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  Published by Ballantine Books:

  THE ROBOTECH™ SERIES

  GENESIS #1

  BATTLE CRY #2

  HOMECOMING #3

  BATTLEHYMN #4

  FORCE OF ARMS #5

  DOOMSDAY #6

  SOUTHERN CROSS #7

  METAL FIRE #8

  THE FINAL NIGHTMARE #9

  INVID INVASION #10

  METAMORPHOSIS #11

  SYMPHONY OF LIGHT #12

  THE SENTINELS™ SERIES

  THE DEVIL’S HAND #1

  DARK POWERS #2

  DEATH DANCE #3

  WORLD KILLERS #4

  RUBICON #5

  ROBOTECH: THE END OF THE CIRCLE #18

  A Del Rey Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1988 by HARMONY GOLD U.S.A., INC. and TATSUNOKO PRODUCTION CO. LTD. All Rights Reserved. ROBOTECH is a trademark owned and licensed by HARMONY GOLD U.S.A., INC.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-91852

  ISBN 0-345-35301-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-82392-2

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Excerpt from Death Dance

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Appendix

  Robotech Chronology

  ROBOTECH CHRONOLOGY

  1999 Alien spacecraft known as SDF-1 crashlands on Earth through an opening in hyperspace, effectively ending almost a decade of Global Civil War.

  In another part of the Galaxy, Zor is killed during a Flower of Life seeding attempt.

  2002 Destruction of Mars Base Sara.

  2009 On the SDF-1’s launch day, the Zentraedi (after a ten-year search for the fortress) appear and lay waste to Macross Island. The SDF-1 makes an accidental jump to Pluto.

  2009-11 The SDF-1 battles its way back to Earth.

  2011-12 The SDF-1 spends almost half a year on Earth, is ordered to leave, and defeats Dolza’s armada, which has laid waste to much of the planet.

  2012-14 A two-year period of reconstruction begins.

  2012 The Robotech Masters lose confidence in the ability of their giant warriors to recapture the SDF-1, and begin a mass pilgrimage through interstellar space to Earth.

  2013 Dana Sterling is born.

  2014 Destruction of the SDFs 1 and 2 and Khyron’s battlecruiser.

  2014-20 The SDF-3 is built and launched. Rick Hunter turns 29 in 2020; Dana turns 7.

  Subsequent events covering the Tiresian campaign are recounted in the Sentinels series. A complete Robochronology will appear in the fifth and final volume.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  All I have learned of the Shapings of the Protoculture tell me that it does not work randomly; that there is a grand design or scheme. I feel that we have been brought here, kept here, for some reason.

  Yet, what purpose can there be in SDF-3’s being stranded here on Tirol for perhaps as long as five years? And during that time will the Robotech Masters be pursuing their search for Earth?

  Since tempers are short, I do not mention the Shaping; I’m a little too long in the tooth, I fear, for hand-to-hand confrontations with homesick, frightened, and frustrated REF fighters.

  Dr. Emil Lang, personal journal of the SDF-3 mission

  On captured Tirol, after a fierce battle, the Humans and their Zentraedi allies—the Robotech Expeditionary Force—licked their wounds, then decided it was time to mark the occasion of their triumph. It was, as nearly as they could calculate, New Year’s Eve.

  But far out near the edge of Tirol’s system, a newcomer appeared—a massive spacegoing battleship, closing in on the war-torn, planet-sized moon.

  Our first victory celebration, young Susan Graham exulted. What a wonderful party! She was just shy of sixteen, and to her it was the most romantic evening in human history.

  She was struggling to load a bulky cassette into her sound-vid recorder while scurrying around to get a better angle at Admirals Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes Hunter. They had just stood up, in full-dress uniforms, clasping white-gloved hands, apparently about to dance. There had been rumors that the relationship between the two senior officers of the Robotech Expeditionary Force was on shaky ground, but for the moment at least, they seemed altogether in love.

  Sue let out a short romantic sigh and envied Lisa Hunter. Then her thoughts returned to the cassette which she was bapping with the heel of her hand. A lowly student-trainee, Sue had to make do with whatever equipment she could find at the G-5 public-information shop, or Psy-ops, Morale or wherever.

  At last the cassette was in place, and she began to move toward her quarry.

  In Tiresia, the moon’s shattered capital city, the Royal Hall was aglow. The improvised lighting and decorations reemphasized the vast, almost endless size of the place.

  The lush ballroom music remained slow—something from Strauss, Karen Penn thought; something even Jack Baker could handle. As she had expected, he asked her to waltz a second time.

  And he wasn’t too bad at it. The speed and reflexes that made him such a good Veritech pilot—almost as good as I am, she thought—made him a passable dancer. Still, she maintained her aloof air, gliding flawlessly, making him seem clumsy by comparison; otherwise, that maddening brashness of his would surface again at any second.

  They were about the same height, five ten or so, he redheaded and freckled and frenetic, she honey-blond and smooth-skinned and model-gorgeous—and long since tired of panting male attention. Jack had turned eighteen two months ago; Karen would celebrate her majority in three more weeks.

  They had been like oil and water, cats and dogs, Unseducible Object and Irrepressible Force, ever since they had met. But they had also been battle comrades, and now they swayed as the music swelled, and somehow their friendly antagonism was put aside, at least for the moment.

  The deepspace dreadnought was a bewildering, almost slapdash length of components: different technologies, different philosophies of design, even different stages of scientific awareness, showed in the contrasts among its various modules. From it, scores of disparate weapons bristled and many kinds of sensors probed.

  With Tirol before it, the motley battlewagon went on combat alert.

  On the outer rim of the ballroom, members of General Edwards’s Ghost Squadron and Colonel Wolfe’s Wolfe Pack traded hostile looks, but refrained from any overt clashes; Admiral Lisa Hunter’s warnings, and her promises of retribution, had been very specific on that point.

  Edwards was there, a haughty, splendidly military figure, his sardonic handsomeness marred by the half cowl that covered the right half of his head.


  Per Lisa’s confidential order, Vince Grant and his Ground Mobile Unit people were keeping an eye on the rivals, ready to break up any scuffles. So far things seemed to be peaceful—nothing more than a bit of glowering and boasting.

  Hanging in orbit over the war-torn ruin of Tirol, Super-dimensional Fortress Three registered the rapid approach of the unidentified battleship.

  SDF-3 had been tardy in detecting the newcomer; the Earth warship’s systems had been damaged in the ferocious engagement that had destroyed her spacefold apparatus, and some systems were still functioning far short of peak efficiency.

  But she had spotted the possible adversary now. According to procedure, SDF-3 went to battle stations, and communications personnel rushed to open downlinks with the contingent on Tirol’s surface.

  Perhaps the strangest pair at the celebration was Janice Em, the lovely and enigmatic singer, and Rem, assistant to the Tiresian scientist Cabell.

  Janice was Dr. Lang’s creation, an android, an artificial person, though she was unaware of it.

  Lang shook his head and reminded himself that the Shapings of the Protoculture were not to be defied. He was really quite happy that the two were drawn together.

  He turned to Cabell, the ancient lone survivor of the scientists of Tirol.

  What were once the gorgeous cityscape of Tiresia and magnificent gardens surrounding the Royal Hall, were now only blasted wasteland.

  Above was a jade-green crescent of Fantoma, the massive planet that Tirol circled. Its alien beauty hid the ugliness that Lynn-Minmei knew to be there in the light of Valivarre, the system’s primary. The green Fantoma-light cast a spell with magic all its own. How could the scene of so much death and suffering be so unspeakably beautiful?

  She shivered a bit, and Colonel Jonathan Wolfe slipped his arm around her. Minmei could feel from the way he had moved closer that he wanted to kiss her; she wasn’t sure whether she felt the same or not.

  He was the debonair, tigerishly brave, good-looking Alpha Wolf of the Wolfe Pack—and had rescued her from certain death, melodramatic as it might sound to others. Still, there was a danger in love; she had learned that not once but several times now.

  Wolfe could see what was running through Minmei’s thoughts. He feasted his eyes on her, hungered for her. The Big, Bad Wolfe, indeed—an expression he had never liked.

  Only this time, the Big Bad was bewitched, and helpless. She was the blue-eyed, black-haired gamine whose voice and guileless charm had been the key to Human victory in the Robotech War. She was the child-woman who, unknowingly, had tormented him with fantasies he could not exorcize by day, and with erotic fever-dreams by night.

  She hadn’t moved from the circle of his arm; she looked at him, eyes as wide as those of a startled doe. Wolfe leaned closer, lips parting.

  I love her so much, Rick thought, as he and Lisa went to join the dancing. His wife’s waist was supple under his gloved hand; her eyes danced with fondness. He felt himself breaking into a languorous smile, and she beamed at him.

  I can’t live without her, he knew. All these problems between us—we’ll find some way to deal with them. Because otherwise life’s not worth living.

  The music had just begun when it stopped again, raggedly, as Dr. Lang quieted people from the mike stand. The ship’s orchestra’s conductor stood to one side, looking peeved but apprehensive.

  Everyone there had already served in war. Something inside them anticipated the words. “Unidentified ship … course for Tirol … Skull and Ghost squadrons … Admiral Hayes and Admiral Hunter …”

  The war’s come between us again.

  Rick started off in a dash, but stopped before he had gone three steps, realizing his wife was no longer with him. Fortunately, in all the confusion, only one person noticed.

  He looked back and saw Lisa waiting there, head erect, watching him. He realized he had reacted with a fighter jock’s reflexes, the headlong run of a hot scramble.

  It was the argument they had been having for days, for weeks now—tersely, in quick exchanges, by day; wearily, taxing to the limit their patience with one another, by night. Rick was a pilot, and had come to the conclusion that he couldn’t be—shouldn’t be—anything else. Lisa insisted that his job now was to command, to oversee flight-group ops. He was to do the job he had been chosen to do, because nobody else could do it.

  Rick saw nothing but confidence in his wife’s eyes as she looked at him, her chin held high—that, and a proud set to her features.

  Sue Graham, wielding her aud-vid recorder, had caught the whole thing, the momentary lapse in protocol, in confidence—in love. Now, she rewound the tape a bit, so that the sight of Rick Hunter dashing off from his wife would be obliterated, and began recording over it.

  Just as people were turning to the Admirals Hunter, Rick stepped closer to Lisa. In that time, conversation and noise died away, and the Royal Hall itself, weighted by its eons of history and haunting events, seemed to be listening, evaluating. Rick’s high dress boots clacked on an alien floor that shone like a black mirror.

  He offered her his arm, formal and meticulously correct, inclining his head to her. “Madam?”

  She did a shallow military curtsy, supple in her dress-uniform skirt, and laid her hand on his forearm. The whole room was listening and watching; Rick and Lisa had reminded everyone what the REF was, and what was expected of it.

  “Orders, Admiral?” Rick asked his wife crisply, loudly, in his role as second-ranking officer present. By speaking those words, he officially ended the ball and put everyone on notice that they were on duty.

  Lisa, suddenly their rock, gazed about at them. She didn’t have to raise her voice very much to be heard. “You all know what to do, ladies, gentlemen.

  “We will treat this as a red alert. SDF-3 will stand to General Quarters. GMU and other ground units report to combat stations; all designated personnel will return to the dimensional fortress.”

  There was already movement, as people strode or hurried to their duties. But no one was running; Lisa had given them back their center.

  “Fire-control and combat-operations officers will insure that no provocative or hostile acts are committed,” she said in a sharp voice. “I will remind you that we are still on a diplomatic mission.

  “Carry on.”

  Men and women were moving purposefully, the yawning hall quickly clearing. Lisa turned to an aide, a commo officer. “My respects to the Plenipotentiary Council, and would they be so gracious as to convene a meeting immediately upon my return to SDF-3.”

  The aide disappeared; Lisa turned to Rick. “If you please?”

  Rick, his wife on his arm, turned toward the shuttle grounding area. REF personnel made way for them. Rick let Lisa set the pace: businesslike, but not frantic.

  When the shuttle was arrowing up through Tirol’s atmosphere for SDF-3 rendezvous, and the two were studying preliminary reports while staff officers ran analyses and more data poured in, Rick paused for a moment to look at his wife as she meditated over the most recent updates.

  He covered her hand with his for a moment; squeezed it. “We owe each other a waltz, Lisa.”

  She gave him a quick, loving smile, squeezing his hand back. Then she turned to issue more orders to her staff.

  To Rem, the Humans and their REF mission had been bewildering from the beginning, but never more so than now.

  With this news of an unidentified warship, he and Cabell—who had been a father to him, really, and more than a father—were hastened toward the shuttle touchdown area, to await their turn to be lifted up to the SDF-3. Their preference in the matter wasn’t asked; they were an important—perhaps crucial—military intelligence resource now, even though they were just as mystified as anybody else.

  There were confused snatches of conversation and fragments of scenes as Rem guided Cabell along in the general milling.

  There were the two young cadets Rem had come to know as Karen Penn and Jack Baker. They had been pressed into s
ervice as crowd controllers and expediters of the evacuation. Jack kept trying to catch Karen’s eye and call some sort of jest or other; she just spared him the occasional withering glance and concentrated on her duties.

  Rem couldn’t blame her. What could be funny about a situation like this? Was Jack psychologically malfunctional?

  Then there was the singer, Minmei, Janice Em’s partner, possessed of a voice so moving that it defied logic, and a face and form of unsettling appeal. The one they called Colonel Wolfe seemed to be trying to usher her along, seemed to be proprietary toward her, but she wasn’t having any of it. In fact, it appeared that she was about to burst into that startling and alarming human physiological aberration called tears.

  The Ghost and Skull and GMU teams were cooperating like mindlinked Triumvirates, though Rem had seen them ready to come to blows only a short time before.

  He look about for Janice Em, Minmei’s partner and harmony and, in some measure, alter ego, but couldn’t see her. She had been with Lang only moments before, but now Lang was gone, too. Rem tried to push troubling thoughts from his mind, such as the rumors that were rife about Lang and Janice. Lang was supposed to be like an uncle to her, though some said he was “much more.”

  But what? Rem barely understood the concept “uncle,” and had no idea what “much more” might mean. Yet his cheeks flushed, and he felt a puzzling rage when he thought of Jan having some nebulous relationship to Lang that would make the old Human scientist more important to her than, than …

  Then all at once Rem and Cabell were being rushed into a shuttle, and a sliding hatch cut off the haunted nighttime view of ruined Tiresia.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  I never got tired of covering the Hunters, the admirals. To me, they were a perfect couple, the best the Earth could field.

  But in another sense, the enemy had fielded his worst.

  Susan Graham, narration from documentary Protoculture’s Privateers: SDF-3, Farrago, Sentinels, and the REF

  On the bridge of the Superdimensional Fortress Three, Lisa Hayes surveyed the preparations for battle and despaired, thinking the REF diplomatic mission might be doomed to find nothing but war.