The Zentraedi Rebellion Read online

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1994 by Harmony Gold USA, 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: 93-90967

  ISBN 0-345-38774-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-82397-7

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  2015 Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  2016 Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  2017 Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  2018 Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  Appendix

  2015

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  2015 began much as any other year in recent memory: a Zentraedi attack left yet a third version of Macross in ruins; friends died and were buried; and Rick Hunter found himself hopelessly conflicted, if not by love this time, then by rumors of promotion and his dark imaginings of things to come.

  Altaira Heimel, Butterflies in Winter: Human Relations and the Robotech War

  Spring’s first sunrise brightened a bleak landscape, pockmarked with craters and crazed with fissures opened by weapons of destruction. In the Northwest Territory, where a rain of Zentraedi annihilation bolts had incinerated countless acres of fir forest and hardened vast expanses of sand to glass, stood thrice-born Macross City, Earth’s burgeoning capital only three months earlier and now its most recent casualty of war. Hurricane-force winter storms had been no kinder to the place than Khyron had, and with the early thaw had come an understanding of just how much damage the city had sustained in the moments before its frigid burial.

  From a rostrum that once had been a segment of elevated highway, a middle-aged man with a noticeable Germanic accent was addressing a sizable crowd of Robotech Defense Force personnel and civilians. The only way to tell one from the other was by the RDF unit patches adorning the sleeves of the soldiers’ antihazard suits.

  “The sudden deaths of friends and loved ones affect us more profoundly than the near death of an entire world,” the speaker was saying. “And it is those loved ones—those teammates, techmates, and comrades—that we seek to honor today, on the occasion of this sad assembly.”

  His name was Emil Lang, and he was Earth’s preeminent mathematician and physicist. Robotechnology’s chief proponent for more than a decade, he was seldom at a loss for words, but much of his address that day had been written for him by Lisa Hayes. She was Admiral Hayes now, in the wake of the destruction of Macross City and the Superdimensional Fortresses 1 and 2, and the deaths of Admiral Henry Gloval and dozens of the RDF’s highest-ranking officers.

  Few among a crowd estimated to number ten thousand were aware that Lang’s were borrowed words, though Rick Hunter knew as much, because he had been with Lisa when she composed them two months earlier.

  “Lang wants to know what I would say if I’d been chosen to deliver the memorial,” Lisa had explained at the time.

  Rick understood how Lang might be nonplussed by the assignment; commo of the nontechnical sort didn’t come easily to the Wizard of Robotechnology. And yet who better to memorialize Gloval, Claudia Grant, and the rest than the man most responsible for the reconstruction of the SDF-1? The Earthman most responsible, that was. To another went credit for the ship’s original design and engineering: the Tiresian Zor, in whom Robotechnology itself had its beginnings.

  Lisa’s contribution notwithstanding, Lang’s sentiment was genuine, and it spoke to everyone in the crowd. Several of Rick’s closest friends had died in Earth’s protracted war with the Zentraedi—some in deepspace, some in Earth’s wild blue yonder—and each of those deaths had touched him more than the devastation visited on the planet as the culmination of that conflict. Rick was willing to accept that he, like so many of Earth’s survivors, had been living in staunch denial of the cataclysm. But if that were true, then Khyron’s surprise attack on the dimensional fortresses and the city that had grown up around them had constituted a long-overdue wake-up call.

  Those sections of Macross that hadn’t been atomized during the attack, had been rendered uninhabitable by radiation, thwarting early plans for salvage operations and memorial services. Readings hadn’t subsided to safe levels until late February, and then there was the snow to contend with—snow that had commenced on the night of the attack and continued unabated for two months, almost as if nature had fashioned a microclimate to hasten the cooling. March’s sudden melt loosed avalanches that had blocked the pass between Macross and Monument City and had turned the valley floors to sludge. Even now, Rick’s Veritech—a VT-1S configured in Battloid mode—stood to its ankles in thick mud.

  Rick thought the de rigueur antihazard suits a touch belated, given that one-quarter the city’s population had been dosed with radiation on emerging from the shelters—Rick, Lisa, and Minmei more than most. In addition to the sixty-six hundred dead who had been aboard the fortresses or providing mecha support, over five thousand civilian residents had died, most within days, some as recently as that morning. Bodies had been retrieved by the planeload, but it had been decided that there would be no coffins. General staff’s plan called for Lake Gloval to be filled in and made a common grave site—a shrine. Though a shrine none would dare visit for at least ten years to come.

  Macrossers, however, were nothing if not war-hardened, and most would have braved the residual fallout suitless to honor those who had flown endless against-all-odds missions in their behalf. Rick would have numbered himself among that noble group, but as an RDF captain, commander of celebrated Skull Team, he was obliged to attend as both man and mecha—“crafted,” as the Veritech pilots put it.

  Skull—the lot of them in Battloid mode—was deployed along what remained of the concourse linking the downtown mall to the flight deck of the SDF-1’s Daedalus forearm. Ghost, Vermillion, and Indigo teams were similarly arrayed along the parallel concourse that fed the Prometheus. Both appendages were actually Thor-class supercarriers that had been grafted onto the fortress some five years earlier, at the start of the War against the race of giant warriors known as the Zentraedi. Rick, seated NBC-suited and neural-capped inside Skull One’s ultratech cockpit, was ten city blocks west of the slagged half-mile-high hulks of the SDFs 1 and 2; the former, dismembered and decapitated, was up to its chest in the mud-filled crater that had been the lake, the twin booms of its truncated main gun raised in a attitude of humble entreaty.

  No more, it seemed to be saying to the early morning sky. Let it end here.

  Looking west, Rick could see across the rooftops of block after block of burned-out buildings clear to th
e elevated roadway that was serving as a stage for the long-delayed ceremony. By telephotoing the VT’s exterior-mount videocams, he could bring into sharp focus nearly every hooded face on the makeshift rostrum: Dr. Lang, Professors Lazlo Zand and Sheamus Bronson, Macross Council politicos Milburn and Stinson, Chief Justice Justine Huxley, and Mayor Tommy Luan. Elsewhere stood Brigadier General Gunther Reinhardt, generals Maistoff and Motokoff, full-bird colonels Caruthers and Herzog, and Major Aldershot.

  Rick spent a moment contemplating his pending promotion and shuddered at the thought of being lofted into the numbing company of all that assorted brass. He would just have to decline any advancement in rank, he told himself. Appeal to the aging flyboy in Reinhardt by saying that while he was flattered by Command’s confidence in his leadership abilities, his place was and would always be with the Skull.

  He reasoned he had a good chance of pulling it off. Providing that Admiral Lisa could keep from getting involved.

  “In conclusion, let us at least try to embrace a constructive perspective,” Lang was saying. “Let us try to view the coming years as a bridge to the future, however uncertain. We are a forward-looking race, and it is our faith in the future that will guide us …”

  Lang was finally winding down—and just in time, Rick decided. For what had begun as a remembrance of the dead had deteriorated into a eulogy for Lang’s precious dimensional fortresses and his plans for constructing an SDF-3.

  And so when Vince Grant succeeded Lang at the podium—towering over it—he concentrated on remembering his sister, Claudia. And when Lieutenant Mitchell took the microphone she remembered enlisted-ratings techs Sammie Porter, Vanessa Leeds, and Kim Young, all of whom Mitchell had relieved at one time or another on the fortress’s bridge. Cat crew officer Moira Flynn read off the names of hundreds of pilots she had waved into battle, and Dr. Hassan, chief surgeon aboard the SDF-1, recalled acts of unsurpassed bravery.

  And when Lisa Hayes spoke … Well, when Lisa spoke about what it meant to have served under Henry Gloval—the father she would have preferred—and about Claudia Grant, her closest friend and sister-in-arms, not even the MBS broadcasters could keep their deep voices from faltering.

  “Skull,” Rick barked into his helmet pickup, as sobs filtered through the tactical net. “Present arms!”

  The crowds turned to the half-buried ships. The technoknights of Skull, Ghost, Vermilion and Indigo raised their autocannons in salute, Veritech teams screamed over the lake, disgorging payloads of hothouse flowers, and the massive guns of a dozen MAC II Destroids offered thunderous praise to the dead. A reclamation crew positioned on the rail-gunned shoulders of the SDF-1 unfurled a huge banner bearing the RDF insignia: an encircled, curved-sided diamond suggestive of a fighting kite.

  Sunlight gleamed off the battered alloy surfaces of the SDF-1.

  There had been talk of a closing address by Exedore, but the general staff had had a last-minute change of mind and the Zentraedi ambassador’s shuttle flight from the factory satellite had been canceled. Khyron’s raid—though in no way undertaken in the name of all the Zentraedi—had brought about a resurgence of hatred for the race with whom Humans were now forced to share the Earth. Bron, Rico, and Konda—the first of the aliens to defect during the War—had been ordered to remain in Monument City and satisfy their grief by watching live coverage of the funeral.

  Their absence was nearly as conspicuous as that of Lynn Minmei.

  Following the ceremony, Lisa came directly from Fokker Field, outside Monument City, to Rick’s temporary quarters—even though her quarters were only a few blocks away in Monument’s newest suburb, transported all but intact from Macross by a fleet of flatbed trucks.

  “I don’t want to be alone,” she said when she arrived. “I can’t be alone. Not tonight.”

  Rick held her and stroked her long hair. They went over the day’s events and she cried in his arms; then Rick led her to his bed and tucked her in. Gradually, her sobbing diminished and she fell asleep, and Rick returned to the living room, planting himself by a fixed-pane window that overlooked Monument’s distant high-rise skyline. He felt strangely separated from the world, insulated by the window glass as he had been by the faceplate of the thinking cap and the permaplex of the VT cockpit.

  The walls of the small house were hung with photos of Skull One and of assorted mecha, and dangling from the ceiling were plastic models of vintage prop planes of the sort his father and Leo Epstein had so loved, some of them purchased at Bron, Rico, and Konda’s kiosk in the Macross mall. In Lisa’s quarters were her stuffed toy ostrich and an oval vanity mirror decaled with stars that had somehow survived Khyron. Mass-produced modular rectangles of plastic and lightweight alloy, the two houses were mirror images of one another but identical to dozens of others in the transplanted neighborhood.

  In the kitchenette was the round table at which Lisa had composed the introductory remarks to Lang’s speech. By the time she had finished, the notepaper was so tearstained that Rick had had to have the few paragraphs transcribed. He marveled at how fluently she could cry, at how deeply she could grieve, especially when there didn’t seem to be a tear left in him. With all that had happened in the past five years, it had gotten so that death was only unexpected when its cause was disease.

  Fortunately for the Human race, Earth was proving itself immune to pessimism. In spite of what the War had wrought, the planet was healing itself. Angry sunsets and blood-red moons were things of the past, and songbirds had returned to a patch of forest in the hills surrounding Monument—Lisa’s favorite spot for picnics. Conditions in the so-called Southlands were reported to be even better.

  Monument City had been founded by a group of Zentraedi loyal to Breetai, the warrior giant without whose help the War would have been lost—without whom, in fact, the Earth itself would have been lost, rid forever of “Micronians,” as the aliens referred to any race that failed to measure up to their forty-foot stature. The city lay to the southwest of Macross, across a now-tortuous landscape of eroded hills and precipitous outcroppings, and was in many ways an imitation of Macross, right down to the milk-carton skyscrapers, Quickform buildings, pedestrian malls, and crater lake. Save that the rusting ship centered in Monument’s lake was a Zentraedi dreadnought that had driven itself, like a spike, partway into the ground—one of tens of thousands of disabled and depleted warships that had oriented on Earth in the final moments of the War and plunged toward it. Much of the planet’s ravaged surface was an eerie Robotech boot hill studded with crumpled ships, too numerous to either bury or dismantle. Only time and the elements might remove them, though not in the life span of anyone then living.

  With the unequivocal destruction of Macross—it would never again rise from its ashes—facsimile Monument had been forced to accept Macross’s 100,000 refugees, much as Earth had been forced to accept the defeated and marooned Zentraedi. Thus, in the three months since Khyron’s assault, Monument had swollen to over ten times its original size. There was no SDF-1 to supply the fabricators that had enabled Macross Three to flower overnight, but Macross’s city planners—out of foresight or perhaps paranoia—had seen fit to construct Macross as a veritable transportable city. Indeed, the construction designs and materials developed for Macross had already been exported around the world, to wherever people were struggling to rebuild: to Portland, Denver, Detroit, Albuquerque, and Mexico in North American Sector; to the Eastern European Commonwealth, Japan, India, Australia, and central Africa; and to relatively robust South America—the Southlands—whose cities housed the highest concentrations of Micronized Zentraedi—those of Human scale, whether by choice or design.

  Monument had a mixed population of full-size and Micronized aliens, and despite the sudden growth and ethnic flip-flop, it remained essentially a Zentraedi city, governed by a council made up of aliens and representatives of the small but vocal group of advocates who had spearheaded the movement for autonomy from Macross.

  Watching the lights wink on in Mo
nument’s towers, Rick wondered how much longer the city’s most recent immigrants would be willing to live under Zentraedi rule. The War, after all, had been fueled by fears of alien domination.

  When he went to check on Lisa, he found her sound asleep, covers pulled tight around her head like a hood. Gazing at her from the bedroom door, she seemed the same, plainly pretty, twenty-nine-year-old military brat he’d once called an old sourpuss. Same heavy locks of brown-blond hair, same pale complexion and slender figure. Not that he was all that different from the long-haired Veritech jock Lisa was always accusing of indulging in amateur heroics. But Rick knew that deep down they both had changed. Or had been changed by events. Who knew anymore?

  Mostly, he was still trying to get used to the idea of the two of them as partners. They had only declared their love three months back, amid the searing flames of a city under siege—just when it had looked as if Rick and Minmei would be setting up house after five years of flirting with the arrangement. No matter that he had won Minmei by default; she had proposed to him, and no one could revoke that moment.

  Minmei had moved into his Macross module, following her disastrous breakup with cousin, manager, and then love interest Lynn-Kyle. She was going to give up her career as a singer—as The Voice—and Rick, in turn, was expected to resign from the RDF. Minmei’s formula for happily ever after: just the two of them, playing house, reminiscing about old times, going gray together. But all during that week they had spent together, in and out of each other’s arms, Rick couldn’t get Lisa out of his mind. He’d been between the two women for so long that the very idea of choosing one over the other … Well, maybe he needed confusion in his life, he’d told himself.

  Unaware that Khyron was about to guarantee that.

  Minutes before the Backstabber’s assault, Lisa had stopped by the house to inform Rick, very matter-of-factly, that she was being transferred to the factory satellite. Once there, she was to assume command of the near-completed SDF-2, and of the proposed Expeditionary mission to Tirol, homeworld of the Robotech Masters. Realizing that she would be out of his life for a long time to come had almost been enough to drag a confession from him. But it was Lisa’s follow-up that finally did the trick: she loved him, she said. She had always loved him. And she was tasking Minmei—Miss Minmei, at that—with taking care of him.