Before the Invid Storm

by Jack McKinney

"First the power of Protoculture fills me," Zand had raved, "then the power of Dana Sterling. The Masters promised me that I would be wed to the Flower and I will not be disappointed!"

  Polly, Dana's Cheshire cat of a pet, had shown up shortly after Zand had activated the device, but could do nothing as he trained it on Dana. The Protoculturist's own form enlarged, vibrating and contorting, while Dana stood paralyzed and rotund Russo cowered like the little creep he was.

  Across the plain, the Masters' flagship was coming apart and the genetic messengers of the Flower were gushing into a hellish June afternoon. Dana felt the tap of Death's bony hand on her shoulder and was on the verge of turning into the Reaper's embrace, when Zand loosed a howl of such agony and fright that even the Reaper retreated.

  Zand had perhaps underestimated the dosage the device was feeding him, or somehow underestimated Dana's contribution to the influx of power. But either way, the net result was his transformation into a short-lived burst of radiant energy. And regardless, Dana wanted to believe that the outsize Flower of Life that took root where he had stood was actually him—Zand, wed to the Flower . . .

  Arriving in a hijacked alien assault craft, the members of the 15th had found her there, stripped of her armor, Polly under one arm. Dana doing her own babbling about Zor Prime, the spores, the Invid, and a starship that she would someday pilot to wherever her parents were. But everyone had been patient with her, figuring that the nonsense she was spewing was the

  result of combat trauma. It was Dana's cry for Mommy, the orphaned generation's cry for all that had been denied them.

  Nova Satori had brought her around. "Invid or no Invid, we have to report to whomever is in interim command," the intelligence officer had said. Plans had to be made, defenses set in place. No matter that Nova was cradling a clone infant in her arms.

  Dana had composed herself and had ordered that the escape capsule and the bottle-shaped assault craft be emptied of all rations and emergency supplies; and then she had grabbed Angelo's side arm and assigned herself the point position.

  Renewed hope had eased the burden of the first couple of miles, but as the sky darkened and Monument's fire glow suffused the horizon, Dana felt herself sliding into despair. The brooding silence of the march told her that her squadron mates and the Tirolean clones were experiencing the same sense of loss.

  "The war is over," Bowie had announced when he had stepped from the assault craft. And at the time she had been prepared to believe him. But now she wanted to respond, "This war—only this war is over." And suddenly there seemed so much to do . . .

  But it would get done, Dana decided. The way all things got done: one step at a time. So she gritted her teeth, straightened her shoulders, and concentrated on planting one foot in front of the other.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Considerable irony attends the notion that, had the Masters been granted access to the Macross mounds and retrieved the Protoculture Matrix, they would have taken Earth as their own, unaware that their homeworld [Tirol], ravaged by the Invid, had subsequently fallen into the hands of the Robotech Expeditionary Force. Ironic or not, the theory is moot, in that enough evidence exists to suggest that the Masters, during their communications with Tokyo (i.e., EVE and Zand), had in fact been apprised by their Elders of developments in Tirolspace. Planetless, they most certainly would have claimed Earth, sowed it with the Flowers of Life, and moved on to some other world, leaving Earth—and whatever remained of humankind—to the Invid. In short, Earth was destined to play host to the Regis and her swarm, one way or the other.

  Dominique Duprey, Prelude to the Second Robotech War

  In contrast to the fanfare that had attended the interment of Macross City in 2015, the funeral for Zentraedi-founded Monument proved to be little more than a nod good-bye. No rousing speeches, no flag waving, no overflights by squadrons of mecha.

  Rick Hunter and Max Sterling had flown with the Skull that spring day in Macross; Emil Lang, Lisa Hayes, and Vince Grant had offered remembrances. But Miriya Parino hadn't even been invited to attend the ceremony. She and two-year-old Dana had remained in Monument City, watching the memorial on TV. Monument had been Dana's home ever since, though it was Rolf Emerson with whom she had lived and not Max and Miriya, both of whom had left Earth in 2020, aboard the SDF-3.

  Today many of Monument's Qwikform towers were still standing, but the core of the city was slagged, and it was without power and running water. Could the place be rebuilt, as Macross so often had? Probably. Though, what with the deaths of Leonard and Moran and the destruction of

  Fokker Base, ASC headquarters, the Senate Building, and the Presidential Palace, there seemed little point in doing so. Moreover, the slow exodus that had begun even before the Masters' arrival had resulted in a shortage of skilled workers.

  The city would not be abandoned, however, because Denver, Portland, and many of the towns and villages that dotted the northwestern corner of the continent had closed their doors to immigrants. Many of Monument's residents would be forced to live in the ruins, guarding what little they possessed from roving bands of foragers, and praying that, if and when the Invid came, the aliens would select some other landscape to ravage.

  As early as their march from the Macross mounds, Dana and the rest of the 15th had realized that there would be no saving the city, or, by the looks of things, the Army of the Southern Cross. Evidence of lawlessness and mass desertions could be found everywhere, in the form of looted stores and abandoned formfitting body armor and mecha. Too—though the war machines of the Masters lay silent in the streets, on rooftops, wherever they had crashed or gone to ground—the clones who had piloted the ships were found to have been executed by rogue civil defense units or butchered by mobs of vigilantes.

  Greeted with such sights, Dana had ordered the rescued clones to discard their capes and tunics in exchange for ordinary Earthwear, and, at all costs, to keep their mouths shut. Plus, given that the barracks of the 15th ATAC hadn't survived the fires, she thought it best to avoid venturing too close to the city. Instead she led everyone to the mountainside log cabin she and Rolf Emerson had shared—along with Bowie Grant and Rolf's housekeeper, Sarah Willex—one structure which had survived the directed light of the Masters' weapons. There, they would make camp, at least until it could be determined who, if anyone, was in command of the city.

  But when that determination was made, prospects for the future looked even darker than before. The mayor and the members of the City Council were dead. The half-dozen rear-echelon officers who had fled ASC headquarters short of the Masters' bull's-eye strike had, by default, been

  promoted to positions of authority. But the officer of highest rank to have weathered the war was ALUCE-based Major General Nobutu, and he and hundreds of TASC pilots had their hands full tending to the massive pieces of alien technology that remained in decaying orbits above the Earth.

  On the political front, less than half the Senate had survived; and since many of those senators had been nothing more than the lackeys of various political factions, the so-called United Earth Government was effectively a headless entity.

  Scarcely anything remained of the buildings in which Anatole Leonard and UEG Chairman Moran had died, let alone bodies. Even so, as information about Leonard's endtime equivocation began to emerge, the search for his remains took on a pathological frenzy. Many wanted to do to him what had already been done to countless Bioroid pilots. The power behind Chairman Moran's political throne, Supreme Commander Leonard was condemned even by the members of his general staff, who reviled the fact that he had gone down with his ship, as it were, and had not had the courage to answer for the miscalculations he had made.

  Rumors abounded that Leonard had been in contact with the Masters two years prior to their actual attack. People argued that, regardless of who had fired the first salvo—Masters or Humans—the war could have been averted if Leonard had simply given the Masters access to the Macross mounds. But others felt that, while there was cer
tainly some truth to the argument, it was just as likely that the Masters would have enslaved or exterminated Humankind once the Protoculture Matrix had been retrieved. In the end, history alone would pass judgment on the actions of the xenophobic Anatole Leonard.

  Rolf Emerson, on the other hand, was being lauded as the war's true superstar. A champion of Zentraedi rights even during the Malcontent Uprisings of 2015-18, Emerson had showed himself to be an accomplished politician as well as a capable field commander. And more importantly, he had died a hero.

  In the short time allotted to such things, Dana and Bowie had arranged

  a private observance for the man who had parented them through the long years of boarding schools and military academies to which they had been subjected. Rolf had cared so strongly about Earth's future that he had chosen not to ship with the Robotech Expeditionary Force on its diplomatic mission to Tirol, and had agreed to take Dana and Bowie as his wards, knowing full well that the SDF-3 might never be heard from again. These actions said more about his charitable nature than either of them could put into words, though they tried, nonetheless, speaking to the hundreds-strong crowd of senators, military officers, and plain folk who made the trek to the somewhat remote cabin.

  Even Terry Weston, all but marooned at ALUCE, managed to send his condolences.

  The first official meeting of the provisional Earth government took place two weeks after the destruction of the Masters' flagship, in Nueva Mesa, some two hundred miles south of Monument City. In attendance were those few senators who believed that something could be salvaged from the UEG—Barth Constanza, Alfred Nader, and Owen Harding, among others—and those few officers who nursed similar misconceptions about both the Army of the Southern Cross and the Global Military Police. Where such meetings had once convened in a vaulted hall of marble columns and adamantine floors, this one was held in a nondescript cinder-block building, which, in past incarnations, had housed a superman and a cineplex.

  After requesting a moment of silence for the dead the always outspoken Constanza brought the meeting to order. "I think our first order of business should be to determine whether we indeed have any business to discuss." The sturdily built Constants spread his hands and regarded his confederates from his seat along the northern arc of the massive round table. "Ladies and gentlemen, I pose the question: Are we viable or not?"

  "As a political body or a planetary species?" someone grumbled.

  "Let's take them one at a time," Constanza said, maintaining his aplomb. "Is there a hope in hell that the nation-states of the world will

  voluntarily assign representatives to a global agency, or has it come down to every nation-state for itself?"

  "The latter," Alfred Nader answered. He was a slight man with ruddy cheeks and a shock of white hair. "Speaking as a Southlander—though not for the Southlands—I can assure you that the policies of any global agency will be ignored. Oh, perhaps if such an agency were to situate itself in the Southlands, it might enjoy some limited respect. But even that much is in doubt. With the fall of Brasília, the last hope for a nucleus has been dashed. I'm afraid, Senator Constanza, that medieval attitudes hold sway from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego."

  Everyone glanced at the fiber-optic world map that dominated the east wall of the vast, grimy space. Outside of the preemptive attack on Brasília and the intermittent harassing of Cavern City and Buenos Aires, the Masters had ignored the Southlands, where hundreds of agrarian-based polities had flourished since the defeat of the Zentraedi malcontents. Many of those polities had sworn allegiance to HEARTH, the Heal Earth Hajj, but as many others considered themselves nations in their own right, and rejected all attempts at enlistment in a global community.

  "We could, of course, compel them to support a united government," Constanza suggested. "After all, we have the mecha."

  The newly promoted General Vincinz, a former ASC staff officer, shot Constanza a withering look. "The Southern Cross answered to Supreme Commander Leonard," he thought to point out, "not to the Senate."

  Constanza returned the glower. "If you're implying that the presently leaderless Army of the Southern Cross is now autonomous, General, I suggest that you first poll the mechamorphs under your command. Those who haven't already deserted, that is."

  Vincinz didn't proffer an immediate rebuttal. Some estimates put the desertion rate as high as 70 percent, and in at least half of those cases, the deserters had taken their mecha with them.

  Across the table from Vincinz, General Nigel Aldershot, a seasoned veteran of the Robotech Defense Force, seemed to have anticipated the

  attention that was suddenly focused on him. "Let me assure all of you the GMP will continue to act in the interests of global unity and will be quick to thwart the actions of any group that threatens that unity."

  Made up of former Robotech Defense Force units and—much to the irritation of Supreme Commander Leonard—answering principally to the UEG, the Global Military Police had been formed after the attempt coup of 2029.

  Aldershot glanced at the portly Vincinz. "Accept the fact that the Army of the Southern Cross has been dealt a serious blow, General. It might behoove you to abandon the separatist policies Leonard brought to the military."

  "We're warriors first," Vincinz said, "politicians, never."

  Constanza used his gavel to silence the arguments that broke out. "It's apparent that we've learned nothing from the divisiveness that split the Earth Defense Force after the launch of the SDF-3. Call yourselves what you will, Southern Cross or GMP. But bear in mind that you are the planet's only defenders. It rests in your hands, gentlemen, whether we engage the Invid— if they come—or roll over and show them our belly."

  "They will come," GMP Major Alan Fredericks interjected. Second in command to Aldershot, Fredericks was lanky and pale, with prominent ears and long, flaxen hair. "That isn't tree pollen on the windowsills and on the cars. What you're seeing and sneezing at are spores of the Flower of Life— the Invid Flower of Life. Their Sensor Nebula has probably already registered the change in our atmosphere and relayed its findings to the swarm, wherever in the galaxy it is."

  Originally dismissed as a spindrift cloud of interstellar dust that had somehow wandered into the Solar system from some impossibly distant region, the Sensor Nebula had made its appearance at the end of the war. Some of the assault ships of Rolf Emerson's strike force had actually passed through the leading edge of the cloud on their way to engaging the Masters' fleet. But it wasn't until the recordings of Leonard's conversations with the Masters had been decoded that the aberration had been correctly identified

  as an Invid Flower of Life sensor.

  "Can't we simply destroy the thing?" Senator Stephen Grass asked. A muscular six-footer with a cunning smile, he had been a staunch supporter of the Army of the Southern Cross since its inception in Brasília during the Malcontent years.

  Both Aldershot and Vincinz shook their heads. "The blasted thing has retreated to Mars orbit, where we can't get at it," Aldershot said. "It's as if it anticipated a threat."

  "It exhibits signs of sentience," Fredericks elaborated. "And assuming that it can be destroyed, we'd need more than Logans or Veritechs to do the job. Something equal in firepower to a Tristar-class command ship. But even the least damaged of our frigates and fleet destroyers are going to require months of repairs."

  "What about the enemy war machines?" Owen Harding suggested. Again, Aldershot spoke for both the GMP and the Southern Cross.

  "First of all, most of them are depleted of Protoculture. Second, there's no figuring the damn things out. They seem to have been guided, in part, from the Masters' mother ships." He forced a weary exhale. "They're the junk in our new postwar landscape. Scaled-down versions of the husks of the Zentraedi cruisers we've been living with for twenty years."

  Constanza cut him off. "Since these Flowers of Life seem to have taken such a liking to Earth, can't we matrix them, or whatever it is you have to do to them to extract Protoculture?"


  Fredericks showed him a tolerant look. "I'm afraid that it's more complicated than that, Senator. In fact, with Dr. Zand dead, I'd hazard to say that there isn't anyone on Earth who would even know where to begin."

  Vincinz drew attention to himself with a cough. "Speaking of Protoculture, I strongly suggest that we act quickly to consolidate all existing reserves—by force, if necessary."

  "I concur with the general," Aldershot said.

  Nader glanced at the two men. "I've heard rumors to the effect that many of the deserters left with their mecha."

  Constanza nodded. "I've heard as much myself." He cut his eyes to Aldershot. "Suppose we enact a policy of amnesty. Every pilot who returns his or her craft will, in return, receive an honorable discharge. I mean, I understand these people not wanting to fight another day. Sometimes . . ."

  The senator let the word dangle, and into the vacuum created by his silence poured the unstated anguish of every person seated at the table. Aldershot broke that silence after a long moment.

  "Amnesty is a noble idea, Senator, but in order for it to fly, we need to have a government mandated to grant amnesty—which we don't—or an intact military to be discharged from—which we don't. Hell, we'd be better off offering bribes of food or scrip."

  "We'll have no immediate need for the missing mecha if the Invid can be reasoned with," Nader said. "After all, we have no argument with them. And now both our races have fought the Zentraedi and the Masters."

  Vincinz snorted a laugh. "Yes, and only we've beaten them."

  Fredericks looked at him. "We didn't defeat the Masters. Zor Prime did." A quick glance around the table revealed that few were familiar with the name. "An enemy pilot the GMP managed to recruit and turn," he explained. "The alien took a . . . liking to Lieutenant Dana Sterling, and it was through him that Sterling and the 15th ATAC succeeded in infiltrating the Masters' flagship."