He could see them overhead, given false color and solidity by the cockpit canopy's polarized tint. Only now he saw that the bogies were not spherical at all but the rounded, lightemitting tips of tendrillike forms. He flashed on the Sentinels' encounter with Haydon IV's antibody defenses, thinking: But so. . . No one at the briefing had been interested in hearing about that episode.

"They're onto me," one of Marie Crystal's wingmen blurted. "It's like I'm looking at tentacles. B-but they're not attached to anything!"

"Hold your position, " Jack heard Marie tell the pilot. "Christ, Captain, they're practically all over me!"

"Blue Six, you are not to engage unless provoked, " Vallenskiy ordered over the com net. "Maintain position. " Jack felt something graze the Alpha's radome and cockpit and realized that the VT was being probed and explored. Reflexively, he crouched down in his seat, suddenly feeling as though he were about to enter an old-fashioned car wash. But what would have been brush tips were flickering lights. Blue Six gave a panicked cry. "Holy shit, they passed right through me, Captain! The things just shot right through me!" Jack shuddered, chilled to his center, as one of the light tips pierced the hull and thudded wormlike against his "thinking cap." It was incredible: The tendrils were not puncturing the hull but simply penetrating it! Some tore right through it, while others were whizzing lightning-quick recons around the cockpit. A few seemed to enter his body and course up and down his arms and legs; one even took a fast tour of his mind, leaving him dizzy and momentarily nauseated.

The tac net was filled with the sound of gasps and near exultation as the lights penetrated one Veritech after another. No one was capable of responding to Command's urgent requests for updates.

Jack braced himself for the lights' return the way one tightened up at the crest of a roller coaster drop. But at the last instant the tendrils that were headed for the Alpha divided and joined separate groups closing on Jack's two wingmen. This time, however, they did not pierce the VTs but danced around them, forming dazzling nimbi of light. Then, almost simultaneously, the two fighters winked out of existence.

Jack could not get his voice to work. When he did, he had difficulty reporting what he had just witnessed. Command, however, had apparently seen the two Veritechs disappear from the threat board.

"Red and Blue leaders, we show two, make that four, missing spacecraft," Vallenskiy said. "Can you confirm? Repeat, can you confirm?"

"They're gone!" Jack managed. "Atomized, dematerialized, disintegrated. . . I don't know what. The lights, surrounded them, then took them out."

"That's affirmative, " Marie said, answering for the Blue Team.

"Did you engage? Any of you?"

"Negative," Jack said, counting follow-up denials on the net: Dante, Crystal, Penn, Phillips ...

"Can you verify present UCT positions, Red leader?" Jack glanced at his displays and screens, tipping the Alpha starboard with a brief firing of the VT's attitude jets. The lights had lost interest in the squadron. Beneath him, the tendrils were like spears gone ballistic, the SDF-3 soon to be pincushioned or worse.

Jack said, "You're the center of attention, Command."

"Then you are to engage, full teams," Vallenskiy returned. "Stop those things from reaching the ship!"

Rick stood on the TIC'S command balcony, listening to Vallenskiy relay commands to the mecha recon teams. Unless his eyes or the fortress's exterior cams were lying, he had just seen four VTs dematerialized by an enemy light. And now he had ordered the squadron to counterattack. With the hope of accomplishing what? he asked himself. Punishing the light for its omnipotence? According to the available data, it was not even light they were facing but some animated form of electrical energy.

Something like the synaptic firing of a neuron, Lang had explained.

"Fortress defensive shields raised," a tech announced from the command console. "Red and Blue Teams falling in to engage, sir."

Rick swung around to the monitors in time to see the Blue Team pilots imaging their VTs over to Battloid mode. Captains Baker and Penn and what remained of the Red Team were configured as Fighters or Guardians.

Rick briefly considered what he would do if he was out there. He pictured himself strapped into the cockpit seat, one hand clasped on the Hotas, face bathed in display light, scalp tingling from contact with the helmet's neural sensors, the smell of fuel and heated circuitry. No good to use heatseekers, he thought. Go right to lasers.

"Lasers fired, sir," the same tech reported. Rick squinted at the monitor screens.

And what he saw blinded him for the next ten seconds and left him with a dull ache in the back of his head he knew he would feel for a week.

His eyes opened to the sight of men and women throughout the TIC bent over their consoles in postures of anguish. The lasers had only fed strength to the light.

Succeeded in angering it.

Sirens wailed: Brace for impact!

Kami deliberately placed himself in the path of the first light tendril to penetrate the hold. It shook him with all the force of a baleful premonition, a minatory sending from the hin.

And how like the hin it seemed-the source of this light! Garudan, Kami had an intimate knowledge of such nonordinary states of mind-that which Terrans considered nonordinary was the norm on Garuda. Credit Haydon or blame him, but his tamperings had resulted in a planet that was hell for those offworlders who chanced to breathe its rarefied atmosphere, a heaven for those fortunate enough to have been born into it. No, hell for the lupine Garudans was to be deprived of their homeworld's atmosphere. And it was thanks only to treatments received on Haydon IV that Kami could function aboard the SDF-3 without the transpirator he had worn through the Sentinels' perilous campaign.

Credit Haydon again. Or blame him.

Kami saw that Learna, his mate and partner those long years of war and tenuous peace, had discerned his intent and was also about to position herself under the full force of the teeming rain of crazed light. Her sendings were strong as she ventured forth from useless cover, the hin both guide and umbrella.

From across the hold came shouts of concern from their Terran shipmates and Local Group brothers and sisters in arms. Gnea said something in Praxian neither Kami nor Learns could comprehend. Baldan, Lron, Crysta, and several other Karbarrans were nearby. There was barely a corner the light had overlooked by then, save for what some called "the Pit," where Kazianna Hesh and a dozen or so Zentraedi were suiting up in power armor.

And it was not until the tendrils found the warrior giants that the Garudans' allies in the hin opened a portal to the truth.

Kami realized at once that the SDF-3 was not dealing with some blindly malicious Luciferian strike force but the scouts and emissaries of a powerful but childlike superintelligence. His encounter was brief by necessity, for he could barely maintain his individual self in the suffocating intoxication of the experience. The portal had been opened into a realm unlike any he had ever visited in the hin, opened into a soul unlike anything met there. The call of life's beyond, a siren song of such warmth and transcendence that Kami was tempted to surrender himself and be absorbed.

It was only Learna's presence that saved him, Learna, anchored firmly in the non-ordinary and beckoning him back with her love.

The light in the fortress's belly was retreating, dazzling eye and mind with its speed and brilliance. It had discovered something in the Zentraedi that filled it with fear, a fear that sent it screaming through the rest of the ship, as though desperate to find a route to its own safety.

"Please, Rem, hurry," Minmei said; tugging at the flared sleeve of the Tiresian's tunic. "I don't like this; I'm frightened of it!"

Rem was standing in the center of the cabin, arms akimbo and face uplifted to the ceiling. He looked like a dreamyeyed teen in love with the idea of being caught out in a spring shower.

"You're a child sometimes," he told her with a laugh. "Something wondrous seeks us out, and you'd have me hide under the bed. What frightens you?"

Minmei opened her mouth to speak but realized she had so response in mind. The truth was that she could not articulate what it was about the lights that frightened her, but all her instincts told her that Rem was in danger.

That he was not listening to her came as no surprise, really, for who was she to tell Lord Protoculture anything? Oh, once he would have listened, when she was still the voice that had won the Robotech War, but it had been years since that voice had sung, and it was Rem's star that had been on the ascendant since. Playing Johnny Appleseed on New Praxis with the Flowers of Life, conjuring Protoculture from them, fabricating the matrix Lang and the REF command worshiped like some sacrosanct icon.

Rem suddenly took hold of her narrow wrist and pulled her close, encircling her shoulders with his right arm. "Let it find us together," he said, still eyeing the ceiling expectantly. "Open your mind to it."

She tried not to quiver so in his embrace, but dread was sluicing through her veins like ice water. She wanted nothing more than to dig a deep dark hole for the two of them to hide in.

The first lights passed through the cabinspace with scarcely a moment's hesitation, piercing the room obliquely from ceiling to floor. A second group followed from the opposite direction. But the third and fourth entered through the starboard bulkhead and instead of exiting along their line of flight began to dart around the perimeter of the cabin, as if to fence the couple in.

Rem took a bold step forward and immersed a hand into the flow. The light raced up the length of his arm and outline of his body, as it was doing to other objects in the room. Minmei instantly became part of the tableau, her thoughts sent reeling by the tendrils' inquisitive caress. And suddenly then was more longing in her heart than her mind could process more light in the cabin than her eyes could absorb.

Rem bellowed the most mournful sound she had ever heard and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

With the confusion of the Great Transition behind them; the Zentraedi Imperative in place, and the Compulsion implemented, the Robotech Masters went about systematically expunging Zor's name from all records of the technovoyages of the starship Amtraph. They sought nothing less than to rewrite history in such a way that credit for the discovery of the Protoculture would go to the Elders themselves. However, Zors own accounts of those voyages survived in secret for some time, until destroyed by the young scientist himself as he began what has been termed his quiet rebellion-save for a precious few jottings preserved by Cabell. All details of Zor's early investigations and experiments vanished with the destruction of these notebooks and journals. And it is likely that we will never know more than we do now about the Amtraph's first sighting of Optera.

From Emil Lang's introduction to Cabell's - Zor and the Great Transition

Rem's cells remembered.

So many worlds to explore, countless even within the limited zone defined by the ship's reflex superluminals. So many landscapes to wander across with devices in hand, hillsides to climb, forests to penetrate, skies to soar. So many lifeforms to contact, cultures to experience-more than a mortal should be allowed to glimpse, let alone contemplate, more than an understanding god would have created ... They were there but to tempt, those climes of eruptive heat or frost waste, those worlds of nascent sentience or eons-old evolutionary struggle. But was there any greater rapture than to journey from one to the next? To watch worlds turn through cycles of their lives? To gaze from a ship's deck upon the sweep of time itself? ... If there was, it was surely beyond the scope of his intellect to imagine, and even had that gift of imagining been his, would he choose to deprive himself of this joy? He supposed not ...

Always those thoughts upon awakening from the essential sleep, Zor told himself. The artificial extension of life, while the Amtraph thrust itself from star to star. Man's little game played with time. A bit of existential trickery ...

He regarded the sleep chamber now-the nutrient drips that sustained the body, the contact studs that stimulated muscle and bone, the headband that helped to nourish dreams-and laughed away his musings, chest aching from disuse, unaccustomed to the sudden return of those chaotic, nay, inspired, rhythms.

Vard was watching him from afar-able servant and faithful friend-the rest of them already hobbling away from their opened cocoons like aged ministers hurrying off to meeting, and conferences. A spectacle ill befitting the courageous crew they were-scientists to the last, sworn to exploration and the search for truth. Zor breathed deep, congratulating himself on the choices he had made, the paths that had turned him away from government service and carried him offworld a last, clear of Tirol's crowded skies. If only Vard could feel the same content with the quest itself-instead of continually focusing on the goal.

But Zor was too astute, too used to their calculated designs, not to feel in Vard's promptings the hand of his Elder: in the Academy. The hungry members of the Grand Chair; perhaps even Cabell himself, mentor and father in his own curious fashion. No, the data he transmitted were never enough for them: the trade arrangements and scientific exchanges too profitless to sate their appetites for progress.

We must have worlds to use as way stations for our glorious expansion, they would tell him, as though it were conquest they had in mind. We must have discoveries that will further the glory of our race, as though it were immortality they were striving for.

Oh, Vard, he thought, filling his lungs with the ship's sweetened air, perhaps this next world will be the one your real masters would have me find. One with wondrous things to offer, the miraculous things they feel certain are out here for the taking.

He stood up and stretched, as though reaching for the very stars beyond the reflective sheen of the viewport overhead. "Out among you somewhere," he said to the fixed lights. "Out among you is the world I'm destined to discover. By Valivarre's will, may the cause of peace profit above all."

Karen Penn tried one final time to inflict some damage on the lights, to extract a toll for whatever it was they had done to her Red teammates. With disciplined hand and quieted mind she reconfigured the Alpha to Fighter mode and burned for the fortress's stern, where the lights had clustered on and around the reflex drive exhaust ports. Jack was in plain view at three o'clock, his burn through the eerie glow of newspace complete, a Veritech pas de deux as they fell toward the ship.

The Blue team mecha, Battloid-configured, were hitting hard at the SDF-3's bow from just below the midline, head lasers emitting a deadly light of their own.

Karen planned on depleting her undercarriage lasers this time, taking no quarter, routing the light or luring it away, making it cry uncle or roll over and die.

She was shifting her weight in the padded seat, composing herself for the kill, willing the VT in, when all at once the fog of newspace lifted.

Her eyes were so fixed on the reticle of the Alpha's targeting screen that it took a moment for the change to register. Then, suddenly, there was darkness where there had been glow, and the lights were gone.

"Sonuvabitch," she heard Jack exclaim. "We're home, gang-we're home!"

But Karen was not buying it. Though they seemed to be drifting through the inky blackness of home space, something was missing.

"If we're home, Jack," she asked over the net, "where the hell are the stars?"

On the fortress bridge, Lisa mimicked Lang's on-screen head-scratching pose. She did not understand it, either: One minute the lights were digesting critical portions of the ship, and the next they were gone. Had the SDF-3 punched or been punched out of the hyperdomain? she wondered. And was that actually the real world outside the viewports or yet another black tunnel in the sky?

"Stations shipwide report all clear, Admiral," Forsythe said from across the bridge. "The lights are gone."

Lisa ran a palsied hand through her undone hair. "Damage assessment, Mister Price. Immediate. All decks."

"Aye, aye, sir."

Lisa returned her attention to the com-line monitor. "Well, what about it, Lang? Are we home?"

Lang looked at something off screen and shook his head. "No, Lisa, nothing has changed."

"Maybe you'd better have a look outside, Doctor." Lang's puzzled expression remained in place. "I have looked, Admiral, I assure you. But present readings are identical to those previously assembled." He snorted. "We're still a long way from home."

Lisa felt her heart race.

"We've lost a good deal of our reflex drive systemry," Lang continued as though to himself, pupilless eyes glazed over. "I'm beginning to believe that the reason the Veritechs were assimilated had nothing to do with defense against intrusion. No, whatever was directing the lights had need of specimens. Perhaps it has yet to make up its mind about us."

Lisa swallowed hard. "You make it sound like our pilots were appetizers, Doctor."

"In effect, they were just that," he told her, more animated suddenly. "By the time the lights reached the ship, they knew exactly what they were after."

"We're crippled, then. Is that what you're telling me?" The scientist shook his head. "Oh, no, we have some drive capacity left to us, although nowhere near what we'd require to go superluminal. In fact, as things stand we would be as stranded in our own space as we are here."

Lisa let out her breath. "You're full of good news, aren't you?"

Lang shrugged. "I'm sorry if I can't tell you what you'd undoubtedly like to hear."

Lisa waved a hand at the screen. "I'm the one who's sorry, Doctor. But you've got to give me something to go on. I mean, do we sit here and wait for those . . . things to come back and nibble away at more of our systemry?"

"As opposed to what, Admiral?" Lang wanted to know. "Christ, I don't know. Move. Somewhere."

Lang smiled, recalling Rem's real-time bubble theory. "Your husband suggested that I fashion us a world."

Lisa regarded him tight-lipped. "Then do it," she said after a moment.

Minmei cradled Rem's head in her arms. She pushed his hair back from his face and leaned an ear close to his parted lips. She was certain he had ceased breathing for a time, but that heart-stopping moment was past, his exhalation ruffling the strands of hair she had hooked behind her ear. Her breath was coming in shallow gasps as she pressed his head to her bosom, praying that he would regain consciousness soon.

Holding him like that, staring down at his beautiful face, she found herself walking through an ancient memory. Tiresia, on the night of the SDF-3's New Year's celebration. The Sentinels' ship, Farrago, had yet to arrive in Fantomaspace, and there she was with eyes only for Jonathan Wolff: But she remembered watching Rem that night while Wolff told her all the things he must have assumed she wanted to hear. And she remembered gazing at him the way she had often observed others gazing at her, with a look people reserved for screen idols and heroes. What might have happened if Rem had remained in Tiresia instead of joining the Sentinels? she wondered. Would his presence have altered events, given her the strength to steer clear of Edwards and grandiose plans?

It was Rem who had rushed to her side after she had killed Fdwards's horrible minion on Optera. Her voice had awarded a personal victory, a fitting end, she had decided. But on that same day Janice had walked out of her life forever. And Lynn-Kyle so soon before that ... It had been difficult for to go on when the memories of the sacrifices made in her behalf were so vivid. When she had been so undeserving. So evil.

But Rem had continued to stick by her in Tiresia, during the months she had languished under doctors' care, the Booths and years when she had so little will to survive. And looking at him now, imagining the two of them walking Tiresia's Romelike streets together, she was not sure she was envisioning a past that almost was or a future that could be. A kind of alternative present, she told herself. One they could fashion together to erase the mistakes both Zor and Minmei had made.

She ran a hand across her belly arid sighed. At the same time a soft groan escaped Rem's lips, and he moved his head against her.

"Rem," she said. "Oh, please, darling . . ." And his eyelids fluttered and opened.

Jack knuckled his eyes with gloved hands, wondering what could have given him such a shot to the head that he was seeing stars. It was not exactly unheard of for the "thinking caps" to malfunction and send a jolt of current through one's system-to bite the head that fed them, as the saying wentbut that usually left one with twitching limbs or feeling like someone had unzipped one's backbone and poured hot lead down one's spine. Not seeing stars. And he didn't think he had sustained a hit from one of those lights, either, because he had seen them retreat into the black curtain newspace had unexpectedly lowered.