The SDF-3 has remanifested from spacefold, but no one aboard has the faintest idea where they are. The ship appears to be grounded in some glowing fog, ensnared by light itself. Lang and Rem dub the phenomenon "newspace" -- but are at a loss to explain what it really is and who, or what, is keeping them there. For Lang, it seems like old times: The ship's Protoculture drives have disappeared.
But other events are transpiring, unbeknownst to the stranded crew of the SDF-3.
In Earthspace, the Ark Angel has been spared the fate suffered by the REF main fleet after the Invid transubstantiation. Vince and Jean Grant decide that the only logical course of action is to try and locate the SDF-3...
On Haydon IV, something has awakened the Awareness -- and a mysterious change comes over the Haydonites. Exedore and the four Sterlings suddenly find themselves imprisoned beneath the surface -- as the planet leaves orbit, destination unknown...
All of the pieces of this strange cosmic puzzle are about to come together...and the ultimate conflict is imminent. The question is:
Will The Universe Survive?
Release date:
April 30, 2014
Publisher:
Del Rey
Print pages:
344
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“Beware the skies, for the cerulean raiments of that sweet-scented realm mask a darkness and evil that know no bounds. And do not look to heaven for peace, for there resides hell. And beware all who descend from those skies, for they are the harbingers of death and destruction.”
Dogma of the Church of Recurrent Tragedy as quoted in Weverka T’su’s Aftermath: Geopolitical and Religious Movements in the Southlands
The starship Ark Angel hung in geosynch, 36,000 kilometers above Brazilas in the Southlands. Recently returned from a distant campaign, it alone had been spared the wrath of the Invid’s transubstantiating departure, one ship among scores in that moment of victorious defeat.
Scott Bernard had yet to decide whether its survival constituted a curse or a blessing.
He could just make out the warship’s underbelly through a small oblong viewport set high up in the curved hull of the chemical shuttle’s passenger cabin. A soft-soled boot, free-floating, drew his attention forward, and he watched it for a moment, thinking: Weightless. Hugged to the padded contours of an acceleration couch by web belts and Velcro straps, as if on some nostalgia-steeped theme park ride.
Although restrained might have been a better word to describe his present circumstance, as in temporarily prevented from doing harm to himself or others. Not that he would. But there were half a dozen G2 analysts planetside who thought differently.
Scott sniggered aloud, unperturbed by the curious glances his self-amusement had elicited. He returned the looks with interest until one by one each of his fellow passengers in the cramped cabinspace turned away.
Oh, he had it, all right: what Rand had once called the look of the lost.
Scott inclined his head to one side to get a better angle on the ship, her dark symmetry obscuring a narrow sweep of stars. Built and christened on the other side of the Quadrant, she was the very ship Colonel Wolfe had pirated from Tirol orbit years before. The ship that had become the Sentinels’ own.
Running lights illuminated an array of weapons and sensor ports dimpling her underside—retrofitted sometime during the three years since Scott had last seen her—along with a swath of heavily blistered alloy, where angry tendrils loosed from the Invid’s mindstuff phoenix had brushed her just three months before. She rested alone in gravity anchor, save for the countless metal fragments that drifted above and below her: the lingering debris clouds of Dolza’s fleet; of Little Luna, the Zentraedi factory satellite; of the hapless, goose-necked ships of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter Divisions; of the Robotech Expeditionary Force’s tri-thrusters and Karbarran-manufactured boilerlike monstrosities.
Earth was in fact haloed by death and destruction. But liberated—or so it seemed.
A Tiresian-accented voice cautiously interrupted Scott’s painful reverie.
“Colonel Bernard,” the woman repeated as Scott turned from the view. She stood wavering in the narrow aisle, Velcroed in place, strands of auburn hair wafting out from under a pearl-gray shuttle bonnet. The smile, too, seemed fastened there, detachable with the slightest tug.
“What is it?” Scott asked, masking his thoughts.
“Sir, General Grant wishes you to be informed that he’ll be on hand to meet the shuttle. Mrs. Grant and Senators Huxley and Penn are with him, sir.”
Scott nodded and put on a pleasant face, certain it read as a twisted malicious grin. But the woman only broadened her smile in response and asked if there was anything he needed before docking. He told her he was fine and leaned over to watch her space-step down the aisle, a child learning to walk.
So much to relearn, he told himself. So much to forget.
The chemical shuttle itself was symbolic of the change. Launched from a twenty-five-year-old reconstructed base in Venezuela Nueva, the ferry and a handful of others like it were humankind’s only existing links with near space. There was the Angel, of course, but she had remained in geosynch ever since the disastrous finale to the assault on Reflex Point, the Invid queen’s hivelike stronghold on the North American continent. Word had it that a small portion of the REF’s mecha—Alphas and Shadow fighters, principally—was still functioning, but most of the older generation Cyclones and Veritechs had simply given up the ghost.
No one knew what to make of the events that had occurred at Reflex Point. In the wake of the Invid departure all sorts of reports had reached Scott and his team of freedom fighters. The REF fleet had been destroyed; it had survived. The Invid had exited the solar system; the Regess had relocated her horde in the Southlands. The SDF-3 had been destroyed; it had manifested from fold and been swallowed up by the Invid phoenix; it had failed to appear at all … Eventually, Scott learned that the fleet had indeed been vaporized and that the flagship had failed to emerge from hyperspace. He had not bothered to wait around for verification. With an assist from Lunk and Rand, he had managed to prepare his Alpha-Beta Fighter for the long journey, only to find that the VT was not much good outside the envelope and that the Ark Angel had removed herself to stationary orbit over the Southlands.
It had begun to make sense after the initial anger and disappointment had washed through him. Much of the northern hemisphere was devastated, and where else would reconstruction commence but in the south, where several cities had actually flourished during the occupation. Norristown, once the site of a Protoculture storage facility, was fast emerging as the leader of the pack, and it was there that Scott had ultimately set down. Like a fly on lacquered paper. Mired in red tape for close to two months before Provisional Command had okayed his request to be among those shuttled up to the starship.
The question he had heard most often those two months had been: “Scott who?”
It seemed that Mars and Jupiter Divisions were filed away in Command’s mainframe as having gone down with all hands, and so the person claiming to be Lieutenant Scott Bernard of the 21st Squadron, Mars Division, had to be a ghost, a zone loonie, or an ambulatory case of what the neurometrics were calling Post-Engagement Synaptic Trauma—PEST, for short.
Ask Dr. Lang about Scott Bernard, he had pressed. I’m his godson, for chrissake!
Only to hear: “We’re sorry, er, Lieutenant Bernard, but Doctor Lang is not available at this time.”
Later, Scott would learn that his godfather and mentor had been aboard the ill-fated SDF-3 when it had jumped from Tirol. But in the meantime he suggested that Captain Harrington might be able to vouch for him. Harrington had commanded the first wave of Cyclone ground teams the REF had directed against Reflex Point.
After all, it wasn’t like he was asking for medals, Scott had assured the analysts. But the least Command could do was acknowledge what he had achieved on the yearlong road to Reflex Point or applaud his one-on-one with the Invid Corg in the seasonally shifting skies above the hive cluster. Why, some of Harrington’s team had even seen the Invid simulagent’s flame cloud, had even seen Scott go into the central dome!
He was sorry he said it even before the words had left his lips.
“Now, uh, what was that you were saying about talking to the Regess, Lieutenant?” the boys from G2 had asked. “You did say something about her being, let me see here, ‘a bald-headed column of light twenty feet high.’ ”
And so he had played the PEST for them, steering clear of any mention of Marlene or Sera or any of the mind-boggling time-space displacements he’d experienced inside the hive chambers.
In retrospect, he had to ask himself whether pulling out all the stops would have brought the med teams’ debriefing reports to Jean Grant’s attention any sooner, but they had reached her on their own momentum in any case, and Scott had finally been granted permission to come aboard.
And issued a battlefield commission to full bird, to boot.
For Scott it was something else to snigger at: a promotion, in an armed force without ships or soldiers, defenders and liberators of a world that wanted little part of them even now.
The shuttle docked in one of Ark Angel’s starboard bays just as Sol was flooding the eastern coast of the Southlands with morning light. Scott drank in the view that had been denied him when Mars Division had approached a year earlier: Earth’s characteristic clouds and swirling weather fronts, its deep-blue water oceans and healing landscape. And for the first time in years he found himself thinking about Base Gloval, his father’s forefinger thrust upward into the Martian night, pinpointing a homeworld. Huddled afterward in the prewarmed comfort of his sleep compartment, he would grapple with the notion—that faint light, a home. But even after his family had been transferred to the factory satellite to work on the SDF-3, Scott could not regard Earth as such. And he had so few memories of those years that he called Tirol home now and perhaps always would.
Only a week ago he had learned that his parents were still there.
The memories surrendered to more recent recollections as Scott and the rest of the shuttle’s privileged boarded a transfer vehicle that ferried them into the ship proper, Ark Angel’s artificial gravity settling on him like oppression itself. Nearly every component of the ship was different from what he remembered, from the illumination grids that checkered the holds to the persistent foot-tingling basso of the dreadnought’s internal systemry.
He soon caught sight of Vince Grant, towering walnut-brown and square-shouldered over a small gathering of civilians and military personnel bottlenecked at the arrival hold’s security gate. There were hands in the air, salutes, a welter of voices that brought to mind vid-scenes of turn-of-the-century airport arrivals, and it was obvious to Scott all at once that the REF was as altered as the Angel herself. He sensed something cool but determined in the ship’s slightly sour air, a single-mindedness at work he had not experienced since Tiresia.
A male aide appeared out of the crowd to escort him through security, and a moment later he stood facing the Grants and the two Plenipotentiary Council senators.
“Colonel Bernard, reporting as ordered,” Scott said with a crisp salute. “Permission to come aboard, sir?”
“Granted,” Vince returned, working the muscles of his massive jaw into a tight-lipped smile. “Welcome home, Scott.”
“Oh, Scott,” Jean said, rushing forward to embrace him. “God, let me look at you.”
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