Dimension 2, Tyrol
(date indeterminate)

The Dreamweaver dropped its cloak when it fired on the Brain, destroying it and most of the remaining Inorganics, and without the brain the remainder collapsed. When it did, all hell broke loose when the REF recognized the two ships flying with it, especially the crews of the SDF-3 and the Valivarre. Things got even more interesting, as Wolfe and his men assaulted the building a few minutes later, unaware of the events in orbit, only to find the threat cooling on the floor, and six men in (to him, prototype) power armor securing the site.

"Don't shoot, Jon, we're friendlies!" Scott called out.

"Did Lang send you?"

"Not exactly. Let's get these two out of here, and we can talk when we get back to Lang and the others."

"That's not good enough an answer."

"Is this good enough for you?" Rick said, putting his back to Kyle and Minmei, and opening his visor so Wolfe could see his face, then closed it back. "We're not from here - and I don't want to bring this up in front of those two, for many of the same reasons that you need to give Minmei some space right now."

"How?"

"I'm a dimensional explorer," Scott said. "In fact, 20 years ago, we served together alongside the Sentinels in my universe. I picked up 'the captain' at my first stop, and after we made sure these events would never occur in their universe, they chose to come with me to help put a stop to them here. We can go into more detail when we're back to a safe location; if it's anything like home, the council survived, and is currently relocating to the SDF-3."

"And, you are?"

"General Scott Freeman; REF retired, now commander of my Earth's Dimensional Exploration Corps. I got into the dimensional business originally, from being in a fold accident in 2016, that dumped me and my salvage team into an alternate universe over Garuda, during the time period that universe's counterparts of you and the Hunters were liberating it from the Regis. After we managed to get back home, shortly after the events corresponding to today, we had some 'issues' that prevented on us capitalizing on more than the most minimal information that we brought back, and experienced the Sentinels campaign first-hand, instead of being barely trusted dimensional anomalies."

The Wolfe Pack members helped the two civilians out of the building, and into one of the transports back to the spaceport. Wolfe, on the other hand, rode back in the same vehicle as Scott, Rick and their men. Others could recover the Alphas later.

"Should I ask what happened to me?' Jon asked, as they traveled.

"Your counterpart died in 2034, fighting the Invid during the occupation of Earth."

"The Invid took Earth?"

"For four years - the REF couldn't make it back in time, because of that asshole cooling in the trunk seizing control of the Regent's half of the Invid, after the Regent died fighting Breetai. Yes, had he gotten out of here, he was heading to Optera, and would have been in prime position to use that same set-up that he used to control the Inorganics to make him the leader of that half the Invid. The Regent tended to recruit the mindlessly obedient half of the race, while the Regis tended to draw the more intelligent and free-thinking to her side.

"As such, the Regis had pretty much told her mate to go fertilize himself, and took her half to look for the world where we came from - one that she got general coordinates for from Rem's mind, since he started recovering Zor's memories that were part of his latent programming Cabell instilled when cloning him as a child to raise. Then, the war between the Southern Cross and the Masters resulted, in effect, to create a big flashing beacon on Earth to draw the Regis in. She invaded less than a year after the Southern Cross and the Masters effectively annihilated each other in a desperate last battle that neither side could afford to let the other win, and managed to both lose as result.

"Your counterpart managed to get there after that battle, but before the Invid, but had to effectively put the unit under military parole with the Regis, to keep the Invid from annihilating them. In the end, he died because Scott Bernard; yes, the boy that attempted to stop Edwards in the courtroom, arrived, leading a band of freedom fighters, and Jon chose to die saving him rather than let the Invid kill him as per the parole agreement."

"I was betraying people to the Invid?"

"Yes and no. Like I said, Jon was committed to keeping his men alive, and the civilians that had flocked to the Wolfe Pack's camp in the vacuum created by the fall of the Southern Cross. At the time, there was no hope of successful resistance, and the loss of the next attack wave only confirmed that to most people. Military parole's an old concept, that went out of fashion around the time of the American Civil War. He laid down his arms, and agreed not to fight, to keep his people alive. It's actually a notion the Regis respected.

"However, part of the condition was that he had to agree to keep people in his territory from taking up arms against the Invid - including those that weren't actually under his control. The only way to do that was to remain an apparent beacon of resistance, then separate the sheep from the goats. If new arrivals were just getting supplies, and moving on, they were allowed to do so, and given escort out of the area, supposedly for their own protection. If they were looking to attack the hive, or cause trouble if they stayed, your counterpart and the Invid would stage attacks, where a few of his most trusted men would take the troublemakers to the hive, and the Invid would sacrifice a few of their own, targeting only those whose armor wasn't marked to identify them as Jon's personal team. In return, to make it seem like the mission was a success, they were given supplies to bring back. It cut him every time he did it, and he was in his own personal hell by the time Scott's band arrived, and had lost hope. The enormity of what he'd done hit, then, and he ended up saving Scott from the Invid, when Scott went in to rescue one of his own men. Ironically, in saving Bernard, he voided the agreement, and the town was destroyed.

"Your counterpart couldn't have known, but his sacrificing himself and his unit to save Bernard, saved Earth. It was the first time Scott had to deal with a situation that wasn't black or white, where doing the 'right' thing killed hundreds, after doing the 'wrong' thing had kept those same people alive for three years - and it was the man who had been his idol, that inspired him into uniform, that did it. As Scott traveled on to Reflex Point, he encountered other examples, but none as extreme as the fate of the Wolfe Pack and their dependents. By the time he got there, and experienced what seemed to be the ultimate betrayal - that of himself falling in love with a girl that turned out to be an amnesiac Invid spy in human form - he was more open to finding a way out of the war that didn't involve extinction of one or both sides. He and his girlfriend, now his wife, persuaded the Regis to leave Earth - and while leaving, destroy the doomsday weapons Reinhardt launched to sterilize Earth, in the Hunters' absence - yes, the SDF-3 misfolded on the return trip, too."

"What did he do to make them leave?"

"His unit, and the daughters of the Regis, showed her that she had become the same kind of monster as the Masters, in striking back at those she considered to be the heirs of the Masters. To paraphrase Nietzsche, she'd been staring into the Abyss too long, much as her REF opponents had, and it took the next generation to show them what they'd become, and how to back down.

"Frankly, I'd gotten pretty damn bitter about it myself, having lost a lot of friends. But, over time, it became apparent just how warped the REF had become since you and I left for Earth to fight the Invid, each with our own commands, and its state at the time of the liberation attempts. Some of the same council bastards you just saved, in a few years, would have ordered thousands of NEW ZENTRAEDI be created, from the genetics of the REF mission, brainwashed into thinking they were natural-born humans, and sent to Earth - most died, never setting foot on the world they THOUGHT was home. That same council ordered the Hunters to take doomsday weapons to Earth, and use them if the result of the battle for Earth was going to be anything other than total human victory, and stuck Reinhardt as the task force commander in charge of the weapons. He even had orders, that if it came to the point where launch was mandated, and the Hunters refused to destroy Earth, that he was to relieve them of command, and launch."

"Tell me which ones, and I can take care of that."

"You can't really act on 'what if' scenarios. The best scenario is to get those jokers back to Earth, where their political offices have been filled for a decade by others, and their time here makes them ineligible for office for years after their return due to residency rules. Let them be the terror of their neighborhood associations, not terrorizing the universe with their fascism."

"You know, the image of those hacks at the mercy of local politics, just warms the heart."

On the shuttle flight up, Minmei came back to Jon's seat.

"Jon, I guess you know part of what I'm going to say."

"Yeah... I'm really glad the two of you finally found each other again."

"Every relationship I've been in has been a total disaster. At least with Kyle, our original problems stemmed from unrealistic visions of how the world should be; and we've both gotten a lot wiser since then - the hard way. Perhaps it's time for you to mature as well."

"Huh?"

"Go back to Earth; find Catherine and Johnny. Man up and be the husband and father you should have been a decade ago. Even if she rejects you, at least make the effort. Too many people have screwed their lives up already. I've been given a second chance with a man that truly loves me; don't pass up any opportunity you get to put right your mistakes."

With that, Minmei turned, and went back to her seat in the other compartment.

"Wow," Jon uttered.

"Actually, though drugged and under the influence of Edwards at the time, she said almost the same thing to you in the other two universes where I was present for this day. Only then, it was meant to hurt you. In this time and place, it was meant as helpful advice, given freely. I will tell you, though - if you decide to act on it, it needs to be soon. Both Cathy and Johnny go MIA, presumed dead, on the last day of the Masters war. This means that you've got to act quicker than you did then."

"And, how do I do that?"

"Well, it should be quicker to replace the bridge section blown off the SDF-7 with the same component blocks off the one that's 90 percent complete, than have you wait for the latter to reach completion, like your counterparts had to do. That, and having my engineer tweak its fold system, should get you there about the same time as Carpenter. And, trust me, his arrival didn't go so well."

"How bad?"

"Ever see the schematics for the old Tyrolean colony ships? The ones that were flying bricks the size of Manhattan?"

"Yeah; never actually saw one."

"That's because the last time they were actually used to transport colonies was over a thousand years ago. The Masters pulled the last dozen or so out of mothballs to transport all their viable clones to Earth for the recovery of the Storage Matrix. After all, even blasted by the Zentraedi, Earth's ecosystem makes Tyrol's look like a parking lot by comparison. Each of those was outfitted with about the same weapon complement as a pair of Zent flagships, and about ten times more Bioroids than they had pilots for. They started out using partial clones not viable outside their containment as most their pilots, then started experimenting with captured Earth civilians brainwashed to serve the same function. By the end, they were only using sentient pilots, as they decided that quality worked better than quantity."

"Jesus."

"The Southern Cross managed to cripple their flagship, because my engineer figured out a vulnerability in their power system, back when he was still a hovertanker in the ATAC. Then, they modified their ships to eliminate that, before recovering that ship off the surface. They didn't lose one of those ships permanently until Carpenter's ship was crippled, and he abandoned ship after locking the autopilot on one of them. Louie's unit, led by Dana Sterling, boarded the enemy flagship a few weeks later, and managed to rig it to blow with the help of the last Zor clone, that had rebelled against the Masters after getting reeducated by Dana's unit; unfortunately, nearly all personnel had time to evacuate. Of the rest, most were reduced to skeleton crews and sick clones for the final battle, and the majority of healthy clones transferred to the new flagship. That one finished off the Southern Cross, but at the moment of their victory, Zor and Dana killed the Masters, and blew the ship over the ruins of Macross, in a vain attempt to keep the Invid from finding Earth."

"You're telling me the most effective unit in the war was-"

"Yes, Jon, it was a hovertank unit. You're perfectly within rights to feel vindicated."

"Now, will you tell me what REALLY happened back there in the cell block? You didn't have the type of weapons to do that to Adams and Edwards."

"Minmei killed them - not your Minmei, but my universe's Minmei."

"Then, where was she?'

"Her younger daughter is, well, special; for that matter, so's my son, and a few of my nieces. Your Sterlings' second daughter, due any day now, also falls into that category. Prolonged exposure to Protoculture has made the next generation of REF kids special, though Dana and other kids of Zentraedi are like that to an extent. And, back home, someone trying to alter our history from their own enhanced them even further. Minmei actually had her two-year-old teleport the two of them down from my ship, her own idea, to get her own form of vengeance on Edwards. In my universe, she was prisoner for almost a year on Optera, and was raped physically and mentally over the entire duration by Edwards. It took her years of counseling to recover from it. It's gonna be one hell of a shitstorm when I get back up there to deal with that."

"So, Captain Hunter; that was your wife that transmitted to the SDF-3, correct?"

"Yes, it was. When she realized the situation, she came up with the idea and ran with it."

"So, where did you pick up Fokker at, if you're from 2014?"

"I'll handle this, Rick. My family has a strange hobby. They like bringing the dead back to life. For example, my niece and my wife brought Fokker, Grant and the women of the bridge crew back to life on my world, and another niece did the same for Fokker on Rick's Earth. Of course, Roy was easy - he was put in cryogenic storage after he died of organ failure from blood loss, awaiting burial on Earth, then never was decanted, and left interred on the SDF-1. That system was still on emergency power as late as the SDF-3 launch. Portable storage canisters not quite as sophisticated were used on the SDF-1 bridge crew, and their frozen corpses were left on the bridge when the wreckage was buried. Both were well within the realm of recloning into living bodies with most of their memories. Hell, I'm even married to a clone one of my nieces made, though of a living person, not someone dead."

"Anyone I'd know?"

"Remember how I said there were a number of 'special' kids? My first niece was the strongest of the lot - in 2017. She aged to adulthood within six months, then cloned one of her kiddy friends to be an adult friend, after telepathically learning how to operate the machinery from Lang. Trust me, I was NOT pleased when I found out my girlfriend was a clone of my commanders' five-year-old, not to mention how Max reacted."

"Max? You married a clone of DANA?"

"You've not heard the half of it... I'll tell you when we have more free time. Rick's already heard it all, and I don't want to bore him retelling it."

The council was still rather shook up when Scott and the other two ship commanders made their entrance, and gave them a reaming out for letting Edwards go as long as they did. Scott then came over the top and hit them with the crimes of their future selves, from his universe. From there, he started bringing in evidence of some members' collusion with Edwards that led to this point, from their desire to get Lang and other moderates off the ruling council. This was facilitated by Marie, who had every teleporting adult in the fleet, including herself, going around to the places where such evidence was found in the council treason trials of 2035-2036, and gathering as much of the evidence as possible over the six hours leading up to the confrontation.

The result was devastating; one council member even had a heart attack when his actions were made public - a real one, since it was hard to fake it with a psychic doctor present (Noel), and she took care of it using her powers to force the clot the dissolve. By the time the night was through, those that had started the day thinking Edwards would save them, were dragged down with his fall - and didn't escape to poison the REF further, like they did elsewhere.

The first order of business was to try to call the Sentinels, to no avail. By this point, they were probably in transit to Peryton, and that whole region of space was a mess. In fact, it took almost two months to finally contact the local versions of the Hunters, by which time Wolfe had left on his repaired ship with some of the Dreamweaver personnel aboard. Also, the SDF-3's fold engines had been totally stripped down and rebuilt to Louis' standards, since his engineering crew and that of the other two SDFs had already done new fold engines for the latter two ships prior to the trip here, and in fact had built many of the parts needed before departing, based on what Scott told them his grand-niece said. The decision was made to move the discussion to Haydon IV aboard the SDF-2, which would give them the opportunity to sneak Noel and Louis into the planet-ship's guts and make Haydon's slumber an eternal one, and allow the Ark Angel to meet them under its own power. After an awkward round of introductions, the parties sat down to discuss the next step.