"That was a foolish thing to do," Max said in a lecturing tone, loud enough to be heard above the ursinoids' unnerving growls and grumblings.

"Maybe it was," Dana conceded, "but I don't like it when somebody says they're concerned for my safety and then aims a weapon at me."

The incident only pointed up the differences between them. Dana had had reservations about returning to Haydon IV with her parents as early as those first few weeks in Tiresia, but it had meant so much to them that she get to know Aurora and give peace a chance. And then, when she had learned that Rem had assigned himself to the SDF-3, she saw no alternative but to give Haydon IV a try. Oh, she supposed she could have signed aboard the Ark Angel or any one of the ships of the fleet, but she saw little purpose to it.

It had come as quite a shock to find yet another Zor-clone waiting on Tirol after she had just finished her brief go-round with one on Earth. Rem and Zor Prime were more like twins separated at birth than clones, but there were enough underlying similarities to make her feel as though she were dealing with the same person. She thought the original Zor must have been one mixed-up character, another trickster in a galaxy full of them.

She still couldn't explain just what it was about the slender, elfin-featured clones that drew her to them. But it seemed obvious that the attraction arose from the Zentraedi, biogenetically engineered side of her personality.

Those thoughts were with her for the duration of the short descent to Llan's "level four," where, she imagined, luxuriously appointed shelters awaited them. She had even begun to feel guilty about her perhaps misguided outburst in the plaza and was about to apologize to Max, when from up ahead in the corridor-the recycled air thick with the musky smell of Karbarran fur and fear-came cries of protest in trader's tongue.

"You limbless mechanoids!" one Karbarran yelled. "May Haydon curse the lot of you!"

Dana went up on tiptoe in an attempt to discern what all the commotion was about, but all she could see was the backs of massive shoulders and knob-horned heads. It was not until the group reached the terminus of the corridor, where it opened into a vast, domed chamber lit by an unseen source, that she glimpsed the reason for the Karbarrans' distress: A police force of black-cloaked Haydonites a meter taller than the norm were using their enabled light-prods to segregate the confused crowd into planetary types, shepherding each into separate rooms similar to ones Dana knew had been used by the Invid Regis to contain the Sisters of the Praxian diaspora.

"Comport yourselves in a manner befitting the intelligence of your race and no harm will come to you," the police line sent to everyone in frightening telepathic discord. "Your nutritional and medical needs will be attended to. Haydon IV will strive to make you as comfortable as possible in your containment."

"Imprisonment, I'd say," said an all-too-familiar voice off to the left of the Sterling family. Dana caught sight of Exedore peeking out from behind the high-collared cloak of one of the hovering jailers.

"Yes," he added, folding his arms and glancing around. "I suggest that we consider ourselves under arrest."

As expected, their individual cells were splendidly designed affairs with all the necessary conveniences and furnishings, all the more sinister in their homeyness. Exedore and the Sterlings found themselves lodged with the four Praxians whose very size dictated that they be given the largest of the four rooms. Their section of the jail was flanked by Karbarran and Spherisian quarters but was effectively sealed off from them, with access to the central portion of the domed chamber barred by laser fence. Thoughts of escape were not only difficult to entertain but periodically discouraged by squads of the now obsequious jailers who glided through sweeps of the area.

Dana, however, had not yet given up on the idea and sat timing the patrols while Exedore filled everyone in on the details of his own arrest.

"One moment Veidt and I were interpreting the results of our latest calculations, and the next I was being hurried out of the data room by two of these black-cloaked fellows, with Veidt warning me to obey their every command."

"Our advocates acted the same way," Max said. "Turned on us without warning."

"Oh, I don't think it safe to assume they were acting at all," Exedore cautioned. "It's my belief that the Awareness sent a command to each and every Haydonite-a telepathic stirring, if you will, analogous to that which prompted the planet to reorient itself in space."

"Then we are . . . moving?" Miriya asked.

Exedore nodded. "Most definitely moving."

"But we saw a salvo of energy bolts, Exedore," Dana interjected. "The planet's probably moving because it's under attack."

Exedore shook his head. "There's been no attack, although what you witnessed was certainly defensive fire. It seems that the commander of one of the Karbarran cargo ships armed his weapons array when planetary realignment commenced. The Awareness registered this and responded as programmed. I'm afraid several ships were destroyed in the process. This much I was able to learn from Veidt."

"Then our lives are in danger," Miriya said, hugging Aurora to her.

"No, child. Haydon IV is not only abandoning its orbit around this system's primary but shedding its atmosphere as it accelerates. That's precisely why we've all been brought down here.

"For all this sudden militant posturing, they do seem to have our safety in mind. Haydon knows they require no true atmosphere for themselves, nor any need of Glike, for that matter." The Zentraedi snorted. "A surface paradise, indeed, for that's all that it was-a veneer, to borrow a Terran word.

"It only confirms what I've been saying all along: that Haydon IV is not a planet transformed by ultratech wonders but a ship. Its very name suggests as much. Haydon IV, and yet it occupies the third place in the Briz'dziki system. " Exedore adopted a puzzled frown. "No. It has come to be known as Haydon IV because it was Haydon's fourth."

"Haydon's- fourth what?" Max wanted to know.

Exedore threw up his hands. "Any answer I give you would be pure speculation. Much as my guess as to exactly where it is that we're headed."

"We'll know when we get there, is that it?" Dana said. "Well put."

Max looked from Exedore to Dana and back again. "But what about these calculations of yours? You still think this has something to do with the SDF-3?"

"I'm certain of it," Exedore affirmed. "And with the Invid departure as well. A pulse of novel energy has been sent into the known universe. Our calculations prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the focus of this outpouring is the dead star we Zentraedi know as Ranaath's." Miriya sucked in her breath. "Exedore!"

"Yes, Miriya, I'm afraid so. But there's more: This pulse has also caused subtle but potentially dangerous quantum and gravitational shifts throughout the continuum. All standard measurements seem to have been infinitesimally affected." "Meaning what?" Max said.

"Meaning that something unprecedented has occurred, Max. It's as though everything is suddenly drawing closer and closer together."

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Eventually, Rem saw the logic of the REF's arguments [that a Protoculture matrix was essential to ensure certain victory against the Invid Regis]-or at least he gave Lang every impression of being convinced. Just as Zor had once given sway to the Robotech Masters' conviction that knowledge went hand in hand with power and that all real power sprang from the conquest of life itself . . . This tendency to submit, this plasticity, was a character flaw inherited by both clones-Rem and Zor Primeand taken advantage of by yet new generations of masters. "Zor, the reshaped," as Lang himself once thought to describe Rem in his notes. Who else could have enticed Protoculture from the secret places of the Flower but one of equal lability?

Adrian Mizner, Rakes and Rogues: The True Story of the SDF-3 Mission

Even with the knowledge they had been able to amass during the voyages of the SDFs-1 and -3 and with what little they had been able to beg, borrow, and steal from the Sentinels, the fortress's chief astrogators still considered themselves among the Quadrant's least experienced travelers. So while the void they had been folded into presented a novel challenge, there was no sure way of ascertaining whether this "newspace"-as it had been termed-was not just some commonplace occurrence among the more well traveled. To this end, interviews with those Sentinels aboard-Kami, Learna, Lron, Crysta, Baldan, Gnea, and others-had thus far proved unenlightening, a not entirely unexpected development given that the original crew of the starship Farrago had never been top-notch spacefarers to begin with.

Lang nevertheless had gone about his investigation of the ship's environment with unflagging confidence and textbook determination. The results of Jack Baker's brief extravehicular recon were in. Exterior background temperatures and the velocity of light had been measured and found to be constant; the fortress chronometers were still functioning. Physical laws inside the ship-and within a radius of a half million kilometers from it-were in fact operating much as they should have. It was simply that the stars-indeed, space itself-had disappeared.

The SDF-3's reflex engines were functioning, but there was still nowhere for the fortress to go.

"I'm inclined to favor the hyperspace hypothesis," Lang was saying, eyes glued to an immense tabletop display screen in his office. Rem stood behind him, just off to one side, the handsome features of his pale face highlighted by the screen's intermittent flashings. "We've somehow become trapped in the fold corridor itself."

Rem grunted noncommittally. "You're dismissing the popular notion, then-the one circulating through the ship?"

"What, that we're all actually dead? I certainly am." No one knew just how the rumor got started, but it seemed that the results of a survey taken of some two hundred crewpersons had revealed remarkable similarities in their fold, space lace experiences. These included feelings of tranquillity, out-of-body experience, the encountering of a presence or a deceased relative in a dark tunnel, a sudden urge to review one's life, a warm and accepting light at the end of the tunnel, and a brief merging with that light prior to an immediate return to physicality.

"If we were all dead," Lang continued, "we probably wouldn't have returned at all."

"And how to prove it in any case?" Rem said, smiling. "Against what can we measure nonexistence?"

Lang turned to regard the Tiresian, pleased that he had finally succeeded in spiriting him away from Minmei, if only for a short while. One would have thought the strangeness of the ship's predicament alone would have been enough to pique Rem's interest, but the Zor-clone had agreed to a conference only after Lang had made mention of the vanished Protoculture.

Lang had reminded himself later that he should have known better; Protoculture was the only thing that ever brought Rem around. But Rem did not share Lang's enthusiasm for Protoculture's application to mechamorphosis or astrogation. In fact, the REF had had to coerce him into lending his brilliant talents to the creation of the facsimile matrix by painting lurid scenarios of what was bound to occur throughout the Quadrant should the Invid Regis have her way with Earth. How long, they asked him to consider, before the Queen-Mother would decide to spread her vengeful horde across the stars as her husband had done? How long before her armies would return to the Local Group for what they had been forced to surrender-Optera itself? And what of the Praxians, then, who had made that tortured world their own? And what of Tirol and Spheris and the rest, so recently liberated from the claw hold of that very race?

Rem could be infuriating at times, but how Lang enjoyed the few discourses they had shared! How thrilling it was to converse with an intellect as powerful as his own. What they might be able to achieve together, he often thought, were it not for Rem's preoccupation with the biotransmutational aspects of Protoculture or his inexplicable attachment to LynnMinmei.

Lang swung back to the tablescreen. "Oh, I'll admit there's something to this afterlife speculation that's worth pursuing," he said abruptly, "but for the present there are more tangible enigmas to grapple with." He motioned to the displays. "These are the latest readouts."

Rem leaned over the table.

"Either this void has yet to decide which set of physical laws it plans to subscribe to, or our scanners are in over their, artificial heads." The Terran scientist's voice was a mixture of apprehension and excitement. "I haven't seen anything like it since my supercollider days thirty years ago. But at least I knew then that our accelerators were manufacturing all those weakly interacting massive particles. Here, there's no rhyme or reason to it. One could almost believe we've entered a kind of dark-matter universe."

"I doubt we could exist in such a place, Lang."

"Precisely my point. The findings are more consistent with fold anomalies than anything else."

Rem nodded. "Then the real question we should be asking ourselves is whether the ship is still on its way to somewhere or whether it has in fact arrived."

Lang threw him a skeptical look. "I don't see how we can possibly be on our way to something without the fold drives." Rem made a dismissive motion with his hand. "The Protoculture is only essential for initiating a fold, Lang; it has little to do with destination."

"But how are we to emerge, then?"

Rem's gaze grew unfocused. "You fail to see the potential, Doctor."

"Perhaps I do, Rem, but-"

"When all you need do is think back to your experiences inside the ship you called SDF-1-when it crash-landed on Earth."

Lang's face went blank.

"Your own notes state that you were at a loss to explain the time displacement you and your team experienced inside the ship."

"Yes..."

"And so you postulated that some 'quantum'-your word, Doctor-some quantum of hyperspace had adhered to the ship."

"And the team was actually walking through a kind of hyperspace dimension," Lang finished in a rush. "Yes, of course, I remember now."

Rem laughed. "Ah, what tricks the overmind plays with us!" He offered Lang a tight-lipped smile. "Listen to your words, Doctor: 'I remember now.' That's what the SDF-3 is doing. Zor's ship captured a quantum of hyperspace and conveyed it into the world of time. Our ship has captured a quantum of time and carried it into hyperspace. "

Lang glanced at the mathematical constructs assembling themselves on the tablescreen as if to confirm something.

"I don't know why the Protoculture chose this particular moment to abandon us," Rem resumed, "or just what Shapings are to be inferred from it. But I do know that the SDF-3 is remembering now-now, Lang." He gestured toward the exterior bulkheads. "And what I think we're seeing out there is a universe in the making."

"Remember when he was just learning to walk?" Rick asked, regarding his five-year-old raven-haired son from the transparent side of the nursery's one-way mirror. "It was like he wanted to start off running. Always in a hurry to get somewhere."

Lisa's eyes narrowed somewhat. "No thanks to you. Walking must have seemed awfully tame after all the aerial acrobatics you put him through."

Rick laughed. "Guilty as charged. But I didn't have anything to do with turning him into a whiz kid. That's gotta be your doing."

Lisa patted the bun of gray-streaked hair at the back of her head and laughed with him.

In meeting at the nursery, the two proud parents had agreed to call a moratorium on discussing the fortress's present circumstance, at least until Lang and Rem could sort out whether they had punched themselves into some misty uncharted corner of hyperspace or were simply on line in limbo, waiting for judgment. Morale was low in all sections, and so Lisa had ordered most of the ship to secure from battle stations.

She returned her eyes to Roy and to the transformable puzzle block one of the ship's child-care specialists had handed him. Silently, as she watched Roy rotate the alloy block in his tiny hand, she applauded his analytical powers: the way, he seemed to size it up before making a move, the way the expression on his sweet face mirrored his intense concentration. At the same time she marveled at the dexterity he demonstrated as he began to expose one after another of the block's hidden forms, nimble fingers prying open doors, separating sections, twisting others, extending telescoping parts. And just as silently she worried.

Up until a few months ago Roy had seemed just an ordinary child to her, perhaps too ordinary, if anything. For all her efforts at keeping him as far from the SDF-3 as she could manage, at seeking to raise him as someone other than the son of two career officers, Roy had been going through the same action/adventure stages as his peers aboard the fortress. One could take the child away from Earth, but one apparently could not take Earth away from the child. Airplanes, action figures, toy guns ... even an invisible friend who still showed up every so often.

But things had changed once she and Rick had completed their transfer to the SDF-3. Suddenly it was puzzles that fascinated him, both manual and computer-generated. And then there was the look he would give her sometimes, as if to say: I know exactly what you're thinking. To hear Kazianna tell it, her son Drannin and some of the other Zentraedi children were behaving likewise, and there had been occasions when Lisa had had to drag Roy screaming from his oversize "play mates." She still didn't know whether to feel comforted by all the youthful bonding or even more worried than she already was. More than anything she wished Miriya were there to tell her what it was like to nurture a genius, what the Praxians sometimes called a Wyrdling.

And how much of it, Lisa wondered, could be traced to the ship itself?

She felt Rick's arm go around her shoulder, and she rested her head against his.

"We've had some good days, haven't we?" Rick said softly. "Especially these past few years."

She knew what he meant: how good it had been to absent themselves from the endless tasks they had overseen during Reconstruction and again after the destruction of New Macross.

Rick turned to face her. "I've been missing them lately. Really feeling at a loss."

Lisa recalled her postfold malaise and shot him a look. "You, too, Rick? Like you've lost something important?"

He nodded. "First I thought it was just leaving Tirol, but it's more than that. Lately I've been thinking about Pop's air circus, Macross Island, even the Mockingbird."

"But it's pervasive, isn't it?" Lisa said. "Like you can't pin it down."

Rick bit his lower lip. "I think I know what it is now," he began with a nervous laugh. "I'm willing to lay odds it's the Proto-"

"Begging your pardon, sirs," Rick's adjutant interrupted, stepping through the observation room hatch. "Tactical Center requests the admiral's immediate presence."

"What is it?" Lisa asked, hurrying to the room's intercom.

"We've got a screenful of bogies, sir." "Signatures?" Rick said.

"Not yet, sir. Radar's silent. The ship's bio-sensors made the call."

Rick and Lisa traded looks. "Bio-sensors?"

"TIC patched the system into IFF, sir, but couldn't raise a signature or profile."

"Invid?" Lisa said, cocking her head to one side. "Some self-mutated form?"

Rick met his adjutant at the hatch. "Maybe someone's shown up to lead us home," he suggested, and was gone.

Belowdecks in one of the fortress's mecha bays, Captain Jack Baker gave a downward tug to his flight jacket as he paced back and forth in front of his small audience of veteran pilots and mechamorph aces.

And not one of them had soared where he had now. "You may think the background stuff's unimportant, Captain Phillips," Jack was continuing after a bothersome interruption, "but what I'm trying to do is give you a sense of the experience."

Sean Phillips threw an imploring look to the high ceiling. "No offense, Baker, but I think we've all heard about what happened when you piloted the VT down to Haydon IV. I just don't see the relevance."

Jack's innocent face reddened. With so many heavy hitters to choose from, he still could not figure out why the admiral had singled him out for the void recon. He hoped, of course, that Hunter's finger had simply gone right to the top of the list, but then, he supposed that list could have been alphabetical. Jack nevertheless was determined to make the most of the distinction while it lasted.