It’s ironic that the SDF-3 expedition was on its way to find the Robotech Masters to strike a diplomatic accord, at exactly the time the Masters were on their way to Earth. Ships passing in the night, in truth.
There are those who lament the fact because they believe the second war could have been averted. I do not share this view. Do Humans, mining for precious gems, make deals with the monkeys whose jungle they invade?
The Masters were arrogant in a way that, in Humans, would certainly be diagnosed as psychotic. They were as single-minded as the mindblanked clone troops they were forced to use in their final offensive.
Major Alice Harper Argus (Ret.), Fulcrum:
Commentaries on the Second Robotech War
“Doesn’t even faze ’em,” an infantryman gritted over his tac net. He put another burst into the alien, and this time the raving, long-haired wildman in offworld uniform went down.
But not for long. The thing got up again, hollow-eyed, skin stretched tight across its face, leering like a skeleton. It raced at him with unnatural speed and dexterity, firing some kind of hand weapon. The grunt flicked over from teflon-coated slugs to energy and held the trigger down, until the zombie was burning chunks of debris.
But all at once another zombie reared up, grinning, to bear him over and grapple hand to hand, not skilled but as unrelenting as a mad dog. They pressed rifles against one another. Only the infantryman’s armor kept him from having his throat bitten out.
Everywhere it was the same. Only a few Southern Cross units had been deployed here to Newton, to guard against a landing at the outmost perimeter of Monument City. The grunts were badly outnumbered by the Living Dead. What had happened among the defenseless civilians, the soldiers could not bring themselves to think about.
The zombies kept coming even after their weapons were exhausted, trying to grapple hand to hand, wanting only to kill before they themselves died from the supercharged overdoses they had been given. In time, the Human survivors rallied near the town’s central plaza. They formed a tiny square of fifteen men and women, one rank standing and one kneeling.
Like something from a nineteenth-century imperialist’s fantasy, the square fired and fired on all fronts as the damned rushed in at them. Time and again the tremendous firepower of modern infantry weapons cleared the area, and each time more mindblanked assault clones stormed forth, some still firing but most not, their weapons exhausted.
At times it was hand to hand; body armor gave the infantry a powerful edge. But each time they drove back their foes, a new wave came to crash against them.
The square shrank to a triangle, eight desperate men and women. And then, high above, cross hairs fixed on them.
It was regrettable that two assault ships’ cargoes of mindblanked clones had been mistakenly disembarked in the target population center. But such things were unavoidable, given the haste of the operation and the unreliability of some of the crew clones.
Still, the demonstration of Robotech Master power had to be made as ordered, even at the cost of a few expendable null sets.
From a third assault ship, a beam sprang down and the entire middle of Newton disappeared in a thermonuclear inferno. Friend, foe, civilian—all vanished instantly, as blast and Shockwaves spread holocaust.
Leonard heard the news without showing any response, cold as a Robotech Master. The technical officers clamoring at him with their assorted explanations of how the alien ray worked, some claiming it was a new development, others disputing it, were of no importance, and he waved them aside.
Two towns had been utterly destroyed, but that was of no importance to him; Leonard knew as well as anyone that Monument City might very well be next, and it had no defense. There was no time to consolidate forces in the UEG capitol, but he gave the command that it be done nevertheless.
An aide tapped his shoulder tentatively, “We’re receiving a communication from the Aliens!” The face of Shaizan appeared on the primary display screen before him, Bowkaz and Dag standing behind and to either side.
They knew his name. “Commander Leonard, we are now capable of destroying your species with very little effort. You will therefore surrender and evacuate your planet immediately.”
Leonard looked at the screen blankly. Evacuate? He had once read a war college projection that if spacecraft production were to continue at full speed and the birth rate were suddenly to drop to zero, such a thing might be possible in another ten years or so. As it was, the aggregate space forces of Terra before the current battle wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of carrying out such a mission.
But where was the Human race supposed to go? With their fleet of fold-capable ships diminished by war, a few frail Lunar and Martian colonies and several orbital constructs were the only alternatives, unless the Masters meant to help, which they manifestly did not.
That left an instant for Leonard to marvel at how the Masters overestimated the Human race in assuming homo sapiens could pull off such a miracle. But again, it was more likely that the Masters simply didn’t care; maybe “evacuation” only meant, to them, the escape and preservation of the power structure—the government.
Thoughts and evaluations boiled in Leonard’s mind then: perhaps it would be possible to take the very most essential personnel—himself chief among them, of course—and thus avoid total annihilation.
As he was studying the Masters’ sword-sharp faces he heard Shaizan say, “Within thirty-eight of your hours. Else, we shall have no option but to slay you one and all.”
Leonard’s fists shook the desk with a crash, as he stood. “Now you listen: this world has been ours, from the time our species stood up straight to use its hands and its brains! Through every disaster and our own wars and the ones you and your kind waged on us! This world is ours!”
He was shaking his bunched fists in the air before him, speaking an unprepared speech for once. Then he realized, with surprise, that a few of the men and women around him were nodding their heads in agreement. He had come to think of himself as a man who could never have the heartfelt support of those around him.
He was thinking along new lines when Bowkaz, speaking up, dashed his hopes. “Leonard, this is an ultimatum—a fact of life—not a suggestion or a mere threat. The Invid, our bitter enemies, will soon confirm the presence of Protoculture on your planet.”
“They will come,” Dag said. “And, it seems, there will be more war. You can leave or you can be crushed between; there is no third way. Go, and leave this matter to us.”
Leonard resisted the urge to duck offscreen to consult with his advisers and image-makers, or break the connection. But pride made him stand there, as the Masters knew by now that it would, protecting to the last his Lone Warrior, his Gunfighter-Patton-Caesar persona.
But the self-preserving side of his mind was making very, very fast calculations. If only a portion of the Human race were to survive, it was his duty to rule them.
“Impossible,” he told Shaizan, hoping the word didn’t sound too tremulous. “More time!” Leonard added. He grabbed a figure from the air, “At least seven days!” There was something Biblical about it, but nothing workable.
Shaizan raised his arm, but Leonard couldn’t see that he, like his triad mates, was touching the Protoculture cap.
“Forty-eight of your hours, and no more,” Shaizan decreed. He cut off Leonard’s objections. “And after that, no life on Earth.”
The screen de-rezzed, then went clear. Leonard turned to his nearest subordinate, saved from an agonizing decision because the Masters had insisted on the impossible. “Reconsolidate all units in the area of Monument City and prepare for an all-out assault.”
There were only a few tentative hesitations; all of them jumped-to when he bellowed, “Do it now! On the double!”
They were compliant because no other attitude was tolerated in Leonard’s inner circle, and so there was no contradiction. They scurried.
Leonard reflected, We whipped the Zentraedi and we can whip these Robotech Masters! And the Invid, whatever in hell they are!
Men and women prepared as best they could: Some children were shielded or remanded to shelters by their elders, but many found a weapon and got ready to be part of the final battle.
There was a brief calm in the wake of the beams, something to savor even though it wasn’t meant to be savored. Soon, the sky split apart again.
The holding action fought by the Tristar, Emerson’s flagship, was the sort of thing children’s stories and patriotic poetry are made of. Emerson himself would have given anything not to be there, or at least not to be the last living crewmember among the dead.
But that was how it had happened. An enemy blast took out virtually all the bridge systemry and killed the senior gunnery commander who had been standing between him and the nearest explosion. But he had taken shrapnel and the command chair under him was stained with his blood. His head had been rocked against his headrest at an angle where the padding was of little help, dazing him.
Emerson felt infinitely tired and regretful—regretful that he had never spoken his heart to Bowie; that he had lost the battle; that he had made such a mess of his marriage. More than anything, he was regretful that so many lives had been or were about to be sped into the blackness.
Smoke roiled from the control panels in a bridge that would soon be a crypt. Emerson’s head lolled back and he had only an instant to recall something he had read in Captain Lisa Hayes-Hunter’s war-journal, Recollections.
It was getting harder to think, but he pulled the quote together by an act of will. Why are we here? Where do we come from? What happens to us when we die? Questions so universal, they must be structured in the RNA codons and anticodons themselves, it seemed to Emerson.
He had no answers, but expected to shortly. He was pretty sure those answers would be as surprising to the Robotech Masters as they would be to dead Terran generals.
Then he was blinking up at Lieutenant Crystal and Lieutenant Brown. Emerson couldn’t imagine how they could have landed their craft on the critically damaged Tristar. He couldn’t decide if they were real or not. But the agony he felt as they dragged him over to an ejection module convinced him it was all real, and even revived him a bit.
Dennis Brown didn’t quite know what to say to Marie; the whole Emerson rescue had been so improvised, and they had only gotten to know one another as unit commanders. Sitting crowded into the little alloy-armored ball with the injured general made things different, somehow awkward. But there had been no time to get back to their mecha, and anyway both craft were so badly damaged that the ejection capsule was the better bet.
“Looks like we made it,” he ventured, as the Tristar began to blow to pieces behind them, jolting the metal sphere along on its Shockwave.
She considered that. “Yes,” Marie hedged.
But then they saw that they had been premature; the maw of an enemy cruiser, one of the last still functioning, came at them like the open mouth of a shark, like something out of a nightmare.
They were swallowed up.
At some point, Dana looked down and the Pollinator was no longer frisking along behind; she was used to those sudden disappearances, but wondered if she would ever see him again.
The 15th and its friends and allies, having made it to the top of the mound that buried the SDF-1 and every vital secret of Protoculture, looked down at a circus of light and sound. The GMP appeared to have gotten there first, with troop carriers, giant robots, and crew-served weapons. There was an energy cordon farther out, and a lot of activity at the foot of the mound. In the distance, cities burned and smoke went up in mile-wide clouds where the enemy had struck. For some reason the GMP troops, following Colonel Fredericks’s orders to recapture the aliens at all costs, were forgotten or couldn’t be reached by Southern Cross brass desperate for reinforcements.
As Zor thought about the madness of it all, Dana thought about Zor and how very badly she needed to understand him and understand herself. As the eight who stood there dealt with their wildly varying thoughts and memories and impulses, another shadow crossed the land.
They all looked up, as did the Gimps below, to see, hovering above, a cinnamon-red, whiskbroom-shaped Robotech Master assault ship.
Karno and his triad mates were gazing into an enormous lens. “There rests the last Protoculture Matrix,” Karno said in his single-sideband voice. “But who are those, atop the mound?”
Theirs was the ship and the mission for which all the rest were providing a distraction. The last thing they had expected was to find the mound surrounded by combat units.
It was all very confusing. There was no sign of the three frightful Protoculture wraiths, no least indication of any counteraction, and that was enough to make anyone knowledgeable in the ways of Protoculture cautious.
But this? As the focus zoomed in, Karno saw his onetime fiancée, Musica, the latest of the Zor clones, and six Earth primitives ranged about at the brink of a cliff.
“Zor is with them,” Darsis observed with a dispassion worthy of the Elders themselves.
“Even Musica,” pronounced Karno, forcing himself to match that proper tone, willing to die before admitting the hot, hateful feelings coursing through him.
Dana looked at Zor in surprise, as he stepped to the brink and addressed the empty air. “If you attack, we will destroy all that is here. Flowers. Protoculture. Muse. All.
“Go to your Robotech Masters! Tell them this war must end. You in the depths of your ignorance, you and your Masters: it is time for you to learn how to learn.”
Zor was intent on the ship, but Nova looked at him wonderingly, and had misgivings. What if, somehow, he wasn’t bluffing?
The godlike voice from the assault ship gave the Humans a start, but Musica and Zor were braced for it. “We will be back,” it said, as flames rose from alien strikes all around, all the way to the horizon and beyond. The assault ship lifted away, for space and the flagship.
Nothing Nova had ever been taught quite served in analyzing what had come to pass. She, too, set aside her oath of allegiance as Dana had, silently but finally. “Zor, the Flowers—the Masters … you remember now!”
He made the barest of smiles. “Yes, but only in fragments.” He turned the smile on Dana. “It’s all beginning to coalesce in my mind now, and Musica is the key!”
Dana’s back went stiff. And that’s all huh? Musica? Ignoring everything Dana had … Ah, hell!
Zor started giving orders, and Nova for one seemed to be ready—willing—to take them. Zor outlined his plan to have Angelo, Sean, and Louie infiltrate the GMP perimeter and come back with the 15th’s Hovertanks tandem-towed.
Dana walked over to the ventlike opening in the mound, watching the minute parasol spores bump against some invisible barrier and float back down, to rise and bounce again. She couldn’t sort out for herself the reason why there was such immense fascination in it for her. She resolved that, if they lived, she would make Zor explain.
Zor looked up at Earth’s sky, while Bowie hugged Musica to him. Some people were fleeing Monument City, terrified of another onslaught of the destructive rays or the arrival of the Bioroids.
Last of a long line of one selfsame entity, heir to brilliant mastery of the Shaping forces of the Universe and to every misdeed of his predecessors, Zor Prime sniffed the breeze.
And now the war ends, he promised himself, promised all Creation.