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the Matrix flared brighter.
Dana's efforts to contact Zor with the capsule's little commo unit had
drawn no response. Now she blinked at the bright sunlight, as the hatch opened
and the fragrant air of Earth drifted in.
The capsule had landed at the cress of a low foothill across the plain,
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just within view of the SDF-1's gravesite. She already knew from the capsule's
crude monitoring equipment that the mother ship had followed her down through
the atmosphere, headed for the mounds.
Dana drew herself out of the capsule and saw the five mile length of the
Masters' last starship come in to hover over the resting place of the SDF-1.
"Zor. Don't-please!"
There was no other way.
Zor's red raised its discus pistol. The destruction of the mother ship
directly over the mounds would ensure that the Flowers of Life and their
spores would be completely obliterated, and spare the Human race the slaughter
and ruin of an Invid invasion.
Some spores had already drifted free of the mound, though instruments
weren't clear as to why that hadn't happened before; there were completely
unique and unprecedented Protoculture aberrations down there, and no time to
analyze them. But that didn't matter now. The radius of the blast would get
all of them.
Now!
The red fired its pistol at carefully selected targets; it was easy for
him to find the vulnerable points in the systemry the original Zor had
conceived. In moments the entire ship was a daisy chain of ever increasing
explosions, ripping open its hull, gathering toward that final, utter
detonation.
He thought he would be swallowed up by grief in those last moments, to
see only the ghosts of the victims, and the shadows of the suffering he had
caused. Unexpectedly, though, Zor Prime's last thoughts were of the thing that
had made this last incarnation so different from the rest, and let him free
himself.
Dana, I love you!
Dana shrieked at the exploding ship, knowing it would do no good, until
the explosions reached a crescendo. "Stop! Zor, there must be a better way-"
Then she threw herself to shelter behind the grounded, armored capsule
and wept, face buried in her arms.
In the mounds, the wraiths gathered all their remaining energy, and
contained the explosive force of the mother ship.
Zor's calculations were entirely correct, insofar as they went. The
self-destruction should have vaporized the mounds and wiped out the curse that
was the blooming Flowers, the drifting spores.
But the Shaping of the Robotech Wars had been set long before. Earth was
to be saved from destroying itself in a Global Civil War and, at the same
time, serve as the focal point that would let a tremendous wrong be righted.
The time for the righting of that wrong had not yet come to pass, though the
stage was now set.
And so the wraiths dampened the blast of the exploding starship. The
Matrix flared like a nova, sang a single piercing note, and released all its
power upward. The wraiths used it to muffle the blast in an unimaginable
contest of warring forces, and won.
Still, the mother ship was blown to fragments and, even as Zor Prime
soared to a higher plane of existence, freed at last of the cycle of crime and
guilt in which he had been caught since his first terrible transgression, the
fragments began to fall.
Even a small piece of the mother ship was enormous, and not all of the
explosive force had been contained. Housings and armor and structural members
pelted the plain and the mounds, raising huge puffs of dust, opening the mound
even further; the explosive force caught the rising spores and sent them high
and wide, to ride the winds of the world. Ripping down into the garden that
had been the last Matrix, the blasts freed a hundred thousand times as many
more, and sent them wafting, lifting petals and even whole plants, gusting
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them forth.
The winds that came from the Protoculture detonation behaved unlike
normal air currents. It was as if they had been given a purpose, dispersing
the spores, sowing them, taking many into upper airstreams that would bear
them far-would seed the face of the planet with them.
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