Spirit does not willingly abdicate its throne. The Big Bang was Spirit’s first rebellion against form—its imprisonment in matter. Subsequently it fought humankind’s acceptance of fire; it battled against steam; it contested electricity and nuclear power; it raged against Protoculture . . . War is Spirit’s attempt to attain freedom from matter, its effort to remain autonomous. Wars are waged to prevent matter from becoming too comfortable or complacent. For it is Spirit’s divine purpose to someday abandon its vehicle and transcend, to reunite with the Godhead and suck the universe back into itself.
Reverend Houston, from the foreword to Jan Morris’s Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians
Protoculture is technology’s royal jelly.
Dr. Emil Lang
UNKNOWN TO BREETAI OR HIS CREW, THERE WAS A STOWAWAY aboard the Zentraedi flagship—a Micronian Veritech ace named Max Sterling.
Sucked into space through the hole in the hull created by Rick Hunter’s self-destructed Battloid, Max had unknowingly duplicated the walk Breetai had undertaken along the outer surface of the ship sometime earlier. Breetai, however, was familiar with the manual air lock mechanisms, so he merely had to let himself in; Max had to discover a way in. Fortunately he had stumbled upon an unclosed breach in the hull—the fried bristle sensors surrounding the hole gave evidence of a previous exploration—flown himself into an empty bay, and, returned to Battloid mode, made his way into the ship through an unlocked hatchway. His gatling cannon had been left in the hold, his lasers were burned out, and he had scarcely half a dozen rockets left. Max was operating on willpower, driven by the hope of rescuing his friends.
The interior of the flagship was a labyrinth of corridors and serviceways, some well lighted and maintained, others dark, damp, and in varying states of disrepair. But luckily, all of them had been deserted.
Until now.
Max was at the intersection of two corridors—curved ceilings, large overhead light banks—peering around the corner when he saw the alien enter. A private, Max guessed: standard-issue drab highrise-collared uniform, a round cap with an insignia. He moved the Battloid back a step and scanned the area. A short distance down the corridor behind him was what appeared to be a utility closet with a curved-top hatch. He made his way to this as quickly and quietly as he could manage, threw the bolt, and secreted the mecha inside. Shut off from the corridor, Max had no way of knowing which route the Zentraedi had taken, so the look of surprise on the alien’s face upon discovering a Battloid in the utility closet was no greater than the startled look on Max’s own.
For what seemed like an eternity they both stood there marveling at each other, until Max’s training brought a decisive end to it. He executed a sidekick with the Battloid’s right foot that caught the Zentraedi’s midsection, instantly doubling him over. Gathering up the unconscious private in the Battloid’s right arm, Max stretched out the left, grabbed the door bolt, and slammed the hatch shut.
He was puzzling over what to do with the guy, when all at once the cockpit indicators began crying out for attention. He checked the readouts but still couldn’t make sense of anything: All systems were functioning, and there didn’t seem to be any immediate threats to the mecha, environmentally or otherwise. So what was going on?
Then Max glanced at the astrogation displays. The temporal sensors were spinning wildly—the flagship was folding!
Max watched as hours and days began to accrue on the gauge. He slumped into his seat and waited…
* * *
The emergency spacefold which had catapulted the SDF-1 and Macross City clear across the solar system had been Lisa’s first; and, as such, there hadn’t been time to… well, look around. It had also been a relatively short jump through space and therefore a brief one through time. But for this, her second trip through the continuum, the temporal indicator built into her suit registered the equivalent of fourteen Earth-days. Wherever the Zentraedi were going, it was a long way from home.
Lisa had plenty of time to look around.
It was nothing like she had expected, nothing, in fact, like she had been trained to expect. The stars did not so much disappear as come and go. She couldn’t be certain, however, that it was the same stars that were rematerializing each time. The heavens seemed altered with each fade, as though someone had snipped frames from a strip of film, editing out the transitions from event to event. The energy umbrella that kept her and the others confined to the grid prevented her from observing flux details in the laboratory, but when she looked at Rick or Ben, she noticed a slight shimmering effect that blurred the boundaries of objects; occasionally, this effect intensified so that there was a sense of double focus to everything: the form of the past, the form of the future, distinct, discrete, unable to unite.
In real time, one Earth-day elapsed; and as the flagship began to decelerate from hyperspace, the past twenty-four hours took on a dreamlike quality. Had she slept through most of it, dreamed a good part of it? Or was this some new condition of consciousness yet to be named?
Lisa, Rick, and Ben stood at the edge of their small world, watching the stars assume lasting form once again. These were alien configurations to their eyes; brilliant constellations of suns, dwarfs and giants, three planets or moons of some unknown system, all against the backdrop of a gauzy multihued nebulosity. And something else—something their unadjusted vision labeled an asteroid field, so numerous were the dark objects in that corner of space.
“What are those things?” asked Ben.
“Space debris,” Rick suggested. “We might be near their home base.”
Lisa squinted; then her eyes opened wide in amazement.
Not asteroids, not space debris, but ships: amorphous ships as far as the eye could see, ships bristling with guns, too numerous to count, too numerous to catalogue—scouts, recons, destroyers, cruisers, battle wagons, flagships. Thousands of ships, millions of them!
“The enemy fleet!”
It was too much to take in, but Lisa used the microvideo recorder the aliens had overlooked to capture what she could.
More than a year would pass before they learned the exact count; a day of reckoning…
The flagship was now closing on a dazzling cluster of lights, a kind of force field that housed an immeasurable asymmetrical fortress their senses refused to comprehend.
But they soon had other issues to confront. Without warning, the energy umbrella had been deactivated and the circumstances of their world redefined. They had wondered how their captors had been able to provide them with food and drink served on human-size plates, with cups and utensils in proper proportions. But there would be no such comfort for them from this moment on.
Two giants now stood on either side of the grid, which turned out to be some sort of specimen table. Could anything have prepared them for the assault of sensations that followed—the deafening basso rumble of the giants’ voices, the sonorous roar of their mecha and machines, the intensity of the corridor lights, the overpowering smells of hyperoxygenated air, stale breath, sweat, and decay?
They were transferred to a second platform—a hover-table directed through the corridors by their jailers—and ultimately to a gleaming conference table as large as a football field. There were banks of overhead lights and several chairs positioned around the table. Lisa noticed that amplifiers had been strategically positioned here and there—the better to hear you with, my dear! And one by one their interrogators entered the room and sat down.
The first to arrive was a male scarcely half the size of those Zentraedi they’d seen. A slightly hunched back was evident beneath his blue cowl; swollen joints and outsize hands and feet suggested some sort of birth defect. He had an inverted bowl of henna hair thick as straw concealing a deformed cranium, uneven bangs bisecting a high forehead above a drawn face, a bulging, seemingly lidless eyes with pinpoint pupils. He was carrying notebooks, which he placed on the table next to a light-board device; this he activated as he sat down, bending forward to regard his three prisoners analytically.
Next to enter the chamber was the immense soldier Rick had battled in the hold; there was no forgetting that faceplate, no forgetting that malicious grin. Trailing behind him were three more males of differing heights, wearing identical red uniforms, not one of them as short as the disabled Zentraedi or as tall as their commander. They took seats at the far end of the table.
Lisa was wondering who or what was going to fill the empty seat between the commander and his adviser; when the answer to her whispered question arrived, she was at once sorry she had asked.
“How many sizes do these guys come in?” said Ben in amazement.
The grand inquisitor stood well over eighty feet tall and wore a solemn gray robe with a high upturned collar that all but enclosed his massive, hairless head. The heavy brow ridge, pockmarked sullen face, and wide mouth gave him a fearful aspect, and when he spoke there was no mistaking his meaning.
“I am Dolza,” he began. “Commander-in-Chief of the Zentraedi. You will submit to my interrogation. Should you choose not to, you will die. Do you understand me?”
Rick, Ben, and Lisa looked at one another, realizing suddenly that they had failed to elect a spokesperson—for the simple reason that they hadn’t expected an actual session with the enemy. The fact that they would be able to communicate with the Zentraedi gave them new hope.
Lisa secretly activated the audio receiver of the microrecorder, while Rick stepped forward to speak for his group.
“We understand you. What do you want from us?”
Dolza turned to the dwarf. “Congratulations, Exedore, you have done well in teaching me their primitive language.”
Exedore inclined his head slightly.
“Why do you continue to resist us, Micronians?” Dolza gestured to the male on his right. “Surely Breetai has already demonstrated our superiority.”
Rick pointed his finger at the one called Breetai. “You launched the attack on us! We’ve only been trying to defend ourselves for the past year—”
“Immaterial,” Breetai interrupted. “Return to us what is rightfully ours—Zor’s ship.”
“‘Zor’s ship’? If you mean the SDF-1, that’s our property. It crashed on our planet, and we rebuilt it. You—”
Dolza cut Rick off. “It is as I feared,” he said to Exedore.
“Tell us what you know of Protoculture. You—the fat one.”
Ben gestured to himself questioningly. “Me? Forget it, high rise. I don’t know anything about it.”
“Tell us what you know about Protoculture!” Dolza demanded.
“You deny that you’ve developed a new weapons system utilizing Protoculture?” Exedore wanted to know.
Rick turned to his companions and shrugged. The questions kept up, increasing in volume, until Lisa decided she’d had enough. She stepped forward boldly and held up her hand.
“That’s enough! I will no longer submit my men to your questioning!”
Dolza raised what he had of eyebrows. “So the female is in charge here.” He sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers as he did so. “You underestimate the seriousness of your predicament, Micronian.”
And with a wave of his hand the room was transformed.
Lisa, Rick, and Ben were suddenly in deep… space! At least it appeared that way: Here were the stars, planets, and tens of thousands of ships they had seen upon defold into Zentraedi territory. And yet they had not moved from the table, and Dolza’s voice could still be heard narrating the phenomenal events occurring in that unreal space.
Photon charges were beginning to build up in several of the fleet ships; they were taking aim at a planet not unlike Earth in appearance…
“We are in possession of sufficient power to destroy your world in the blink of an eye,” Dolza was saying. “And if you need proof of that, behold…”
As lethal rays from the battle wagons and cruisers converged on the living surface of the planet, a glow of death began to spread and encompass it; and when that fatal light faded, a lifeless, cratered sphere was all that remained.
Lisa hung her head; the Zentraedi had just destroyed a planet merely to make a point. Is this what they had planned for Earth? But then, why were they holding back? What had Exedore said about “a new weapons system utilizing Protoculture”? She made up her mind to try a bluff.
“You don’t have enough power to destroy the SDF-1, Dolza.”
“Impertinence!” their interrogator yelled.
Ignoring Rick’s plea for caution, she continued: “The SDF-1 has powers you’ve never dreamed of.”
Dolza brought his fists down on the table, throwing the Terrans off their feet. He then reached out and grabbed Lisa in his right hand. He brought her close to his face, warning Rick and Ben to stay put.
“Now, my feisty female, I want to know by what process you become Micronians,” He tightened his grip around Lisa, demanding an immediate answer.
“Stop squeezing her!” said Rick. “We’re born this way. We’re born… Micronian!”
“Born from what is the question,” said Exedore.
“Huh? Well… from our mothers. What else?”
“What is this thing you call ‘mother’?” one of the Zentraedi behind Rick asked.
Ben swung around to face the red-uniformed trio.
“Mother. You know, like the parent that’s female.” Ben turned to Rick, twirling his forefinger against his temple.
Exedore was startled. “You mean that you are actually born from the females of your kind?” Breetai was incredulous.
“Hey,” Ben continued. “It happens, you know. You put a man and a woman together and… well, it just happens.” He laughed. “It’s love.”
Breetai looked over at Dolza, then fixed his gaze on Ben. “‘Love,’ yes, I have heard that word mentioned in some of your transmissions. But what is it? How do you express it?”
“Oh, brother,” Ben said under his breath. “You field this one, Commander.”
Rick shot him a look and chuckled, in spite of himself, in spite of the gravity of the situation. “It can start with a kiss, I guess.”
Dolza wasn’t buying it: If Micronians could be produced by kissing, then he wanted living proof of it. He ordered Rick and Ben to demonstrate.
“Demonstrate this kissing or I will crush all of you!”
Rick was stammering an explanation of the facts, when he heard Lisa agree to volunteer. Released from Dolza’s grip, she staggered weakly over to Rick, leaning against him as though regaining her strength and taking advantage of their proximity to explain her plan: She wanted Rick to kiss her… so she could record the aliens’ reaction on her microcamera.
Rick stepped away from her. “Do it with Ben, Commander.”
She turned and looked over at the corporal briefly. “Listen, Rick, I’d rather do it with you, all right?”
“You’ll have to make it a command, sir.”
“Proceed at once!” said Dolza.
Lisa held Rick’s gaze, softening his anger somewhat by the hurt look he thought he saw in her eyes.
“I’m giving you a direct order, Lieutenant Hunter: Kiss me.”
Rick made a silent appeal for Minmei’s forgiveness and stepped into Lisa’s arms. They kissed each other full on the mouth, and for several seconds the two of them were far away from it all. It was, however, difficult to sustain that romantic mood while six giants were making sick sounds behind their backs. They broke their embrace and stepped apart.
“What is happening to us?” said Dolza. “This results from Protoculture?”
“It is their weapons system at work,” said Exedore.
Dolza was on his feet, glaring at the Terrans. “Take them out of here at once! Get these Micronians out of my sight!”
Rick turned to Lisa as the three of them were being herded onto the hover-table once again. “Are we that bad at it?”
She looked at him and said, “I guess we are.”