The Masters' Gambit Read online

  The Masters’ Gambit

  By Jack McKinney 1995

  For Bill Spangler, whose comic book series, CyberPirates, figures on the action

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  This book is a reworking of the plot Carl Macek devised for the animated film ROBOTECH: THE MOVIE, blended with some of my own ideas and those put forth by Bill Spangler in his CyberPirates series for Eternity Comics. The addition of this book to the ROBOTECH/SENTINELS epic alters the order in which the novels are meant to be read. For what it's worth, here's how it should go: Robotech 1-6, Robotech 19 (The Zentraedi Rebellion), Sentinels 1-5, Robotech 20 (The Masters' Gambit), Robotech 7-12, and finally, The End of the Circle. A future book will probably be tucked between Robotech 9 and 10.

  CHAPTER ONE

  With the Zentraedi menace ended—and that race's few survivors self- exiled on the factory satellite—humanity was free once more to wage war on itself. The so-named United Earth Government essentially served the needs of the Northlands and the sundry city- and nation-states that comprised the Western European Sector. Most non-allied regions had become self-sufficient and were loath to involve themselves in any global bureaucracy. Separatism prevailed. The thinking went that, should [the Masters or the Invid] arrive, the territory that played host to their planetfall would have the privilege or task of dealing with them. And so low-intensity conflicts flourished, particularly in the Southlands. Much as the Robotech Expeditionary Force had abandoned Earth, Anatole Leonard had abandoned the Southlands after parceling it up among his former lieutenants and cronies. By 2029, petty disputes between rival armies and polities had escalated to fullblown warfare.

  Dominique Duprey,

  Prelude to the Second Robotech War

  It was good weather for a battle: a clear sky, tolerable heat, and an invigorating wind out of the northwest. Sated on weeks of rain, the lush forest south of Cavern City was vibrant, unblemished by mud or dust, charitable with outpourings of oxygen and floral scents. The lost-world tablelands to the north seemed near enough to touch. For a change, crafted warriors could perform without fear of suffocating in the cramped cockpits of their mecha, and foot soldiers armed with rifles and grenades had the planet's plush mantle to cushion their falls.

  It was good weather to live or die.

  Until noon, when the battle had taken a turn, most of the dying had been done by the severely outnumbered forces of Krista Delgado. But now it was Rawlins's crusaders who were crashing and burning and staining the

  savannah with spilled blood.

  "You think I don't know we're killing children?"

  Delgado was telling her field officers in an underground command bunker not far from the ruins of the Southern Grand Cannon. "You think I've forgotten that there are ten-year-olds out there? But remember this: those kids would think nothing of massacring everyone in Cavern City." She paused to make brief eye contact with each of her lieutenants. "See that your teams are reminded of what Rawlins's People's Army did in Porto Velho, Leticia, and Manaus. Then order them to press the counterattack—even if that means employing Mongoose missiles against Wolverine rifles. This isn't an honorable fight, ladies and gentlemen. We're going for the win, whichever way we have to."

  Delgado had to force the words from her mouth. A handsome, small- boned woman closing on sixty years, she had raised seven children, four of them members of the same orphaned generation Aaron Rawlins had conscripted into his People's Army and loosed on the strife-torn city-states of the Southlands. She could issue orders until she was blue in the face, but who could she point to as the source of her orders? Who was she answering to but her own conscience?

  She dismissed her officers and turned her attention to an array of monitors, on which half-a-dozen battle views were running in living color. The expert-system computer tasked with coordinating the aerial counteroffensive put the morning's casualties at 4500; 3000 more were projected to die by nightfall. Remote cameras panned the bodies of the dead and dying, spread-eagle in the tall grass, entangled in precarious heaps, arranged like the numerals of a clock around the rims of blast craters. The battlefield was littered with the holed torsos and armored limbs of mecha as well: Gladiators, Excalibers, early-generation Veritechs, Hovertanks, and even a couple of Alpha Fighters—courtesy of the Earth Defense Force, which had dispatched a brigade to intervene in the fighting and had wound up taking part in it.

  Colonel Tannen, one of perhaps fifty EDF soldiers who had allied

  themselves with Delgado's Cavern City militia, was in the command bunker just now. "You're doing the right thing, Krista," he announced. "Rawlins has to be stopped. It might as well be here."

  Delgado swung away from the monitors with arms folded across her narrow chest. In place of a uniform, she wore a blouse and skirt, covered by a dun-colored battle apron. Black boots met the hem of the skirt, and her long gray hair was captured in a chignon. "And better still if the one hundred EDF siding with Rawlins die with him." Her pale blue eyes flashed. "I'm aware of your motives, Evan, so don't try to con me."

  The colonel quirked a wry smile and bowed his head. He was younger than her by five years, but age spots and the dark pouches under his eyes made him appear ten years older. "Kris, you always could see through me."

  "Then, now, and tomorrow," she told him.

  Tannen's tight-fitting black pants and leather torso harness were standard EDF issue, but underneath it all, he was Robotech Defense Force through and through. Seven years earlier, the RDF had been incorporated into the EDF, but it lived on in the hearts and minds of those who had served. Delgado, too, had been an RDF officer during the war against the Zentraedi, though she hadn't actually gone to guns with the aliens until the final battle, in which the surface of the planet had been ravaged by plasma and directed light. Then, following the Rain of Death—and for reasons never fully explained to Tannen—she had thrown in with Anatole Leonard and risen to full-bird in Leonard's Army of the Southern Cross. Even so, Delgado had been openly critical of Leonard's actions in Cavern City in 2018, and might have resigned if he hadn't ultimately bequeathed her the city. The former Southern Cross now comprised the majority of the EDF. Only days earlier, when infighting had factioned the peacekeeping force sent to Cavern City, two out of three soldiers and mecha had gone over to Rawlins's side.

  Rawlins had been one of Leonard's trusted lieutenants during the Reconstruction and the Malcontent Uprisings, spearheading numerous attacks on alien bases in the Zentraedi Control Zone. When Leonard relocated permanently to Monument City in 2022 and the Southlands was

  "compartmentalized," Rawlins received the southwest and Delgado the northeast, including most of what had been the Venezuela Sector. The two had fought on opposing sides in the Global Civil War and had rarely seen eye-to-eye under Leonard. But their mutual distaste hadn't flowered into enmity until Rawlins fell under the sway of HEARTH—the Heal Earth Hajj.

  Founded by disabused members of the Church of Recurrent Tragedies, HEARTH had seized the orphaned generation of the Southlands, those born between the years 2008 and 2020, some of whom had survived the Rain of Death, and all of whom had been raised to expect a second invasion from the stars—from either the Robotech Masters or the Invid swarm. HEARTH, however, was a reaction to the pervasive paranoia of the times. Its founders posited that the United Earth Government had conspired to foster the fear of extraterrestrial invasion as a means of maintaining power and shaping a contentious future. HEARTH rejected all notions of imminent warfare and most aspects of high technology; to its tens of thousands of followers, the launch of the SDF-3 to Tirol had been little more than an elaborate and criminally costly ruse. HEARTH advocated the overthrow of the UEG and the myriad bureaucracies it had spawned, and worldwide commitment to the healing of the planet.

  Aaron Rawlins had been responsible for affixing "Hajj" to the acronym and militarizing the movement. Birthed in the provincial territories of western Argentina and southern Amazonas, the People's Army had begun a slow northward march through the Southlands, gaining converts en route— overrunning townships and isolated city-states, burning churches and temples, closing schools, butchering politicians, lawyers, doctors, and any who refused to subscribe to the new order, sowing vast killing fields wherever they ventured.

  Krista Delgado hadn't felt threatened by the Hajj until it was clear that Rawlins had his sights set on Venezuela. She had never taken lightly to people who thwarted her own designs. Ask any Zentraedi. On inheriting Venezuela's dubious throne, Delgado's first order of business—following a precedent set by Leonard in the early days of Brasília—had been to rid

  Cavern City of the aliens who had clustered there. More dispirited than they'd been on losing the war, the displaced Zentraedi had attempted to emigrate to the Northlands, only to find things so uncomfortable there that most had ultimately quit Earth for the factory satellite. Hundreds had starved themselves to death in protest; others succumbed to mysterious illnesses, or lost themselves in the still-radioactive wastes their own annihilation bolts had created.

  Having rid her domain of one scourge, Delgado wasn't about to open Venezuela's borders to the likes of Aaron Rawlins and his army of mindwarped—some said narcotized—children. So, as a dare to Rawlins, she had massed her troops south of Cavern, near the site of the dismantled Grand Cannon.

  The situation had been closely monitored by the United Earth Government, which was headquartered in the Northlands, in Monument City. The UEG had taken a stab at negotiating a truce between the two former allies, but no accommodation
had been reached. Finally, when warfare seemed inevitable, a peacekeeping force had been ordered south, jointly commanded by Colonel Tannen and Colonel Laubin—another ex- Southern Crosser. The Earth Defense Force brigade hadn't been on the scene twenty-four hours before everyone began to choose sides.

  Forty years earlier, when both had served aboard the supercarrier Kenosha, Tannen and Delgado had been lovers. But passion from the old days didn't count for much in the postmodern world.

  "Don't think for a minute I'm dumb to why you were so quick to break ranks with the EDF, Evan," Delgado was hectoring him now. "You don't give a shit about Cavern City or the People's Army. It's Laubin's contingent you're after. The chance to kill a couple of dozen Southern Crossers."

  Tannen shrugged it off. "Like Laubin isn't doing the same thing, Kris. I know for a fact he hates Rawlins. But he'd back Satan if it meant a shot at eliminating a handful of Robotechs from the EDF." He regarded Delgado mournfully. "It comes down to this, wherever we're sent. None of us have any commitment to the EDF. It was counterfeit from the get-go, something

  the UEG hatched to keep the RDF and the Southern Cross from trading fire before the Tirol mission launched. Hell, if the Masters or the Invid showed up next week, we wouldn't have a prayer. We're too busy fighting each other to take on a mutual threat."

  Delgado's look had softened somewhat. "Chairman Moran should have sense enough to disband the EDF and start from scratch."

  Tannen grunted noncommittally. "Maybe it'll come to that. But until it does, friendly fire is going to remain an EDF soldier's worst enemy."

  Delgado held his gaze for a moment, then eyed the monitor screens. "I sympathize, Evan. But in the meantime, there's killing to be done." She thought once more about Aaron Rawlins's crusaders. "Even if we are making mincemeat of our own future."

  "What happens in the Southlands is of no consequence to Monument City and its allies," Barth Constanza told the members of the Senate from his seat in the vaulted hall that was their workplace. The hall occupied center place in the classically adorned building that housed the United Earth Government; within were marble columns, adamantine floors, and fine furnishings, all under the protection of squads of towering military police armor.

  Senator Constanza went on, "We didn't create the mess down there, and we're under no obligation to solve it. Those territories chose to secede from the UEG, and most elected to pursue a separatist course even after Wyatt Moran was elected chairman. If they're determined to wage war on one another, there's nothing we can do to prevent them, short of giving our blessing to a full-scale invasion and subsequent occupation by the Defense Force."

  The remark met with vociferous opposition, and Constanza had to raise his voice to be heard over the tumult. "What we cannot permit, however— what we must not permit—is factionalism and the perpetuation of internecine fighting among the EDF!"

  There was little point in continuing until the room quieted; when it did,

  Senator Grass, esteemed member of the old boy network of the Southern Cross, was on his feet. "Does the senator from Portland propose that we simply ignore would-be conquerors like Aaron Rawlins? That we allow ourselves to sink further into the medieval morass our previous inactions have fostered?"

  "Rawlins isn't the issue," Constanza returned from the other side of the hall. "The People's Army would have been crushed months ago if it had been in our interests to do so. The point is that the EDF is using these so- called peacekeeping exercises as an excuse to settle old scores between the RDF and the Southern Cross. And such an army can hardly be trusted with defending the Earth from invasion."

  Owen Harding, from Detroit, took the floor. "Skirmishes are inevitable at this point—whether between Delgado and Rawlins or rival factions within the Defense Force. These conflicts are a by-product of tensions produced by years of waiting for an enemy that has yet to show itself."

  "Tensions we inflamed by faking Communiqués from the SDF-3," Constanza pointed out.

  Grass took issue with him. "And if we'd admitted the truth—that the SDF-3 hasn't been heard from? That wouldn't have proved inflammatory? The people had to be given hope, something to hold on to!"

  "We are the people," Harding shouted. "Or at least we're supposed to be. And our lies have kept the entire world on a war footing for almost a decade now. The truth wouldn't have been any more devastating. What's more, people have already begun to see through our fabrications. Take this HEARTH, for example. They doubt that the SDF-3 ever launched. To them, it's still sealed inside the factory satellite. We know it launched, but no one can say whether or not it ever reached Tirol. And where, I ask you, are the Robotech Masters? Where is this ultratech army we've been made to fear?"

  A substantial portion of the Senate applauded. Constanza waited, then rose to his feet. "Some of you seem to have forgotten what Hunter and Lang said before the launch: silence should not necessarily be construed as a sign of success or failure, but rather as a signal to heighten our readiness. And

  this is why the EDF must be brought under control. It should come as no surprise to anyone in this hall that Monument will be the focus of any attack. Rawlins or others like him won't be factors in a global invasion; Earth will live or die by what happens right here."

  "Commander Leonard has been saying that for years, Senator," Grass said. "If Alfred Nader, from Roca Negra, hadn't requested intervention, Leonard would never have ordered a peacekeeping force into Venezuela."

  Constanza ridiculed the idea. "Leonard knew full well those troops would break rank and throw their support to Rawlins or Delgado. He'd like nothing more than to eliminate the RDF from the army he forged and brought here from the Southlands. The RDF has been a thorn in his side since the SDF-3 launched."

  The hall was deathly still. No one rose to challenge Constanza or to pat him on the back. The senators lowered their eyes and studied their hands.

  Constanza understood. "This is a secure room, people. We're supposed to be free to speak our minds here." Nothing. Not a voice, not so much as a cough answered him. He snorted in derision. "It's not enough we've had to watch the skies for fifteen years? Now we have to watch what we think and say, for fear of retaliation from one of our own kind?"

  "Should I see to it that Constanza learns some manners?" Joseph Petrie asked. A small man with a squarish head and close-cropped hair, he had been Leonard's adjutant during the old days in Brasília and was now a kind of behind-the-throne presence in Leonard's cadre of EDF officers.

  Leonard himself was sitting across the room, blunt fingers steepled, the hairless brow of his bullet-shaped head furrowed. A protracted exhale ended his long moment of silence. "Constanza's harmless. He's only saying what a lot of them are thinking. In any case, I respect a man who endorses the unpopular opinion, even when he knows that he's bound to lose. The rest of them are spineless."

  "So I should let him be?" "For the time being."

  The two men were in what Petrie liked to call the "listening post" of Leonard's office in EDF headquarters, elsewhere in Monument City. The Senate meeting was coming to them real-time via A/V bugs planted throughout the allegedly secure hall.

  Headquarters was a soaring megacomplex of high-tech needles, punctuated with crenels and merlons like some medieval battlement. The central tower cluster had been built to suggest the white gonfalons, or ensigns, of a holy crusade hanging from high cross-pieces. Leonard's chambers were luxurious, but he often longed for Brasília, for his palace by the lake, with its small rose-windowed chapel in which he had offered morning and evening prayers.

  And just as often he thought of Seloy Deparra, the Zentraedi who had become his lover for a short time, a partner in the games of debasement and atonement he had devised—the female who had borne him a son, whom she had named Hirano. But Deparra and the boy were dead, dead ten years now, though Leonard shuddered nightly at the memory of their corpses, picked over by carrion birds in the jungle camp that had been home to the all- female Malcontent group known as the Scavengers.