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  She turned to him as if they had all the time in the world, pure loathing in her eyes. She reached for the handle of the back door and threw it open.

  Rick spotted her.

  He had the Veritech reconfigured to Guardian mode and was setting down on the theater street several blocks behind Kyle's sports car. Kyle was revving the engine, too preoccupied to take notice of the mecha's descent, but Minmei caught sight of it in the rearview mirror and spun around in her seat.

  She sucked in her breath. "Kyle, please don't leave yet-it's Rick!"

  Skull One had landed. The radome of the Veritech was on the ground, tail up in the air like some mechanical bird searching the earth for worms: Rick had sprung the canopy and was climbing out of the cockpit.

  Kyle said, "We're late already!" and gunned it, patching out on the pavement.

  Rick was chasing them on foot, and Minmei could read his lips: He was calling her name, asking them to stop.

  "Turn around, Minmei!" Kyle yelled at her from the front seat. "It's too late!"

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  "Good-bye," she said softly to the small figure in the distance. It's too

  late!

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Zentraedi are not inferior beings, nor should they be treated like second-class citizens. They should enjoy the same freedoms the rest of us do-life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! No one can say for sure that some of them won't turn to crime or evil purpose, but at least we won't have repressed their right to express themselves-we won't have acted like fascists!

  From Lynn-Kyle's Pamphlets on Pacificism

  The line forms to the right!" One of Khyron's shock troopers bellowed, gesturing with his massive hand.

  Forty feet below the giant's angry face, a micronized Zentraedi, recently returned to the fold, wondered whether he had made the right decision in joining the Backstabber's battalion. It had been an arduous journey from New Detroit to reach these snowbound wastes. And now there was a certain hostility in the cold air...

  But all at once the shock trooper was grinning, then laughing and slapping his knee. Other soldiers were, too, and all along the line of micronized Zentraedi the laughter was spreading.

  "Well, that's what the Micronians are always saying, isn't it?" the shock trooper asked his diminutive counterpart. " 'Line forms on the right,' 'no parking,' 'no smoking'...I mean, we Zentraedi warriors have learned something from the Micronians, haven't we? We want to do things orderly from now on-peacefully!"

  "Yeah, we're all for peace!" said a second trooper, brandishing his laser

  rifle.

  A third added: "We love their homeworld so much that we're just

  gonna take it from them!"

  And everyone laughed and threw in comments of their own, giants and micronized Zentraedi alike.

  The line led to the sizing chamber, back where it belonged in Khyron's

  command ship now, where one by one, Zentraedi were doffing their Micronian outfits and being returned to full size in the conversion tank. It was a slow and tedious process, but no one seemed to mind the wait.

  Khyron least of all.

  He and Azonia were sitting some distance from the tank, sipping at tall glasses of an intoxicating drink one of the former micronized Zentraedi had introduced to the growing outlaw battalion. Khyron had taken a fancy to sipping straws, and his consort humored him by having one in her glass also. Close by, Grel watched them nervously.

  Word had spread quickly through the wastelands that Khyron had captured the sizing chamber and was ready to make good his promise to return to full size any who would join his army. Each day the lines of micronized Zentraedi males and females grew longer, and Khyron was reveling in his victory. He had instructed his spies in the population centers to make it known just who had taken the chamber.

  Let them know that Khyron had returned!

  Laughing hysterically, the warlord lifted the glass in a toast to a soldier who stepped from the chamber, naked and powerful once again.

  "Now that Khyron is in possession of the chamber, he will rebuild his army and crush the Micronians! This wretched world will have known better days!"

  With that, he heaved his glass at the line, shattering it against the interior hull of the ship and showering those waiting with glass and liquid.

  Azonia looked at her lord and grinned proudly. She was half in love with his insanity, though "love" was hardly the word she would have used.

  But suddenly Khyron wasn't smiling.

  He made a guttural sound, stood up, and began to pace back and forth in front of her, his clenched fists at his hips holding the campaign cloak away from his scarlet uniform.

  "Not enough," he said at last. "Not enough!" He whirled on her without warning, devilish fire in his eyes. "We must have the Protoculture matrix itself-Zor's factory. It's somewhere still in that rotting fortress, and we will

  have it!"

  "But m'lord, surely the Micronians-" Azonia started to say.

  "Bah!" he interrupted her. "Do you think they would even bother to guard this chamber if they had the factory in their possession?! No, I don't think they've found it yet.

  "Yes, but-"

  Khyron smashed a fist into his open palm. "We will do what we should have done all along. We will take something from them-something they deem precious. And we will hold it in exchange for the dimensional fortress. There is a Micronian word for it..." He turned to Grel and said, "The word, Grel-what is it?"

  "'Ransom,' m'lord," came the speedy reply.

  "Ransom, yes..." Khyron repeated softly. He gestured to the sizing chamber and instructed Grel to speed things along. "We're going to be leaving here shortly," he told him. "But we must not forget to leave a little surprise for our Micronian friends..."

  New Detroit had been placed under martial law. There was little reason to expect a follow-up attack, but the theft of the chamber had the resident Zentraedi up in arms. Some of them believed that the Earth Forces had staged a Zentraedi raid in order to gain possession of the chamber. Reconstruction crews and civil defense reinforcements had been flown in from New Macross, and a field headquarters (with Lisa Hayes in command) had been set up outside the city limits.

  Whether a band of malcontents from the wastes were responsible for the assault had yet to be confirmed, but reconnaissance flights north of the city had revealed the existence of a base of some sort, hastily constructed around the remains of a crashed warship whose towering presence dominated that snowy region. A squadron of Veritechs under Rick Hunter's command was on its way to the site now, Lisa Hayes monitoring their progress from field HO.

  Her screen had indicated no activity at the base, but when the

  Cat's-Eye recon dropped in for a closer pass, the displays had lit up: Enemy missiles had been launched at the approaching fighter group. Lisa went on the com net to warn them.

  "Uh, we roger that, control," said one of Rick's wingmen. "Enemy projectiles maintaining tracking status. Onboard computers calculate impact in twenty-three seconds."

  "Evasive!" Lisa heard Rick say over the net.

  Lisa watched her screen: The missiles were altering course along with the fighters.

  "They're still on your tail, Captain Hunter."

  An elisted rating at the adjacent duty station turned to her suddenly. "Picking up a sudden heat emission."

  Lisa was already back on the net. "The projectiles have activated protoboosters."

  "All units," said Rick. "Send out ghosts."

  Lisa studied the screen once more. The missiles had gained on the group, but the false radar images had confused them. Only momentarily, however. "They've swung around, Commander."

  "Roger, control," Rick answered her. "We've got them in our tracking monitors. We're planning a surprise of our own."

  Skull One led the group in a formation climb and rollout that brought them nose to nose with the incoming projectiles. Though eyes saw nothing but blue skies ahead, the Veritech screens
read death.

  "Impact in seven seconds," said Rick's wingman. "Hammerheads on my mark-now!"

  Missiles tore from launch tubes as the group loosed a bit of their own death; projectiles met their match head-on, annihilating one another in a series of explosions that fused into an expanding sphere of fire. The Veritechs boostered through this, scorching themselves but holding their own, the route to the enemy base clear as day.

  They came in hugging the barren terrain, the tail section of the leaning hulk looming into view over the horizon. Rick ordered reconfiguration to

  Guardian mode when they hit the edge of the target zone and released a score of heat-seekers to announce his arrival.

  The ground at the base of the Zentraedi warship was instantly torn up. Snow and dirt were blown from the area, and when the smoke cleared, there was a newly formed crater fully encircling the ruined warship. But no return fire or signs of activity. Rick guessed what the Cat's-Eye indicators would reveal.

  "Scanners indicate no sign of life," the recon plane's pilot said after a moment.

  Rick ordered half the team to put down and reconfigure to Battloid mode for entry into the warship itself.

  The fact that the hulk might contain unknown traps was on everyone's mind, so they were to proceed slowly and methodically, compartment by compartment, checking for timing devices or infrared trips.

  Three hours in, they reached a central cargo hold filled with Zentraedi ordnance and supplies. Still there was no sign of occupation.

  "Looks like the place was deserted when we hit it," Rick proposed. "The missiles must've been controlled from a remote outpost."

  Rick's wingman gestured the arm of his Battloid to the weapons cache. "Take a look at all this stuff."

  Rick did just that: If whoever had been here could afford to leave all this behind, he didn't want to think about what they were packing when they left.

  He moved his mecha toward one of the supply crates, absently brushing dirt from the lid. As he did so, the insignia of the Botoru Battalion began to take shape.

  Khyron's battalion!

  One thousand miles west of New Detroit, through land that had once been home to dinosaurs and buffalo, ran the strangest group of creatures to appear in many a day: a small band of giant humanoids and ostrichlike machines-in some cases a commingling of the two, with giants riding

  piggyback on the pods, hands clamped tightly on plastron guns, legs wrapped around the pods' spherical bodies. Inside an Officer's Pod at the head of the pack sat the Backstabber, a crazed smile on his face while he addressed the images of Azonia and Grel on the mecha's circular screens.

  "Everything is going just as I planned," he congratulated himself. "These Micronians are so easily fooled."

  "Battlepods are now approaching objective," his consort reported. "No sign of any resistance," said Grel.

  "They fell for it!" Khyron cackled.

  As a cowboy would the rump of a horse, he slapped the console of the pod to hurry it along. He could hear the mechaless giants give out a war cry as they crowned a small rise in the terrain and moved on the city.

  Denver, Colorado, as it was once known, had been rebuilt so often since the Global Civil War and had undergone so many name changes that people now referred to it simply as "the City." An enormous hangar used decades before by America's NORAD had been converted to a concert hall large enough to accommodate several thousand Humans and close to a hundred giants. There was a small crowd tonight, but Minmei was singing her heart out nonetheless, memories of the raid on New Detroit fresh in her mind and the need to cement relations between Human and Zentraedi foremost in her thoughts.

  She had the crowd, small as it was; the band was tight, and there were moments of perfection in her performance. For a while she could put Kyle from her list of concerns; he hadn't said ten words to her on their cross-country trip from New Detroit, and even now she was certain that he was glaring at her from the stage wings.

  Minmei, in that same ruffled dress she had sported in New Macross, was two verses into "Touch and Go" when the real trouble began. The giant Zentraedi seated in the upper tiers were the first to notice it: a rhythmical undercurrent of mechanical articulation, the beat of metalshod hooves in the streets, a sound like distant thunder.

  The singer herself became aware of the noise a moment later and stopped midsong. Most of the audience was on its feet, staring up at the curved roof of the hangar: Something was moving up there...

  When the building began to quake, everyone made a run for the exits, but they were a bit late: The roof seemed to tear open, and all at once it was raining Battlepods. Several more broke through the hangar walls, followed by Zentraedi shock troopers armed with laser rifles and autocannons. The hall was pandemonium, even though not a single shot had been fired.

  Minmei stood paralyzed center stage, Battlepods close enough to be reflected in her azure eyes. She was aware of Kyle's presence at her side but incapable of moving of her own free will.

  "Minmei," he was screaming, "they're heading right for us! You've got to snap out of it!"

  An unusual-looking pod had positioned itself in front of the stage; it had a red snout, a top-mounted cannon, and two derringer-like hand-guns-one of which it slammed against the stage as Kyle was leading her away.

  She felt herself thrown off her feet by the violence of the force, but even that wasn't enough to restore her will.

  So she surrendered herself to Kyle, allowing him to pull her up and lead her to the stage steps, down into the orchestra pit, down into that grouping of pods closing in on them...

  "Well, look what we have here..." an affected voice boomed out far above her.

  Minmei looked up into a handsome, clean-shaven face framed by attractive blue hair. The giant Zentraedi who had climbed from the unusual-looking pod was wearing a scarlet-colored uniform trimmed in yellow and an olivedrab campaign cloak that fastened on itself over one shoulder. He reached his hand out and grabbed hold of her and Kyle, crushing them together in his grip as he lifted them high above the stage.

  "Let us go!" Kyle managed to yell. "You're going to kill us!"

  The warrior titan held them up in front of his face; Minmei saw the

  devil in his steel-gray eyes.

  "I wouldn't dream of it," he said, some unspoken purpose in mind.

  "No harm must come to Minmei, Commander!" she heard one of the other giants insist. She craned her neck to see past the warrior's thumb, fighting for breath to get a look at the one who had spoken in her defense.

  Khyron gestured to one of his Battlepods, and without warning the mecha kicked the friendly Zentraedi, catching him in the groin and sending him sprawling back against the wall of the hangar, where he rolled over in agony.

  "I will not tolerate disobedience!" Khyron bellowed, raising his other

  fist.

  He shot Minmei a look that chilled her heart; then he threw his head

  back and roared with laughter.

  Khyron's name was being shouted in the streets of New Portland, New Detroit, and several other cities that had seen incidents of Zentraedi uprising. Lisa Hayes had heard as much at field headquarters, and she was the one who first reported the rumors to Admiral Gloval. But Gloval remained skeptical: If history had taught him anything, it was that heroes, regardless of their orientation toward good or evil, were often resurrected in times of cultural stress. The Zentraedi were no exception, so it was natural for them to suddenly believe that Khyron, their evil lord, had not perished along with Dolza and the commanders of the armada but had somehow escaped and had merely been lying in wait these two years, ready to strike back at the Earth with an equally ghostlike battalion of warriors when the time was right.

  Of course, there was no actual proof that Khyron had met his end in battle, and the most recent attack on New Detroit and the theft of the sizing chamber were suggestive of his style. There was also Commander Hunter's discovery of an arms cache bearing the Botoru Battalion insignia...

&n
bsp; The admiral, ran through all of it once more as he paced in front of the large wall screen in the SDF-2 situation room. He was about to put a match

  to his favorite briar when Claudia called to him from her duty station. "We're receiving a transmission from someone claiming to be Khyron,"

  she told him. "Shall I put it on the screen?"

  "Yes, by all means," he replied, stoking the pipe. "And be sure to get a fix on the source of the transmission. "

  Gloval fully expected to encounter the likeness of an imposter. After all, no one in the Earth Forces had met the so-called Backstabber face to face (although God knew how many had met him mecha to mecha and regretted it). The admiral had, however, seen trans-vids of Khyron supplied by Breetai and Exedore during the long debriefing sessions following the defeat of the Zentraedi armada.

  ...Which explains Gloval's sudden start when Khyron's devilishly handsome face appeared on the wall screen. A collective gasp went up from the command center personnel; even those who hadn't been privy to the trans-vids recognized the real item when they saw it.

  Khyron sneered: "What a pleasure it is to interrupt you, Admiral Gloval."

  "He sounds like that sixties actor," someone in the control room commented. "James Mason."

  Gloval made up his mind that he was not going to allow himself to be rattled. He cleared his throat and chomped down on the mouthpiece of the pipe. "On the contrary," he said with appropriate sarcasm, "the disgust is all mine, I assure you."

  Khyron seemed to like that and said as much. He made a gesture with his hand to indicate something off to his left, and the camera swung slightly to find a second Zentraedi officer-a female, at that. She was not unattractive; with close-cropped blue-gray hair, fine features, and a pointed chin, but she wore the same malicious look on her pale face as that worn by her commander. Gloval didn't have to guess: This had to be Azonia, also believed to have been killed, the dreaded Quadrono leader who was Miriya Parino's superior.