some sort of middle-European accent.

In the foreground between starship and black hole floated what Vince had first taken for a dumbbell-like structure captured by the system's nearly lightless sun, the host upon which the hole had fed for countless eons. It was only after the ship's onboard AI had served up a graphic breakdown of the object that he had begun to comprehend it. One end of the dumbbell was in fact a small rouge moon, yanked from orbit by what constituted the dumbbell's twin-cupped opposite end: a radically reconfigured Haydon IV.

The cylindrically shaped bridge that joined moon and artifact world were made up of two massive conduits, which had apparently telescoped out of each of Haydon IV's now separated northern and southern hemispheres.

Vince ran a hand down his face and left it covering his mouth, as though fearful of what sounds might emerge. Just in view far off the Ark Angel's port side were the ships of the Karbarran battle group, a school of predatory fish awaiting the scent of blood.

"Evaluation," Vince said, turning to find Louie Nichols headlocked to the room's comp console. Data-expedient or not, the sight of the wizard's cranial ports still left him distressed.

With an audible pop, Louis jacked the umbilicus out of the skull. "No doubt about it, they're mining the moon for metals. Haydon IV's turned itself into a working factory."

Vince gestured to the viewport. "You mean those, those tubes are mine shafts?"

"In a manner of speaking," Louie told him. "See, instead of parking yourself in orbit and shuttling payloads of raw materials up the gravity well, you construct transfer corridors ship-to-surface and suck up what you need. A variation on the old space elevator or orbital tower concept."

"But what the hell are they manufacturing?"

Dr. Penn and Cabell approached the console to hear Louie's response.

"Ships would be my guess," Nichols said, only to receive skeptical looks from the three of them.

"Assume for a moment our theories about Haydon are on the money, then put yourself in his boots." Louie stood up to make his point. "Here are Haydon and his crew wandering the spaceways for tens of thousands of years, jumping system to system, world to world. And frankly, the whole thing's becoming a yawn. They've conquered war, hunger, pestilence, disease, death ... I mean, what's left to do?

"So all at once they begin asking themselves some serious questions. Like maybe if there isn't more to life than gallivanting around the galaxy playing deity to groups of awed primitives. They start focusing on ontological and teleological questions about purpose and god and what's supposed to come after you punch exit and wave good-bye to your biological parts. Of course they've been asking themselves these questions since they crawled up out of the gene pool, but all of a sudden there's an urgency attached to it. It's a kind ofwhat'd they used to call it?-a midlife crisis thing."

Louie took a breath and adjusted his opaque goggles. "Thing is, for all their investigations into existential metaphysics and such, for all their experiments with religion, sensory dep, mind-altering substances, and cyber-interface, they just can't seem to break through to any of the ethereal dimensions they figure must be out there or in there or somewhere. After all, the math works, so where's the experiential side to the equation?

"So Haydon gets the notion that maybe his or her or their race just isn't meant for transcendence-I mean, they're just not built for it. They're psychically deficient or constitutionally deprived or something. But that doesn't necessarily rule out the existence of these other realms or the possibility that some other race is capable of getting there." Louie looked at Vince. "You following me so far, General?"

Vince deliberated, then nodded.

Louis rubbed his hands together. "Okay. So what they decide to do is see if they can't speed things along by scouting the galaxy for likely candidates and lending a helping hand wherever they can." Louis motioned to Cabell. "They hit Karbarra, Praxis, Peryton-all the worlds you mentioned-adding something here, deleting something there. Then they sit back to see what happens.

"But-" Louie raised an index finger. "-we're talking millennia again. So rather than risk a second yawn they decide to build themselves a world-that world," Louie said, gesturing out the viewport, "to do the monitoring work for them. And they equip the AI they've set up to run the place with instructions to call them when one of their experiments racial transmutation bears fruit."

Cabell saw where Nichols was headed and smiled knowingly.

Louie returned the grin. "Yeah, you see it. The Karbarrans aren't cutting it, and neither are the Garudans or the Spherisians, but hey, what's going on over here in Optera's corner of the Fourth Quadrant? Why, we got some kind of war going on here between the Invid and the Robotech Masters over those Flowers Haydon left behind."

Louie snorted a laugh. "Well, one thing leads to another, and the Invid arrive on Earth, mate with the Protoculture Zor conjured from their blessed Flowers, and bing, bang boom!transcendence. They soar clear off this mortal coil, and an alarm clock goes off on Haydon IV. The Awareness says, 'All right, all you slumbering spacefarers, it's rise and shine. A trail's been blazed, and it's time to start settin' out for the new frontier.'"

Vince and Harry Penn were hanging on his every word. Gibley and the rest of Louie's teammates had gone back to playing video games. Louie glanced at them and aimed a laugh at the ceiling. "So, I forget, where was I headed?"

"Ships," Penn reminded him breathlessly.

"Oh, right, ships. Well, that's the obvious part, isn't it? The Protoculture sure isn't going to get Haydon into the other domain. Besides, there's none of the pure stuff left. So what they need now is ships."

Cabell's forehead and bald pate wrinkled. "But if what you're saying is correct-if Haydon actually plans to follow in ships-the Invid's departure would have to have resulted in a detectable physical rend in the continuum."

"That's true," Louie said. "And I'm betting the Awareness will be programming the location of that rend into the ships Haydon IV's going to start spitting out."

Vince slapped a hand down on the table. "So all we need to do is hang around until Haydon shows up to claim the ships and tag along behind."

Louie nodded. "I don't think they'd mind a coupla hitchhikers, do you?"

"But we don't have any idea how long this process will take," Penn protested. "Ships, slumbering spacefarers ... The idea is absurd. But even if all this is true, suppose Haydon does mind. Suppose they don't want to share the discovery with outsiders. What then?"

Louie pondered that for a moment. "We've still got one other lead-the Invid simulagent. We continue to put the squeeze on her until she talks. Once we have the location, we can get a jump on Haydon's ships, beat 'em to the pass."

"My God," Vince repeated. "What have we gotten ourselves into?"

"That's unimportant," Penn said. "The question should be phrased, What are we getting ourselves into?" Cabell tapped a finger against his lips and turned to the viewport... "There's one point Doctor Nichols still hasn't addressed. Here is Haydon IV, joined to the mineral-rich moon of a dying system orbiting a gravitationally collapsed star." He swung around to the room. "Inside which are Haydon and his race hiding?"

Scott was not surprised when Obstat so willingly acceded a his request that Marlene be released in his custody. Intel had made it clear what they were after, and Scott had in some sense become their field agent.

They were in his quarters, side by side on the narrow bed, exhausted from stress and the fleeting sense of relief lovemaking had provided. Try as he might, Scott could not push the image of Sera from his thoughts. Marlene was so frail in his arms as to be intangible, and once more he had begun to fear for her life. And he kept thinking about what Cabell had said about stars disappearing, the very fabric of the universe strained. Was it that cosmic tightening that had finally brought him to his senses? Had it required nothing less than gravitational collapse to bring Marlene to his arms? She was almost asleep, but he felt the need to talk, as though spoken words forestall the inevitable.

"These last few days have made me wish things had been went on Earth," he told her in a whisper. "I wish I hadn't been so stupid and blind. I wish we hadn't waited for this...'

Marlene raised her eyes to his, her long lashes fluttering against his bare chest. "Do you mean that, Scott?"

He nodded and kissed her forehead.

"And how would things have worked out, Scott? Your love for me would have kept you from leaving? You would have launched in your fighter only to return immediately to my arms?"

"Yes."

"And we would have traveled together to the Southlands and pitched in to farm and restore the planet while you left it up to your friends to search for the SDF-3."

Scott's throat seemed to dry up. To hear his wishes presented like that only undermined the sentiment and filled him with misgiving. But he answered yes to all of it.

Marlene raised herself on one elbow to study his face. "Remember Sera, Scott. You would have ended up alone."

He worked his jaw. "It wouldn't have mattered. We would have had each other."

"Like you had the Marlene Rush you can't forget?"

"Change it, then, goddammit!" he seethed. "Find the Regis and make it right for both of us! Maybe your queen can have it end differently for you. Then maybe we can have the dream you just laid out."

Marlene curled against him and took a deep, shuddering breath. "You're not making it easy for me to remember who and what I am," she said softly.

His chest where the holo-locket used to rest was damp with her tears. He squeezed her to him. "Tell me what I have to do, Marlene."

"You have to stop loving me, Scott. You have to stop treating me so human."

Elsewhere in the Ark Angel Minmei and the sister clones sang:

Little Protoculture leaf, Waiting for our palates, Where will you take us?

Flower of Life!

Treat us well!

What had happened on this world? Zor recalled having asked himself only a few days before. What enchanted hand or conspiracy of sky and soil had shaped that grand experiment in life?

For as far as the eye could see there had been nothing but this: a living landscape under skies tinged with aquamarine. Life pure and unadulterated, which here had chosen but two forms of expression. The one, vegetal but without question sentient; the other, more the animal stuff of his own being but seemingly free of the gross entanglements so often given rise to by bone and sinew. The one, a flower, fruit, and tree, pulsating with occult power, the other, feeding from that power but returning everything to it, tranquil and selfsufficient, with no need to look outside itself to answer the questions that burned in Zor's soul. It was symbiosis of the most perfect sort, true synthesis, two life forms nourishing each other in every possible way and altering in the process of that joining the physical structure of their environment. Nothing there seemed fixed or constant, neither natural law, nor dictated shape, nor evolutionary design. All was potential . . .

He recalled Vard calling out to him. Vard and several of are ship's crew on the trail below, the one that switchbacked down from that bit of high ground the creature had guided them to. An eagerness in Vard's voice Zor had rarely heard before, excitement prompted by the thrill of discovery. Zor, come! Hurry! He had ignored the young man's direction" drill too mesmerized by sky and landscape to tear himself away ...

Weeks before, the dropship had put down in a boundless field of the tri petaled flowers. Triumvirate in their groupings, they were of a coral color, with elongated teardrop-shaped buds and long trailing stamens. And oddly enough they cast forth both pollen and seeds.

The landing party had made its way into a forest of sphersically canopied fruit-bearing trees-impossibly tall, some of them with rainbow-colored fluids coursing through translucent trunks. Zor remembered: Tzuptum's rays warming limbs stiff from space sleep: the spongy ground cover wondrously welcome to feet too long accustomed to deckplates of cool and unyielding alloy. The air thick and redolent, almost too perfumed to inhale unfiltered. And in fact two members of the party had succumbed to a kind of delusional psychosis and had had to be returned to the ship. But for Zor those bet weeks had been magical. He and his science team had run scans and collected botanical samples while other teams charted distances and topography and probed the surface for useful metals.