The Zentraedi Rebellion Read online

  A scary thought, even in the best of times.

  Lisa hadn’t gotten a block when Khyron’s cruiser had fired the first of its annihilation bolts, and there she went, hurrying right into the thick of it. Giving chase, Rick’s first obstacle was Minmei, who threw herself in front of him, shouting, “You can’t leave me like this. How can you even think of going back into space?”

  He had stepped around her and dashed after Lisa, Minmei hot on his heels, intent on playing out their final scene to a backdrop fashioned in hell.

  “If you really love him, you’ll let him go,” Lisa had told Minmei. “He’s a pilot Flying is his life.”

  “You call that a life?” Minmei said back. “Battle after battle until everything is destroyed?”

  Rick chimed in: “We’re fighting to preserve a future. Someday you’ll understand that.” A somewhat ill-timed remark, what with fire falling from the sky and much of Macross already in flames.

  The look Minmei returned was pitying. “There is no future. And you’re wrong, Rick, I’ll never understand—not war, not love, not any of it.”

  But hadn’t that been Lynn-Minmei’s problem all along? Rick asked himself now. Her celebrity had so isolated her that she had no comprehension of the real world. Lisa, on the other hand, understood all too well.

  “It takes a soldier to understand the bitter truths,” she had said earlier that same afternoon. “People think that because Khyron is dead and spring has arrived that the RDF’s work is completed. They’re wrong. But it’s always easier to pretend. Everyone’s become a Minmei.”

  No wonder that he and Lisa were inseparable, Rick thought. And that he hadn’t so much as spoken to Minmei since the attack.

  The bitter truths many of Macross’s hagridden inhabitants were ignoring were two threats that still lurked in the stars: one posed by the race that had bioengineered the Zentraedi—the Robotech Masters—the other posed by an equally fiercesome race known as the Invid, one of a host of enemies the Zentraedi had made during their period of empire building for Tirol. The SDF-2, the gargantuan fortress Lisa was to have commanded, had been built to address the first threat. As envisioned by Admiral Gloval, the members of the Expeditionary mission would sue for peace with the Masters in their own space, thus removing the Earth from danger. Now, though, with the SDF-2 about to be interred, hope for the successful execution of the mission had centered on the sole remaining spacefold-capable battlewagon of the Zentraedi armada: Breetai’s flagship. From the flagship would be fashioned a new dimensional fortress, Lang’s SDF-3.

  There was no denying the necessity of the mission. Rick, in fact, had probably been the first to suggest using Breetai’s ship. But lately he’d been regretting having opened his mouth. Why couldn’t he have said, We’re just going to have to pray that the Masters and the Invid have better things to do than come looking for revenge. Didn’t it make more sense to get on with healing and repopulating the Earth instead of wasting time worrying about things that might not even happen?

  Even so, he knew it was too late for regrets. There was no dissuading Lisa, in any case. She saw it as a sacred obligation to carry out the assignment Gloval had given her on the morning of his death. Rick could understand that, too, though it sometimes felt that his and Lisa’s newly affirmed love was little more than an extension of that obligation. Something he and Lisa owed to Gloval, Claudia, Sammie, Kim, and Vanessa, all of whom had foreseen a Hunter-Hayes union long before either of them had.

  The hand of fate seemed to be steering him along with forceful claps on the back. He was grateful for the shove that had landed him in Lisa’s life, but he wanted to evade any jostling that might mean added responsibilities. He was comfortable with his captain’s rank, and he knew that he was an able team leader. No need to overextend himself, or allow anyone else to. He simply didn’t have what it took to command from a desk or from behind the shielded partition of some tech-heavy balcony in a war room.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Owing to certain remarks attributed to Admiral Gloval in the days preceding Khyron’s raid [on Macross City], controversy has long surrounded the SDF-2. Gloval is chimed to have said that the fortress wasn’t built as a vehicle for the Expeditionary mission [to Tirol]; instead, it was meant to serve as a decoy, to be used in the event that the Robotech Masters should come looking for Zor’s original creation. Hence, the fact that while bearing a visual resemblance to its progenitor, the SDF-2 was incapable of reconfiguring from Attack mode, wanted a barrier system, and lacked any means of executing a fold. Drawing on [Lisa] Hayes’s assertions [in her Recollections], several commentators have posited that Breetai’s flagship was to have supplied the fold system for the SDF-2 once the two ships had rendezvoused at the factory satellite. While it is clear that Hayes accepted this as given, the evidence is inconclusive that such a transfer of technology was discussed, let alone planned. At the time, Lang was reluctant to tamper with the flagship’s fold system or reflex engines, and the factory satellite itself was plagued with glitches. It is far more likely—and certainly more in keeping with the surreptitious methods of the REF—that the decoy SDF-2 was to have been dispatched from the Solar system by fusion drive, allowing the REF to focus on finding some means of refurbishing Zor’s ship and employing that to reach Tirol before the Masters reached Earth.

  Mizner, Rakes and Rogues: The True Story of the SDF-3 Expeditionary Mission

  Khyron’s Christmas Eve raid on Macross, launched as a prelude to his decisive assault, had already reduced much of the eastern part of the city to charred rubble: the industrial sector, the fuel-storage depot, and a residential area squeezed between the lesser lakes, one of which hosted its own spikelike Zentraedi destroyer—a Thuveral Salan. Portions of the Downtown Mall had suffered as well.

  RDF Command had purposely allowed the Backstabber to escape with a supply of Protoculture sufficient to revitalize his badly damaged cruiser, in the hope that he would quit Earth and fold for Tirol, presumably to inform the Robotech Masters of the defeat of the Zentraedi Grand Fleet. A costly miscalculation, to be sure, for just over a week later, Khyron returned to inflict his final vengeance on the Micronians who had won the War.

  The cruiser had announced itself from twenty miles out, ten degrees southwest, with a plasmic eruption that obliterated the downtown center on its way to crippling the SDF-2. The unprotected ship immediately listed and toppled forward into the lake, incapacitated and aflame. Admiral Gloval countered with a surprise of his own by ordering the SDF-1 into the skies, reflex engines roaring, Hammerheads and Decas streaking from launch tubes, in-close weapons thundering away at the closing enemy ship. When brute servomotors had repositioned the titanic twin booms of the reflex cannon so that they were pointing straight out from the fortress’s shoulders, Gloval issued the fire orders and the ship spewed a two-mile-wide beam of directed energy that flayed Khyron’s cruiser and went on to burn a hole in Earth’s magnetic envelope a quarter way to the moon. Gloval’s was a brave though one-shot gamble, however, exhausting the fortress’s energy stores; and, as devastating as it was, the blast failed to fully nullify the force field of the unstoppable battlewagon.

  It will never be known who if any aboard remained alive. But someone or some mindless system steered the cruiser into a suicidal ballistic dive, even while the drained fortress was falling back into the lake, the booms of the main gun disintegrating on descent. The last words to reach the RDF’s shielded command bunker in Macross City were Lisa Hayes’s: “Brace for impact!” only moments before Henry Gloval and Claudia Grant forced Hayes into an emergency escape module and ejected her to safety.

  Generals Reinhardt and Maistroff, eyes fixed on video screens in the bunker, had watched as the incendiary javelin that was Khyron’s ship streaked between the main gun booms and sheared off the command tower before plunging into the lake. Knocked backward by the force of the impact, the SDF-1 seemed to go into spasms as it settled deeper into the now frothing water, liquid fire and mass
ive steam clouds rising around it, throwing the winter sky into utter confusion.

  And soon the snow began to fall …

  “I keep thinking back to my first experience of this ship,” Emil Lang was telling Lazlo Zand in the midst of their final tour through the corpse of the SDF-1, two weeks after the funeral ceremony. Lang’s tone of voice was nostalgic, even mournful. He aimed a meaningful look at Zand through the tinted faceplate of the antihazard suit. “This ship changed my life, Lazlo.”

  Zand smirked and keyed the privacy communicator built into the suit’s hood. “Safe to say it changed all our lives, Doctor.”

  Lang was chagrined, but only for a moment. A highly competitive colleague, Zand refused to grant that Lang might have been changed more than most—though Zand knew full well that it was true. “This was where Gloval ordered us to split into two teams,” Lang went on, indicating a narrow corridor of glassy alloy. “Naturally, the ceiling was much higher then, and the ductwork is our own, retrofitted while we were returning from Plutospace.”

  Zand glanced around but said nothing. In the faint illumination provided by the bipedal drone-light that accompanied them, the corridor looked as if it had been finished in bold stripes, though in fact the stripes were scorch marks six feet wide.

  Lang pointed starboard, to an enormous mass of slagged metal that had been a generator of some sort. “Gloval, Edwards, and I went this way. Roy Fokker led his group of marines along the port side.”

  Lang was a sturdy man of average height, normal looking except for his eyes, which seemed to be all dark, deep pupil, lacking iris or white. A souvenir from his initial penetration of the SDF-1 fifteen years earlier, when the ship was known as the Visitor.

  The term visitor referred to the fact that the ship’s seemingly calculated descent and controlled crash on Macross Island hinted at the potential for an equally calculated lift-off at some future date. At the time, Lang had proposed calling it the tease.

  Zand was bonier and slightly taller, with an unruly fore-lock of dark hair streaked with strands of premature gray. He was attached to the Special Protoculture Observations and Operations Kommandatura, and he answered directly to Lang. Laboratory-bound in Macross City’s Robotech Research Center for the past two years, Zand had only been aboard the SDF-1 on one other occasion, and he suspected that Lang had deliberately kept him away from the ship. That he had been invited on this, the last tour before the fortress was to be buried, had only added to an ever-increasing feeling of vexation.

  They had just traveled downship from the hold in which Macross Two had been housed during the SDF-1’s journey home from the outer reaches of the Solar system. Further downship were the engine rooms and the now cold and hollow bellies of the reflex furnaces. Elsewhere in the ship, Dr. Bronson, Ambassador Exedore, and Breetai were searching for any Protoculture-driven components that might be usable for mecha reconfiguration—mechamorphosis. Though Micronized for the tour, Breetai was still a giant of a man, eight feet tall from the soles of his jackboots to the crown of the hastily fashioned cowl that covered the ruined side of his face.

  Previous surveys had established that there was little worth salvaging from the fortress, or, for that matter, from the submerged SDF-2, which had been explored by teams of underwater specialists. The ship’s mother computer, known as EVE, had been moved to the Robotech Research Center in Tokyo shortly before Khyron’s raid; and most of the remaining systems were so damaged that the process of dismantling and removing them would have proven more costly than fabricating them from scratch in the null-g heart of the factory satellite. As well, there were health and psychological reasons for laying the SDF-1 to rest as expeditiously as possible.

  “It was somewhere near here that Fokker’s team was attacked by the mecha that killed Cesar Hersch,” Lang said, several minutes further along. “When I think of all the men who died on even that first recon … Jenkins, Caruthers, Lance Corporal Murphy …” He stopped to look around and his words trailed off. “Colonel Edwards and I are the only ones left.”

  The story of that initial recon was well known among the elite science corp of the RDF: the reconfiguring ship, the encounters with forty-foot-tall mecha, the rewiring of Robbie the Robot, the attacks, the rotting carcasses of dead giants. However, the tale had been so exaggerated and flavored with anecdotes over the years that it had become difficult to separate what was true from what was legend. The story about Gloval’s chronometer, for example. On emerging from the fortress, the team reckoned that they had been inside the ship for six hours, when in fact the recon had lasted only fifteen minutes. Then there was the oft-repeated tale of Lang’s IQ-boosting encounter with a piece of alien technology.

  Zand was obsessed with the story, and he made reference to it now, interrupting Lang’s comments about Colonel Edwards. “I’d like to see where it happened, Doctor.”

  Lang’s eyes narrowed perceptibly behind the suit’s faceplate. “Where what happened, Lazlo?”

  “The event that changed your life.”

  Lang nodded in revelation. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

  “I thought as much,” Zand said nastily. “I was simply wondering if it might not work a second time, on a second person. Or am I being impertinent by even asking?”

  Lang planted his gloved hands on his hips. “First of all, to this day I don’t know precisely which system I activated to generate the power surge. One minute I was listening to Zor’s onscreen message of counsel, and the next thing I knew I was regaining consciousness atop Roy Fokker’s shoulders.”

  He gestured broadly to an array of blackened modules and fused components. “I’ve spent fifteen years with this ship, Lazlo. I know it intimately, head to toe. But even at the end I could do little more than throw the proper switches—this one to fire the main gun, that one to effect a modular transformation, the other one to initiate a Daedalus maneuver. But ask me to explain how any of those systems worked, and all I can do is shrug.

  “More importantly, Lazlo, when I say it’s impossible for you to view the site of my encounter, I simply mean that nothing remains of the cabin where it occurred.”

  “Zor’s quarters, I believe,” Zand said. “The cabin you saw fit to make your own for all those fifteen years.”

  The helmet pickups amplified Lang’s forced exhale. “I make no secret of feeling a sense of kinship with Zor—in attitude if not intellectual prowess. But I’m not being proprietary with the technology he bequeathed us, if that’s what you’re thinking. For God’s sake, do you think I’m in favor of having this ship buried when we’ve barely scratched the surface in comprehending it?” Anger had crept into his voice. “My artificially boosted IQ is irrelevant. Besides, I have something of equal importance to show you.”

  Neither man spoke while Lang led the way through a labyrinth of corridors and down several stairways into an immense hold in the groin of the ship. The obedient drone-light trained its beam on a cluster of towering columnar containers, which Zand recognized as Protoculture conversion modules, supplying reserve power to the Reflex drives.

  Protoculture was the essence of Robotechnology, its fundamental fuel, its life’s blood. Believed to be derived from an alien plant known by the Zentraedi as the Flower of Life, Protoculture infused the inanimate with a kind of lifelike willfulness. It functioned as a mediator between animate minds and mechanical systems, imparting to the latter the faculty to shape-shift, to reconfigure. More, it had the power to perform that same magic on the fabric of space-time, enabling ships like those that had carried the Zentraedi to Earth to fold near-instantaneously across distances of millions of light-years.

  “What exactly am I supposed to be looking at?” Zand asked impatiently.

  Lang gestured to an empty area in the center of the hold. “That was where the fold generators stood before our inadvertent jump to Plutospace.”

  “The ones that got away,” Zand said, chuckling.

  “I’ve been asking myself ever since where they vanished to, an
d whether someday they might not rematerialize, unbidden.” Lang took a few steps toward the empty area. “Another reason I’m against interring the ship. Think what we could do if we had those generators now. Think, so to speak, of the time we could save.”

  Zand regarded him dubiously. “Am I expected to help you look for them?”

  “Of course not,” Lang said, storming away, then whirling on Zand in obvious agitation. “I want you to know if you feel anything from this space, or perhaps from the Reflex drives. Something unseen. Some lingering … presence.”

  Zand saw immediately that Lang was dead serious, so he shut his mouth and tried to attune himself with whatever it was Lang was sensing. But it was hopeless. He would never be able to feel what Lang felt—not without first having his own mind enhanced.

  Lang was gazing at the Reflex array. “If I had another week, Lazlo … If Milburn and the rest of those visionless politicians could only understand …” The helmet pickups betrayed his private laugh. “I’d begin by dismantling each of these drives.”

  “Then you do have some idea of what you’re looking for.”

  Lang snorted a laugh. “Not really. Perhaps something Zor concealed here for reasons we may never grasp. Something I fear will remain alive in this ship despite our best efforts to bury it.”

  In the Macross Council’s transitional headquarters in Monument City, Council President Braxton Milburn was hurrying through the promotions in an attempt to move on to matters of more pressing concern. The unmistakable urgency in Milburn’s voice grated on Lisa Hayes. Important moments should never be rushed, she thought, and this moment had importance written all over it.