Doomsday: The Macross Saga Page 12

  The computer-generated graphics from civil defense command had been patched through to the fortress bridge. A schematic bird’s-eye view of the city streets showing the deployment of CD and enemy troops filled the screen of the threat board. Gloval and his crew had been spared actual video footage of the devastating attack, but it didn’t take much imagination to visualize the horrors that were befalling the place. These were the streets and landmarks of their world, just as surely as the bridge and base were. Each and every injury inflicted there affected the entire fortress. What happened to one happened to them all.

  Gloval was not really a religious man, despite what his verbal expressions may have suggested. But more than once during the past two years of warfare he’d come close to finding some sort of divine, intervening, benevolent intelligence at work in the cosmos. And most often it had been the Zentraedi’s sudden and inexplicable strategic reversals which had given rise to those theological revelations. The captain was in the middle of one of these at the moment, standing stockstill behind Vanessa’s chair and staring uncomprehendingly at the novel troop movements on the screen.

  “The enemy’s actions have become totally chaotic,” Vanessa said, stating the obvious.

  Gloval nodded his head slowly. “I see it … I see it … I don’t believe it, but I see it.”

  Initially it had appeared that the Zentraedi command was merely relaxing its methodical march and allowing its forces to scatter—to loot or pillage or engage in whatever it was that giants did in Micronian cities. But on closer examination the board revealed that certain pods were chasing, routing others. One pod in particular—an Officer’s Pod according to its schematic signature—was actually destroying them. Gloval let his mind rake quickly over the possibilities: There was Lisa’s two-faction theory, a schism in the Zentraedi high command; the chance that some of the VT pilots had for some reason commandeered several pods; and then there was … God. And perhaps any or all of them spelled God in the end, Gloval decided, as he turned forward to face Lisa and Claudia.

  “Alert all auxiliary groups to assemble and lock in on sectors seven, nine, ten, and eleven. We should be able to box the pods in near the Macross amphitheater.” Gloval regarded the board briefly and added, “See if you can raise the Skull team and ascertain their position.”

  Lisa went to work carrying out the captain’s orders. Brown, Indigo, and Green squads were taking up positions near the amphitheater when she finally succeeded in contacting Skull Leader. It had been a long while since Rick had radioed in, and she found herself as relieved as she was angry when he came on-line.

  “Uhh, sorry, Commander.” He sounded distracted and distant.

  “You haven’t been reporting in, Rick. Where are you? What’s going on?”

  “They’re here,” he answered sadly, turning his head from the cockpit camera. “Kyle and Minmei. Send a rescue group to the amphitheater.”

  “The amphitheater?” she said in alarm. “Rick, you’ve got to get them out of there!”

  Rick said nothing.

  “Have they been hurt, Rick? Answer me. Has something happened to Kyle?”

  Lisa saw him reach out for the kill switch, and a second later the monitor screen signals on the bridge went diagonal in static.

  Skull One turned its back on the lovers’ kiss; dejectedly, the Battloid walked from the amphitheater’s tier, head down, arms hanging loosely at its side, interfacing with and mirroring the emotions of its pilot.

  Rick felt as devastated as the city itself, at once angry at himself for spying and heartbroken by the result. It had been far worse than that tender cinematic kiss that had riled him so.

  How could she have done it? How could she have been so blatantly unfaithful to him?

  There wasn’t a trace of irony in his inner voice. He desperately wanted to feel betrayed, and he meant to put the anger that welled up from the wound to good use.

  Max Sterling was waiting for him at the exit gate.

  “Did you find her?” Max asked over the net.

  “Find who?” Rick spat back.

  “Minmei, buddy. Is she in the shelter already?”

  Rick almost raised the muzzle of the cannon on his friend.

  “She’s only one person aboard this ship, Max, you got that? My job is to defend the SDF-1, nothing else.”

  “Sure,” Max said, backing his Battloid away a bit. “Then you’ll be happy to learn that you’ve got your job cut out for you. CD has herded the enemy right into our lap.”

  Inside the cockpit module Rick stomped on the foot pedals and primed the gatling cannon.

  “Then let’s go get ’em,” he said to Max.

  There were eight Battlepods waiting for him on the shattered street and burning rooftops. He acknowledged them with a nod, raised the cannon, screamed a throat-tearing war cry, and launched himself into their midst, skull and crossbones prominently displayed.

  The pods poured fire into the street and descended on him like rabid birds of prey. Running headlong into a horizontal rain of blue death, Rick kept the gatling at waist level, discharging searing fusillades against his ship’s enemies. He sustained hits his mind refused to feel and blew away one after another of the galloping pods. Explosions relit the artificial night.

  He jagged to the right as one pod took to the air and trap-shot it, two hands on the cannon now and screaming his war cry all the while. He twisted left and blew the legs out from under a second, screen-shot a third. Even when the gatling had expended itself, his blood lust was far from diminished. He went close in, using the cannon as a club; when he lost that, he continued to fight, metalshod hand to hand.

  On the other side of town six pods played dead.

  The double-pulled hinged hatch of one these opened, and three small faces peered out. Explosions could still be heard off in the distance, but from the sound of it the fighting was sporadic and winding down. Thanks to Khyron, the Micronians had been able to snatch victory from the very jaws of defeat; their troops were mopping up what the Backstabber’s timely escape from the fortress had left unfinished. But the micronized Zentraedi soldiers inside the undamaged spheres had no bones to pick with him. Quite the contrary: Thanks to Khyron! indeed.

  Rico, Bron, and Konda rappeled to the street on ropes thrown from the cockpit; had they been aware of the Micronian custom, they would surely have kneeled down and offered a kiss. Other Zentraedi began to follow their lead, and soon the entire cult was reunited.

  These six pods had managed to keep together since the assault; they had peeled away from the main strike force just before the destruction of the population center had begun. Consequently they had come through the battle relatively unscathed, but most of their fellow deserters had not been as fortunate. Several pods, only a few of them containing micronized Zentraedi, had been unlucky enough to cross paths with Commander Khyron. The diabolical lord of the Botoru Battalion had meted out punishment on the spot. There was no way of guessing just how many soldiers he had put to death; but as word had spread through the ranks, many had given up their hopes for resettlement among the Micronians and fled into space.

  As the lucky ones now began to take a look around their dreamland there were mutterings of disappointment and regret. One of their number had found a foot-high Minmei doll on the sidewalk, its embroidered red robe stained and tattered. He was holding it in both hands cheerlessly.

  “What’s wrong with it?” one of his companions asked. “Why isn’t it singing?”

  “It seems we’ve damaged it.”

  “That doll’s not the only thing we’ve damaged,” said Karita, gesturing in general to their surroundings.

  “You mean it’s not supposed to look like this?”

  Bron stepped in and took the doll. “Karita’s right. This population center was once beautiful and peaceful.”

  “The Micronians know how to repair things,” Konda added.

  “Then they’ll rebuild all this?” Karita asked hopefully.

  Rico nodded. “
They know the secrets of Protoculture.”

  This brought surprised gasps all around, even from those micronized Zentraedi who had no understanding of the word but knew enough to recognize it as the shibboleth of the command elite.

  “But what do we do now, Rico? If we’re discovered by the Micronians, we’ll be executed for our actions against the fortress.”

  “Yeah, now what?” others chimed in.

  Rico thought for a moment. “There’s a Micronian who was trying to convince everyone that the war had to be stopped—the one I pointed out to you during the battle record trans-vids we watched. He was talking about peace all the time.”

  “What’s ‘peace’?” asked one of the clones, but the others shushed him.

  “Go on, Rico.”

  “Well, I think we should turn ourselves over to the Micronian high command. We’ll tell them that we’ve come in the name of peace.”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  I remember my parents telling me about a popular amusement center that existed before the [Global] War. The place was called EPCOT, and it was located in the southeastern Panam, in what was then called the state of Florida. There you could walk or ride through any number of pavilions, each representative, architecturally and culturally, of its nation of origin. Pop was fascinated by the Mexican exhibit. Apparently, once inside the building, it was easy to surrender yourself to the imagineers’ illusions. A marketplace, an ancient pyramid, even a smoldering volcano—all under a twilight dome full of redolent aromas. Pop was so taken with the pavilion that he went back to it over and over again, and one day he was allowed in before those illusions were in full swing. Much to his later disappointment. Because without that starry sky and that cool and gentle breeze, he was well aware of where he was: inside a human-made environment. The pavilion would never be the same for him again. And this is how the dimensional fortress civilians felt when they left the shelters after the Zentraedi attack. It was all too plain that they were inside an alien spaceship; Macross was changed forever.

  The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

  Mayor Tommy Luan was one of the first to leave the shelters. He had set out immediately on an inspection tour of Macross that by day’s end had left no proverbial stone unturned. But every step along the way proved to be an ordeal.

  The fires had been extinguished and the thick smoke exhausted through the enormous exterior ports, but the air still reeked of molten metals and plastics. The hold windows and bays, the so-called starlights, were encrusted with the same resinous grime that seemed to have settled on every horizontal surface in the city. The streets were potholed, cratered, and torn up, running with water loosed from subsurface and overhead conduits. Recyclable sewage from the devastated oubliette system had been heaped up here and there or blown into the air to adhere to street signs and buildings. There didn’t appear to be an intact piece of glass anywhere; shards littered the sidewalks, the lobbies, the interiors of offices and homes. In the most unlikely places one was able to stumble upon pieces of mechanical debris, a car part here, the leg of a Destroid over there, a Battloid finger buried in a wall. Perhaps worst of all, there were those holes in the sky.

  Residents were sorting through the mess like zombies, trying to locate fragments of their past lives, staring shell-shocked at standing walls that no longer embraced a home, walking eerily to and fro calling out names of the displaced, the lost, and the dead—of which there were miraculously few.

  For the most part casualties had been confined to the area around the amphitheater, which had seen the worst fighting by far. The Star Bowl itself would not house a concert for a long while, and the surrounding buildings were damaged beyond repair. Here there was hard evidence of the battle: the silent husks of pods and Gladiators still locked together in war-memorial poses, undetonated missiles projecting from storefronts, craters that were in effect immeasurable.

  The Macross amphitheater, however, wasn’t the only landmark to have been hit. The Hotel Centinel had collapsed like a layer cake, and the neighboring skyway was in shambles. Numerous monorail line pylons had been felled; street and store signs were down. Much of Macross Central Park had burned—the only “living fire” the SDF-1 would ever witness. Electrical power was out in many sections.

  Macross was a disaster area.

  But Tommy Luan was already rolling up his shirt sleeves and putting things back in order. On the one hand there were several things to be thankful for, he told the populace from a makeshift podium set up on the boulevard not far from the Fortress Theater. The aliens had been beaten back. True, they had leveled quite a bit of the city, but they had not penetrated any of the command areas of the ship—astrogation, engineering, or even the Robotech Defense Forces base. There was certainly an enormous amount of work ahead of them, but they had already rebuilt once before and they would be able to do it again. Luan called on them to think back to a time even earlier than the spacefold accident and recall their experiences during the Global Civil War, when scarcely a city on the planet had escaped devastation in one form or another. Robotechnicians would come to their aid and provide the know-how once again, Luan promised, and Macross would meet those technicians halfway supplying the strength and spirit required to implement their designs. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he reminded them. “Macross City was!”

  It was a rousing address, and the city applauded its mayor and spokesperson as much for his determination as for his optimism. There were few among the resident population who doubted that renewal was possible, but an alternative to rebuilding had presented itself to some: Just open the air locks, they publicly maintained. Let space suck out the debris and the memories, and then simply start again from scratch.

  For a small and select group of victims the disaster actually facilitated the procurement of much-needed supplies—a different sort of uniform for starters.

  “Clothes!” Bron reiterated. “How many times do I have to tell you: Some of the Micronians are soldiers, and some are civilians. The soldiers wear uniforms; the civilians wear clothes. Now repeat it—clothes.”

  “Clothes,” said the club members, hangdog expressions on their faces.

  “I don’t know …” Rico said uncertainly. He turned to Konda and Bron for reinforcement. “Can we get away with this?”

  The Minmei cultists had abandoned their Battlepods and hiked crosstown—a troop of curious-looking scouts in sackcloth dresses. It had been decided that Rico, Bron, and Konda would surrender themselves to the SDF-1 high command and explain the reasons for their desertion from the Zentraedi forces. Since the others had little command of the Micronian language, Rico thought it best that they go into hiding for a while. He was actually more concerned about their overeagerness to partake in the Micronian way of life, although he didn’t tell them this. All along he’d been proclaiming to have sampled widely of the population center’s offerings, and now his followers were beginning to press him for answers he simply didn’t have. “When we do get to meet Minmei?” “Can we begin to kiss her immediately?” “How long are we supposed to keep our lips pressed together?” Rico felt like he needed to run off somewhere and hide, but it would probably work out better for everyone if he hid them instead.

  A hideout would be easy enough to come by, but at some point the micronized soldiers were going to need food. Which meant that one of them was going to have to go out unescorted into the streets. Which meant that clothes were essential. Rico shuddered when he recalled how the Micronians had laughed at Bron when he stepped out in female clothing. Rico shuddered again at the thought of Karita or one of the others stepping out into Micronian society. But something had to be done—and fast!

  Konda, who had the best sense of direction among them, led them through a maze of ruined streets and ultimately into a relatively undamaged department store he remembered from the surveillance visit. The Micronians were just beginning to emerge from their battle shelters as they entered the well-stocked store. Rico turned the group
loose and regretted it almost immediately. Karita and the rest scattered and started stuffing all sorts of objects into their sackcloth gowns—toys, small appliances, hairbrushes, entertainment discs, time devices, earlobe ornaments … whatever they could lay their hands on. It took well over an hour for Rico, Konda, and Bron to round them up; Karita and a second cultist had to be forcibly restrained from lip-pressing every fabricated female form they passed.

  “Clothes!” Bron shouted angrily when they were all regrouped. “We’re here for clothes and nothing else. Is that understood?”

  Sheepishly they promised to behave and followed Konda up a stairway (which under normal circumstances would have been mechanized) and into an area of the store set apart exclusively for apparel.

  “Now, pick what you want and be quick about it!” Rico yelled as they ran off, their eyes lit up by the display.

  Konda was the first to see them return from their foray: Rico and Bron caught his slack-jawed look and followed his gaze. Down to the last, they had picked out female attire—long thin-strapped gowns cut low in front and back; A-lines and pleated skirts; high-waisted sleeveless frocks; sweater and skirt ensembles; ruffled blouses; lingerie, hosiery, and high-heeled shoes.

  It took another hour to get everyone properly outfitted, but by the time they left the store there was no reason to doubt they could pass for Micronians. Except, that is, for the three leaders. Their next move was to get themselves identified as Zentraedi, and they reasoned that the original sackcloth uniforms might help that along.

  The sidewalks and streets were filled with Micronians now, most of whom were busy clearing rubble or sorting through debris. Food and drink booths had been opened for the needy. Armed soldiers and battle mecha patrolled while huge Robotech vehicles hauled away the remains of pods and multigunned civil defense units. The population center was already mobilizing, breaking up into teams and relief groups to deal with the damage. Not fifty paces out of the department store, Rico and the others were assigned to one of the work crews.