In the midst of all the ironies and reversals, the struggles, treachery, conquests, and betrayals, the mad scramble for mutated Flowers and irradiated worlds, it was easy to lose sight of the war’s central concern—which was not, as many have claimed, the Flowers of Life, but their deified stepchild, Protoculture. Even the Regess seemed to forget for a time; but it could hardly be said that the Regent’s Invid, the Masters, or the Expeditionary mission, had anything other than Protoculture as their goal and grail. Protoculture was needed to fuel their mecha, to drive their war machines to greater and greater heights. And it was all but disappeared from the galaxy. What a trick it played on all of us!
Selig Kahler, The Tirolian Campaign
As it would happen, Commander Leonard’s fears were justified, but seven years would pass before the spade fortresses of the Robotech Masters appeared in Earthspace. And perhaps history would have vindicated Leonard if the man’s misdeeds had not stayed one step ahead of his contributions. Fate offered him one consolation, though: he would dead only about a year before the Invid arrival. Earth would fall, just as he had predicted; just as Tirol fell after the Masters had begun their long journey through space and left their homeworld defenseless.
The Invid, however, were less confident in those days. Optera—their native planet—and Tirol had been at war for generations, and the Invid especially were at a disadvantage in terms of firepower. They had, after all, been deprived of the one thing that had cemented the social structure of their race—the Flower of Life; and more importantly, they were novices in this game called warfare. On the other hand, the Masters were adepts, addicted to Protoculture, obsessed with control, and driven to transform themselves—not through any measure of spiritual evolution, but through sheer conquest of the material realm. Profligate, they lived for excess; cloned a race of warrior giants to police their empire, then, still not content, cloned an entire society they could rule at whim. They took the best specimens with them when they abandoned Tirol; all that remained were the three Elders of their race, several hundred imperfect clones—lost without their clonemasters—and Tirol’s preclone population of humanoids, who were of no use to the ascended Masters.
Tirol, the third of Fantoma’s twelve moons, was not the Masters’ original homeworld; but they had successfully transplanted themselves on that utterly barren planetoid from one of the outer satellites. Tiresia, the capital, a blend of Tirol’s analogue of Greco-Roman architecture and ultratech design, was the only occupied city; and as such was aware of the Invid’s coming ahead of time.
Aware … but hardly prepared.
Early-warning sirens and howlers had the humanoid population scurrying for shelters beneath the city well in advance of the midnight attack. The clones wandered the streets in a kind of daze, while the Elders who were responsible for their reaction made certain to hide themselves away in specially-designed chambers the Masters had seen fit to construct before their mass exodus. But there were two who remained at their work while the alert sounded through the city: the scientist Cabell, and his young assistant, Rem.
“Whoever they are,” Cabell was saying, while his fingers rushed a series of commands into one of the lab’s data networks, “they’ve put down near the outpost at Rylac.”
“Is their identity any doubt, Cabell?” Rem asked from behind the old man’s chair. Video monitors showed a dozen burnt-orange oysterlike troop carriers hovering over a jagged ridgeline of mountains west of the city. The network spit out a data card, which Cabell immediately transferred to an adjacent on-line device.
“I don’t suppose there is, my boy,” the scientist said without turning around. Several of the ships had put down now, and were disgorging mecha from their forward ramps.
“Will the city’s defenses save us?”
Cabell left the question unanswered; instead, he turned his attention to activation switches for the remote cameras positioned at the outpost’s perimeter, his long snow-white beard grazing the control studs while he reached across the console. He was every bit a wizard of a man, portly under his tasseled robes and laurel-collared capes, with a hairless knobbed skull and thick white eyebrows, mustache, and beard. He was indeed old enough to be the young man’s father, although that wasn’t precisely the case. Rem was tall and slender, with an ageless, almost elfin face and a thick shock of slate-blue hair. He wore a tight-fitting uniform with a long cape of royal blue.
“We’re defenseless,” Rem said a moment later, reacting to Cabell’s silence. “Only the old and the sick remain on Tirol.”
“Quiet!” the scientist told him. The central viewscreen showed the transports lifting off. Energy-flux schematics scrolled across half-a-dozen lesser screens. “Now what could they have in mind?”
Rem gestured to a secondary video monitor. “Frankly, Cabell, I’m more concerned about these monsters they’ve left behind.” Waves of armored, felinelike creatures could be seen advancing up and out of the drop zone.
Cabell leaned back from the console to contemplate the images, right hand stroking his beard. “They resemble drones, not monsters.” One of the creatures had stopped in its tracks and seemed to be staring at the camera. Cabell brought the lens to bear on the thing, focusing in on the four-legged creature’s razor-sharp claws, fangs, and shoulder horns.
“It spotted the remote!” Rem said, as the cat’s eyes began to glow. An instant later a metal-shod claw swiped at the camera; the image de-rezzed, and the screen crackled with static.
The Invid were a long way from home—if Optera could still be thought of in those terms. That their strikes against the Masters’ empire were fueled by revenge was true enough; but the conquest of worlds like Karbarra, Praxis, and Spheris had had a more consequential purpose, for all these planets had been seeded by Zor with the Flowers of Life—the renegade scientist’s final attempt at recompense for the horrors his discoveries had inadvertently unleashed. But the resultant Flowers had proved a sterile crop, mutated at best; and so the search was under way for the one key that could unlock the mysteries of Zor’s science: the Protoculture matrix he himself had hidden aboard the Superdimensional Fortress.
The legendary device had never been uncovered by Lang’s teams of Robotechnicians, and now that ship lay buried under tons of earth, rock, and Macross debris far from where the Invid were directing their quest. But at the time they had no way of knowing these things.
The Flowers had been their primary concern—their nutrient grail—but that purpose had undergone a slight perversion since Zor’s death at the hands of Invid troopers. For not only had he transgressed by seducing the Flowers’ secret from the Invid Regess; he had also spread a kind of contagion among that race—a pathology of emulation. And within a generation the Invid had refashioned themselves, and, with a form of self-generated Protoculture, created their own galactic war machine—a fleet of disc-shaped starships, a strike force of bipedal crablike mecha, and an army of mindless battle drones—the so-called Inorganics. But this was chiefly the work of the Invid Regent, not their Queen, and a schism had resulted—one that would ultimately affect Earth’s fragile hold on its future.
The Invid fleet was anchored in space above Tirol when word spread through the ranks that the Regent himself had decided to take charge of the invasion. Companies of Inorganics had already been deployed on the moon’s surface to counter ground-force resistance. Now, aboard the fleet flagship, one thousand Invid troops stood at attention in the docking bay, backed by more than two hundred Pincer assault mecha.
The unarmored individual Invid was primate in shape. Bilaterally symmetrical, they stood anywhere from six to eight feet tall, and walked upright on two powerfully-muscled legs. Equally massive were the forearms, shoulders, and three-fingered hands, with their opposable thumbs. The bulbous head and huge neck—often held parallel to the ground—approximated that of a snail, with an eye on either side, and two sensory antennae at the snout. The skin was green, almost reptilian, and there was at this stage no sexual differentiation. The Regent himself was by and large a grander, nearly twenty-foot-high version of the same design, save for his purple hue and the organic cowl that rested upon his back like some sort of manta ray. This hood, which could puff like a cobra’s at times, was ridged front to back with tubercle-like sensors that resembled eye-balls.
The commander of flagship troops genuflected as the hatchway to the Regent’s ship hissed up, spilling brilliant light against the soldier’s crimson body armor. Helmet snout lowered to the floor, the trooper brought its right hand to its breast in salute.
“My lord, the Inorganics have met only token resistance on Tirol,” the commander reported, its voice distorted by the helmet filters. “So far there is no sign of the Robotech Masters.”
The Regent remained on the shuttle’s rampway, his bulk and flowing blue robe filling the hatch.
“Cowering beneath their beds, no doubt,” the Regent said in a voice so deep it seemed to emanate from the ship itself.
The commander raised its head some, with a whirring of mechanical adjusters. “Our beloved Regess has expressed some displeasure with your strategy, my lord.” It offered up a cassettelike device in its left hand. “She wanted this to be given to you.”
“A voice imprint?” the Regent said dubiously. “How thoughtful of my wife.” He snatched the cassette in his hand. “I can hardly wait to hear it.”
He activated the device as he moved from the docking bay into one of the flagship’s corridors. The commander and a ten-trooper squad marched in formation behind him, their armored footfalls echoing in the massive space.
“Do you truly believe that you’ll find what you seek on this wretched planet?” the synthesized female voice began. “If so you are even a greater fool than I ever suspected. This idiotic invasion of yours is the most—”
“I’ve heard about enough of that,” the Regent said, deactivating the voice. “Tell me, where is our beloved Regess?” he asked the commander after a moment.
“She has returned to her fleet flagship, my lord.” When the Regent had reached his quarters, the commander thought to ask, “Shall I tell her you wish to see her, my lord?”
“Negative,” the Regent said sternly. “The farther she is, the better I like it. See to it that my pets are brought aboard, and let the invasion proceed without her.”
The Invid squad snapped to as the door hissed closed.
The humanoid soldiers at the Rylac outpost were easily overrun. Given the few weapons at their disposal, they made a valiant stand, but the Inorganics proved too much for them. The forward assault wave was comprised solely of Invid feline mecha; but behind these Hellcats marched companies of Scrim and Crann and Odeon—Invid robot analogues, which in some ways resembled skeletal versions of their own Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships, a demonic, bipedal infantry.
A schematic representation of a Scrim came to life on one of Cabell’s monitor screens, rotating and shifting through a series of perspectives, as intact remotes from the Rylac sector continued to bring the action home to the lab.
“There is only one species capable of producing such a device,” Cabell commented flatly.
“The Invid,” said Rem. “It was only a matter of time.”
“The strategy is typical of them: they won’t descend until their fighting drones have cleared away the resistance. And after they’ve devastated Tirol, they’ll leave these things behind to police us.” Hellcat schematics were taking shape on the monitors. “These machines are puzzling, though. It’s almost as if …”
Rem looked back and forth between the screens and the old man’s face, trying to discern Cabell’s meaning. “It’s hopeless, isn’t it?”
“I’m not saying that, my boy,” the scientist replied, leaning in to study the data flows. “This feline drone is like its two-legged counterparts: computer-driven and incapable of independent action. Its functions, therefore, must be controlled by an external centralized power source of some kind.” He swiveled around in his chair to gaze at his assistant. “That is its weakness, the one flaw in the system, and we must take advantage of it.”
“Cabell—”
“Is it not easier to attack one target than a thousand? If we can locate that power source and disable it, then all these dreaded machines will be deactivated.”
Alert lamps flashed in another part of the room and Cabell swung around to them. “The Inorganics are closing on the city. Now we’ll see how they fare against real firepower.”
“The Bioroids!” Rem said excitedly.
“They’re our only hope.”
Rick and Max had shuttled down to the surface simply to ride back up with Lisa, Miriya, Lang, and other members of the mission command team. Both men were aware that the short trip constituted their last visit to Earth for an indeterminate period of time, but neither of them made much of this. Max was still nursing some concerns about leaving Dana behind, but was otherwise fully committed to the mission. Rick, on the other hand, was so preoccupied with the wedding that he had begun to think of the mission as a simpler and more certain voyage. So it was during the return trip that he was paying almost no attention to the discussion taking place in the command shuttle conference chambers.
“I only hope this plan works,” Jonathan Wolfe was saying. “Coming in disguised as a Zentraedi ship … It could backfire on us.”
“Oh, you’re forgetting your own Earth history, Colonel,” the Zentraedi ambassador told him. “The Greeks and their Trojan horse.”
“I think you’re confusing history and mythology, Lord Exedore. Wouldn’t you agree, Admiral? Admiral?” Wolfe repeated.
Rick surfaced from his own thoughts to find everyone at the table staring at him. “Huh? Sorry, I was, um, thinking about something else.”
Wolfe recapped the exchange: justification for the disguise had been something of an issue from the start. Exedore and Lang were of the opinion that Tirol’s defenses would annihilate any ship that Regesstered an alien signature. According to the Zentraedis, the Robotech Masters had been at war for generations with a race called the Invid, and any unannounced entry into the Valivarre system would be tantamount to an act of aggression. Wolfe, however, along with several other members of the general staff, advanced the view that the Zentraedi themselves might no longer be considered welcome guests. After all, they had not only failed in their mission to reclaim the SDF-1, but had allied themselves with the very “Micronians” their armada had been ordered to destroy.
Wolfe was a persuasive speaker, and while Rick listened he couldn’t help but be impressed by the scope of the man’s learning. Handsome, articulate, an inspired commander and deadly hand-to-hand combatant, the full bird colonel was considered something of a glamour boy; he favored wraparound sunglasses, wore his dark hair slicked back, and his mustache well-trimmed. But the leader of the notorious “Wolfe Pack” was anything but glamorous in the field. Wolfe had made a name for himself and his Hovertank ground unit during the Southland’s Malcontent Uprisings, where he had first come to the attention of Max Sterling. When the Zentraedis who survived those days spoke of Wolfe, one couldn’t help but hear the mixture of reverence and dread in their voices; and anyone who had read the declassified documents covering the Control Zone mop-up ops had no trouble understanding why Wolfe and Breetai were often mentioned in the same breath.
“I’m just saying that disguising the ship and loading it down with mecha only serves to undermine the so-called diplomatic thrust of the mission.” Wolfe snorted. “No wonder Leonard and the Southern Cross brass tried to make mincemeat out of you down there.”
“What do they expect us to do?” Max wanted to know. “Go in there flying a white flag? At least we’ve got some bargaining power this way.”
“Let’s just hope we won’t need to use any of it,” Rick said at last, straining against his seat harness. “Without the Zentraedi, the Masters could be defenseless for all we know.”
Exedore shook his head. “Oh, I wouldn’t count on that, Admiral.” Breetai had already briefed everyone on the mecha the Masters had been developing before Zor’s death—Hoverships and Bioroids.
“Gentlemen, the time is long past for arguments about strategy,” Lang cut in before Rick could speak. “We’ve all supported this plan, and it seems rather late in the day to be changing our mind.”
“I agree,” Max said.
“Look, I agree,” Wolfe wanted the table to know. “I’d just like us to agree on an approach. Are we going in with fists raised or hands up? The Masters aren’t going to be fooled by our outward appearance—not for long, at any rate.”
“Possibly not,” Exedore answered him. “But if we allow possibilities to influence us, we’ll never leave orbit.”
“I’ve got as many doubts as anybody,” Rick said from the head of the table. “But the time’s come to put them behind us. We’ve made our bed, as the saying goes …”
Brave Talk, Hunter, he thought, listening to his own words. And I’ll keep telling myself that when I’m walking down the aisle.
Two RDF officers were watching the approach of the command shuttle from a rectangular bay in one of the factory satellite’s peripheral pods. One was a slim and eager-eyed young major who had recently been appointed adjutant to General T. R. Edwards; and the other was the general himself, his disfiguration concealed beneath an irregularly-shaped black-alloy plate that covered most of the right side of his face and more than half his skull. On the uncovered left side of his head, long blond hair fell in waves to the collar of his tight-fitting uniform. He was high-cheekboned and square-jawed, and might have been considered handsome even with the plate, were it not for the cruelty in his eye and downward-turning mouth.
“So tell me, Benson,” Edwards said, while his one eye continued to track the shuttle’s course, “what do you know about the illustrious vice admiral?”
“I know that Hunter’s one of our most decorated heroes, sir,” Benson reported to the general’s broad back. “Leader of the Skull during the Robotech War, commander of the RDF after the destruction of the superdimensional for tresses, about to marry the admiral … That’s about it, sir.”
Edwards clasped his hands behind his back. “That’s right. The high command likes to award medals to people who end up in the right place at the right time.”
“Sir?” Benson asked.
“Anything in your academy history books about Roy Fokker?” Edwards said nastily over his shoulder. “Now there was a real VT ace for you. I remember turning those blue skies red trying to nail his ass … But you’re too young to remember the Global War, aren’t you, Benson? The real heroes.” Edwards leaned forward and pressed his fingertips against the bay’s permaplas viewport. “Fokker taught Hunter everything he knew, did you know that? You might even say that Hunter is what Fokker would’ve been, Major—that Hunter is Fokker.”
Benson swallowed hard, unsure how to respond, uncertain if he even should.
Edwards touched his skullplate, remembering, forcing himself back over tormented terrain—to what was left of Alaska Base after Zentraedi annihilation bolts had destroyed the Grand Cannon and made a hell of that icebound site. And how one man and one woman had survived. The woman was unharmed, protected where she cowered while her father had fried alive; but the man, how he had suffered! What agony he had endured, down on his knees shamelessly trying to push the ruins of an eye back where it belonged, fingers pinched in an effort to knit together flesh that had been opened on his face and forehead. Then the rapture he had known when a solitary Veritech had appeared out of those unnatural clouds. But it was the woman that VT pilot had come for, and no other. It was the woman who had been flown to safety, the woman who had risen through the ranks, while the man had been left behind to die, to rot in that alien-made inferno …
“Ah, what a wedding this will be, Benson,” Edwards continued after a moment of angry silence. “Admirals Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes. Star-crossed lovers, if ever there were. Born and reborn for each other.”
“Till death do them part,” Benson returned with a uncomfortable laugh.
Edwards spun on his heels, face contorted, then erupting in laughter. “Yes, Major, how right you are!”
Most of the Zentraedi had been off scouring the galaxy for Zor’s ship and its hidden Protoculture matrix when the Robotech Masters first perfected the Bioroids. twenty-foot-tall nontransformable goliath knights piloted by low-level clones, they were meant to act as the Masters’ police force on the remote worlds that comprised Tirol’s empire, freeing the Zentraedi for further acts of conquest and continued warfare against the Invid. The Masters had never considered that Protoculture would one day be in limited supply, nor that their army of giant warriors would be defeated in a distant corner of the Fourth Quadrant by so simple a weapon as love. So it fell on the Bioroids by chance and Protoculture’s own dark designs, to defend the Masters’ empire against Optera’s ravenous horde. But try as they might, they were no match for the Invid Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships, with their plasma weapons and energy discs. And as Protoculture grew more and more scarce, they could barely defend against the mindless Inorganics.
“It is sheer numbers,” Cabell explained to Rem as they watched Tiresia’s first line of defense fall. The clonemasters left behind to rule the Bioroid pilots were an inferior lot, so the fight was not all it should have been. The Masters have thrown them our world, Cabell left unsaid. Those massive spade fortresses with their clone populations were the Masters’ new homes; they had no plans to return to Tirol.
Command-detonated mines took out wave after wave of Hellcats, but this did little more than delay the inevitable. The Bioroids dug in, finding cover behind hastily-erected barricades, and fired until their cannons and assault rifles went red-hot and depleted. And when the Inorganics began to overrun their lines, they went hand-to-claw with the marauders, employing last-stand tactics worthy of history’s finest. Cabell could feel no sympathy for them as such; but staring at the lab’s central viewscreen he was overcome by a greater sense of pathos and loss. External mikes picked up the clones’ anguished cries, their desperate utterances to one another in that raspy, almost synthesized voice the Masters so loved.
“There’s too many of them!” the pilot of a blue Bioroid told his teammates along the front, before two Hellcats leaped and crashed through the mecha’s visorlike faceshield. A second blue blasted the intruders with the last of his weapon’s charge, only to fall an instant later, Inorganics ripping at the machine’s armor in a mad effort to get to the pilot within.
Disgusted, Cabell stood up and reached across the console to shut down the audio transmissions. “The Flower of Life, that’s what they’ve come for,” he told his apprentice in a tired voice.
“But that plant hasn’t been present in this sector for generations,” Rem said, slipping into the padded con chair.
“Then they’ll want the matrix. Or failing that, vengeance for what the Masters ordered done to their world.”
Rem turned his attention to the screen. Scrim devils and Hellcats were tearing through the Bioroid base, eyes aglow like hot coals, fangs slick with the clone pilots’ blood. “They’ll rip the planet apart looking for something they’ll never find.”
“No one ever accused the Invid of being logical, my boy, only thorough.”
“Then the city will fall next. Those drones are unstoppable.”
“Nonsense,” Cabell exclaimed, anger in his voice. “They may be intimidating, but they’re not unstoppable.”
Rem shot to his feet. “Then let’s find their weak spot, Cabell.” He drew a handgun from beneath his cape and armed it. “And for that, we’re going to require a specimen.”