[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Emerson was reordering the disposition of his units even as the alien
mother ships disgorged scores of the whisk broom-shaped assault craft. With
his battlecruiser Tristar at the center, Emerson prepared to fight his way
through to ALUCE.
Blue Bioroids came in at the Humans like maddened automaton hornets. The
call went out for the A-JACs to scramble, and the expedition's ships began
throwing out a huge volume of fire to clear the way for them and hold the
Bioroids off.
Once more, Marie Crystal led her Black Lions out in the A-JACs. She was
all combat leader, all Robotech warrior now, the regret and hurt from Sean's
betrayal savagely thrust aside. Leave love for fools, and let Marie Crystal do
what she did best!
The Bioroids and the A-JACs swirled and struck, lighting an unnamed
volume of space with thermonuclear lightning and sunfire. The killing began at
once, the casualties piled up.
Marie skeeted a Bioroid right off its Hovercraft, so that the circular
platform went on, unguided, heading for infinite space. She went to Battloid
mode, ordering others to do the same, changing tactics abruptly and taking
advantage of the foe's brief confusion.
Assault ships swept in, to hammer away at the larger expeditionary
vessels and be volleyed at in reply. Hulls were pierced through and through;
blasts claimed Human and clone alike. Space was a maelstrom of plasma-hot
beams and blowtorching drives and the ugly flare of dying ships.
Professor Miles Cochran gathered up all of his nerve to ask, "Dr. Zand,
the Invid Nebula is so appallingly dangerous-it might even take hostile action
against Emerson's force. Are you certain we shouldn't give him some inkling of
that? Perhaps it's not too late..."
There had been a tremor in his voice; he couldn't help it. Cochran began
to tremble as Zand turned that eerie stare upon him there in the grandiose,
Page 27
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
forbidden sanctuary of the Kommandatura in a Robotech-rococo chamber deep in
the Earth. Zand's eyes were all pupil, with no iris or white at all; his was a
gaze no one could meet for long.
Even more unnerving than his eyes was the power radiating from him,
which intimidated his handpicked disciples. The power of Protoculture. The
outside world might see him as a slightly odd-looking researcher, the UEG's
top scientific officer and adviser-a man of normal height and build with an
unruly forelock, who dressed in a somewhat rumpled uniform. An egghead. But
the seven men and one woman seated around the table knew differently.
The group met in a vaulted room that mixed the technological with the
mystical. Side by side with the latest computer equipment and with Zand's own
systemry were musty copies of the Necronomicon and The Book of James, along
with talismans and gnostic paraphernalia. There was an enlargement of a
satellite photo of the mound in which the wreckage of SDF-1 was buried. Zand
sat at the head of the black obsidian table staring at Cochran.
He said, almost delicately, "Do you think I expunged all mention of the
Invid, the Matrix, and the Flower of Life from every record but our own just
so that you could go blurting it to Leonard and his military imbeciles? Or the
fools at UEG? Have I wasted so much time on you?"
Cochran fought against a years-long habit of obedience to Zand, of
self-sacrifice to the transcendent plan the scientist had enacted. He and the
few others who sat there-Beckett, Russo, and the rest-were the only ones on
Earth aside from the man himself who knew just how much Zand had altered the
course of history.
"Confrontation is the whole point of the Shaping, don't you see?" Zand
went on. "War is the whole point. Do you think Dana Sterling's dormant powers
will be released by anything short of the Apocalypse?"
Data on the Invid and the Matrix and the rest of it, gathered from the
Zentraedi leaders Exedore and Breetai, and from Captain Gloval, Miriya
Sterling, and a few others, had been kept under tightest restrictions. Once
Lang, Hunter, and the rest left Earth on the SDF-3 mission, it hadn't taken
Zand long to see to it that everyone who knew about that information either
joined his cabal, or died.
"The Protoculture's Shaping of history is moving toward a single [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]