Before the Invid Storm

by Jack McKinney

  "To resurrect them as agents of death and destruction," Shimada said sadly. "I'm sorry, Ms. Sterling, but I think I prefer them as lifeless rather than animate things."

  Dana nodded. "I respect your decision, sir. But there's one more point I need to make: I said that most of our fighters are depleted. But even so, there are hundreds that remain operational. Meaning that the Defense Force is more than capable of taking what it wants, when it feels that all attempts at negotiation have failed."

  Shimada kept his composure when all about him were losing theirs. "I suspect that you were ordered to say as much, and I appreciate the veil you draped over the Defense Force's threat. Please advise them, in return, that they should feel free to impose their will on us. Without weapons, we would be fools to resist. Therefore, they can come and possess whatever we have— except, of course, our attitude toward peace."

  He looked around the table. "You see, Ms. Sterling, we are nondiscriminating toward all would-be invaders: Defense Force or Invid, we will treat them both the same."

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Southlands' penchant for tribalism was undoubtedly a legacy of the continent's indigenous peoples: the Inca, the Chibcha, the Moche, the Mapuche, and the countless peoples who inhabited the vast rain forests of the interior. Commentators are quick to assign tribal or cult status to the Church of Recurrent Tragedies, HEARTH, and the Starchildren, but neglect to include the bands of Zentraedi that flourished during the Malcontent Uprisings—the Shroud, the Burrowers, Khyron's Fist, and, of course, the Scavengers—or the scores of "indy" battalions that came into being in the wake of the mass desertions following the Second Robotech War: the Stonemen, the Altiplano Five Hundred, the Pantanal Brigade, and others. Under the heading of Southland factions, one could even, I suppose, include Anatole Leonard's Army of the Southern Cross.

  Major Alice Harper Argus (ret.),

  Fulcrum: Commentaries on the Second Robotech War

  Cordiality returned with the end of the meeting. Dana and Louie were treated to a grand tour of the Shimada facility, which struck Dana as being closer to what she had read about the complex as it was under Emil Lang than under his chief disciple. Lazlo Zand. Around every corner and crowding every laboratory were robots, curious machines, and computer- created specimens of artificial life. Too, many of the facility's scores of researchers—Asian, for the most part—wore the wide-eyed gaze that had long been associated with Robotechnology, rather than the "furtive warlock" look that typified the members of the Zand cult, wherein Protoculture was deified.

  Kan Shimada and his top jonin, Miho Nagata, remained at Dana's side the entire time, drinking in everything she had to say about the Masters and their weapons of destruction, the 15th's reconnaissance of their flagship, and the valiant battles that had been fought on Earth and in near space.

  Shimada was astonished to learn that a group of Tiroleans had been rescued from the flagship and were currently in protective custody in Monument City.

  After three hours of riding elevators, talking to machines, and shaking countless latex-gloved hands, Dana was spent, and was searching for ways to quit the tour. Louie, however—who had spent most of the time talking nonstop with Gibley, Shi Ling, and a cute blond named Strucker—was just getting started. Dana recalled something he'd told her when he was working on his targeting glasses, months before. I just like machines—period. They expand Human potential, and they never disappoint you if you build 'em right. Somebody with the right know-how—such as myself—could create the ideal society. Unimpeded intellect! Machine logic!

  So Louie decided to remain at the facility while Dana excused herself under the pretense of being exhausted from the transPacific flight. In fact, she was looking forward to spending some personal time with Terry, whom she hadn't seen since long before the start of the War. But when she finally succeeded in locating him—in one of the building's subground-level bars— he was with Misa, who clearly knew Terry as well as, or perhaps better than Dana did.

  The three of them retreated to Misa's apartment, in a subterranean luxury high rise only a dome away from the Shimada Building. The apartment was an eccentric combination of traditional Japanese and ultratech, and had a balcony that overlooked a park with a waterfall. Terry was as much at home in the place as he had been in the backseat of the limousine. Misa—who was long-haired, curvaceous, and taller than Dana— wasn't a researcher but some kind of glorified accountant, though how number crunching had earned her a place at the Shimada table was anyone's guess.

  The opulence of the apartment discomfited Dana; for the first time since the end of the fighting, she felt uncertain of her place in the world. How could all this exist, she asked herself, in light of what had happened on the other side of the world? The recent past took on a kind of unreality, and

  for a moment, she could almost convince herself that Rolf, Zor Prime, Jordan Sullivan, and so many others were still alive.

  It took several cups of Misa's sake to take the edge off her mood. Pleasantly intoxicated, Dana scarcely batted an eye when Terry informed her that Misa was the person who had inadvertently come into possession of the encrypted data disk that he had turned over to Rolf, and it was the disk that had brought Terry and Misa together. The irony was obvious, in that Terry and Dana had met under similar circumstances during the Giles Academy incident—an intelligence operation mounted by Rolf Emerson, against a Leonard lieutenant named Joseph Petrie.

  "We're like blond and brunette bookends for this guy," Dana told Misa between fits of laughter.

  As an unsettling dusk descended on the subterranean city, their talk turned to the state of the world outside the shelter that was Tokyo. Neither Terry nor Misa put much stock in the warnings Dana had voiced about the Invid. To them, it—invasion—couldn't happen a third time. They envisioned a better tomorrow for everyone, and a gradual resurfacing from terror. The thirty-year curse of Macross was ended. The political and military disarray in the Northlands would stabilize, the Southlands would surrender some of its feudal attitudes, Europe and Africa would recover . . . And Tokyo—a kind of inverted Shangri-la—would be there to lead the way into the future.

  "Dana, you should think about coming to live here," Misa suggested. "Mr. Shimada would probably appoint you mayor."

  Somewhat disarmed by the sake, Dana said, "I'm leaving the planet." It was only when she realized that Misa and Terry were staring at her that she thought to add, "To go to the factory satellite, I mean."

  "But when you return," Misa said, looking relieved.

  Dana displayed a practiced smile. "When I return. Sure, why not."

  On the muddy slopes below Brasília's ruined Esplanada dos Ministerios Brasília, twenty Southern Cross A-JACs deployed in Battloid mode, their quartets of gyro blades slung on their backs like the vanes of a

  windmill. Above them, dispersed between the spires of debris that had been plasteel and concrete buildings, waited an equal number of Hovertanks and battered Veritechs, several of them also configured in that most Humanlike of fighting modes.

  Lieutenant Dewey Tast in Green Tiger One glanced at his communications console to see the narrow face of Gavin Murdock resolve on-screen. Murdock was crafted in one of the Hovers on the Esplanada just now, though as recently as two months ago he and Tast had been wingmen during the Emerson-led assault on the Masters' fleet.

  "Haven't you got more important things to do, Lieutenant, than to follow a couple of deserters all the way to the Southlands?"

  Tast knew better than to be thrown by Gavin's smile, which he flashed even when dead serious. "No, Sergeant, it's my sad duty to inform you that you're the only game in town."

  "So what game are we playing?"

  "It's called 'coming clean,' and here's the way it goes: First off, you people get together and decide whether you want to be military or civilian. If you choose civilian, you surrender the mecha and walk away without any penalties. If you choose military, then you get to keep the mecha but you have to follow orders."
>
  "And what's the penalty for choosing military?"

  "That's the beauty of it: there isn't any. So, either way, you win." "Except for losing the mecha."

  "As civilians, you have no right to them."

  "Oh, yeah? Then what's the penalty for refusing to play the game, Lieutenant? A court-martial?"

  It was a good question, and Tast had to take a moment to consider it.

  Once the crown jewel of the Southlands, Brasília had endured its own brief Rain of Death during one of the frequent lulls in the pitched fighting in Monument and out near the moon. Those lulls had come to be feared by everyone downside, for it was then that the Masters' space fortresses would ravage whatever landmass happened to be below them at the time.

  Occasionally they would target a specific place, but more often their energy bursts were unpredictable, scouring uninhabited tracts of forest, or leveling mountaintops, or boiling lakes dry.

  Brasília's unlucky day had come four months back. The Masters' preemptive attack hadn't lasted more than five minutes, but in that time, the city—given new life by Anatole Leonard when he had led refugees there from the devastated coast following the original Rain of Death—had been laid to waste. Given that everyone had grown accustomed to living out the lulls in the city's poor excuse for an underground, casualties were comparatively light. But there wasn't a building that hadn't been touched by directed light and sent crumbling to the cobblestone streets. Many believed it was because of Leonard that Brasília had been targeted. But what, then, of Mexico City—also ruined beyond repair—where the Masters' nemesis had never even planted his jackboot?

  Brasília, nevertheless, was still home to many of the Southern Cross regulars who had followed Field Marshal Leonard to Monument City after the launch of the SDF-3. And it was to their roots they had returned in the course of the mass desertions that had followed the destruction of Earth's primary fleet and the end of the war.

  Gavin Murdock was of those who had returned home.

  "I'm still waiting to hear about the penalty for refusing to play, Lieutenant?" he directed over the link to Tast's A-JAC.

  Tast decided to try a more down-to-earth approach. "Murdock, what do you plan to do down here?"

  "Defend ourselves, brother. 'Cause God knows you people aren't going to do it."

  Tast shook his head for the cockpit camera. "Look around you, Gavin.

  There's nothing left to defend."

  Murdock acknowledged the comment with a nod. "Maybe not right here, Lieutenant. But not all of the Southlands looks as bad as this place. HEARTH has got things pretty much under control in the interior and up north."

  "Is that what you're planning to do—throw in with those cultists?"

  Murdock smiled. "Hey, Lieutenant, those cultists are Earth first, you know what I'm saying? They're not about to fight a war that can't be won. The Invid want a piece of planet? Fine, they can have it, so long as they leave us alone to do our thing. We protect our property, our land, and nobody else's. You can tell that to General Vincinz and the rest of command. Tell him we're not surrendering the mecha, and that he should think of us as an indy battalion. Civil defense, whatever. But we're not taking orders from anyone. Understood?"

  Tast sighed wearily. "You've got, what—fourteen Hovertanks and six Veritechs that can hardly stand on their feet? Have you considered that you're outgunned?"

  "Okay, then. Go ahead and shoot us. Eliminate more of Earth's remaining mecha—and mecha pilots. You know, we're not saying that we won't fight if push comes to shove. We're just saying we get to decide when and how."

  Tast muted the communication display and opened up a frequency on the command net that connected him to the Green Tiger commander, Captain Vitti, who was waiting with ten more A-JACs, five miles to the south.

  "Did you monitor that, Captain?"

  Vitti's face appeared on-screen. "I got it."

  "Do we show them what for, or do we starve them out?"

  "Neither. Let them be." Vitti gave his head a mournful shake. "And let's just pray that the goddamned Zentraedi on the factory satellite will be more inclined to see reason."

  Tast thought he could hear Anatole Leonard rolling over in his grave.

  Surrounded on three sides by pianos and synthesizers, Bowie Grant noodled his way through a little-known Lynn-Minmei song entitled, "Screaming Across the Skies." It was late morning and the sun was creeping over the jagged ridge opposite the Emerson cabin, dappling the sloping land

  with golden light. Bowie loved this hour of the day—and now more than ever. Shortly, the air would warm, and perhaps some of the stiffness would begin to leave his fingers.

  He could recall a time when the outbuilding that was his studio behind the cabin had been a sanctuary. Home on leave from any number of military academies, he would retreat to the small wooden structure and play keyboards until his fingers were too cramped to move. But even in those days, when music was everything to him, he knew when he had reached a point of diminishing returns; when sheer exhaustion was undermining the effort he was putting into perfecting some dazzling chord progression or arpeggio. Just now, however, concerns about exhaustion and technique didn't enter the picture; he didn't dare allow himself the luxury of a break, for fear of fomenting mass hysteria among the Tirolean clones.

  In fact, the relentlessness of his playing had as much to do with maintaining some semblance of order among the refugees as it did with drowning out the sounds of their anguished cries, baleful moans, and unnerving laughter. What with one of the Hovertanks supplying a couple hours of electricity per day, he had tried running a loop track of samples over the camp's improvised PA system, but the Tiroleans—accustomed to Musica's live compositions on the Cosmic Harp—didn't respond nearly as well to recorded music. Against both the emotional outpourings and the near-constant music, Sean and Angelo had simply taken to wearing earplugs round the clock.

  Rescuing the Tiroleans from the Masters' disintegrating flagship hadn't exactly been Dana's idea, but the three campbound members of the 15th ATAC held her responsible just the same. Well before the end of the War, sickened by the fighting, the squadron had rebelled against killing the programmed Bioroid pilots. But it was Dana, to whom Bowie had always looked for support, who had set everything in motion; Dana, who had seen something of herself in the Tiroleans and insisted that they had to be cared for. And now she was off on a mission to the just-returned factory satellite, and Louie was still in Tokyo, and responsibility for the refugees had fallen

  on Bowie, Sean, Angelo, and a handful of volunteers they had recruited into service.

  Though no more accustomed to leadership than the Tiroleans were to individuality, Bowie—as both musician and Musica's mate—had inherited the real burden of their custody, regardless that he hadn't the slightest notion on how to proceed. In the same way that the Protoculture pods aboard the Masters' ships had become contaminated by the Flowers of Life, so, too, had the clones become contaminated by emotions.

  Of the two hundred plus that had been rescued, sixty had already died; some from wounds sustained during the fighting aboard the flagship, others from disease, and others from heart failure brought on by sensory overload, panic, hypersensitivity—Bowie didn't know what to call it. Phlegmatic under the Masters—Dana had once referred to them as "zombies"—they were nothing less than manic without them, milling within the confines of the Emerson camp like dogs before a fox hunt.

  With Monument City deserted, save for the diehards and foragers who had taken up residence in the city's crisped towers, Bowie had given thought to relocating everyone to the lower valley, where they would at least be closer to the crashed assault ships that were supplying food—of a sort—for the clones. But the pale and fragile Tiroleans were as ill suited to travel as their gauzy clothing had been to the Northwest's extremes in temperature. They had been made for life in the climate-controlled interior of the mother ships that had carried them from Tirol, and for nowhere else.

  En masse, th
ey seemed to be suffering from dislocation. They longed to return to their previous circumstances: to those inboard cities that resembled Old World Venice without the canals; to their lives of meaningless activity and arranged marriages; to their devices—the bioscanners and reprogrammers—that analyzed and modified their behavior as need be; and to the unquestioned authority of their armed and long-haired Clonemasters.

  Perhaps most of all they yearned for the return of the three-in-one mentality the Masters had fashioned for their society, in which each clone

  was part of a Triumvirate and was incapable of individual effort or action. Bowie often asked himself why the Masters had bothered to create such oblivious creatures; but then he supposed that all would-be-gods— beneficent or corrupt—required applause, and the beings equipped to deliver it . . .

  Still chording with his right hand, Bowie was giving his left a rest when Musica edged into the studio and gave him a wan smile. She was dressed in mismatched items from Bowie's civilian wardrobe, and her long, dark-green hair was tied in a ponytail. A fresh dressing, courtesy of Sean, covered the scorch she had received on her upper arm during the final fight with Karno and some other clones, but the wound had festered and wasn't healing. In her arms, she cradled the infant they had rescued from oblivion. A boy, the infant was sleeping for a change.

  "Are things any better with your people?" Bowie asked while continuing to play.

  She shook her head. "Worse, Bowie. Most of them wish they had been included among the aged ones the Masters jettisoned from the flagship. We're . . . we're at a loss."