Epilogue: T5
A ball of scrap metal rolls over the snow covered barren land.
What the day before was one of the composite eyes of the mantis like mother-bot, now has taken on a life of his own. The cybernetic mind of the Quadnik retrieve unit, separated once again from the Quadnik component of Naecken, has returned to his original purpose: finding the composite being and bringing it back to the Quadnik dimension.
Small wings appear on two spots of the ball, little hands and something resembling a head protruding from the surface. The small robot takes flight toward north.
It lands a few hours later on the rocky coast of Cape Horn. Four persons looks at the sea, toward south.
The robot lands in front of them. "You are looking for Naecken, aren't you?" says the synthetic voice.
The four persons, surprised by the assertion, looks at each other. One steps further, talking to the robot. A few seconds later, the robot change shapes, enlarging to the point of being able to contain the four persons. They get aboard, and the robot launches itself toward space.
Epilogue: Constantin Goodmorning
"Constantin Goodmorning. What a stupid name" thinks Frank Cavalli, getting off the airplane that brought him back from La Perdita. But it served his purpose, a simple fake name to give to people that would have recognized a fake name as credible as it would have been. The EPS. It was Rose Biggle, the woman with whom Cavalli had a sort of relationship since the last spring, that asked him to enlist as a volunteer for them.
He never heard about them before. Rose seemed, on the reverse, to know a little, a very little, about them. But with her ties to the Strikeforce, and that Jack Merlin, he would have been surprised by the opposite. But on the two flight, from and to la Perdita, he, like the other, was not allowed to see anything about that, if not the interior of the carrier. Even the man giving orders to them was invisible.
But Cavalli is happy. He has helped a lot finding wounded people and bringing them back to safety.
And Rose was not disturbed by the fact that he was not able to find anything useful about those men. "Just keep your nose well open when you walk across Chicago, Frank" she said, after kissing him, just before his departure for the windy city.
Epilogue: Mandelovia
Attendant Nikto is facing General Colton D'goon: "Should we keep the nuclear missiles pointed to the Antarctic, sir?"
"No, point them back to Washington. There is nothing left there". The fall of the Nibiru surprised greatly D'goon the day before. The time he had given Vanguard to try to retrieve Naecken was coming to an end, and he was ready to sent nuclear missiles not only on Naecken's fortress, but also over the Nibiru, as an answer to the Strikeforce 1 invasion. But Vanguard did good use of the time they had, and accomplished his same goal. They were really smart as he was sure they were.
Epilogue: the war
"... the Strikeforce valiantly defended the human populace against this dreaded enemy in Antarctica, sacrificing their own lives to assure a future for our own planet..." says Merlin, his face bruised and battered, speaking to a reporter on CNN. The images follows quickly on the TV screen, showing the fall of the Nibiru, Captain Ekorre praying God, in Norwegian, driving the ship toward the fortress, hundreds of soldiers in the Strikeforce 1 uniform attacking the T5 droids and Mandelovian soldiers, and finally Hero saving Paris from the metor fall. Nowhere images of Vanguard, the EPS or the volunteers are to be found.
"It's all a fake!" hisses Jake at the images running on the TV at Jake's place
"At last the metahumans of La Perdita know the truth" suggest Bhaghhh-rupth .
"But not the rest of the world" says Otto. "I think Vanguard will have to work on their public relations, or Merlin will steal the whole show!"
