“For what?”
Minmei opened the door. “Get in, Admiral. Let it be my surprise.”
They caught each other up on events of the past year while the limo carried them into Monument City. Minmei talked about her months in Hawaii and about having recently signed with theatrical agent, Samson O’Toole, who was negotiating a talk-show deal with the proposed Lorelei Network. The cowboy hat complemented the rest of her outfit of jeans, fringed jacket, and snakeskin boots.
Rick said little; each time he tried to respond to her questions, she interrupted him and brought the conversation back to herself. The limousine stopped in front of the restaurant Chez Mann.
“For old times’ sake,” Minmei said, slipping her arm through his as they were headed for the entrance.
The last time they’d been to Chez Mann she’d given him a scarf that made him look like some World War I biplane flyboy. They had talked about her career struggles, her problems with Lynn-Kyle, her desire to be finished with the “People Helping People Tour”—which the media had nicknamed the Grateful Undead tour. Minmei had had too much wine. Then Kyle himself had made an unexpected appearance, lecturing her about irresponsibility, tossing a drink in her face, tugging her from the restaurant. Seemed she’d kept an audience waiting somewhere, much as Rick had left Lisa waiting with a packed picnic basket at the Seciele Coffee House in Macross …
“Do you ever wish we could turn back the clock, Rick?”
“To when?” Rick nearly snapped. “I mean, when were things ever easy in our lifetimes? The Global Civil War, years of low-intensity fighting between the Internationalists and the Exclusionists, the War with the Zentraedi, Khyron …”
“You’re right, I suppose. But I was happy aboard the SDF-1.”
“I heard you tell Katherine Hyson that.”
“It’s just that so much has changed since then.” Minmei stepped to one side to regard him. “Look at you, look at me.”
Rick glanced over Minmei’s shoulder and smiled. “Some things haven’t changed at all.” When she had followed his look and spied a group of teenagers approaching them, he added, “People still want your autograph.”
Minmei started to say something when the leader of the teenage pack waved a piece of paper in the air. “Admiral Hunter,” the youth asked, “would you sign this for me?”
Minmei laughed and Rick laughed with her. “See, I told you things have changed.” She took hold of Rick’s hand and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “Let’s at least be friends like we were before. I’ve got no one to talk to, Rick.”
Max felt a drop of sweat trickle down the side of his face from sideburn to jaw and work its way beneath the rolled-foam collar of the thinking cap. It was three o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day in Buenos Aires and the temperature outside the Veritech was fifty-nine degrees; inside the cockpit, though, with the permaplas canopy lowered and the air conditioning switched off, the ambient temperature was closer to ninety, and Max—not only in helmet but in multi-layered flightsuit—was dressed for Arctic conditions.
He opened the tactical net to take a quick roll call of Skull’s elite, each pilot crafted inside his mecha on the Argentine Base jet strip: Ransom, Phelps, Fowler, Greer, Mammoth, Bell, Zotz. Lieutenant Ransom, presently at Max’s left wingtip, was second in command and, along with Mammoth and Fowler, had flown with Hunter during the War. Bobby Bell was the youngest pilot, but Teddy Zotz—fresh out of Fokker Aerospace Academy and brother of Frankie, manager of the Close Encounters game arcade in Monument—was Skull’s most recent addition. With the exception of Zotz, who was partnered with a VF-1A, the team flew twin-lasered VF-1Js.
“Preflight auxiliary checklist,” Max said over the net. He flipped a series of toggles on the instrument console and watched the data-display screen for self-check responses. “Thermal shields—check; rad shields—check …” Telescopic enhancement, utility arms override, pilot seat hydraulic, radio/video feeds, collision warning system, canopy-ejection—manual, HUD mode control, threat-identity display, weapons-next toggle, laser targeting, interrogate friend-or-foe control display, countermeasures—electronic, chaff, flares …
The newer-generation Veritechs had sixty-seven controls, ranging from foot pedals to operate the legs to levers to activate the mecha’s folding-torso system, though all were subordinate to the master control, which was the pilot’s brain. Throwing the Guardian-mode lever without thinking the craft through the appropriate changes could land a pilot in serious trouble. The thinking cap was the material interface between Human and machine, but a thinking cap was only as efficient as the pilot who wore it. Mechamorphosis depended on a shrewd symbiosis between Human and mecha—or, depending on who you asked, between Human and Protoculture.
Piloting the VT in fighter mode, however, could be as uncomplicated as piloting a conventional craft—easier, since the Veritech’s command computer was capable of not only executing perfect takeoffs and landings, but plotting courses, making necessary corrections, and tracking as many as fifty individual targets. Anything but biochauvinistic, Max had already instructed the computer to handle Skull One’s takeoff and to plot the team’s course north to the site of the Grand Cannon, in the Guayana Highlands of the Venezuela Sector—a distance of almost three thousand miles. Tasked, the computer informed him that their cruising altitude would be 35,000 feet, at a median airspeed of Mach one. Given the weather conditions, the estimated flight time was four hours and ten minutes; estimated time of arrival at the target was 6:40 A.M., Vene zuela-local time. Fuel was not a concern; a Protoculture-celled VT was good for approximately twelve years of continuous intra-atmospheric flying.
Max placed his gloved fingertips on the console keyboard and called up a map of the Southlands. The flight path would take them over the Argentine mesopotamia, the still-viable city of Asunción, Cuiabá, the forested interior of Amazonas, and Manaus, and on into the lost-world mesa region of Roraima. Darkness would mask the scarred landscape: the craters put there by annihilation bolts and fallen warships, the endless tracts of blanched forest, the burned and irradiated cities. Only the rising sun, blood-red behind a pall of lingering ash, would betray what had happened below.
Airborne, Max kept Skull One on autopilot, freeing himself to reflect on the past few days and perhaps think forward through the coming few. Anything to keep from thinking about the present.
Meeting and talking with Rolf Emerson had been an unexpected pleasure. Max hoped that Emerson and his companion would be transferred to Monument so that the friendship could continue to grow. A friendship between Miriya and the dark-complected Ilan might even be of some benefit to Dana; she would at least come to realize that the Zentraedi world didn’t begin and end with Rico, Konda, and Bron. Alternatively, Max would have to see about getting Miriya to visit Buenos Aires to meet Emerson and Ilan, just to get things rolling.…
And he was going to have to confront Rick about pressuring him to join the REF. Max formulated possible replies and rehearsed some of the lines to himself: I’m not a diplomat, he would tell Rick. And I refuse to sign on as a potential combatant against the Masters or the Invid—not with Miriya and Dana aboard. And there was no way he would leave either of them behind …
Three and a half hours later, almost two hundred miles short of the Grand Cannon, Max established contact with Cavern City’s RDF Base, employing a quantum-encrypted laser signal. The sun had been up for over an hour and the pale blue dome of the sky was brushed with crystalline cirrus.
“Skull leader to Cav City, requesting a news update. Anything to tell me, Control?”
Max waited for the on-board computer to decrypt the reply, hoping to hear that the situation had been resolved. But earlier intelligence reports remained unchanged: The Cannon was in the hands of no fewer than fifteen Zentraedi, armed with eight Tactical Battlepods. Mecha for mecha the odds were nearly even, but Skull had the advantage because the pods were manned by Micronized Zentraedi; even if the headless ostriches’ weapons arrays were p
acking full plasma charges, they wouldn’t be as maneuverable or in-close capable. Generally speaking, pods only succeeded through sheer numbers, in any case.
At one hundred miles out, Max again contacted Cavern City, but this time without running the signal through the VT’s encrypter. At the premission briefing it had been decided that the Skull should attempt to lure the pods into an aerial encounter. Max was grateful for any strategy that kept him from having to hear the sound of pods running on their cloven feet—a grating, almost chain-clanking noise that still rattled him seven years after first hearing it on Macross Island. Battlepods might be the grunts of the Zentraedi forces, but the strident sound of an overland charge by two or three hundred pods could unsettle even the most hardened RDF combat veteran.
From twenty miles out, Max could see the gaping high-tech maw of the never-completed Southern Cannon. With the IFF still silent, he went on the net to order the Skull into a low-vector approach. Then, at the fifteen-mile mark, the targeting computer chirped and the threat-assessment display screen filled with paint. Max emptied his mind of concerns for the future, and attended to the business of war.
“Six bandits at twelve o’clock,” he sent over the net. “Enabling laser targeting and Mongoose heat-seekers. Prepare to break formation on my mark.”
Max ordered video enhancement of the approaching mecha as electronic icons swung crazily through the onscreen targeting reticles. The sure-kill zone for most pods was behind and slightly below the juncture of the reverse-articulated legs, but none of the enemy were showing vulnerable profiles.
“Reconfiguring to Guardian mode,” Max said, and, with a predatory bank, peeled away from the formation and fell upon the enemy.
Seloy Deparra stood at the port-side rail of the Sin Verguenza and swept her eyes along the Caribbean coast of what someone aboard the run-down trawler had referred to as Nicaragua. The sun was setting behind the shore’s fringe of palms, suffusing the sky with shades of pink and purple. Seloy put her face into the wind and licked the sea salt from her lips. The four-day crossing from the ruined city of Barranquilla had been peaceful, but she was eager to plant her feet on dry land once more. The infant was quiet for a change, asleep in its basket, on its stomach with its legs bent and rear end raised. The boy child had spent most of the days and nights whimpering, either from hunger or some illness contracted during the arduous journey north from Brasília; Seloy couldn’t tell which, and none of the Human crew had been inclined to come to her aid. Several times she had tried to get tiny Hirano to suckle at her breast, but her milk, which had never flowed strongly, had dried up.
“Once we’re ashore, we still have a long trip ahead of us,” Marla Stenik commented from a few feet away along the rail.
“How long?” Seloy asked.
“Freetown is almost a thousand miles northeast of our port of call. Figure on a week’s travel.”
“By ship?”
Boyish-looking Marla shook her head. “Overland. Perhaps on foot.”
The two women had met in Barranquilla, where they were among a group of thirty-six Zentraedi—women, mostly—all seeking passage to the Northlands. It had taken Seloy six months to get that far, surviving on the scrip she had stolen from the child’s father when, sick to death of the games she had been enticed to perform with him, she had left him to the luxuries of his Brasília palace. At the time she had little understanding of those games, though Marla had been helpful in explaining some of them since.
Seloy and the infant had gone into hiding after the May riots, then fled Brasília in the company of forty or so other frightened and equally disillusioned refugees. Never had the prospect of lasting peace between Humans and Zentraedi seemed more untenable. For a time, when she’d felt most vulnerable, Seloy had considered contacting Miriya, but in the end had decided that Miriya was better off thinking her dead. Hirano’s father, obsessed with his search, would have inspected each of the dead rioters personally. And surely he was still looking for them. So it was better that Miriya remained ignorant of her whereabouts and plans.
She could only hope that the next team of assassins would succeed at their mission.
Midway into her sexual relationship with Anatole Leonard, she had begun to recall the rumors she’d heard about Khyron and Azonia in their final days, when the Imperative had broken down and they’d given themselves over to physical gratification. Seloy had had no inkling of the dangers of Human love, lust, or sexuality when she met Leonard; but she had been willing to give the relationship a try, as Miriya had with Max Sterling. Leonard, though, wasn’t looking for a love partner but a disciplinarian—and who better to torture Human flesh than a Zentraedi? His addiction to pain and degradation had constituted an Imperative, of sorts, and so his desire to create a child with her had only confused her all the more. Particularly since the act was devoid of the intimacy Miriya had told her about. Instead, in keeping with the engineered thing that she was, she was artificially inseminated, rendered a mere piece of birth machinery. And when she learned late in her pregnancy—her body so altered she scarcely recognized it and her mind so warped by hormones that she couldn’t think clearly—of Leonard’s plan to keep the child for himself, she knew that she had to flee her royal prison and bear the child in safety. Two sympathizers, ignorant of her ethnic background, had midwived the birth and helped her to decide on the name, Hirano, which suggested a condition of being caught between opposing forces.
That first horrible night in radiation-poisoned Barranquilla, Marla Stenik had spied the infant and had asked Seloy why she was carrying the thing. Seloy had lied, answering that she had found the baby abandoned in Manaus. As to why she was carrying it, she said that the helpless thing had aroused her curiosity, adding that she felt no real attachment to it—which, in fact, was partially true. She marveled at the bond Miriya had apparently been able to form with her daughter, Dana.
During the sea crossing, Marla slowly revealed that two months earlier she had attended a rebel meeting in a jungle encampment well north of Brasília. Several hundred Imperative-driven Zentraedi and at least half that number of disaffected Humans had joined forces to launch raids on various Southlands cities and RDF installations. But Marla made it clear that she hadn’t been encouraged by what she saw at the camp. While some of the Zentraedi had worked with Humans, it was obvious that they had learned nothing of Human culture or psychology. These were Zentraedi who still put their trust in Battlepods—as had the group known as Khyron’s Fist, whose recent seizure of the useless Grand Cannon could only end in defeat and further shame for the Zentraedi race. Who would profit from their rashness, save for those who would die mistaken in the belief they had done so under the aegis of the Imperative?
Marla favored lofting a force of Zentraedi to the factory satellite and skyjacking the dimensional fortress under construction there. “The fortress is the key to our survival as a race,” Marla had opined. She was certain that there were Zentraedi forces scattered throughout Sol’s system of planets, waiting to connect with those whose warships had crashed on Earth.
Seloy and Marla’s somewhat one-sided conversation had been overheard by two Zentraedi females, who had wandered over to introduce themselves. Vivik Bross was a small-boned, pixie-eared former Quadrano, while Xan Norri, with her high cheekbones and mounds of pale hair, could have sprung from the same clone queue that generated Seloy.
“I’m also in favor of infiltrating the factory,” Bross said. “Not to skyjack a ship that won’t be spaceworthy for years to come, but to organize a network for smuggling mecha parts down the well to our beleaguered forces.”
Seloy could still recall the amused look on Marla’s face. “And just who among our ‘beleaguered forces’ has the know-how to make use of these mecha parts?”
Bross had pointed to Xan Norri. “She does.”
Xan, it emerged, had worked closely in Macross City with a Human scientist named Harry Penn, who headed up the RDF’s mecha design team. Penn had talked endlessly to Xan about t
he inner workings of Veritechs and Destroids. The war-widowered Penn had even confessed his love for her, begging that his secret be kept.
Xan’s revelation had set Marla laughing. “I sometimes think that this thing the Humans call ‘sex’ is our real strength as female Zentraedi. Kissing with open mouths, touching, stroking body parts … Men will do anything for it. So it seems to me that the very weapon the Humans used against us during the War could be turned against them.”
“Have you tried it?” Bross wanted to know.
“Of course I have,” Marla told her. “How do you think I paid for my passage aboard this foul-smelling ship? And, trust me, I’m not the only one.”
Seloy was struck by the fact that no one spoke for a long moment. Had exchanging sex for favors become a common though secret practice among Zentraedi females?
“So about these mecha you want to build?” Marla said at last.
“We’ve discovered a way to convert Female Power Armor into weapons of terror. We’ve already fashioned a prototype.”
Seloy couldn’t believe her ears. “The prototype is more powerful than Female Power Armor?”
Bross nodded. “It has three times the firepower, and it can be piloted by remote.”
Even Marla was impressed.
“Our idea is to let the male groups attend to the actual combat,” Xan went on. “They’re reasonably good at it, and the fighting will keep them out of our way. They would never permit a female group to lead them, but I’m certain they’ll have no qualms about being supplied with weapons that match the new Veritechs in missile strength and maneuverability.”
“It’s all about inciting terror,” Bross added. “Humans have an inborn fear of haphazard violence.”
Marla was shaking her head. “Even at its most efficient, a smuggling organization based on the factory won’t be able to supply what you need.”
“Only some of the parts would have to come from upside,” Xan argued. “Protoculture cells, remorphing relays, that sort of thing. Otherwise, we have what we need right here on Earth. Aboriginals in the Southlands have been guiding the male groups to warships so concealed by the jungle that they haven’t even been logged and plundered by RDF reclamation teams. Some are plunged to their stern thrusters into the ground, others are submerged in rivers. And in addition to the ships, we have a third source: a former Quadrano named Neela Saam, who is involved in the black market in Freetown, near the city of Mexico. That’s where Vivik and I are headed, along with sixteen others aboard this ship.”
The Zentraedi Rebellion Page 12