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Part Seventeen: Event Horizon

Chapter One:

"Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not a sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be." - Jose Ortega y Gassett


. "Jeez, the water's cold!" Alex gasped, breaking the surface after jumping into the small lake.

"It isn't that bad;" Noel replied. "It's warmer than that pond back in the Andes."

"It can't be by much. We can't stay in too long, unless we want to risk hypothermia."

"We needed the bath - we haven't seen indoor plumbing since Annie's birthday party, and it's not like the people in Baton Rouge were bending over backwards to get us to stay after Burdette's bunch was taken care of." That was almost a month ago, and those people, while happy to be free of the tyrannical former Ghost and his goons, were too afraid of a repeat to allow the group to do more than spend the night and top off their supplies for the trip. Once they'd left, they'd spent three weeks crossing the deep south, now a desert that, while it did get decent rain this time of year, had become very rough terrain from the lack of plant growth. When the rain came, it was almost always in the form of heavy thunderstorms, and they'd had either straight-line winds or a tornado flip over their parked Veritechs once, while they hunkered in an old storm shelter with the mummified corpses of those had died in that shelter during Dolza's attack (from the thermal pulse of a near miss). This abandoned farm pond in the South Carolina Piedmont was the first consistently green area they'd come across in days, and the first one of this leg of the trip to have enough water for more than sponge bathing.

"Come here and let me scrub your back; that dust got everywhere."

"I think you're getting a little too far around from the back, there..."

"I can't help myself."

"Would you two hurry up in there?" Rook yelled from the campsite on the other side of the stand of trees that had grown up in the last 25 years since the farm was leveled.

"All right, all right," Alex yelled back. "Can't a married couple have a little fun anymore?"

"Not when they've got everyone else waiting for their turn," Scott interjected. "I want to get back on the road before dark."

"Okay, we'll finish this later," Alex whispered into Noel's ear, nibbling her neck. "Wash your hair again while I finish up."

Ten minutes later, they were in dry clothing, discussing the mission ahead with Scott, Lancer, Rand and Lunk, while Rook, Marlene and Annie took their turn bathing.

"One of the things we got from Burdette's notes back in Baton Rouge is that there's a major storage facility in Manhattan that the Invid maintain for their human flunkies. The flower of life didn't take root in the Eastern Hemisphere as well as it did here, so they have to send out a shipment out once a month. Thanks to the actions of Vulcan Division and the navy, the amount the overseas traitors have needed has been going down rapidly, so there's a large backlog in their fuel dump there. If we can get in there, we'll have more than enough for the rest of the trip."

"If we come across more Protoculture, could we bypass it?" Lunk asked.

"Not really;" Scott replied. "Our information from the freedom fighter network indicates that the defenses for Reflex Point are weakest on the east side, north of the Ohio. It's also one of the most-recovered areas of the north, so there's more cover to hide behind. It's believed that the Invid consider it in their perimeter because it has regular overflights from the movement to and from Manhattan, but it's not got the in-place defenses that the rest of the approaches do, until you get into Ohio."

"So, we're going to waltz up to the Invid warehouse, steal their Protoculture, and fly TOWARD their home base while they're chasing us;" Rand sneered. "That sounds like a brilliant plan."

"Can you think of something better, Rand?" Scott asked, rhetorically. "I didn't think so."

Suddenly, the roar of aircraft turbines became apparent, coming from the souteast."

"What the hell?" Lunk asked, as two heavily modified Valkyries morphed to Guardian mode in the process of coming to a quick stop, almost over their camp, then settled to the ground.

"John, what the hell are you two doing? Trying to tell every Invid on the east coast where we are?"

"You know these idiots?" Lancer asked, as the pilots climbed out of their mecha.

"Yeah, ever since the war with the Masters. John was one of the discipline cases that Dana and I got stuck with, and Jen was GMP; the two met during one of his arrests. They were part of our force that defied both the Masters and the High Command at the end of the war. Hell, Jen almost got herself killed trying to cushion the landing of Noel and Zor after Noel teleported them out of the Masters' ship. They retrained the same time the three of us were in Brasilia, but they were in a different section."

"And, those veritechs?"

"Well, they started their lives as RDF VF-1s, but that was before the REF got done playing with them. They've got a variant of the Beta's pop-up launchers and a force field in that kit, to allow them to go over mach with all that gear still attached."

John walked up, and gave a mock salute. "Alex, you know these planes have shadow devices; it's not like the Invid use acoustic sensors."

"So, how did you find us, and what are you doing here?"

"Well, Karen told us where to look, and as to what we're doing here, we've been sent ahead to help organize the local resistance. The majority of our forces are down in the Antilles, but will be moving north next month. Dana and Zor are up in New Columbia for the next couple days, but are supposed to fly back down and leave us marshaling the locals for an assault up through Cumberland Gap concurrent with the landings in Florida and Georgia."

"We had been planning on heading up to Manhattan before turning west across Pennsylvania. Want us to join you, instead?"

"Truthfully, Alex, you couldn't pay me enough to have you guys with us."

"Huh?" Scott asked, having joined in, finally.

"You haven't heard, have you?"

"Heard what?"

"Well, it's hard getting any sort of useful intelligence from the Invid, but what little we've gotten is that you all are SPECIAL...."

"And that means?"

"The Invid seem to really like you guys, and I don't mean that in a good way. They want you all taken out, and from what we understand, their fully autonomous types are told to take as many of your group alive as possible, but really hurt any place that gives you all aid and comfort. Half the places you passed through in South America are just plain GONE, now. You folks need to stay moving, to distract the Invid from the invasion forces. Those are the orders Colonel Freeman told me to pass on to you all. Keep on going up the Atlantic Seaboard, and get the locals aware of the coming invasion. Once you get the word to the Manhattan Resistance, try to make it to Reflex Point - but do it without traveling with any group that could face the Invid's wrath from the association."

"So, we're to go it alone, all the way there?"

"That's the gist of it. I know it sounds pretty cold, but you folks would be an albatross around the neck of any group that tried to absorb you, before the final assault. On the bright side, if she has recovered enough by then, Noel's abilities are worth a company of special forces - she proved that in Monument and Africa."

"That's just wonderful. Can you at least resupply us?"

"A little bit. Send Alex and Noel up to New Columbia, and they can pick up enough cells to refuel all your Veritechs and Cyclones, and several loads of missiles for the bikes. Any missiles would literally have to be pulled from Zor's Beta, so I can't really say what he can part with."

"I guess that will have to do; besides, Noel and Dana probably will be itching to get together, even if we didn't."

"By the way, Alex; nice mecha."

"You know me; I always preferred the tanks over being a jet jockey."

"Okay; we'll stay here with Bernard and Belmont, and fill them in on what intel we have of points to the north. After all, your orders mean that you all can't risk actually going into town as a group. They seem to care less about you two than the others, though."

"And that's supposed to be a comfort?'

*******

An hour later, Alex & Noel pulled into New Columbia in the Hovertank. A green Legios was sitting under camouflage netting at what was left of an old civil airport, next to one of the few intact hangars. A crowd was gathered around the hangar, and few gave the Hovertank a second look as it pulled in, indicating they were accustomed to the presence of human mecha. As they climbed out of the mecha, the crowd parted to let them through to the hangar interior.

"Noel!" Dana called out, walking away from the group she had been standing with. "Glad you could make it." The two met and hugged, as Alex walked on past to where Zor was in the middle of a discussion with five men that were unmistakably Tyrolean in origin.

"Friends of yours, Zor?"

"I guess you could say so, Alex. Near the end of the battle at Monument, New Detroit and Manhattan finally realized they couldn't stay on the defensive, and tried to send in a few air wings. These clones are the survivors of the force that the Masters sent to intercept. They were knocked out of the air by the Protoculture conversion, and managed to make their way to one of the surviving enclaves of Zentraedi. With the Invid on the way, they managed to get everyone to work together to get as much of the surviving military gear operable. Eventually, they joined with the local resistance here, and they've been prepping for eventually taking down the Invid collaborators that have seized New Charlotte."

"I gather this is happening soon."

"We were planning for tomorrow, actually. Want to stick around and join us?"

"Sure; it's been kinda dull the last month or s-" An air raid siren interrupted him.

"I believe the Invid have gotten wind of our plans."

"Then, let's go so them how rude it is to barge in unannounced."

Alex ran outside, and hopped into the Spartacus. Behind him, the hangar doors opened, and Zor and the others walked out in a mix of red and green Bioroids. In quick order, they jumped onto one of the hovercraft, leaving behind a spare. Alex smiled, transformed to Battloid, and followed suit. He hit the power switch, and triggered his exterior speakers.

"ALL BIOROIDS TO YOUR HOVERCRAFT!" he droned in imitation of the clone masters, then followed it up with a classic rebel yell.

"Tyler, you lunatic!" Dana yelled from the cockpit of her Alpha, as she and Noel got the Legios ready for launch. "What in the hell are you doing?"

"What does it look like? Blame your husband..." Several years earlier, Zor had lost a bet, the payoff being him teaching Alex how to use a bioroid hovercraft effectively, compared at least to the minimal use they learned in their escape from a Masters ship the year before.

"Don't remind me..." Zor replied. "At least the locals added radio gear to these Bioroids." Zor took 4 shots in as many seconds, destroying one Invid with each burst. "It would be too hard coordinating with conventional mecha, without it."

"Why do you think the Invid chose now to attack? There seems to be more than a random patrol here..."

"Someone from the opposition probably saw you roll into town in that hovercraft."

"Let's make sure we pay them a return call, after this. What do they have, other than Invid friends?"

"Two Valkyries stuck in Battloid, a Logan, about a dozen Battloids and a couple dozen Cyclones," Dana replied, as she spashed the last shock trooper. "You guys ready to pay Charlotte a visit?"

"Sure, if the locals are ready."

***

The counterattack was over quickly. The Invid collaborators had grossly underestimated the resources that Columbia had on hand, especially when factoring in the Legios and Hovertank. The collaborator town was really little more than a town whose "protectors" held the rest of the populace under their thumb with the threat of what their mecha (and aid from the Invid) could do. As the locals couldn't risk rising up unless all the bad guys could be taken down at once, it had been a stalemate - until the force rolled in from the south, and made quick work of the Cyclones and CDU Unicorns that responded to the attack once they realized the Invid weren't coming to help. A few of them chose to run, rather than fight - they never made it out of town, as their "subjects" finally saw their deliverance at hand, and shot down the fleeing traitors - usually from the back.

As the noises of the main battle fell silent, the people began to emerge from their homes - and immediately took out four years of frustration on the homes of the now-deceased collaborators, and those that had willingly worked with them. For Alex, it brought to mind images from school classes on the decade prior to the SDF-1's arrival, of dictators and corrupt regimes in Eastern Europe falling, and the people turning on the Communist Party functionaries and officials in an orgy of violence - especially if they managed to catch members of the secret police. Half of those nations would soon be ravaged by the Global War, when Russia's civil war spilled out into Europe and the Middle East, then dragging the rest of Asia & the Americas into the war, and when that conflict was over, came the anti-unity wars, and finally the Zentraedi. In many ways, the specter of the Invid loomed over the town now as did the Zentraedi did over Europe then; but can one argue against celebrating the now, in light of an uncertain future?

Alex went over to Noel, who was sitting on a wall, gazing at the mountains to the west.

"What's on your mind?"

"I was just thinking about how Dad and the others spent the night of the Zentraedi attacks in a house not far from here. They were a bunch of kids, stuck home alone, not knowing what would become of them, as they watched the battle overhead."

"So we're near the ancestral home, huh?"

"Well, not as close as you were to yours back in Monument. Alex, can we go there, for a visit?"

"How would we get there?"

"Dana says to use the Beta."

"Wha- oh, your telepathy. I was getting used to you not having it. Do you even know where the house was?"

"Uncle Scott had Dana & Zor load its coordinates into the Beta, in case they needed a place to hide out; the house was built into the side of a hill, and they concealed it when they left."

"Okay, I guess we can do it. Have Dana get the tank back to Columbia, and we'll meet back up with the others in the morning."

"Great; you don't know how much this means to me..."

********

The sun was setting as the Legios set down in what appeared to be just an overgrown field at the base of a hillside.

"This is it?" Alex asked, not sure of Noel's directions.

"The house was an underground, built into the hillside for both climate control savings as well as it being a fully functional fallout shelter. What you don't see is the small house trailer that served as the more public rooms of the house; Danielle sold it to be recycled after she found it abandoned. Lynn, Dad and the others had moved everything of value into the bunker section, and after they left, looters stole most of the rest of the surface structure."

"I didn't think shelter homes were that common back then?"

"You forget where we are. With the terrorism and the Mideast nukes going off before the SDF-1 arrived, and the escalation into global war, a lot of people were afraid that the nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge, or the TVA's fission plants, might be hit, and that would be even more nasty than a normal nuke. A lot of the people that were commuting to those facilities were making big money, so they in effect started the trend, and the trend only grew with the revelation of the SDF-1's arrival."

"So, how do we get in?"

"Dani buried the entrance with our uncle's tractor, before leaving, and it looked like there's been some mudslides over it since. But, the sensors pick the entrance out about six meters off the Alpha's nose at two o'clock. Once we get it uncovered, we'll have to hook a power transfer cable over to the doorframe, so we can use the key fob that Uncle Scott sent with Dana. If it doesn't work, then we'll have to get more creative."

"Creative? What, blowing the door?"

"Well, only a small part of it. There's a panel on the door, that was meant to be cut open by rescue workers to open the door manually from outside. Needless to say, one didn't mark the exact spot with decals or anything, but the serial number of the door tells which location to cut, and that is found on the outside. They had ten different internal designs that looked identical externally, but each with a different rescue cut location. Scott also sent the list of locations by serial prefix with the fob."

"Always thinking ahead; he's good at that."

************

Luckily, the key fob worked, and they made it in shortly after dark. Everything was as the family left it 23 years earlier, other than a thin layer of dust that had managed to not get swept up by the air purification system before the power was shut down to the bunker systems. Said power systems would probably take longer to restore than the time they had here, so they left the house on minimal power, supplied by conventional APU of the Beta. A couple of the rooms required use of the mecha's survival lanterns, the lights having burned out when there were no replacements, or had failed from age since then. One of those rooms was the master bedroom, that hadn't been used for anything since the morning of the aatack, John Landers Sr. having died in an accident that day, trying to get back home from work as the Zentraedi rain fell.

They stayed awake for to within a couple hours of dawn, looking through old family albums, the heirloom jewelry that Lynn had considered too valuable to take (then her career made her think it was too risky to keep with her), and lots of music discs, ranging from post-war alternative on CD to 70s country & disco on vinyl. They finally went to sleep, and slept past noon, only waking when a signal was relayed by the Beta through the front door, from Dana checking up on them. After getting Dana to hang up, they quickly made love in the huge, still comfortable, bed, before dressing and paccking up things on the list they were told to look for. By dusk, they were flying back over the Smokies to their old friends and new.

********

Of course, it would be Dana and Zor who would be flying the loaded down Beta back to deliver the goods, and in a way Noel was glad for it, In many ways, she was worried that if she went back to base, or even a ship off the coast, she's be immediately yanked from duty and given all sorts of tests to try to figure out why she had such difficulty contacting Karen and the others, after having a much easier time of it for a few weeks back in Utah, months ago. Her place was here, with Bernard and the others; everything in her, body and souls, told her so, and she wasn't going to risk it.

The night after they'd left the civilized part of the Carolinas behind, she was sitting at the campfire, in the overgrown remnants of what was once some Civil War historic site (the US one, not the Global War). She kept twisting the chain of the locket around her neck, with one finger; an old-style photo locket, probably a half-century or more old.

"What's so special about that necklace?" Rand asked, and was almost immediately stared down by Rook for daring to be so unsubtle.

"It's my grandparents' picture inside," Noel responded. She opened the locket, and passed it around. The pictures within showed a couple, in a very Spartan military setting.

"I've never seen uniforms like those before," Lunk asked. "Who were they?"

"They were pioneers," Noel replied. "Those were pictures taken at Moonbase Armstrong, back in 2004. They, and their children, were part of the first group of astronauts allowed to bring their families to settle the Moon, as both worked in the Apollo Shipyards. Granddad even got to fly in one of the last shuttle missions during the war, to launch military satellites. A couple months later, the SDF-1 arrived, and the technology from it changed everything. Suddenly, the idea of bases on the moon and Mars were a matter of months, not decades, and they got in on the ground floor. Dad and the rest spent six years there, before they were evacuated back to Earth with the rest of the non-essential personnel, in the wake of the events at Toronto. When we had these pictures, it was the first images I'd ever seen of them, and I got permission to keep this locket - it was Aunt Janet's."

"They died when Dolza attacked, right?"

"Yes. Uncle Scott actually saw it happen - he'd locked the other kids in the bunker, but stayed outside, waiting for his uncle. The attack on the moon happened as the majority of the fleet was still lining up over Earth. This picture serves to remind me that there's been too many families separated; too many kids orphaned, by these stupid wars over Protoculture. We've got to resolve this conflict once and for all, before too many more lives are ruined."

Chapter Two:

"I'll admit it now, freely. I had found out conclusively that Marlene was an Invid, during the Battle of Manhattan, and had suspected it since at least October, after the encounter with Sera's forces in Donner Pass. But, what good would it have served to reveal it before the point where it was revealed naturally? The answer, of course, was it would have had no good purpose, and would have been to the detriment of us all. As hobbled as my powers were during most of the trip (a safety precaution Karen had slipped into my mind, to make sure I didn't stand out like a glaring beacon to Invid telepathic sensors, until I was in an area where it wouldn't be as obvious), I still had enough capability to actually read Marlene enough to tell that Sera's attempts to 'reactivate' her Invid side was as much a shock to her as her being revealed was to the others two weeks later. It was vital to all of us, and when I say 'us', I mean all of humanity, that she choose between 'Marlene' & 'Ariel' of her own free will, and that she lived long enough to make that choice."

-Noel Tyler, interviewed by Maria Bartley-Rand, for the "Protocultures: Macross+60" documentary (2059)

It was the first week of March, and they had finally made their way up to the ruins of what had been the New Jersey home of several pre-Zentraedi New York sports teams. It was no surprise to hear from the locals that they had progressed up to the top of the Invid's Most Wanted list, with descriptions of them being circulated with the unusual caveat of informing the Invid, instead of a bounty on their heads. For some reason, the Invid wanted to make sure that they were captured by other humans, not killed.

The chance of that actually occurring approached zero. Almost unanimously, the locals hated the Invid, and had long ago taken out anyone working for the Invid (and a number of those who potentially might in the future). The only humans working for the Invid in Manhattan were those impressed as slaves for loading and operating ships and harbor equipment, and they liked the Invid even less than those still free. The 40 years of war (going back to the Global War in the 90s - or even 1993's terrorist attack on the WTC complex) had done much to increase the enmity for bossy outsiders for which New Yorkers had been famous for ever since it was named "New Amsterdam". While the UEG and ASC had been bad - at least they had been human.

As for being seen by the Invid, there were very few Invid that could tell one human from another, without a lot of exposure, and the actual landing in the area that Lunk and Alex had scouted out had been under the cover of a pretty fierce (and fortunate) thunderstorm. The Invid had built their hive literally into the top of the tallest building in Manhattan (started before the Zentraedi, then finished post-Dolza by a famous real estate magnate to symbolize the rebirth of the city, to challenge the size of the Zentraedi wrecks dominating other cities), and due to the hive disrupting the building's original grounding system, it was constantly being struck during the storm.

Lancer, Rand and Annie had set off at first light, Lancer using his knowledge of the area, and the fact he was originally meant to be part of the resistance forces for the region, to get them passage to Manhattan on an old lifeboat retasked as a water taxi. If the others chose to follow, it would mean a long walk north to the George Washington Bridge, since the tunnels were flooded and all the other boats around were based on Manhattan, and only came to the Jersey side for deliveries.

While everyone else could get up at their leisure, Scott (being his usual military self) got up about the time the others left, and woke Lunk not long afterward so they could start maintenance work on the mecha. Rook had stood the last overnight watch, so she was going to be out for a while, and Marlene tended to sleep until woken by someone or something - she probably wouldn't get up until Rook did. Alex & Noel, on the other hand, had other reasons for sleeping late, and finally woke up around 10 o'clock.

"Want to go into town?" Noel asked.

"Are you kidding? We'd be lucky to make it to the bridge by dusk."

"Who needs to walk?" she replied, playfully.

"Are you even up to it? You've only been able to teleport once in the last six months, and that was a blind jump on instinct."

"That shows what you know.... I've been practicing almost every day since we left Louisiana, in case we had to do something drastic while crossing the wastelands to the coast. You worry too much about me, so I kept it secret. Each day, I'd teleport back to our previous night's stop, and I had a radio, in case I needed Rook to fly back to pick me up - she never had to. A jump across the Hudson should be nothing, by comparison."

"Where would you jump? It's not like you've been to Manhattan since we stopped by there during the resistance network planning conference the winter before the Invid arrived."

"I asked around, last night. One of the resistance people told me of a good spot."

"Told you?"

"Well, I did sorta sneak a peek into his mind to see what it looked like when he was there a week or so ago. It's not like I could contact Lancer or Rand, and have them act as an anchor - they still don't believe your stories of what I did back in Monument - or Scott's of what Karen did with the Sentinels, and during the fight with Edwards. I'd probably scare the crap out of them. At least Rook got some exposure to Karen a few years ago, but she's here too - and she really doesn't like me even mentioning telepathy. Karen had to do a lot of scans of her to even get the others to let Karen train her."

"I see. Rook still isn't the paragon of stability, even now, after finally dealing with the crap that drove her TO Brasilia back then. That chicken game Rand told us about was just plain nuts!"

After breakfast, they got their civilian gear on, and Noel teleported them, after telling Scott they'd got a ride across the river (mostly for the benefit of the others - Bernard knew what Karen had been capable of, even if Noel was a pale shadow of her in terms of power).

Their arrival point was the old NYSE trading floor, near the south end of the island. Like much of the rest of the south end of town, it was deserted, being too close to the Invid for human comfort, or for the Invid to let people use the buildings on a regular basis. The vast room was empty of all the furniture and technology it once held, the stock market practically being rendered moot by Dolza, and when a replacement did emerge, it was the New Nikkei Market in New Tokyo, as most heavy industry in North America ended up nationalized by the UEG to support the RDF and its components, if only because the the SDF-1 initially provided the brainpower and tech base to get the surviving factories back on line, and to restore the farmland devastated by Dolza in the Midwest.

Approaching the old doors, they found them sealed by Invid materials tougher than steel plate, and half as massive. After all, the Invid hive was just a few blocks away.

Back in 2001, a group of anti-unification radicals, ran by survivors of the organization that had made an attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 (its main leadership were all "martyred" during the Global War), had tried again, using civilian airliners. What they didn't count on, was that security had increased exponentially in the two years after the SDF-1 arrival ended the Global War, and allowed civilian air traffic to resume. Of the five aircraft meant for the plot Three were to target Washington, DC, and two were to hit the WTC towers in Manhattan, to avenge the martyred Osama bin Laden. One crew meant for Wasington was arrested on the ground, and the other two had their hijackers taken out by air marshals and traveling war veterans without incident, as was the plane meant for the North WTC Tower. The last plane, however, ended up crashing, as a battle ensued between the hijackers and the people aboard, several blocks south of the NYSE complex on Broadway.

While tragic, it was nothing compared to some of the atrocities of the War that had recently ended (or the actions of the anti-unification groups leading up to the Zentraedi arrival, like the destruction of Mars Base Sara, and 2 of the early Oberths in the resulting space battles). A new building, partially financed by a group of real estate tycoons, quickly rose in the area destroyed by the impact, taller than its neighbors at the Trade Center, and using materials technology from researching the crashed SDF-1 to be bigger than any other building in the world - while actually having a hollow interior centered on the impact point, building around the crash site, but not on it. Nearly complete when Dolza arrived, then made even taller than originally planned to challenge the height of other cities' crashed Zentraedi ships, it had sit, mostly unused, for two decades, until the Invid arrived - and used the structure as a support stalk to mount a hive - a hive that had its bottom level 1500 feet off the ground.

When it became apparent that there was no ground-level means of leaving the building, Alex & Noel started searching the sub-levels, and eventually found a recent tunnel that circumvented the also-sealed entrances to the subway system. Once in the tunnels, they were able to walk ten blocks further north, and finally emerge on Broadway. From there, they had a five mile walk ahead of them, as most human activity on Manhattan was centered around Central Park, as it had much of its area converted to farm land, and people tended to live where the food was, either to help work the land, or have easy access to it. Naturally, that's where the Resistance would be, as well as Lancer's little group.

For the first part of the journey, it was eerie walking through the abandoned areas of the city. Once, this street was a near-perpetual traffic jam, bustling with people, taxis and noise. Now, even as they approached Times Square, it looked like a scene out of an old zombie movie - minus the zombies, they hoped. In the Square, though, they started hearing sounds of activity - specifically that music starting and stopping, like one would hear from a stage rehearsal.

Intrigued, they followed the music, finally finding an older theater that had been "un-modernized" to the extent of having opening windows and doors leading directly outside, to allow the passage of air to do what the long non-functional air conditioning once did. As they looked into the auditorium doors, toward the stage, the rehearsal was brought to a screeching halt, literally, by its director.

"Cut!!! Stop it!!! Harvey, I swear you dance like a man with four legs! Arabelle, you look very pretty up there but we don't happen to be doing a waltz! This is supposed to be 1990, not 1770!"

"Simon!" a voice called from the first balcony. "Hey, Simon! Up here! I brought some friends to watch the rehearsal, okay?"

"Absolutely not! You know my rules about people -" Simon stopped short, recognizing the kid's companion. "Am I seeing things? Lancer, is that you, or are you still calling yourself 'Yellow Dancer'?"

Alex and Noel looked at each other, mouthing Lancer's name, then walked up to the stage, as Lancer and the others came down from the balcony. By the time they got there, Lancer was already talking to Simon, with Rand, Annie and their guide watching.

"Hey, Lancer!" Alex called out. "Small town, huh?"

"Who's the wise guy and his girlfriend?" Simon asked.

"Well, he's former Southern Cross - part of the unit that stopped the Masters, no less. She's his wife, and while she was also part of that unit, her past is a LOT more complicated."

"Complicated, how?"

"I think I'll answer that. Lancer," Alex interrupted. "My name is Alex Tyler, and as he noted, my wife and I were part of the 15^th ATAC before the REF pathfinders returned. This is Noel Freeman Tyler, my lovely and extremely talented wife. Simon, how familiar are you with pop music from the 'Teens?"

"I was a teenager then, and you can probably guess from my profession that I wasn't into metal."

"I'll take that as an affirmative. Let me float a couple names by you, and see if you recall them. First, Kayra Marinoni."

"The 'Zentraedi Songbird'. Blacklisted by the fascists running the mainstream media in 2015, joined the RDF in 2016, was declared 'missing, presumed dead' that year, then mysteriously reappeared a few years later as part of Skull Squadron for the SDF-3 mission. Rumored to have returned to Earth five years ago, but unconfirmed."

That's pretty detailed."

"Well, when we heard she might have come back, we tried to locate her, and offer a new contract. I never managed to find out for sure, during the time Lancer and I were in training at Brasilia."

"You were part of the resistance training school?"

"Yep - unlike Lancer, I made it out of South America before the Invid closed the sea lanes. We were stranded down there in our civilian jobs when the Invid arrived, though those of us with actual military rank got stuck into mecha for that April Fools Day clusterf**k." The way Simon half-said the expletive almost sounded like he was trying to vocalize asterisks or some other filler characters. "I even managed to get some news out to the REF about conditions here, before the Invid clamped down here as well."

"Okay... what was your code name?"

"'Happy Feet'; what else?"

"Well, that's another stop on our itinerary taken care of. We'll discuss that business later. Meanwhile, back to my wife's sordid past."

Noel punched him in the side, for that comment.

"Hey, not so hard; remember, I'm the doctor for this outfit, and it's hard to work on your own ribs. Anyway, how about this name - Karen Ellison?"

"RDF pilot, pin-up girl and propaganda singer. Rumored for a couple years to be a computer-generated idol with Kayra providing the voice, until she made her unscheduled appearance at the Hunter wedding reception, providing a third vocal part for the Janice & Minmei song. Was also rumored that her main purpose there was to replace Minmei if she backed out, given Minmei's relationship with Hunter. Known mostly for doing late-century pop covers and translations of pre-Zentraedi songs from Anime, mostly ones with a high military content. Attempts to research her past hit blank walls, hence the wacky theory that she was some sort of virtual idol. Also rumored to have come back in 2030 - I personally think I saw her at Brasilia when I was there."

"Okay, now, take a good look at Noel."

"Wow - Fix her hair up, add about ten kilos weight, give her some makeup and get her into something a bit sexier than that jumpsuit, and she's practically the spitting image of Ellison - well, other than the fact Ellison never looked that drawn out from the road."

"Well, there's a reason for that. Remember when Marinoni was MIA for a year, then out of sight for three more? When she came back from that fold accident, she was pregnant. She gave birth that Christmas, and the circumstances involving the child put she and her husband under lockdown for the rest of the decade."

"How does that tie into Ellison?"

"Well, Kayra married Shannon Freeman during the fold accident. Their daughter got exposed to a number of really bizarre things while in the womb. As a result, that daughter matured at a very fast rate - so fast, that for the parents' sanity, she was replaced by a clone with the aging problem fixed. My wife is that clone - and Karen Ellison was actually a year-old mutant half-Zentraedi when she first appeared on the music scene."

"You're joking, right? Tell me you're joking...."

"Trust me - when we found out back in Monument, we wished it was a joke. There I was, a twenty year old officer, about to propose to my girlfriend, when she first found out that she was only thirteen, chronologically, THEN found out she was a clone of someone else."

"I think I can make you believe this crazy story," Noel said. "Ever see Mary Martin or Sandy Duncan playing Peter Pan in the stage musical? Recorded, of course."

"Sure. It's about required watching as a classic, for choreographers."

"Could a normal person do this, without harness?" Noel launched herself into the air, using her telekinetic powers, and did the a couple verses from the "I'm Flying" routine from the play, both the flying parts and singing the music.

"I'll be damned..."

"If you think that's neat, when we've not been traveling overland for most of a year, and she can get in the proper exercises, she can probably out-dance anyone here in town - probably after just sight-reading the part. And, she has a vocal range over 3 octaves. I've heard he do both Tina Turner AND Mariah Carey covers."

"Stop singing my praises, Alex; it's embarrasing, even if it's true..." Noel stopped, a foot off the floor, then dropped to the floor with a blood-curling scream that got everyone's attention.

"What the hell? Noel, you okay?"

"I am - the people here, aren't. I sensed the Invid - they're done with the city, and are going to wipe it clean, starting at the north end of the island, and working their way down. We've got to get people to shelter, and get the mecha over here to stop them."

"Simon, get your people to shelter," Lancer ordered.

"Noel, can you get us back to camp?" Alex asked.

"No, I've barely got the strength to get just myself back there, after that little flying show."

"Then go back, and tell Scott, Lunk and Rook what's happening." Noel nodded, and disappeared after Annie handed her the Protoculture cells she was carrying..

Lancer turned to Rand & Alex. "Do you think this is happening because we're here? I mean, it seems that the Invid really have it in for us, and might have brought this on, simply by coming here."

"Don't play that game, Lancer. You know as well as I do, that the Invid would eventually take this city out, just like all the others, when they were done with it - and that end was pretty much written by their no longer needed to export Protoculture to Asia & Africa. We just happen to be in a position to try to stop them, this time."

*******

When Noel arrived, the others were already warming up their mecha, having pulled the cells with the highest charge from her Alpha to better power their own. Noel popped in the new cells into the fuel receptacles of her Alpha, and started it up. She noticed that Scott had gotten Marlene strapped into the Beta cockpit; not for any combat reason, but to take her along rather than leave her alone in their camp. Once they got to the rendezvous location, Marlene would be getting out, and Lancer would fly the Beta.

Lunk was also flying an Alpha, the one normally shared by Rand & Lancer. While he wasn't trained in using its other modes, his training did include the ability to fly it in Jet mode, as part of the requirements for testing repairs and transporting repaired mecha back to their assigned unit after repairs - and he'd gotten a lot of the same additional training in the mecha that Rand & Rook were given by Scott & Lancer (and later on, Alex), even if he usually never left the wheel of his truck. This time, the truck wasn't going to play a factor, and he needed to get the Alpha to Rand.

The three Alphas and the Legios screamed through the artificial canyons of southern Manhattan, shooting any Invid they saw in an attempt to draw the Invid terrorizing the northern end of the island back down to protect their hive. Once, when Scott shot a lone scout that had dropped down to street level, Noel was far enough back to see that the people he'd saved were actually Lancer & Rand. Mostly, though, the Invid they were finding were the hive guards that doubled at most hives as the slavemasters and enforcers of the Invid edicts - of course, now attempting to execute the humans of the island.

The Invid quickly disappeared in balls of fire over the next hour, as the weapons of the Alphas were overkill for the scouts and enforcers (which could be dropped by the assault rifles developed for human vs. human warfare). Apparently the carnage became too much for the Invid, as one of the human-piloted Battloids showed up to intervene. Indeed, it appeared to be one of the very same two mecha that had chased them from Mexico, up the Pacific coast and across the mountains all the way to Colorado. That short battle ended in stalemate, and while the Invid ran for reinforcements, the humans could only wait for a sign as to where to find their friends. That signal was not long in coming, as soon they picked up a radio broadcast.

"Hey, guys!" Rook called out. "Check the civilian radio bands!"

"Hey, that sounds suspiciously like an old buddy of mine," Lunk replied.

"I think I found that sign you were looking for, Scott," Rook added. "Check out that building at three o'clock." Off to their right, in the dimming light of the evening, they saw the former headquarters of an airline that had gone defunct before the Global War, its windows lighting up to spell the word "HERE". There was a concert lightshow up on the roof, and Lancer was broadcasting live, which could either be considered inspiring, suicidal, or both.

"That's Lancer, for you," Scott deadpanned. "Is he supposed to be calling us, or distracting the Invid, with that stunt?"

"I think both, Scott," Noel called back. "'Ol' Blue Hair' is back with a bunch of his Invid drinking pals."

"Follow me down to the deck, synchronize your launchers with mine, and prepare to fire on my mark.... NOW!" The four Veritechs launched a spread of missiles, none of them directly aimed at an Invid, but in a blanket formation where the blast radius of each missile overlapped, to create a wall of destruction that the lesser Invid could not survive. As for the big one with the human pilot, it was scorched and battered around, but was relatively unhurt. But, it did have to retreat, to replace the losses it just suffered.

"Okay, we've got another respite. Let's go get those guys into mecha. Noel, you take over the concert, so we don't have to worry if you have a relapse."

"Good idea - this fight has already given me a headache."

*********

"Nice shooting!" Alex called up to Scott, as the latter opened his cockpit after setting the Alpha/Beta combination onto the helipad.

"They'll be back," Scott replied wearily, then went back to the Beta to extract Marlene from its cockpit.

"Alex?" Alex turned to find his wife, already out of her cockpit.

"Noel, you're a sight for sore eyes."

"You're not that bad, yourself. I need you to take over for me in the Alpha. I've really overdone it this time. With a little luck, the Invid will give me enough recovery time to take over on stage for Lancer."

"Will you be okay, here?"

"I should be. Lunk's swapping out with Rand. I'm not totally helpless, just tired, and Lunk can watch me until I get my second wind."

"Fine." He kissed her passionately, then they started walking over to her Alpha, where Annie was already reloading the power cells. "That ought to charge your batteries. How long till you take the stage?"

"About 20 minutes. Not even war can stop union-mandated coffee breaks."

"Typical."

"Hey, Alex - you coming or what?" Rand yelled over his Alpha's external speakers.

"Okay, okay..." Alex climbed into the Alpha's cockpit and started it up, as Noel walked over with Lunk, Marlene & Annie, to take cover in by the stage. The Veritechs lifted off, and were soon out of sight. Lunk sent Annie down to check on how much longer the band would be, before coming back up.

Suddenly, an explosion threw the three adults off their feet. Lunk was knocked out cold, having been closest to the detonation. Marlene staggered to her feet first, and was looking around. Noel had been knocked over an air vent, and almost stood up - then dropped back down when she saw that the pink Invid Battloid had landed on the roof, facing Marlene. Always before, when encountering Lancer or Marlene, the pilot of that mecha always seemed to hesitate, and Noel wanted to know why. It was apparent that the pilot was going to hop out of her mecha, and confront Marlene about something - and Noel both suspected, and dreaded, what it was.

"Ariel; I am Sera, Princess of the Invid, and I have come for you," the strange woman stated.

"But, my name is Marlene; I don't understand why you've come for me..."

"Because you've turned against your own people; and I must know why, before we begin the transmutation of our race. Why have you disobeyed the Regis?"

"I-I don't believe what I'm hearing! I'm not an Invid!"

"You were placed among the people of Earth to learn their plans and report back. As of this date the Regis is still awaiting you first report. Do you expect me to believe that you have forgotten who you are, and why you are here?"

"No, no, NO!!! This can't be!"

"What do you mean?" Sera asked, still not realizing the extent of her sister's amnesia.

"You're lying - you must be!" Somewhere below, either a stray shot or a secondary explosion caused the whole building to shake.

"The battle comes closer; I will deal with you later, Ariel." With that, Sera turned and ran to her Battloid, as Lunk started stirring, oblivious to what had just happened.

Noel stood, and watched Sera's Battloid fly east towards Reflex Point. Her theory about Marlene, the one she had never dared say out loud, had proven true. And, what of Ariel? When Noel had nearly died, in that backlash of psychic energy, she had cried out both names, "Marlene" & "Ariel". Who was this Marlene that so totally scrambled Ariel's programming - for that matter, HOW did it occur? It was apparent that, despite Scott's crying out his dead fiancee's name in that attack, Ariel had chosen that same name from somewhere else. Noel was starting to see things in Marlene/Ariel that were eerily similar to the things that she had experienced over five years before, when her own memories were in conflict with the mental echo that Karen had sent back to Earth with Carpenter.

"But, what of Sera? In her reaching out to her sister, she failed to connect to Ariel, but Noel caught a fair amount of bleedover from the attempt. The struggle within Sera's mind was obvious as well. Both Sera and Ariel would have to make some very difficult choices in the next few weeks; choices that could spell victory or disaster for humanity.

Noel walked over to Marlene, who was visibly shaken (and shaking) from what had just occurred.

"Marlene?"

"W-what is it, Noel?" The poor girl was on the verge of shock.

"We need to talk, woman-to-woman." Noel dropped her voice to a whisper. "I saw the whole thing, and I understand. I want to help you understand, as well."

However, before Noel could get Marlene to a private place to talk, the others blew the hive, and it nearly incapacitated both women. Any attempt to have that talk in the short turn was put aside, as they had to go help load up the last Protoculture they would need for their own private trip to Reflex Point, from Carnegie Hall. There was a lot more there than they expected; Highlander and the other resistance groups in the Eastern Hemisphere must have hurt the Invid much more badly than expected, if so much of a backlog of unshipped cells had accumulated.

Finally, they all flew back across the Hudson to where the truck and Alex's hovertank were were hidden. It would only take a few days from there, to reach the eastern frontier of the Reflex Point complex, and the central hive only a week away, if they were foolish enough to try to go in solo. Given what Noel witnessed, it was highly likely, if they tried it, they'd probably even be allowed to get there - but it would be crazy to even consider, nonetheless.

Foremost in their minds, though, was the one big question. The REF should have started arriving last week, but there was as yet no sign of them. What was taking them so long???

Chapter Three:

"I'm a peripheral visionary. I can see the future, but just way off to the sides..."

-Karen Freeman, quoting 20^th century comedian Steven Wright, epigraph in The Plane Truth

Tongue of the Ocean Sound, The Bahamas

"Remember the last time we were here?" Karen asked her uncle, gazing out at the islands as they stood on the flight deck of CVS Vulcan.

"Yeah; we stranded Rick & Lisa on one of those islands to get him to finally get up the balls to propose to her, and you stole their clothes while they were asleep. As it was, we were lucky they were in a good mood when they came back, as friends or not, we were all still their subordinates, and they could have busted all of Skull for doing it - I'm not sure Lang and Breetai could have kept from being prosecuted for their part in it."

"Those were simpler times - if a bit bloody from the Malcontents. At least then, we understood the enemy a little better."

"What's the ETA for our last arrivals?"

"Marie's in flight from Africa; she should be here in about twenty minutes. After then, it's a matter of getting Dana and the others aboard, and debriefing them. Their intel should be usefulm but there are some things that are well, better left for the actual debriefing."

"I'm not sure I want to, hearing that. Give me an example."

"Would you believe my brother-in-law, in a Battloid-mode hovertank, riding a Bioroid Hovercraft into combat, doing bad Master impressions over the externals to try and incite the Invid?"

"That boy is truly strange."

"He reminds me a lot of you, when you were younger. That's probably one of the things that attracted Noel to him in the first place." Karen kissed her uncle on the cheek, but in a way that made Scott a bit uncomfortable (as she came close to nibbling on his earlobe). As much as he loved her as his brother's daughter, he had long known that Karen's feelings for him were a little bit abnormal for said relationship. It was probably a side-effect of her rapid aging and a series of emotional crises occurring over 5 months, that most children take 20 years to go through. The idea of a physically adult, mentally child, going through the Electra Complex while all of those teen hormones running through their veins would probably have given Freud a stroke.

He decided to cool things off real quick, by giving her a quick shove off the flight deck of the currently motionless carrier. After all, she would have plenty of time to teleport back to the deck, before she hit the water. However, she apparently picked up on it, drug him with her, and did a short teleport to a few feet over the water, then teleporting them back to the flight deck, after they surfaced, and before any alarms could be activated.

No, Karen, he thought - you are the one that's really strange - and you've been acting more and more strange, as the date for the assault approached. Something was really eating at her, that was bringing out a lot of the "weird" stuff in her personality that had been dormant for most of the last decade.

*********

The assault of the Okeechobee Hive was launched at 0800 the next morning. Scott & Marie led the attack, flying in one of the few shadow Legios that the group had modified with devices acquired in the rare shipments from orbit. Highlander would handle the air assault, while the Southern Knights and the Vulcan's Hammer, Aegis and Lightning Squadrons would cover the transport of the ground forces. The light ground teams, those that were in power armor, were being carried as close as they could to the complex with low-flying hovercraft derived from old Zentraedi hover platforms. The heavier stuff needed a little longer trip, as the SLV Jason went overland on its contragravity hover systems to debark the Destroids & Battloids in the ruins of Indiantown, and something that large and slow would need a lot more air cover. While they COULD have used modern craft to transport the stuff in, most of those newer items used Protoculture power systems - it would probably take the Invid longer to detect the non-Protoculture Jason (fitted with sufficient dampers to not reveal the Destroids within) than the hovercraft loaded with active Cyclones.

Not counting Cyclones, the assault force consisted of over 400 mecha of almost every type that had ever walked, flew or rolled out the design studios of humanity's Robotechnology labs. About the only types not present were pre-Zentraedi prototypes, the pre-Masters prototypes of Japan, and the aquatic-only mecha of the navy (The last of which were waiting off both coasts of Florida to serve as rescue vehicles). However, even with those kinds of numbers, they still found themselves outnumbered by a factor of ten, by just the scouts.

"Everyone hit the breaks and go upright! Launch Plan Delta, on my mark!" Delta involved the Legios teams of the first wave going to Battloid, synchronizing their SRM launchers, and each team blanketing a specific region with proximity detonations designed to create a wall of destruction. While this tactic took out half the incoming Invid, it also took half their load of air to air missiles. However, that would give the Cyclone forces the ability to make a dent in those numbers without being themselves overwhelmed.

Each of the shadow mecha then proceeded to the edge of the barely-visible energy shield of the hive. Each of the mecha dropped to ground level, and used their disruptors to hole the shield for the infantry that was coming up behind them. Once through, they regrouped at the hive entrance, and repeated the process with all their disruptors combined, insuring the shield would not be coming back up any time soon. Of course, all these disruptions without apparent cause (not to mention a volley of several hundred missiles from thin air), meant they'd be expecting company any time now, and the hive guards (unlike the other Invid) used both optics as well as Protoculture sensors, and would see them despite the shadow devices. They would have to find their way to the hive center, quickly.

"This way," Karen said, motioning with her Alpha's free hand. She was standing in front of a mecha stasis chamber. "There's a drop tube in here, though its support field is turned off."

"You think you can lead us to the Brain?"

"With my eyes closed." She stepped off into the tube, gradually descending on the foot thrusters of the Battloid. The others followed, hovering down too levels into another stasis area. They hadn't made it more than a few steps into the chamber, when the alarms rang out. Even the non-telepathic people heard the telepathic call-out.

"Warning! Intruders in hive center! All Invid in hive come to Brain's defense!"

"Okay, everyone, hit the kill switches on the Shadow Devices. We don't want only half the Invid seeing us - even they could figure out something's up!"

A fiirefight soon began, at first lopsided in favor of the human mecha, but then two of the human-piloted mecha arrived, and they were soon in one of the toughest fights they'd ever had. Scott's Alpha lost an arm, and sustained severe leg damage, before the two newcomers were even scratched. Seeing this, Marie and Karen dove into the fray, firing missiles at such close range that they were damaging each other almost as much as their targets. The end result was that there was little left of the two enemy mecha, and Karen's Alpha was only slightly better off than Scott's (missing its arms, instead of an arm and a leg), from actually having grabbed one of their foes and holding the larger mecha for Marie to shoot at. Karen chose to get into her Cyclone, and let Scott take over her Alpha (in Guardian mode).

As they approached the Brain chamber, Karen stepped into the way.

"Before we try force, let me try talking to it."

"Are you out of your mind?" both Karen's father and uncle exclaimed in unison.

"Trust me; I might be able to get it to shut down like the one on Tyrol."

"I'll give you a shot at it;" Scott replied reluctantly. "But one false move, and it's toast."

Karen took her helmet off, and walked up to the brain, calling out with her telepathy.

"<Hey, You!>"

"<Who are you, human, to dare approach me this way?>"

"<My name is Karen. You may call me your master. I am the slayer of the Regent, and his human ally. Submit to my will or be destroyed!>"

"<I only obey the orders of the Regis,>", the Brain replied, seemingly amused by the claims.

"<Perhaps, I can change your mind.>"

A battle of wills commenced, even more intense than the one she had with Edwards, on Optera - after all, she was looking to NOT kill this foe. It went on for several minutesw, the others having to occasionally fend off Invid coming to the Brain's rescue, before the brain slumped to the bottom of the tank.

"Is it dead?" Marie asked.

"No, just sleeping, until I wake it up. If you contact our forces outside, you'll find the Invid outside are non-responsive. If you can get them to hold off, I can call the Invid in a few at a time, and put them into storage. I've engineered a hostile takeover. As long as I don't get them within a few hundred klicks of the Regis, I should be able to even control a small force, mentally."

"You've got to be kidding me," Scott said.

"Nope. We should be able to use this hive as our base camp, since the Regis now thinks the hive is gone. It will allow us to make up some of the time we lost getting here."

"Well, if we do, YOU get to write the report on why and how.." Rick's never gonna believe this one.

*******

The next day was even stranger. Karen had mastered the controls of one of the human-piloted Battloids, now painted in RDF Red & White with unit insignia. She'd also had several scouts painted in similar colors, and was now using the Invid mecha to scout further north, while waiting for repairs of her mecha. Scott took one look at the motley crew of candy-striped Invid flying north in the evening light, then went to bed. "Face it, Scott. Rick won't believe this, even with video footage," he mumbled to himself.

Chapter Four:

"Scott (Bernard) had been trying to deny it ever since he first had those thoughts about the connection between Sera, Corg and Marlene. Marlene refused to believe what she had been told in Manhattan. The truth cut through both of them, straight to the heart. Scott felt betrayed by his own heart, Marlene by her origins. Why does love have to hurt so much, some times? The events of the days leading to Reflex Point prove just how human the Invid were really were."

-Noel Tyler, interviewed by Maria Bartley-Rand, for the "Protocultures: Macross+60" documentary (2059)

Pennsylvania

What could have been a journey of a single day, was now in its third day. Scott was playing it safe; Alex understood that, as did the others. But, something had come over both Noel and Marlene, something neither one would discuss, though it was obvious to the others that something had happened. It was a bit unsettling to both Scott & Alex, as neither could find a way to broach the subject. They were currently camped on the Allegheny River, not far upstream from the crater lake of old Pittsburgh. They had already planned on breaking camp. But the lights of a large battle to the west had kept them in concealment until the battle died down.

Finally, they ventured out to see the results of the battle; Scott in the Legios, everyone else onthe ground. In the valley leading towards the former site of Pittsburgh, enough shattered mecha were scattered that a future archaeologic dig might make the mistake of thinking that the references to the Steel City was to the graveyard of mecha, since the real source of the name had been vaporized decades before. Despite the far greater number of Invid wrecks, it was clear that the human side had lost. As they watched, the last Legios of that assault force crashed into a hillside almost a mile away, trailing smoke from its Alpha cockpit area, but strangely not being pursued by the Invid. The majority of the Invid left, on the other hand, appeared to be retreating back toward Ohio.

The wrecked Veritechs, though fairly piecemeal, had obvious differences to those the group was using. One obvious defference, to Noel & Alex, were that some of the mecha had to have been Shadow-equipped, like the one they'd seen crashing on a failing autopilot.

"Karbarran , Tracielle Works;" Noel noted, studying the remains of an Alpha, mercifully missing its cockpit section. You can see the factory insignia on the wing roots. And, I've only seen that wing insignia at briefings on what to expect when the REF was ready to assault Reflex Point." The insignia was a stylized J in a heart. "Jupiter Division, isn't it Scott?"

"I believe so;" Scott replied. When I left Tyrol, the Karbarrans hadn't got their mecha factories working up to REF quality standards, even for producing parts for assembly on by the REF itself. The heart symbol was one of the ones being discussed for Jupiter, when Mars Division left,"

"Noel, keep the others here," Alex stated to his wife, solemnly. "Scott and I are going to go search for survivors; Stay here, and be ready to set up an aid station, if we find ambulatory wounded."

"I will, but it doesn't look good, does it?"

"No, it doesn't; If Mars Division was any indication, some idiot back at Tyrol wasn't training the pilots how to do atmospheric ejections."

************

It was as they feared; they found no survivors. They did find some mecha whose cockpits had been intact until impact, but it was obvious the pilots made the mistake of trying to crash-land instead of using their ejection system. They checked the Legios that they saw crash, but found its Beta empty, its bomb bay doors open, as was typical for missions where the Beta was used to transport small units of Cycloners behind enemy lines - so there might be a survivor or two, somewhere.

"What should we do now, Scott?" Lancer asked. It was on all their minds. Should they wait for the next wave before advancing, or continue on, and hope to link up with the expected forces coming up from the south? For that matter, if they did wait, should they take the time to try to lay the identifiable dead to rest, or avoid the wreckage in case the Invid come back looking for survivors?

"Can't we just leave?" Annie pleaded. "I hate this place."

But, before anyone could try to answer her, an Invid they thought dead staggered back onto its one good leg, tried to walk toward them, then collapsed again, truly dead, from the effort. The nutrient fluid from its cockpit spewed everywhere as it fell on its face.

"Everybody back off!" Rand cautioned. "Remember what Alex and Noel smelled like after they used their sabers to go for those cockpit kills in Colorado?"

"Don't remind me," Alex replied; Even with the decontamination showers they had access to, it took several days to get rid of the smell on them, and it wasn't until they got to Hot Springs for Annie's birthday, that they were able to completely get the smell off their ride armor & Cyclone.

"Hold it right where you are! Don't move!" A woman in black ride armor ran towards them, a video camera on her shoulder.

"Who are you?" Scott asked. "Are you from Admiral Hunter's group?"

"How about you identifying yourself, first?" she snapped back. "You're not wearing armor from this attack wave, after all."

"Lieutenant Commander Scott Bernard, formerly of the Twenty-First Squadron, Mars Division. Most of the others here are indigenous forces trained by Vulcan Division, or actual members of that force on detached duty. And, you are?"

"You actually made it this far; Scott; I'm impressed. Don't you recognize me?"

"Can't say that I do."

"We went to school together on the SDF-3, until the Hunters left with the Sentinels; Sue Graham. I'm with Intel Division, now, attached to the Thirty-Sixth Jupiter - or at least I was. My orders were to film the initial assault, and transmit the recording back to the fleet in Lunar orbit, so they could look for exploitable weaknesses. I barely made it out of my Beta after sending the recording - I don't think it will help them much."

"Was that all you did? Film the battle, while the people in your squadron died?" Scott wasn't happy.

"It's not like I was trained to use any of the weaponry - the Alpha pilot had it slaved to his controls, and I was lucky to figure out how to pop the Beta doors to get out. And, another thing - I wasn't part of that squadron - I'd never met any of them, before the attack; I'm a Corps intel analyst and archivist, not trained for front-line operations."

"Then, how did you get assigned to filming an exploratory assault?"

"I... I made someone mad at me."

Scott still hadn't really placed her, then it hit him. Sue had been high-school age media prodigy; gold enough to legally be an adult, by post-Zentraedi standards, but she preferred the "gifted high-school reporter" spin. She managed to use her parents' positions in the REF to get brought along as one of the documentarians for the mission, and from there, left the SDF-3 with the Hunters to go on the Sentinels aid mission. As he remembered the Sentinels' triumphant return, he realized that Graham was never far from the Admirals - especially Rick. Scott had a sinking feeling as to what might have led to Sue's presence here, the lone survivor of a recon by force that was doomed to fail, as it ignored the lessons that he and the other fesistance forces of Earth had learned over the last 1-4 years.

"Look, don't you think we should get out of here before the Invid show back up? I don't think your Protoculture emanations could have been picked up for a more than a hundred miles. Besides, that carcass probably reported us in its dying thoughts to the hive."

"Unhh... Scott, the Invid are coming back!" Marlene warned through a wince, but everyone but Sue could have told that from just looking at her. Strangely, the Invid deaths earlier hadn't bothered her, as they had as recently as Manhattan, but their approaching communications were doing it now.

"Push over your Cyclones," Sue suggested, after seeing how many were on the horizon, still too far for the Invid to see them, but in numbers massive enough to be seen.

"Make them look like the riders were thrown, or put them through half a depowered transformation, and push them over. If there's no sign of activity, and they look abandoned or wrecked, the Invid usually ignored mecha in our fights on Praxis and Garuda."

"It's worth a shot; we sure can't just stand here," Scott acknowledged, looking at the gross or more of incoming Invid (resembling locusts on the horizon), and the others quickly followed suit.

*********

The Invid came, then left, but not before kicking around Lunk's truck a bit (almost into the river - and it had only been stopped by hitting a huge downed tree that probably had been lying there since the Zentraedi knocked it down), and poking at, if not actually stepping on, the Cyclones. After the Invid wandered off (probably thinking the dying Invid was hallucinating in its death, or remembering its mortal wound, Noel suggested), they recovered their Cyclones (including Sue's, she'd left hidden outside the clearing), and returned to their camp for their mecha. They then slowly relocated downstream to a thicker thicket of trees downstream on the shore of Lake Pittsburgh.

As the sun set on their new camp, Sue took pictures of them with her digital camera and printer, and she did her best to bring them up to date on the status of Operation Eviction. The others were really interested in her description of the Shadow mecha; but not Alex & Noel, who had already used them in combat. They found the Synchro-cannon more interesting, which used a smaller version of the reflex cannon technology of the SDFs and the GMU - in fact, it had long been thought that one couldn't get a working reflex cannon that small, and as former tankers, it really sounded neat. That one had been airdropped, with the recon by force as a cover, was surprising; but since the transport carrying the crew didn't make it, it seemed a bit moot.

Before Sue could discuss the field piece further, a new group of Invid arrive, and sat down in a clearing only a couple hundred meters away, as the humans quickly doused all the lights in the camp..Amazingly, though, it appeared they hadn't been seen.

Leading this group was one of the human-piloted Battloids, a different one than the two that had been their shadows all the way from Mexico to Manhattan. The pilot was a blonde man, whose verbal orders to his Invid subordinates left no doubt as to who was in charge, or as to what they were looking for - the synchro-cannon.

"Human pilots!" Graham whispered loudly. "How did this come about?"

"We were hoping you could shed some light on it," Alex whispered back. "They started showing up about a year ago. Were all of Edwards' traitors accounted for on Optera? We ran into a few of those that deserted him before he fled there, and they weren't all that nice, but the few of these that we've ran into don't appear to be any more cognizant of Earth culture than the typical REF deep colonist, and those types died like tropical flowers in a hard freeze."

"They can't be Edwards' people, they were all accounted for - I covered their trials."

"Then, where could they have come from - clones?"

"Who knows - this is something REF back at Tyrol hasn't heard of yet, at least at my security clearance level."

"I know we reported it about 5 months ago, directly to Admiral Hunter;" Scott whispered. "We managed to get a link to fleet up temporarily in Utah. I'm surprised you weren't informed to watch for them."

"Hunter's not exactly completely in charge back there - the council is trying to armchair general the war, and none of them ever served a day in uniform. Even I have more military experience, thanks to the Praxians making sure all of us women in the Sentinels could defend ourselves. But all those people who never left Tyrol, and slobbered at the feet of Edwards while we were getting killed on Karbarra, Praxis, Garuda and Haydon IV now somehow think they are the only ones who know how to handle long term planning. There's even talk of doomsday weapons for use on Earth if they can't liberate it."

"That's insane!"

"It is; I'm hoping it really is just a rumor, but I'm afraid it isn't; there's some reason why a lot of the empty old Pioneer Mission colony ships got called to Tyrol to be refit for Saturn Division - it sure isn't for personnel transport, as you well know."

"Don't remind me. Sue, do you have any idea what happened to the synchro-cannon?"

"It was dropped about five kilometers away from the battle. When I finally bailed from the Beta in my Cyclone, I went back to the drop zone, and hid it in a cave that looked to be what was left of an old mine blown open by the Zentraedi. I'd driven back, trying to track the Beta as it drifted down on its failing thrusters, when I spotted you. It was supposed to have been on a stationary hover, but its systems were failing even as I bailed."

"We've got to get that weapon before the Invid find it."

"It can wait until morning - the Invid are looking in all the wrong places, and they'd never recognize it mixed in with all that mine rubble in the dark. But, once you get it, you'll be on your own. My Cyclone's only weapon is mightier than the sword in proverb only, and the Praxians gave up on training me with anything more complicated than basic self defense, as a lost cause. I'm a media face and a data gatherer, not a frontline warrior; sorry."

"Just great..." Scott snarled, but realized it was probably an accurate assessment. "Do you think you can lead a couple of us to the weapon in the morning without being seen?"

"It shouldn't be too hard, so long as the inertial mapper doesn't go on the fritz, and the Invid don't jam the signals from the long-range GPS satellites Jupiter division launched beyond lunar orbit - of course those sats are only gonna be good for a week before they drift beyond their accuracy tolerances."

"Good; we'll leave before sunrise."

"Scott, don't do it," Marlene pleaded, having sat quietly through the entire encounter.

"Marlene's right, in a way," Alex interjected. "Scott, you'll be needed here with the Veritechs more than you would at the controls of the cannon. I could go, since I've got the most heavy gun experience, but that experience would probably be best used here. If rand goes, we'll have our best mecha pilots here, and if we have to abandon the gun, you can pick them up in the Legios. I've got a plan that might just work."

"What's that?"

"The gun really isn't all that good against swarms, though it will blow holes through them. It was meant for use assaulting the hive itself. So, it doesn't matter which of us is at the controls. Sue gets Rand to the gun, then moves it on its auxiliary power to where he can get a few good shots at the Invid down by the lake, from the other side from us. There appears to be a veritable camp of them over there - the Regis must have told them to not come home until the synchro-cannon was taken care of. Rand softens them up a bit with the cannon, and when they take the bait, we lift off and hit them in the ass. They won't know what hit them."

"It might just work. Rand, you feel up for it?"

"I can't wait to get my hands on it - though I'm not to sure about this idea of me as bait."

*********

When the others got up in the pre-dawn light, they found that Annie had gone with Sue and Rand, and they had left an hour ahead of schedule. Scott smelled a rat, suspecting that Sue was wanting some good human interest footage at the gun, before the actual footage of the gun in action. They had barely gotten into their gear and into their mecha, when the synchro-cannon opened up, destroying multiple scouts on the ground with the first shot. The four Veritech aircraft waited about a half-minute for the Invid to rise off the ground, before taking off themselves, as Alex got hull-down on a debris hill with his Spartacus in Tank Mode, and started taking shots at the biggest normal Invid mecha - Scott was going to take on the human pilot personally.

Two minutes after the first shot was fired, over one hundred Invid had been destroyed, mostly by Rand after he figured out how to change the beam focus to get a shorter, but several times wider, beam, on the pulse bursts. He wanted to go continuous beam, like some of the old pics of the SDF-1 in action, but that required having a spaceship (or at least the GMU) as a power source, so he had to stick to pulse mode. He was working on his second hundred by the time the Invid finally managed to figure out strategies other than flying down the throat of the gun. He had Annie set a demolition charge onthe cannon, and they ran, noting with a little irritation that Sue had left before he'd really gotten good with the gun. The cannon blewup while surrounded by two dozen swarming scouts, destroying them as well. By the time he made it to the rendezvous with Scott & Marlene, the situation was well in hand, though the human pilot was still being elusive.

Rand separated the Beta from Scott's Alpha, and soon found himself in a duel with the Invid leader, before Annie and Marlene had the chance to fully strap into the bomb bay's bench seat. It seemed as if the man knew it was the heavy gunner that had destroyed most of his forces that had taken the controls of the Beta, and was bent on vengeance. As he did so, nearly all of the remaining Invid fled back toward Ohio, as their mission of destroying the synchro-cannon had been accomplished - taking care of Rand was personal.

Rand tried to fire his missiles, only to find that the missiles wouldn't arm due to a separation glitch making the combat computer think the Alpha was still attached and in the way. He then switched to the Beta's massive arm cannons, that he'd only used once before (to great effect), on the other male-piloted Battloid they'd fought in Manhattan. It took some fairly radical flying, more than what Scott had thought Rand capable of, to get into point blank range, before he opened fire. The move caught the Invid by surprise, and Rand hosed him down with all six barrels on full automatic. The Invid mecha took several hits that would have been catastrophic on their own, and quickly plummeted to the ground right in front of Sue, who was filming the battle from much closer than she should have.

Somehow, the pilot survived the crash, only to be finished off by friendly fire, as an armed scout strafed Sue, not realizing she was unarmed and no threat to the pilot. Everyone quickly rushed to her as they killed that scout, and made sure no other Invid were still in the area.

As they approached, both Sue and the pilot were hemorrhaging badly; this was already fatal for the Invid, and probably so for Sue. But, the really disconcerting thing was the fact that the "human" Invid pilot had bled the same green as any other Invid.

"Is this guy really an Invid, or what?" Lunk asked.

Scott put the Invid out of his mind, and went to see Sue. "Alex,how is she?"

"Terminal; if we had access to a Zentraedi cloning chamber, I might be able to have it reconstruct her spine, and even then it would be touch and go. There's nothing I can do for her. She can still talk, but I've given her a spinal just above the trauma."

"It seems I've got pictures of an Invid with the body of a human," Sue gasped, to Scott.

"Were they worth dying for, Sue?"

"Anyone who bleeds green blood must be an Invid," Annie erupted behind them. "But, why would they make themselves like us? He looks human, but he didn't react like one of us; right, Marlene? Uh, Marlene?" When Marlene didn't answer her, Annie looked up to see Marlene staring at her own arm, where she had been cut by the tumbling around of the Beta in that gunfight. Green blood was seeping from the wound. Slowly, everyone's eyes turned to her, as each noted others looking, but all were trying to deny what they were seeing.

"No - NO!!!!" Marlene screamed, shaking her head in her hands.

"Marlene," Scott pleaded, walking up to her, putting his hand below the cut on her arm. He didn't want to believe it, but when he brought his hand back, he had to accept the reality of the green blood on his hand. "Marlene, I... I..."

Marlene turned, and ran into the dark woods, tears streaming.

"No, wait!" Rand called, but Scott held him back before he could give chase.

"Scott, the facts are staring you right in the face and you're just going to have to believe it."

"You're wrong, Sue, because that woman proves what a person is made of doesn't determine their spirit or the love they possess. But, we've got to accept one thing - Marlene will never feel the same around us, knowing what she does now. She has to find her own way, her own life."

"I can sympathize with her," Sue said, weakly. "I just wish I could start my life over again. Tell Admiral Hayes that I'm sorr-" Sue's eyes closed, and the rest of her body went as limp as the part below her wounds.

"She's gone," Alex said, quietly.

Scott stood erect, and saluted her. "Sue Graham, you were the most dedicated woman I've ever met in my entire military career. Good-bye, and be at peace." The others joined in the salute, as Alex disengaged Sue's wrecked Cyclone from her corpse; it was likely that had he attempted that earlier, it would have killed her instantly, as it had helped immobilize her. He laid her out, then gathered up the packs she'd had slung over her shoulders, holding her spare cameras, recordings and photos.

He looked through the latter, the last being a snapshot of a much more carefree Scott and Marlene, taken the previous afternoon. Alex's heart went out for Scott; the anguish Bernard was going through was a bit like what he had gone through when he had discovered Noel's origins, and from what he'd heard, a lot more like what Scott Freeman had gone through with Marie.

Noel came up to him, and put her arm around his shoulder. Alex looked into her eyes, and knew without asking that Noel had known about Marlene's true nature before this tragedy.

"Noel, why didn't you tell us?"

"I- I couldn't," she whispered, trying to keep the others from hearing. "And, would you have believed me, if I had suggested it? And, how would the others react - or she react? She only found out in Manhattan, and it didn't go well when she did, then - she was in denial right up to now."

"Put that way, you're right. Noel, what's to become of them? Scott & Marlene..."

"I don't know. All I know is that tomorrow will be the finale; for better or for worse. Before the sun sets twice more, the war will be over."

And, as the sun rose to the east, rumblings of battle echoed from the southwest, like the thunder of a distant storm.

Chapter Five:

"Sherman said 'War is all hell', and it is. But, too many people tend to forget this, which leads to their late realization of this truth even uglier." - Scott Freeman

It was around 1400 local time when they reached the locale of the fighting they'd heard at dawn, or at least the eastern end of it. The entire Ohio Valley from the Big Sandy down to the Kentucky was a war zone, one still being pacified. The heaviest fighting had been in the Cincinnati area, amidst the ruins of what had been the capital of the xenophobic nation of York. The battle for the fortress of Prince Harry, formerly the Kings Island amusement park, had taken much of the day, and Highlander was still setting up their field headquarters in the ruins of Goshen, when Bernard's group flew in at 1800.

The lack of continuing combat was disturbing; a human commander with the resources of the Invid would have continued to press their numerical advantage - yet the Invid were actually allowing the REF forces to consolidate. The only thing that would make sense was that there was sort of indecision or leadership conflict going on at Reflex Point - but wasn't that impossible for the Invid?

"Hey, Alex!" they heard, as they walked toward the center of camp. Alex turned and saw Sean Phillips coming out of the officers' mess line with a stack of covered food trays.

"How's it hanging, Sean? I'm surprised Marie hasn't killed - or at least, gelded - you by now."

"The Invid have kept her too busy to try. Come on over to the tent and join us for dinner. Marie, Dana and the Colonel are in a conference with General Fokker and the Jupiter Division commanders right now, but they are supposed to join us in a few minutes, so I got nominated to haul the food over. I've got enough extra trays for you four officers, but the non-coms and civilians will have to go through the line. Before you object, the line has the better food - probably hotter food too; the only advantage officers get is having dinner more quickly, because of all the planning and reorganization we'll have to do tonight."

Alex & Scott looked to the others for a decision, but saw it was already being made for them. In fact, Rank and Lunk appeared to already be drifting towards the chow line, and Rook & Annie were almost to that point.

"Sounds good to me; Rook, tell the others we meet back here in 90 minutes."

"Gotcha." She and Annie quickly fell into the chow line behind Lunk.

As they entered the mess tent from the kitchen area, the tent seemed to quiet a bit, as the people who entered were recognized. One of the people at a table near the door stood, and practically lifted Bernard off the floor with a bear hug,

"Glad you made it, boss."

"Ben? Ben, is that you?"

"In the cloned flesh. You know us Hunters - we're hard to kill."

"Did Claudia make it?"

"Yeah, but she left about ten minutes ago. Highlander managed to divert most of the third wave to Africa. We heard about what happened to your wave. I heard about Marlene; I'm sorry."

At the mention of the name, Scott went somber, and walked over to Sean and the trays, then left with his tray.

"Damn, is he still giving himself that much trouble over her death?" Ben asked, as Sean brought their trays over

"No, we think he'd pretty much shook that by the time we got to Point Kilo;" Alex answered. "but that's where his other problem came from. We found an amnesiac in the ruins there, that answered to Marlene as well. Over the last year, she traveled with us, and Scott fell for her pretty hard."

"What happened? She die too?"

"If only it had been so simple. The spearhead that got slaughtered yesterday over Pittsburgh had a single survivor; she led us to where they'd dropped the Synchro-cannon, and we used it to distract the Invid this morning while the rest of Jupiter came in, and you guys moved up from the south. That survivor died, but we won - but in the victory we got a double shock. First of all, we found out that the Invid pilots we thought were human, are actually Invid in human form. The bigger shock was that the girl that had been traveling with, that Scott had fallen for so hard, was one of them."

"Oh... my... God."

"Considering those goddamn Battloids didn't start showing up until about a month after we rescued her, we think that the girl was a prototype of some sort, either left for us to find, to see if they could pass as human, or was a prototype they had abandoned. If she was a spy, she wasn't doing it knowingly or willingly - and had she been actively spying, we'd have been killed in our sleep long before we got to this side of the Rockies, as they had ample opportunities to do so, had they had a mole in the group."

"Do you have a picture of her?"

"A few, that got taken yesterday. The resemblance to humans is about perfect, About the only way you can tell is if they aren't acting human, or if you draw blood. Noel?"

"Here you go;" Noel said, digging the picture of Scott & Marlene together, laughing, from the bag of Sue's personal effects.

"Wow, she's a looker. And she's an Invid? It seems like every one of these we've ran into could have been a movie star - we should have realized that something was funny."

"Ben, what happened to Scott?" Claudia asked, having come back into the tent. "He looks like he's been through hell."

"As we heard, Marlene didn't make it; then this morning, he found out that his latest girlfriend was actually an Invid simulagent with amnesia."

"You're kidding-"

"I wish I was. Karen's little sister brought in this picture of them, from just a few hours before tehy found out."

"Hmmm... looks like a professional's work. Isn't that Sue Graham's identifier on the back?"

"Yeah - they were some of her last. She died about the same time we found out that Marlene was an Invid."

"Scott named her after his dead girlfriend? That's kinky!"

"Not exactly - near as we can tell, she chose that name herself, though she may have heard us talking about Scott's fiancee."

"She actually looks like she could be the original Marlene's sister. A little taller, a little lighter and longer hair, but their faces are similar - especially the eyes. That's really spooky."

"Ben, Claudia - how well did you know Sue Graham?"

"Too well," Claudia replied. "In the months that we lived with our parents after our cloning, she was always trying to get way too friendly with me, to use me to time alone with Rick. Eventually, we had to leave orders she wasn't welcome anymore. I'm surprised she was with the assault force, even as a mopic."

"Attention, people; here comes our fearless leader!" an anonymous voice yelled into the tent.

Scott Freeman walked into the tent, followed by his wife, his niece and the squadron leaders under his command. Karen, Marie Freeman and Marie Crystal sat down with Noel, and started talking up a storm, making Alex feel left out, as Lancer had gone to check on the others. In fact, Noel ended up being the one to give them the information on what was quickly dubbed the "Fifth-Stage Evolution Invid". Eventually, Scott Freeman left the others, and took Alex aside.

"Alex, Noel said you're upset about something."

"Yes, to the point I'm wanting to resign my commission immediately after the battle."

"That's a little extreme; what's this about?"

"You remember Sue Graham? She went with you on the Sentinels mission."

"Yes; Noel told me she died this morning."

"Lisa Hunter had her killed."

"What in the hell are you talking about?"

"She went in with the 36^th Jupiter yesterday, and was the only survivor until she was killed by the Invid. She had no business embedded with a combat unit, especially one going on what was known before launch to be a probable suicide mission. According to Sue, she was there because she'd pissed Lisa off - and talking with the Hunter kids confirmed it was because Lisa thought Sue was a homewrecker, and wanted to get rid of her."

"That's a gross oversimplification of what really happened."

"Sounds pretty cut and dried to me; an abuse of power for personal reasons."

"Remember who you're talking about, Commander. Not only is she your superior officer, she's also your wife's godmother. Before you spread any more slander around, you need to hear the whole story, and for that I'll have to send back to Africa for copies of my personal correspondence. Meet me in the command tent at 0500, and I'll show you what really happened. Until then, keep Sue's claims to yourself - that's a direct order."

"Fine. But, your evidence better be pretty damn convincing." Alex stood, and walked off, steaming.

"Scott, you were pretty hard on him."

"I had to be; heck, I was tempted to deck him when he started accusing Lisa of those things."

"I know that Dad talked to you about what was going on, but you've told me so little about what was occuring. Are you going to tell me any time soon?"

"It's a long, convoluted, story. IT's best if sit in with us when I talk to him tomorrow."

*************

"Colonel?"

"Come in, Alex, and sit down. If any of the others in your group feel the same way, you can pass this along to them." Scott handed Alex a folder with several transcripts and text messages in it, along with Sue Graham's evaluation reports.

"Two months ago, I got a call from Max Sterling, who has been living on Haydon IV for most of the time since the Regis departed from there, on her way to Earth. He told me that Lisa had contacted him for advice on reassigning Graham. She wanted Graham reassigned from Uranus Division, which is the SDF-3 complement, to Jupiter, which was to leave Tyrol two days after the call. For obvious reasons, she felt that it would be improper to cut such orders personally. Max wasn't too thrilled with the idea either, so he called me to discuss his options. After a few quick conference calls with Lisa and Rolf, we got down to the root of the matter, and arranged the transfer."

"Then, that makes you as guilty as she is."

"Guilty of what? You see, Graham always has had a crush on Rick, almost as bad as Minmei was infatuated with him back in Macross. Of course, a lot of young girls have had crushes on the heroes of the Zentraedi War, but Sue was in a position to act on them. It's a known fact that she never dated anyone during her time with the mission - Lord knows, there were more than enough guys on just the Sentinels mission that would have given their left nut to go out with her, let alone back on Tyrol - she was one of the few young, single females left on the entire mission, by the time you were fighting the Masters. She started trying to get in tight with the cloned daughter of Rick & Lisa, trying to find out their schedules and when to be alone with Rick. The premise was that she was working on a biography of Rick, and was trying to get him to agree to meet at her apartment for some interviews."

"That sounds suspicious, but can you prove anything?"

"Well, up to that point, the evidence was circumstantial. But, then she was seen buying a very sexy piece of lingerie, items for a romantic dinner for two, and not much else, when she was supposedly out doing research for the biography. Remember, despite her looks, Sue was quite the camera nerd, and according to her last physical, still a virgin. She was probably getting her ideas for seduction from romance novels. She made a few conversational slips to the girls working at the store that she had a hot date lined up - and the only thing remotely on her schedule was the 'interview', and no one, not even her neighbors, had ever seen her with a boyfriend or girlfriend - yes, they even checked that out. It was fairly obvious, by that point, that Rick was going to be the target of a seduction - one that probably wouldn't go anywhere, and probably would have embarrassed Sue, more than Lisa - but it could have caused no end of scandal. This, at a time when Rick & Lisa's faction was already losing more and more power to the 'chickenhawk' faction that's been trying to 'armchair general' this conflict for the last five years - you've seen where that's led, and how many people have died as a result of their stupid ideas, stupid military planning, and stupid tactics. If Sue went ahead, it could be disaster for Earth.

"On seeing this evidence, we approved the transfer, but we made it a reporter's dream assignment. She had clearance for any information, any mission, any equipment. She had full freedom to do whatever she wished, once Jupiter Division reached the solar system. Once here, instead of staying with the majority of Jupiter Division that was to hit Earth today, she chose to go with the 36^th, despite warnings that was almost certainly to be a suicide mission, as Vulcan was a day behind schedule, and wouldn't be able to cover their arrival. She took over one of the few Shadow-equipped Betas they had, which required that the Alpha pilot keep the Beta attached.

"I talked to Colonel Harrington, who was originally supposed to have had her going in with one of his Cyclone units. He told me that he felt that Graham's motivation for going on the Veritech assault and cannon deployment was to get great footage of the Invid, that would give her a means to try to worm her way back into the Hunters' lives when they arrived today. Maybe, she even thought that if she got injured or killed in combat, it would put Lisa into a major guilt trip, if not incrimination like what you were feeling yesterday. We went to great extremes to allow Sue to avoid combat; but she chose to make a nuisance of herself in the attack, and became part of what she knew was a suicide mission before she joined it. Ironically, she did that important footage she wanted, but it cost her life."

"We couldn't have known..."

"I know; I guess Sue thought she lived a charmed life. When everything collapsed around her, she needed someone to put the easy blame on. Right up till the end, she couldn't handle that she only had herself to blame."

"Colonel... Scott... That's not entirely true. I think I understand Sue's last words, now. She was trying to say, 'Tell Admiral Hayes I'm sorry'. I'm not sure how much of it was apologizing for the events that lead to her being back on Earth, or how she squandered the opportunities she was given once she got here, but she did make the effort."

"Then she finally learned responsibility, a day too late. I'll relay the apology to Lisa when she gets here."

"Don't; not just yet. She'll probably misunderstand, the way that we did. Save it for tomorrow."

"Then you have grown up more as well, in the last few years. You were still a bit naive, even after facing the Masters, and you're definitely not the same little boy Karen rescued off that cliff in Montana back in 'Seventeen."

"That was you? I had almost forgotten."

"Yes; me, Marie, Karen and Roger. Hikaru would be proud of you, if he was still here."

"Karen and Noel... Did Karen know, back then, about Noel and me, when she saved my life?"

"I don't know; I've never known Karen to see possibilities more than a few days prior. And, I know that when we got back here, five years ago, it was a shock to Marie and me that you and Noel were a couple, as Karen never mentioned you again, after helping Hikaru set up your accelerated education."

"If you don't mind, sir; I've got to get back to Bernard and the others. Noel and I have been acting as irregulars too long to easily assimilate back into a normal unit."

"Go with your friends; friendship may be what it takes to win this war, if what Noel and the others told me about that Invid that traveled with you for so long. Karen said for you all to look for her; she might be the key to ending this conflict without annihilation of one side or the other, much like Miriya or Musica."

"Do remember, Colonel, that in both those cases, it still came pretty close to annihilation."

"Too true - but it's a thought. Even Zor Prime's going to try to get to the Regis to talk to her, though I don't hold too much hope for that, given how even the Masters misrepresented his part in the betrayal of the Invid. Good luck, and I hope we both live to see the end of this day."

As Alex left, both men started to cry. The events of the last twenty years were coming together, and no one knew how or why. All that was evident was that something big, something final, was going to happen today. But would it be a dark finale, or a symphony of light?

Chapter Six:

"Noel:

I wish I could tell you what to expect today, but there's no guarantee any hints we've seen of today will actually happen as we think, and truthfully, even talking about it to each other could jinx us, by changing how we react to things as they come. Today, thousands of years of history come to a tipping point; not just for us, but for the Invid as well. If things go badly, try to protect our own, and the Invid - the one thing certain is that the real danger to us all is the dark side of humanity, and those that would use that dark side to their own evil benefit. The shadows that obscure our path have deep roots, and not obvious ones. If we fail here, our last hope lies in crossing the boundaries of our own existence, and taking the fight to our true foe. The shadows must not win, even if it costs our lives."

- Note left by Karen Freeman in Noel's helmet, the morning of the Battle of Reflex Point

"Scott, we've got problems," Roy Fokker called from the Ops tent. Scott Freeman was outside, doing the final pre-flight of his Shadow Alpha's systems.

"What's wrong?" Scott noted that Roy didn't look this unsettled when he lost his base in South America. "The fleet did show up, didn't it?"

"Rolf just called down with the final report. Saturn Division folded in as scheduled, and the Jupiter Division forces on the Moon have rendezvoused with them. Only, one ship failed to defold on schedule-"

"You got to be kidding..."

"We have to face it; something's happened to the SDF-3 - again."

"Dammit... Did they leave on schedule?"

"Tyrol HQ reported that they left less than a minute after the rest of the fleet. I'm beginning to think that Lisa's father was right when he said that 'SDF' stood for 'Ship of Damned Fools'. So far, the command SDFs are zero for three in fold operations."

"It might not be that bad; remember that the SDF-3's engines have been modified several times since their last use, when the rest of the fleet - other than the Zentraedi ships - are using engines built from scratch with the Nichols Protocols. The numbers might have been a little off, and they could arrive late. I'm sure that Karen would have said something if anything catastrophic happened to them."

"There's another issue - the Saturn Division fleet is bigger than first reported, and there's a ship class I've never seen before, that they won't let me have any information on."

"That's weird. What are they - some sort of assault ship?"

"No, that's the strange thing. They are bigger than anything else in the fleet, other than the SDF-3 and the fleet command cruisers, but the only thing identifiable in their construction is an engine section based on a Garfish, that's less than 1% the tonnage of the entire design."

"That sounds like the Pioneer Mission's self-contained colony ships. A bunch of them were made for establishing pre-fabricated colonies in hostile environments, but only a couple actually deployed to planetary surfaces, since most of the systems they colonized had habitable planets, and the colonies wanted to not live under domes unless they had to."

"These don't look like domes; they look like escape pods with seating for SDFs in Battloid mode, and they've added shadow devices to them."

"Then I don't know what they are. Deployment vehicles for multiple MTUs or GMUs?"

"Possible, but at that size, they'd have to land in the Great Lakes, and the vehicles swim ashore. Could be heavily armored Destroid pods, or a carrier for multiple ballistic insertion pods for ground troops."

"Ugh... Ballistic... I wouldn't want to be around if something like that did a crash and burn."

"Isn't that the truth."

"Sure you don't want to saddle up with us?"

"Claudia would kill me, if the Invid didn't - I've got less than 100 hours in Veritechs since I was cloned. I'd be a liability up there. It's best if I stay here and watch. That means, the fate of the world is on your shoulders, not mine."

"You had to put it that way, didn't you?"

"Balloon goes up in twenty minutes - good luck."

"I'll see you at the victory party."

"Sure, as long as you're buying...."

*************

Scott Bernard's group had been assigned to Colonel Harrington's force, but there were regulations that had to be followed. As much as Rook and Rand protested, they were told they had to stay behind at the deployment point, and wait to be called in as reinforcements - only persons that were active duty military were allowed to participate in the initial assault. Pointing out that there were several other units of irregulars going in did little good, as those groups had the external appearance of being military units, while Bernard's team had been too small and too mobile for classification as a resistance army, instead being classified as guerillas. Annie's participation, of course, was right out. Of course, even Alex & Noel were having issues, as only Lancer and Scott were being allowed to use their Alphas.

"Why can't I use my hovertank, sir?" Alex complained.

"Because it's too big in comparison to the rest of the unit you're going in with - I can't break the TOE to have just one tank heading in, Lieutenant," Harrington replied

"Then, what about Alphas? We've got them to spare."

"Alpha pilots, we have, and that's not your primary training. You've been trained in special ops, and we're a bit lacking in experienced troops in that role. Hell, you and your wife are the only ones in the entire battalion with experience actually penetrating a hive on Earth - not to mention your Southern Cross service, where you penetrated the defenses of Tyrolean vessels no less than four times. You're lucky I don't split the two of you up as company leaders, instead of assigning a single squad to the two of you."

"If you put it that way, Colonel..."

"Just do your job, and get these rookies in. I have more faith in your experience than I do most of the officers that have been with me for the last year - they've got good book sense, but their extent of experience has been VR sims and fights with combat remotes piloted by Karbarrans & Praxian operators. Those rovers might have had combat experience against the Invid, but it doesn't mean they always make the training remotes act like the real thing."

**********

Soon, the attack signal came, and none too soon. The Invid, who had seemed to wait for the humans to come instead of attacking in masse, rose in response, and the clashes soon created a panorama of carnage as far as the eye could see in both the air and on the ground.

The ground forces had only been gone a couple minutes, when Rand just couldn't take it anymore. He turned to go to his Cyclone, Rook giving chase, only to find someone standing there. She looked like Noel, but was in a dedicated flight suit without CVR.

"Going somewhere, Rand? My sister told me you wouldn't just stand by and watch."

"I don't care if I'm not military; this has been my fight for the last two years, and I'm going in whether the REF likes it or not. The time has come for a little well-meaning insubordination."

Karen chuckled. "Question - is it still insubordination if I give you this, and tell you to go?" She tossed him a wallet-sized pack. "After talking to Noel last night, I figure you've earned it, but it took a while to convince my uncle."

Rand opened up the wallet, and found it contained an ID card for him - as a brevet 3^rd Lieutenant. "Is this for real?"

"You bet. And, this one's for you, Rook; it's for the rank you would have had, if they'd let me commission you back at Brasilia. Congratulations, Lieutenant Bartley."

"Thank you, Karen."

"That's Lieutenant Commander Freeman to you, now, Rook;" Karen smiled. "You better catch up with the others. If Bernard gives you a hard time over the ranks, tell him he has to take it up with me - even if he does outrank me, I doubt he'll push it."

Rook looked, and saw Rand already pushing his bike toward the line, trying to get a head start. "Rand, wait for me! You'll get killed going in alone!" She vaulted into the saddle of her Cyclone, and took off after him.

"What about me?"

Karen turned, and looked at Annie. "Do you have to ask? Go find Lunk."

"How? He's out there, who knows where."

"Just follow your nose. Move it; he needs you - or more accurately, he will need your help, by the time you catch up to him. That's an order, Cadet Mint. I can't put you into uniform officially, but I can sponsor you to the academy. Just don't get yourself killed before the start ofthe next term."

"Alright!" Annie took off running for the battlefield. "See you at the hive!"

"You too, Annie," Karen whispered, then teleported back to her Alpha to wait for the order for the air assault to begin.

***********

"Well, Karen's back from whatever she was up to;" Marie commented. "In the nick of time, as usual."

"This is it, Marie."

"Scott, the life I've had with you, I wouldn't have traded it for anything."

"Same here. Between you and Karen, I can honestly say I haven't had a dull moment in decades. Nineteen years, if you count all that Dana/Zand intrigue before the fold accident, that led to Karen's aging and your creation afterward."

"Speaking of me," Dana interrupted, "I think you two need to get your minds back on the battle. We're ten seconds from launch and you've not given the order to spin up the engines."

"Fine, then. Highlander, let's show these space jockeys how you really fight Invid. Power up, and launch at will!"

The Legios of Highlander Squadron lifted off the ground in Combined Guardian mode, shifted to Jet Mode, then streaked forward to provide invisible support to the troops approaching the hive force field perimeter. Overhead, the non-cloaked ships of the REF fleet approached Earth, drawing the Invid into a two-front defense. The final battle of the Robotech wars was underway.

Chapter Seven:

"It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive." -C.W. Leadbeater

The first barrier to overcome was the main force field, which extended over three miles from the exterior of the closest sub-hive of the central cluster. Scattered between the force field and the incoming troops were thousands of lesser rank Invid, that had been dug in months before, and left to hibernate until called on to defend the hive. This gave the Invid a great level of advantage against the ground troops, through surprise, but the act of bursting out of the ground tended to leave the Invid similarly vulnerable to being dispatched by an overhead Veritech, if one was present. The end result was massive casualties for both the Invid and the Cyclone troops. However, as the Cycloners closed on the force field, they became more vulnerable, as the Veritechs were spreading out as the majority of ground forces spread out, encircling the force field as they advanced.

One of the original purposes of the energy field was to provide a microclimate laboratory convenient to the hive for the Regis' research in evolution and adaptation, and as it started getting hit by the disruptors from the Alphas and Vindicators of Highlander and the Jupiter Division squadrons, the energy surges caused the controls to go haywire, and as the weather started swinging wildly, the specially engineered plants within responded, shifting through seasons in minutes, only surviving from drawing on the Protoculture "compost" the Invid had laid down to allow the special plants to shift with changes in climate. When the troops first entered, it was spring, matching the real climate outside. But, soon, it swung through summer, then fall, the chill of winter, and back to spring, with the leaves of the trees literally growing, turning, falling (well, getting caught up in the wind gusts caused by the temperature swings, rarely hitting the ground), then sprouting anew, right before their eyes. The confusion of this, added to more Invid, added to the chaos within the human ranks, and few units remained cohesive for long, and most had already taken at least 50% casualties.

Alex and Noel's recently assigned unit fit this description unfortunately well, as all but two of their subordinates were still alive, despite their best efforts. Only two of the casualties had been less than instantly fatal, and Noel managed to "convince" the body of the one injured the worst to heal itself to the point of being transportable by the other, and divided their remaining ammunition between them. But, by this time, all they really had left was EP-37 ammunition, and their sabers.

"Noel, how badly is this messing with you? The last couple Invid seemed to catch you by surprise."

"There's so much telepathic interference here, I'm lucky to pick you up next to me."

Alex looked up, as two Alphas passed overhead. There was no mistaking who was piloting them, as the blue one had 21^st Mars markings, and the green one, that of a North American unit decimated in the April Fool's Day Massacre. "Good - Scott & Lancer made it in." Suddenly, Lancer's Alpha took a violent hit, after something seemed to distract the two. The now-Battloid Veritech began to plummet towards the ground. "Eject, dammit! Eject!!"

But, instead of ejecting, or even crashing, the Alpha was CAUGHT by the pink Invid Battloid that had been dogging them for most of the last year.

"Well, I'll be damned..." Alex muttered. "Why the hell she do that?"

"Marlene's not the only Invid that's fallen inlove with a human," Noel replied. "Not that she fully comprehends the emotions, yet."

"Oh, wonderful." Then, looking beyond them, he saw what had made Lancer and Scott pull up short, in the first place. "Speaking of our favorite Invid, is that her floating up there like the Ghost of Christmas Past?"

"Yes, that's Marlene. I can hear her; she wants us to follow her, into the hive."

"Then, tell her to lead on. It's a cinch that we won't get much closer on our own."

*************

Scott Freeman felt like he was up to his helmet seal in bogies. No sooner than he or Marie would drop one, another - if not two - would take its place. Then, suddenly, there seemed to be a hiccup in the rush of Invid. In the brief break in the action, the report came in about the strange incident with Belmont and the Invid, and Scott figured that it was a sign that he should head in the direction that the report stated that Bernard, Belmont and the Invid were taking, as it probably would give the best opportunity to act on Zor Prime's mad plan. To that effect, he also called Dana, Zor, Karen, and Angie (the nearest free Beta, and who already had experience working with Karen and Noel) to join him and Marie. They got to the area in time to hear that Bernard's entire group, including Alex, Noel and the former civilians, had already entered the hive, but no one else could get in.

"Karen, I want in on what's about to go down in there; can you get us in?"

"No problem, Uncle, but it's best if we only take one Legios. Just do me a favor and don't shoot anything while we're in there, If you want to get in to see the Regis, you got to trust me - and don't go off on your own; the travel system in here is nothing like what you've seen in the other hives."

"Do I have a choice?"

"No, not really. And, you remember what we found out about Earth's past 18 years ago?"

"Yeah, about the Masters?"

"That was only half of the story. I've deliberately not told anyone the other half of what I found out before. You're going to find out the rest in a few minutes; I don't know which of you will be more surprised - you, Zor or the Regis."

*************

"I can't believe it," Rand said to Rook. "We've made it inside Reflex Point." They appeared to be drifting down a long, dark tunnel, that resembled a holographic star map room. Their Cyclone flight thrusters were on, yet they weren't doing the actual propulsion, and while they could SEE fairly rapid movement, their inertial sensors indicated they were completely still.

"No offense, Rand, but I think I preferred the view from outside better."

"You're not the only one, Rook;" Alex replied. "Noel and I are right behind you. Don't try turning to look - I've TRIED to turn, but I can't seem to move in this place."

Shortly, though, they found themselves at the end of the "corridor", and felt an odd tingle as they teleported onto a platform in a large room. Thankfully, whatever had locked them rigid before, now released.

"Yippee, everybody's here!" Annie yelped, as she looked around the room.

"I thought I told you two to stay put," Scott said to Rook & Rand, as he vaulted out of the cockpit of his Alpha, to the floor. "You're not soldiers."

"Correction, Scott," Rook replied. "You thought we weren't soldiers. Our commissions arrived by a very special courier after you left us. Noel's sister delivered the paperwork and ordered us into the battle - she said that if you didn't like it, you can take it up with her."

"Great. I gather Marlene led all of us here?" Scott looked around at all the nods. "Noel, you're telepathic - did you pick up any indication why she brought us here?"

"Not much, but I think we're here as witnesses, of a sort. I think we'll get the full explanation in a few seconds; we've got company coming."

"The hive has been contaminated!" a booming female voice shouted from the light that suddenly appeared above them. "Foolish humans, you have come here seeking to look upon the face of the Invid. So be it; you shall see." The voice paused, and everything else went black.

"Behold; I am the Invid. I am the soul and the spirit. I have guided my people across the measureless cosmos, from a world that was lost, to a world that was found." The light began to coalesce into a humanoid form. "I have led my people in flight from the dark tides of shadow that engulfed our forefathers, that threaten to engulf us even now."

Now, the Regis' form was clearly visible, and though she had a mouth, it did not move when she 'spoke'. "I am the power and the light. I am the embodiment of the life force, the creator-protector. In the primitive terminology of your people, I am - the mother."

Alex couldn't help but think "And, what a big mother you are", then quickly squelched that thought, realizing that the Regis was using telepathy to communicate with them.

"You are surprised?" the Regis continued. "So were we, when we discovered that the planet to which we were led by the Flower of Life was already inhabited, by a people that resembled the Tyroleans, but were not that race. That alone was the reason you were not immediately exterminated."

"I'll say it's inhabited!" Rand shouted back.

"That is of little consequence. Your species is nothing, when weighed against the survival of my people. We have suffered enough - the Invid life force WILL NOT be denied!"

"NO!" Marlene cried to her mother, to everyone's surprise; especially the Regis, it seemed. "That's not right!" She had resumed the human form she had when she traveled with the group, instead of the energy form she had led them here.

"So, Ariel, it is true; you are a traitor. Was it you that led these children of the shadow to the hive?"

"Yes, I led them here - but you must be made to see that they are not children of the shadow. They have a life force and a spirit almost as strong as our own."

"They are the enemy of our people."

"If they oppose us, it's because WE are trying to do to the same thing to them that was done to us, so many years ago." Marlene then turned to Scott.

"Scott, listen; listen to me. Perhaps if we could begin again, we might be able to find a way for our two peoples to share this planet together in peace."

"I'm sorry - but you know that after the acts of the last four years, that's not possible."

"So, you'd rather have the death and destruction continue?"

Instead of Scott, Lunk responded forcefully, uncharacteristically for the man who had spent three years avoiding any type of conflict. "That's right, Marlene; to the bitter end. Let me remind you - it was YOUR people that invaded this planet; it was your people that attacked the SDF-3 in our first meeting, without warning or any attempt at communication. Remember?"

"I do," she replied, almost ashamed of the fact. "But, Lunk; you traveled with me, you took care of me; I even think you maybe liked me a little bit. I'm no different a person now, than I was then. Why have your feelings changed so?"

"You're an alien."

"Exactly. And the fact that I could travel among you as a friend, all of us unaware I wasn't human, means that perhaps we are not so different, your people and mine."

"Ariel, look at these 'friends' of yours," the Regis rejoined. "Notice how they stare at you in fear and confusion; emotional states which in their species inevitably lead to hatred and violence."

"Yes, they are confused, because they feel that I have betrayed them; but they are not full of hatred!"

"Your contact them has blinded you to their true nature, my child. It is the genetic instinct of their species to destroy what they cannot understand."

Rand couldn't stand by any longer. "Wait a minute, dragon-lady; I've had about enough of this. How do YOU know what we're really feeling in our hearts? So, Marlene's an Invid. Okay, that was a kind of surprise; but we don't hate her for it. We know she's risked a lot to help us; to even get us here to talk to you. But, as far as you're concerned -"

Before Rand could make the point the Regis was acting in the exact smae manner she accused humanity of, she knocked off his feet with a bolt of telekinetic energy.

"See, Ariel; violence is as natural to them as breathing. Their entire history is a catalogue of murder, conquest, and enslavement, all directed at others of their own species."

"That's not true," Marlene countered, as Sera suddenly appeared beside her sister.

"Forgive me, Regis, but I have begun to doubt whether we are any better than they," Sera shouted at her mother. "You say that their species is guilty of murdering and enslaving of their enemies; but how is that any different from what we have done on this planet?"

"So, you too have been turned against us."

"Regis, look at them," Marlene pleaded. "They are not animals or barbarians. They are a brave and noble people trying to protect what is theirs, just as we would do."

Without warning, the sphere above the Regis flashed, and the image of the blue-haired Battloid pilot appeared.

"Have you all gone mad?" he demanded, mostly referring to his sisters, but also wondering why the Regis had not yet eliminated the intruders, which she could have done almost without effort. "How did these humans gain entrance into the hive? Sera, remove them at once."

"I was not aware that I had to obey your orders, Corg."

"Your contact with these rebels has made you weak and spineless-"

"-And it has made a monster out of you, consumed by vengeance and evil passions!" Sera countered. "YOU are a child of shadow, and not these humans!"

"What are you saying? This pathetic species you have become so fond of cannot be stand in the way of our future!"

"Fool!" Lancer shouted up at Corg's image. "If you keep fighting, there won't be a future for ANY of us!"

"Enough; I am called to battle, and that is where my duty lies." Corg's image dissolved into an image of his mecha, then faded, as they saw him begin decimating a flight of Alphas.

"I've got to stop that lunatic!" Scott exclaimed.

"Wait, Scott!" Marlene called, but he paid her no heed. As he lifted off the pad in the apparently sealed room, he found himself teleported back to the corridors near where they entered the hive, and found Corg waiting for him. They quickly took their battle outside, but the others quickly lost track of them as alarms went off in the central hive chamber. The overhead display filled with images from space - the REF fleet had come within sensor range of the hive.

"Well, that does it," Lancer said solemnly. "Any hope of a peaceful settlement has just went down the drain. Heaven help us all."

Chapter Eight:

"I have seen the mystics labor

Once or twice, but I knew they had a reason

Enchantment plays its cards all right

Hand in hand with the workings of the seasons.

Legends can be now and forever

Teaching us to love for Goodness' sake

Legends can be now and forever

Loved by the Sun, Loved By the Sun

Loved...."

-Jon Anderson & Tangerine Dream, "Loved by the Sun"

As Scott and Corg squared off outside the hive, they remained unaware of the fleet's move into the battle. Finally, Corg caught Scott off-guard, and crippled the latter's Alpha. Only the intervention of some of the last surviving Jupiter Division Alphas allowed him to escape and crash-land back near the rally point he'd launched from that morning, but those pilots lost their lives in doing so, and the rally point appeared deserted, as no one came to his aid. Only Marlene was truly keeping track of what was occurring, and she teleported out of the hive to go to Scott's side, and her departure initially went unnoticed.

"All units, regroup and form emergency formations. Repel the invaders at all cost!" the Regis called out telepathically to her children. She then turned to Sera. "Your defection has cost us much, my child."

"It can't be!" Sera cried out, watching Invid of all types being destroyed seemingly by invisible foes.

As more and more of the Invid died, Lancer and Alex noticed parts of the sphere above them darken. Lancer finally asked about it.

"You are very perceptive, human," she replied. "Every time any of my children cease to exist, our entire race is diminished, losing part of its strength."

"Regis, those are Shadow Fighters; the way they're designed, they are invisible to Protoculture scanners, which means most of your people has no defense against them, since Corg squandered his brethren like him against our original attack. Isn't there some way to resolve this before any more of them die? You can't fight what you can't see; you're the only one that can end this destruction."

"Twice before, in our recorded history, we have been forced to relinquish our home, and journey to another star. This time, we will not leave."

"Don't you know when to take 'No' for an answer?" Lunk shouted. "You've been out-maneuvered, and that's that."

"Mother," Sera interjected; "perhaps what Lancer says would not be amiss, in light of their current numerical advantage." Although the Invid had arrived nearly one hundred million strong, most of these had been put into hibernation shortly after arrival, to await greater Flower harvests and the result of the Regis' evolution experiments. Now, over eighty million of those Invid slumbered on, unable to be wakened because of the destruction of their hive, yet their lives had also been spared by their hibernation pods, that could not be penetrated by anything short of a disruptor shot, and those weapons were too costly per shot and prone to failure from use to expend on sleeping Invid - and was as equally likely to wake the Invid as to kill one.

"With all your incredible powers, why can't you find some other world to transform into a home; one with no natives to be in your way?" Lancer asked.

"You cannot understand," The Regis replied. "The Flowers choose where they will grow, and grow properly. This world holds the last known Flowers of Life in the universe. We cannot leave, for we have no other place we can go."

Suddenly, another, unexpected, flash of light lit the platform. Where Bernard's Alpha once sat, a Shadow Legios now sat, parked in Jet mode.

"Who else now defiles the hive?"

Karen teleported to the fore, as the rest of her companions exited the Beta by more conventional methods. "Lady Regis, my name is Karen. I have come to you to offer you a way out. But, before you consider it, I must tell you something. Like my sister here," she nodded to Noel, "I am a telepath, and have been listening to the entire debate you have had since you discovered their entrance into the hive. But there are some facts, critical parts of the story, that even you are not aware of. As you said, Earth's history has been one of violence. And, twice in Invid history, the Invid had to flee their homeworld; the second time because of its desecration for the benefit of the Robotech Masters, at the hands of my mother's people."

"You are half-Zentraedi?"

"Yes, and more. There are things about me, that in many ways make us almost as sisters. But, as I was trying to say, your people have forgotten the truths of the loss of the first home. It is mentioned in your legends, sung in your songs to the flower which came with you from that home. But the actual events around that loss, even the location of that world, have been lost to you for twelve thousand years. Regis; welcome home; this is the long-lost first home, devastated in an awful war that your parents' people instigated. The survivors of that war, disgusted with the betrayal of their leadership, fled this world, led by their greatest scientist, Haydon."

"Haydon knew my parents? Why didn't he-"

"He cared nothing for you, your people, or any other sentient beings, at least after becoming the deranged god-like being that he is now. All he cared about was becoming immortal, which he accomplished, and gaining the powers of a god, which led to his most heinous crimes against your people. Regis; once, long ago, Haydon, your ancestors, were all HUMAN. But, he changed all that, manipulating the ancient religion of those people, saying that their children had no right to be human; had to become lesser beings, to become the penance for their parents' evils. In reality, he saw the power that a fusion of the Flower of Life and a sentient being could eventually attain, through self-evolution, and was setting your people up to be the power conduit that would one day make him a god,"

"You must be lying; that is too incredible."

"Am I? Our peoples are so much alike. If I am lying, then can you explain why your son Tesla became near-human, simply by eating the mutated Flowers of Life of the Sentinels worlds? Had he, or the Regent, actually gotten to partake of the fruit of the uncursed Peryton, they would have become as human, or more accurately - more than human, as I am. Even your genes remember your former form, and the flowers were programmed to attempt to reshape you back to that form - one that Haydon secretly kept, behind his facade of being a paragon of each race he contacted. Unfortunately for him, his near-immortal body finally gave out because you took too long to attain this enlightenment, and he had to become an energy being, residing in the secret heart of the Haydon IV artificial planetoid - and awaits for you now, to arise from Earth, for his final betrayal."

By this point, Rook and Rand had noticed that Corg had defeated Scott, and took it on themselves to go look for Scott and Marlene, and confront Corg personally. Dana Sterling and Scott Freeman both wanted to go as well, in the Shadow mecha, but were restrained by their spouses. Rook and Rand found, that by their sheer desire, they were teleported from the hive to the mecha park where their Alphas had been left, and quickly lifted off. As the red and green Alphas squared off against the yellow and green Battloid, even the Regis paused to watch, and motioned to Karen that further talk would have to wait.

As Rand fell, hearts sank; then Scott arrived unexpectedly in his Beta, and the second battle between him and Corg was shorter than the first, but with a completely different result. Bernard used a frontal attack on the Battloid to distract Corg from a second volley of missiles that had been set as heatseekers, aimed for the flight thrusters of the Battloid. The resulting explosion consumed Corg and his mecha utterly.

While the combatants landed outside, Karen and the Regis resumed their discussion.

"Don't ask me how I discovered the true history of our peoples; it would take to long to explain, other than the survivors of the faction your ancestors attacked also fled Earth, and became the Masters and the Praxians. Those poor people left behind were little more than savages, and slid even further back into barbarism, and became the ancestors of the humans of Earth. Ironically, those legends of the once great races of man that had ascended to the heavens, led to much of the atrocities of the last ten thousand years on Earth, as groups mistakenly believed that they were the descendants of those peoples, when those peoples were across the galaxy. Even gone, legends of the Indiva and Aztlan Tyr killed as many people over the millennia as their descendants did in the last thirty years."

"Why should I believe you?"

"Would it help you believe, if I told you that I believe her completely?" Zor Prime said, finally stepping forward to where the Regis could identify him.

"Zor? You are not the clone I studied on Haydon IV."

"I am another clone, created by the Masters themselves to try to take my knowledge by force; my brother, whom you studied, was one created by my mentor, to try to find a way to stop the Masters, and return the Flowers and Optera to you. As a result of how the Masters made me, I recall completely the defiling of Optera. I was not in control of myself when I... I did what I did to you; I had been reprogrammed almost as thoroughly as a Zentraedi, though my superior mind managed to break that programming in time to save you and your people, and the small area that was left unculled. I then tricked the Masters into letting me seed other worlds with Flowers you could use as food, not realizing that, in fact, this was part of Haydon's dark plans, and why he helped me break free of the Masters. Had I truly known what he had planned, I would not have sent the Matrix here, though I would have still sent my ship here to stop their war, and to allow them the means to destroy the Masters. Karen and her sister have great power, and great insight. It is only due to those women, that I survived my vendetta against the Masters. If she says that something is true, you can believe it to be so."

"If I were to believe you, then how could you save my people?"

"Soon, you will sense another planet to go to, but it is a lie. There is already a world with Flowers growing on it - Optera has being restored - yet Haydon is blocking your sensing of it. What you are instead sensing is a dimensional breach, which will convert the life force of the Invid into a stream that would give all of your power, and then some, to Haydon - and return the invid to the barely sentient foragers that he turned you into twelve thousand years ago. Going that path will lead to your doom."

"What do you suggest?"

"There is another means to breach the dimensional barrier; through me. We can bypass his syphon, but it will require your children to assume your true, human form, and you to assume all the power of the Invid for yourself, in order to confront Haydon."

"I must consider your proposal carefully."

At that point, even more alarms went off.

"Guys, I think we may not have time for that," Dana cried, looking at the sensor screens.

"Huh? What is it?"

"We've got Shadow Fighters entering the hive."

Chapter Nine:

"Sweet songs of youth... the wise, the meeting of all wisdom...

To believe in the good in man..." - Oona, Legend (sampled in "Loved by the Sun")

"General, we've got an emergency call coming in from the Moon!"

"Put it through," Fokker stated. Rolf Emerson appeared on the screen.

"Roy, I'm reading this data right, aren't I? The assault's been a success?"

"We have taken the entire area and are penetrating the hive itself, which means that we're probably less than an hour from total victory."

"I thought so - and that's where the emergency lies. Reinhardt's gone off his rocker. He's broadcasting to the fleet that Earth is lost, and he's instigated some sort of doomsday plan meant to guarantee that the Invid don't keep Earth - and cut us out of the command loop. He's claiming that he's operating on the orders of the Hunters, but they didn't order any such thing. I have a complete, uncensored, copy of their battle plan - something even Reinhardt wasn't cleared for. NOTHING was mentioned about the weapons he's ordered in motion, except that Rick & Lisa were forced to bring them, and Lisa's personal note to me was they'd mutiny, before they would obey any orders to use them."

"What are the weapons?"

"They're those old colony ships in orbit. They were been turned into asteroid mining ore carriers, and are filled to overflowing with nickel-iron ore. They are going to be used as kinetic weapons on North America - each by itself is enough to kill every human on the planet with the after-effects, and they've laced them all with radioactives to further poison the planet!"

"That's fucking insane! Who would even order the building of such monstrosities?"

"The council would; you know, the political geniuses that thought they'd be safer on the SDF-3 than helping Anatole and me rebuild Earth, who thought T.R. Edwards' clone was the greatest military genius since Alexander, and were willing to sell a half-dozen sentient races into slavery for the promise of 'Galactic Peace in our Time'."

"Is there anything we can do? I doubt anything short of the Grand Cannon would stop them from reaching ground."

"I'm going to have to try to force a connection through to Vince & Jean. All normal comm channels to the fleet are locked out, probably to stop us from doing the very thing we are attempting. Keep the battle up. Is there any word from Freeman's group, since they followed Bernard's group into the hive?"

"No, but half of Bernard's group has emerged from the hive, and they took out the Invid commander that was leading the external defense. They've taken some casualties, but they appear to only be technical kills, not personnel."

"The ones still in the hive may be our only hope. That is, if they survive the Shadow Fighter assault. No one seems to have informed the incoming squadrons that we have people inside, and their orders are to kill anyone they find inside - ESPECIALLY if they appear human."

"Rolf, if I don't make it, shoot that bastard Reinhardt for me - preferably in some manner to allow for a slow, painful and certain death."

"I'll try, but there may be a long line ahead of me."

************

"Regardless of the choice I make, I must still discuss it with my children," the Regis said, solemnly. "Even if we become human, or evolve into the form like Ariel and Sera, what is to prevent the bloodshed from continuing from generation to generation?"

"If you choose this route, part of the price is traveling to another universe, across dimensional space - the place where Haydon believes he can rule as a creator deity. Together, only the Invid collective can face him as an equal, as he stole the life force of another universe's Invid to get that realm established, and has already expended much of that ill-gotten power in getting this far."

"Then, why did he manipulate this one?"

"He usurped his counterpart here, to leave that counterpart permanently sleeping in the core of Haydon IV, to intervene as part of a power struggle within his deific realm. He made a mistake - after his first victory, he was persuaded to share his victory with someone who found his actions abhorrent, and that one rebelled. Our struggle here has been, simply, a game of strategy between the two, with the fate of multiple universes - multiple Earths, multiple Invid, and all the rest - at stake. His opponent did the one thing he didn't expect, that has made all the difference - instead of making a lot of pieces to control on the board, he made a single special one - one that neither of them could control, and would fight to preserve their own world, in a manner Haydon could not predict."

"That would be you, I assume."

"Yes, though I really didn't fully understand it, until last year. But now, my path is clear. Together, Regis, you and I can end the shadows, once and for all. All it will take is for you to embrace a destiny of your own choosing, not the ones that the shadows of Protoculture or the shadows of mankind tell you are the only options."

"What of those who still attack us?"

"That can be taken care of. Uncle Scott, by this point you must realize that for me, military formalities are moot. But, you are still the commander of Vulcan Division. Go after Lancer & Sera, who have left to stop the Shadow Fighters trying to force their way here through the conventional transport tunnels of the hive. Use your rank to order the attackers to stop, if possible. Some of them may not listen, and of course some of them are AI drones that won't obey you anyway - but, you must try; if for any reason, to reduce the burden that Belmont may have later for having to fire on other humans."

"What about you?"

"I have someplace else to go; tell Mom and Dad that I love them."

"What is this?" the Regis exclaimed, sensing the onrushing kinetic weapons, too big to truly cloak. "What kind of madness has taken over those above?"

"Are those -" Dana asked.

"I'm not sure, but they appear to be kinetic weapons, meant to destroy the Earth, and the Invid along with it. Not even the Masters were that mad!"

"Noel, Dana, Marie, Zor, Angie...." Karen called out. "Take my hand - I need Noel & Dana's power, and the other two of you as an anchor, if we are to rush this faster than we intended. Regis, take my other hand, and awaken all your children on Earth at once - we must go!'

"What about this world?"

"That is what the extra power is for - we must depart Earth, as you normally would, but guide our path of departure to have the wake of your passing destroy the weapons. Once beyond the fleet, we make the final leap. Noel must be here to tether you to the Earth's biosphere, until that point, to allow all your children to follow, and to draw on Earth's own power center to sustain us through your transformation."

"What about me?" Alex asked.

"Get Lunk and Annie out of here in Marie's Beta, and get everyone you find along the way to follow you out, if you can make it in time. Noel should be able to shield the others through the hive's dissolution, but she'll be hard-pressed to protect four."

"I'll try."

The Regis called out telepathically to the entire world, not just to her scattered children, but to the humans on planet and in orbit, to let them know who truly was trying to kill them, and who in the end, was to save them.

"The final attack has begun; and a terrible error has been made, compounding all the errors both races have made. Know, Terrans, that as I leave with my people, that I save you from the attack of one of your own, gone mad with revenge, meant to destroy your world in a vain attempt to kill my people. Let this be a lesson to both our races - that the true end of this war comes about from the actions of those of Terran, Zentraedi, Tyrolean and Invid blood who put their love of each other ahead of their love of their own people, and in doing so, changed the world. The Invid will trouble this universe no longer, and if we meet in the future, let it be as equals, and as friends. We must not give in to the shadows of hatred again."

"Okay everyone, focus on me, NOW!" Karen shouted to the others, as the hive began to glow, and come apart reminiscent of the master computer program in an ancient sci-fi movie of the 1980s. The light grew brighter and brighter, forcing them to close their eyes, and even then could see the light through their eyelids. The sensory overload was such that, eventually, the only sense they had of anything, was that of their linked hands - and even then, eventually, Noel felt Karen slip away.

The light expanded, as arcs of light from around the world came together on Reflex Point, reforming into the energy phoenix that people swore to have seen arrive four years before, and that Zor Prime remembered that Zor had seen in his dying vision - only this time, Zor Prime felt himself PART of it, yet able to see it from above, as if watching as a million kilometer tall giant, watching from space floating alongside the Earth and Moon.

The phoenix rose from the surface, its turbulence knocking nearly everything flying over North America out of control, intercepting the kinetic weapons before they reached the atmosphere, and vaporizing them into so much dust - while the radioactives within transmuted into stable isotopes. If proceeded from there, to surround the SDF-4 class vessel Izumo, from where the orders to launch the weapons had come. The ship seemed to melt away from the onslaught of energy, and its weapons detonated harmlessly - at least to the phoenix. The weapons had been panic-fired at point blank range to the fleet, and destroyed several other REF ships, and released an energy pulse that knocked out multiple systems on everything that wasn't protected by Earth's magnetic field or being behind the moon, for several million miles. At a range several times the distance of the Moon, the tail of the phoenix snapped, faster than light, from the Earth to its body, and it disappeared in a flash visible to the naked eye from the Martian and Jovian colonies.

As the light faded on Earth, all the Invid were gone, save Marlene & Sera. Whatever Invid mecha had been left behind in flight, fell to Earth, shattering on impact, empty. A few of the hives, like the captured one in Florida, were still standing - but their brains and all their Invid were missing. On the other hand, not a single Flower of Life had been taken, leaving the collective sentience that Haydon had instilled into the plants as bewildered as the typical human civilian, as to what had just occurred. For a few moments, the whole solar system seemed to stop, trying to puzzle out what had just occurred.