The Zentraedi Rebellion Page 3

  “Captain Hunter,” Milburn said in his signature Deep South drawl, “will you rise and approach.”

  Lisa’s heart pounded. She glanced down the length of the long table, watching Rick rise and give a smart tug to his uniform jacket before setting out.

  Milburn, overweight and jowly, had the head of the table. On his right sat Brigadier General Gunther Reinhardt, bald and bearded, and across from Reinhardt, the preternaturally tall Philipe Longchamps. Lisa was seated midway along, on Reinhardt’s side of the table, in among other council members and RDF officers. Those officers receiving promotions—Rick, Vince Grant, Jim Forsythe, and a dozen others—were assembled at a second table. The room’s window wall looked out on the copse of Quickform skyscrapers that was the city center.

  Rick looked dashing. His thick black hair was neatly tucked behind his ears, and the high-necked blue yoke of the double-breasted jacket brought out the sea blue in his eyes. Lisa could barely keep from grinning, though when she swiveled to face Reinhardt once more, a shudder of misgiving passed through her. Would Rick fit in among the general staff? She pushed the thought aside as quickly as it had surfaced. Of course he would; he was made to lead.

  “Captain Hunter,” Milburn said, rising from his chair when Rick had stepped onto the low platform that had been erected for the ceremony. “In recognition of countless acts of bravery performed in the service of the Defense Force, and in heartfelt appreciation of your contributions to the civilian cause throughout this difficult period of reconstruction, and lastly in acknowledgment of your donations to the design of the Expeditionary mission—notably in the aftermath of the destruction of Macross—we, members of the council and the RDF, wish at this time to confer on you a much-deserved and perhaps long-overdue promotion in rank.”

  Lisa grinned despite herself. She’d fought hard to bring this about for Rick, insisting that he receive at least some of the credit for proposing to use Breetai’s ship in the mission to Tirol, and for organizing the relocation of Macross’s uprooted civilian population. No sooner did Rick begin to speak, however, than her smile faded.

  “Sirs, Council Members,” he said, “may I first say how honored I am. But I would be, uh, remiss if I didn’t address some of my concerns about this promotion. I’m proud of what I’ve been able to contribute as a captain, leader of the Skull Veritechs, but I feel that a promotion to full-bird colonel—”

  “Captain Hunter,” Milburn said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but you misunderstand.”

  Rick’s left brow arched. “Huh? Well, of course I meant to say lieutenant colonel. But that doesn’t change my feelings any. Sirs. I mean, it’s—”

  “Mr. Hunter.” It was Reinhardt now, wearing a look of mild bemusement. “We’re going to have to keep interrupting if you persist in making mistakes.”

  All along the table, secret looks of amusement were exchanged.

  “Not lieutenant colonel?” Rick said. “Then, sirs, I’m afraid I’m at a loss …”

  Milburn cleared his throat with meaning. “No reason to be, Vice Admiral Hunter.”

  Everyone in the room rose and saluted, then broke into applause while Rick stood staring at the white command cap Milburn was proffering. Clapping louder than any of them, Lisa fought back an impulse to run to Rick and fling her arms around him—if for no other reason than to shake him out of apparent shock.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” Rick managed at last, his voice cracking, “but I’m only twenty-three years old!”

  Everyone but Lisa laughed.

  “Age isn’t a factor in these crucial times,” Milburn said. “It’s all about being able to lead, Admiral. To shoulder responsibility. To do the job that needs doing. And all of us in this room are confident you can do just that.”

  “But what job—exactly, I mean.”

  “Admiral Hayes,” Reinhardt said, looking at her.

  Lisa turned to Rick, all traces of the smile gone. She was the career officer now, as she had to be. “Admiral Hunter,” she began. “It will be your responsibility to supervise and direct all strategic operations relevant to the Expeditionary mission, including but not restricted to the requisitioning of armaments and mecha, and the selection and tasking of all key mission personnel, who, from now on, will be known as the Robotech Expeditionary Force.”

  Rick was gaping at her. “But that’s supposed to be your job, Lis—uh, Admiral Hayes.”

  Lisa squared her shoulders, faintly annoyed. “My job, as you refer to it, Admiral, will be overseeing the construction of those areas of the SDF-3 that will be allocated to the REF. Is that understood?”

  Rick gulped and found his voice. “Understood, Admiral.” He saluted, but refused to meet her eye while he was returning to his seat.

  The promotions completed, Milburn directed everyone’s attention to the next item on the agenda: plans for housing the Defense Force in what had been Monument’s Excaliber base. Follow-up discussions centered on contingency plans for constructing an entirely new base should the Zentraedi-dominated Monument City Council object to the RDF’s presence.

  Lisa scarcely heard any of it, caught up as she was in mulling over new concerns about Rick. Had she made a mistake, not only in judging who he was but what he was capable of? Would the promotion become an issue in their private life as well?

  It wasn’t until Captain Rolf Emerson stood up to deliver his report that Lisa regained focus. Young, cleancut, and handsome, Emerson was in charge of liaison with RDF units in the Southlands. Lisa had met him through the Grants and liked him.

  “I have troubling news,” Emerson began, his fine features mirroring the gravity of his voice. “Khyron’s death has had a significant effect on Zentraedi concentrations in the Southlands. Most refuse to believe that he’s dead, and many of those that do, believe that the RDF purposely destroyed the cruiser to prevent him from leaving Earth.

  “The point is that his death has given the so-called demobilized hostiles something new and powerful to rally around. Coupled with food shortages and a sharp increase in discrimination as a result of what happened in Macross, the situation has become volatile, and we’re going to have to act fast if we want to diffuse it. I realize that food is in short supply here, but if the North doesn’t at least share what it has with the South, we could be facing a full-scale uprising in a matter of months.”

  Emerson paused to catch his breath. “Khyron might be dead, sirs, but his spirit is very much alive.”

  “It’s a piece of Khyron Kravshera’s skull,” Exedore said evenly. “From the right parietal region, I would venture.”

  Lang regarded their grisly find with a mix of awe and revulsion. Large as a dinosaur’s bone, the blood-encrusted thing bore traces of long bluish hair. Lang was glad to be wearing the NBC suit, and doubly glad that nothing comparable—from Gloval, say, or Claudia Grant—had been discovered aboard the SDF-1.

  Lang, Exedore, and Zand were in a previously un-searched compartment in the tail section of the Zentraedi cruiser. The snip’s blunt bow was buried deep in the lake-bottom sludge, but its clefted stern had been raised from the water by giant cranes set atop the backward-leaning shoulders of the SDF-1.

  Zand’s gloved hand lifted a stiff strand of hair, eight feet long. “Are you certain?” he asked Exedore.

  “Quite certain, Professor. I had many dealings with the leader of the Botoru Battalion previous to his enlistment in the campaign to reclaim Zor’s dimensional fortress. However, as to how this piece of skull landed here, so far from the ship’s bridge, one can only speculate.”

  Sealed inside an unnecessary antihazard suit, Exedore was simply a small man, though in fact he was hunch-backed, almost dwarfish, with mauve skin, a misshapen head, and pinpoint-pupiled eyes. He had barely escaped Khyron’s raid on Macross, having returned to the factory satellite a day earlier.

  Lang had no reason to argue with Exedore’s assessment of the skull, though unlike Exedore, he had only seen Khyron once, and onscreen at that: the previous year, when the B
ackstabber had issued his ransom demands for hostages Lynn-Minmei and Lynn-Kyle. Even so, Lang recalled Khyron’s slate-blue hair, the mannered voice, the condescending laugh.

  The two Humans and the Zentraedi were still gawking at the bone fragment when Breetai and Bronson, a mecha-design specialist, appeared from an adjoining hold. Breetai was carrying what might have been the pincers of a gigantic lobster, save that they had been fashioned from some unidentifiable barn-red alloy and were studded with a trio of huge, glistening claws.

  “Something that might interest you, Doctor Lang,” Breetai announced in booming voice, carefully setting the pincers down on the deck. “Something from Khyron’s collection of war trophies.” He gestured to the adjacent hold. “The body these were attached to is in there.”

  Lang circled the pincers, studying them in silence. “They share some similarity to the arms of Male Power Armor.”

  “As well they might,” Exedore said with transparent amusement, “since they were modeled after our battle suits.”

  “Interesting,” Lang said. “I know I’ve seen them before, but if they’re not part of the Zentraedi’s arsenal …” He started to shake his head in defeat, and then it struck him: Zor had shown them to him in the warning message he had programmed into the SDF-1’s mother computer. Lang was getting his first up-close look at pieces of an Invid weapon.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  LAPSTEIN: Does the process (of Micronization) produce a change in consciousness as well as a change in size?

  EXEDORE FORMO: Only that which might be expected firm suddenly having to address the world as a five-footer after having known it as a forty-footer.

  LAPSTEIN: Does one experience a sense of disempowerment?

  EXEDORE: Not in the way you mean it. Micronization was always purposeful, something undertaken in service to the Imperative. As a result, one feels “weaker” to some extent, but never disempowered.

  LAPSTEIN: What purpose did the Robotech Masters have in mind when they used Protoculture to encode Zentraedi DNA with the capability to reconfigure?

  EXEDORE: I should think the answer would be obvious: Micronized, the Zentraedi could be shipped by the tens of thousands to areas of contest, and once there, returned to full size to carry out the Imperative to kill and conquer.

  Lapstein, Interviews

  So extreme was the punishment visited on Earth during the conclusive battle between the RDF and the Zentraedi that vast stretches of continental coastline and shelf had been altered beyond recognition. From the command center of his boulderlike deepspace stronghold, Dolza, Commander-in-Chief of the Zentraedi, had ordered his battle-group captains to target only those areas found to be richest in Human life as revealed by the warships’ bioscanners.

  The South American littoral, no exception to Dolza’s homicidal wrath, was in moments forever changed. Death dropped in oscillating cyan waves on Lima, Caracas, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Montevideo … In hellish quanta, death rained down the triple spines of the Andes Mountains, from Bogotá to Quito to Cuzco, then east in a sweeping curve across Lake Titicaca to La Paz, Sucre, and Cochabamba, and south through Arequipa and Santiago to Bariloche. Once-grand capitals and high-valley colonial gems suffered more than they ever had from Earth’s tectonic violence, crumbling into themselves like scraps of burning paper. Rivers and lakes surrendered to heat as searing as from an exploding star. Millions of lives were extinguished in the drawing of a breath, the blink of an eye.

  But most of the continent’s “Micronian” hot spots were oceanside, and much of the forested interior was spared, from Manaus on the Amazon River to as far south as the Chaco, in Argentina. And it was into this relatively cool and unscathed parcel of land, this enormous sunlit oval of uninhabited jungle, savannah, and turbulent rivers, that thousands of crippled Zentraedi ships nose-dived in the end moments of the War.

  Most of the goliath alien clones who climbed from the wreckage of those ships soon died of blood loss, starvation, or illness. But some managed to find their way north across Central America into what had once been the United States. They traveled in groups a hundred strong on a pilgrimage of sorts, a journey meant to deliver them to the dainty feet of their idol: to Lynn-Minmei—Minmay—the woman/weapon who was largely responsible for their unprecedented defeat. In honor of her, many submitted to the process of Micronization, while others did so to renounce the counterfeit past that was their racial history. Those that chose to remain full-size were persuaded to lend their strength to the massive projects that typified the reconstruction, helping to reassemble factories, airports, and residential buildings—to put the planet back together. And indeed many, as a result, experienced a peace they had never known, a new security.

  Others, however, within whom the Masters’ embedded Imperative to kill and conquer burned strongest, left their jobs to wander the unpoliced, radioactive wastes, or to ally themselves with Khyron and eventually die with him in the skies over Macross.

  By May of 2015, the only remaining full-size Zentraedi had been lofted to the factory satellite or were living in the north—in Monument, Denver, Portland, or on the Arkansas Protectorate. Their Micronized brethren, on the other hand, were dispersed throughout the world; but nowhere were their numbers greater than in the city-states and polities of the Southlands, which had a long history of racial tolerance.

  Karita was one of those who had come south in search of what he hadn’t been able to find in two years of living in the north. Unfortunately, those who’d sung the praises of the promised land had neglected to mention anything about food shortages.

  “I’m telling you people for the last time,” a man was saying in a pidgin of Portuguese and English from the hood of an ancient gasoline-burning pickup truck, “let us pass—now.”

  The pickup was the first in a convoy of food trucks bound for the city of Cuiabá. But positioned between the convoy and Cuiabá just now was a crowd of some sixty hungry and disheveled-looking Zentraedi men and women.

  “You have to learn to fend for yourselves,” the man continued. “Our land is already overworked. The fields can only yield so much. And we’re not about to supply you with food when there are children with empty bellies right here in Mato Grosso.”

  Cuiabá, in southwestern Amazonia, was where Karita had ultimately landed, dispirited and out of scrip after countless weeks of hard traveling on river barges and decrepit buses and trucks. Fragile, narrow-faced, and white-haired, he had been the tender of a sizing chamber aboard Breetai’s flagship, and one of the first to join the Minmay Cult, founded by the defectors Rico, Konda, and Bron. On Earth, after the defeat, he had worked for a time in a factory, installing Protoculture chips in mecha neurocircuitry boards.

  The man on the hood was thickly built and dark-complected, the owner of a large ranch in the hills. “Clear the road and allow us to pass. We don’t want to have to resort to force.”

  “And neither do we,” a man answered from the Zentraedi side of the crude wooden barricades Karita and the rest had erected across the roadway. Tall and lean, with dark hair and a full beard, he was not Zentraedi but one of those peculiar Humans who, for reasons seldom clear, had made a personal cause of the alien predicament. “We are assembled here in nonviolent protest of Cuiabá’s discriminatory policies,” he shouted in English, the second language of most of the Zentraedi present. “Ours is an act of civil disobedience. But yours is in violation of civil rights edicts issued by the Macross Council in 2013.”

  The rancher scowled in anger. “Macross is a memory, friend. And things have changed a lot since 2013. You want to champion their rights, that’s okay with me. But do it someplace where there’s food enough to go around.”

  Karita was sorry to see that the advocate didn’t have a comeback line prepared. But what was there to say, really? Nothing had changed for Karita since the defeat. He’d known some wonderful moments in the north, especially the previous spring when he and thousands of like-minded Zentraedi had spent weeks foll
owing Minmei from arena to arena on her “People Helping People Tour”—Monument, Granite City, Portland, Detroit … But he had grown disenchanted with his life in Macross. Not that the work wasn’t satisfying, but he was treated with such contempt by so many people. Once, the famous Veritech pilot, Max Sterling, had had to rescue him from a near beating by two racist RDFers.

  But he and most of the others who had come south were not the disaffected—the malcontent—but merely the dispirited, shamed by defeat and now further shamed by having to subsist on the charity of Humans who were skilled in ways few Zentraedi could comprehend, much less imitate. Humans who understood the secrets of creating, manufacturing, and repairing; of working with domesticated animals and coaxing food from Earth’s fecund mantle. So why was it so difficult for them in turn to understand what the Zentraedi were going through?

  “You do have food enough to go around,” the advocate responded at last. “It would just mean a little less for everyone at the distribution center. We’re not asking for any more than an equal share, as is our right under the law.”

  “We?” the rancher said, switching to Portuguese. “Have you forgotten what planet you were born on?”

  The advocate laughed in derision. “Planets, countries, cities … Only a fool would make places more important than people. What matters is that all of us are Human!”

  “I think I remember that one from Detroit,” said the Zentraedi woman pressed against Karita’s left arm, indicating the advocate with her chin while the crowds on both sides of the barricades exchanged threats. “He was always quick to step into our troubles.”

  Close fraternization between male and female Zentraedi was something Karita was still getting used to, but he had gotten to know this female along the route south. Her name was Marla Stenik, and during the war she had served Azonia, commander of the all-female Quadrano Battalion. Petite and blond, she had what Humans would consider boyish good looks.