Wolfe shook his head. “None whatever.”
“That’s good, because the thing I want you to understand—the thing I want the RDF to understand—is that I refuse to run this city as a fortress. That’s not to say that we don’t need defenses, because we do—there are many dissident groups that refuse to believe that the Grand Cannon has been stripped of useful technology—but our goal is to discover some way of letting all people partake of this city, and I do mean all people. The way things stand, we have more Human agitators than Zentraedi. Rogues, foragers, fugitives from prisons destroyed in the Rain of Death …” She shook her head. “Then there’s this motorcycle gang, the Red Snakes—”
“We saw one of them,” Johnny exclaimed.
Lea glanced at him. “They’re not very nice people, Johnny. Especially their self-appointed leader, a man named Atilla One.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “But we’ll go into all that some other time.” She looked at Wolfe again. “Captain, the thing to remember is that I didn’t want this posting—I had my sights set on Ireland, but Senator Moran and the Bureau of Reconstruction Management didn’t see things my way. I’m determined, nonetheless, to make the best of it, and I expect you to do likewise.”
Wolfe gave her his best glamour-boy grin. “Mayor, I’m made for this place.”
Slowly, she grinned back at him. “You know what, Wolfe—I believe you.” She turned to Catherine. “I can tell that you don’t share your husband’s enthusiasm, Catherine, but all I ask is that you give it a shot. And if you’re by any chance looking for a challenge, I’m searching for someone to do public relations.”
Catherine forced a smile. “Thank you, Ms. Mayor. I’ll consider it.”
Carson blew out her breath and rubbed her small hands together. “All right, then, first thing tomorrow we start looking at ways to beef up city security without letting the guns show. And while we’re doing that, we keep all lines of communication open between Humans and Zentraedi—including malcontents.”
“Shut your mouths and let him speak!” Clozan bellowed to the sixty-two Zentraedi attendees of the Cairo parley, whose loud grumblings and separate discussions had overwhelmed the envoy of Khyron’s Fist. Many, following the Quandolmo’s example, wore galabas and headcloths. “The least we can do is keep from squabbling among ourselves.” Six feet tall and bullishly built, Clozan was the leader of the Quandolma band, which had organized the summit. The name meant “resurrected ones,” and the band’s glyph was a laughing skull.
Standing atop an inlaid table with megaphone in hand, Nello, the Khyron’s Fist envoy, had been trying to put the best spin possible on the rout at the Southern Grand Cannon. “It was not a defeat, but a calculated sacrifice. Captain Bagzent and two others escaped with computer documents that will be invaluable to our efforts.”
“Who made this Bagzent ‘captain’?” someone shouted from the rear of the room. “That’s a Human rank.”
“What good are documents when it’s weapons we need?” yelled another.
Nello waved his colorless arms in a pacifying gesture. “These are identity documents that will help us get aboard the factory—”
“Why go up the well in search of targets when we have plenty of them right here?”
Nello swung to the source of the question. “The factory isn’t a target but a source of needed parts for weapons—”
“We are weapons enough,” the same speaker interrupted.
“As long as we have hands and feet and teeth, we have weapons!”
Clozan shot to his feet once more, banging his huge fists on the table. “Shut up, shut up, all of you! I will kill the next one who speaks out of turn!”
That the representatives had to be threatened was proof of the damage done to the Imperative in three short Earth years. Once, Clozan’s every word would have been obeyed without question: a flagship commander in Dolza’s personal fleet, he had enjoyed more authority than Breetai and Reno combined. Now all he had was the Quandolma, and all the Quandolma had was Northern Africa, from sea coast to tropics, which amounted to little more than an expanse of uninhabited desert, oddly reminiscent of the dun-colored wastes of Fantoma.
Excepting Antarctica, Africa had taken fewer annihilation bolts than any other landmass. Ravaged by disease and drought in the decades preceding the Global Civil War and by tribal warfare afterward, it had scarcely enough Human survivors to attract the notice of the warships’ bioscanners. In light of the earlier indignities, many Africans thought of Dolza’s anni bolts as a kind of coup de grace.
Cairo hadn’t sustained a direct hit, but nearby Alexandria had, and what with the radiation born there and the slow eastern drift of clouds raised by the plasmic brutalizing of the Mediterranean, from Spain all the way round to Israel, slow death had come to Cairo’s fourteen million. The city was hot, and would remain hot for a score more years.
Dammed at its delta by Alexandria’s debris, the Nile had overflowed its banks to the south, leaving some of Cairo underwater. The bazaars were deserted and there were no songs in the desert air, calling the faithful to prayer. Looters had moved in once the Nile crocodiles had sated themselves on the dead. But the place was almost as unchanged as Buenos Aires. Many of the mosques and minarets and obelisks were still standing, as were the pyramids at Giza and Saggara, and the Sphinx. Clozan’s crashed flagship contributed a new geometrical relic to the area.
Clozan had chosen the Al Azhar Mosque, just inside the walls of the Old City, as headquarters for the Quandolma, and the mosque’s renowned library of 250,000 ancient books as the site of the summit. But it wasn’t Islamic architecture or handwritten manuscripts that had drawn Zentraedi envoys from around the world, but Clozan himself. And come they had, from as near as the Congo and as distant as Australia, representatives from the Paranka, the Lyktauro, the Iron Ravens, the Shroud, the Crimson Ghosts, the all-female Claimers and the Senburu, arriving in military and passenger planes borrowed from ruined airports, jury-rigged trucks and all-terrain vehicles, recovery craft and theater scout recon pods salvaged from crashed warships, all to pay tribute to Dolza’s once-great battle-group commander …
And now they wouldn’t even listen to him.
A full minute of pounding his fists on the table and the grousing and muttering still hadn’t subsided, so he reached for the closest envoy—who happened to be from the Burrowers—and heaved him through the window into the courtyard below. That seemed to get everyone’s attention.
“Now, allow the envoy from Khyron’s Fist to make his point before you ask your questions.” Clozan nodded to Nello. “Proceed—but be succinct, or you’re the next one to leave the room.”
Nello thumped his chest in salute. “T’sen Clozan. The identity documents won in the raid on the Cannon can be used to infiltrate a group of our Human allies into the factory. Several have already volunteered. The Humans will establish contact with our full-size comrades aboard the factory and determine the best means for smuggling supplies to our mecha production teams on the surface.”
The room fell silent for a long moment. Clozan stared hard at Nello. “Explain yourself.”
“A new form of mecha will soon be made available to us—a variation of Female Power Armor that is said to be the equivalent of the Veritech.”
“Said by whom?”
Nello blanched. “I can’t say, because I myself haven’t been told.”
“Is secrecy now part of the Zentraedi way?” the Paranka envoy asked. Everyone looked to Clozan for the answer.
“Yes,” he said, after a moment of deliberation. “And other Human strategies as well. Covert operations, abductions, ransom demands, terror tactics—these are all part of the Human arsenal, and it’s crucial that we learn to incorporate them into our campaign. We must go where Khyron’s honor forbid him to go, and fight the Humans on a fully integrated battlefield.
“Look how subtle the RDF has become: they make a pretense of answering to the United Earth Government as a means of deflecting the criticism of Humans
sympathetic to our cause; they refuse food to the wretched Zentraedi of the Southlands, hoping they’ll respond by rioting; they encircle the Arkansas Protectorate with rapid-deployment forces; they steal control of Monument City out from under the Zentraedi who founded it; they entice our full-size comrades to undergo Micronization … The RDF is not only waging a psychological war against us, but against all our people. And we must be willing to embrace any strategy that enables us to endure and conquer.”
Throughout the library, envoys traded impassioned looks. This was the old Clozan speaking.
“We can triumph, but we must be judicious. We must operate on a need-to-know basis and take care to ferret out Human or Zentraedi spies among our ranks. We have something the Humans lack, and that is the unrelenting might of the Imperative. We need only to unlearn what the Humans have—”
Clozan’s deep voice was overpowered by a rumbling sound that shook the room.
“It’s coming from outside,” Nello said.
Burnoosed heads swung to the window the Burrowers’ envoy had been through. Filling the western sky was a flotilla of dirigiblelike warships, slung with command gondolas and bristling with weapons. Someone in the library recognized the eagle emblems emblazoned on the ships’ noses as belonging to Anatole Leonard’s Army of the Southern Cross.
Clozan whirled on the assembly, rage in his narrowed eyes. “We’ve been betrayed!” he screamed as the first volley of missiles came streaking toward the mosque.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Poor Zand: one step behind Lang in arriving on Macross Island, overlooked by Russo for inclusion on the first team sent in to survey the Visitor, off-island on Lang’s personal business when the Zentraedi attacked and the SDF-1 jumped across the Solar system, one day late (because of inclement weather) in reaching the SDF-1 after the UEDC had ordered it back into the skies, forced by circumstance to remain on the surface while Lang got to design a starship inside the factory satellite, ignored by Hunter after petitioning for a slot with the REF … Poor, poor Zand. No wonder he was competitive, driven, obsessed. And no wonder Earth got to reap the results of his madness.
Major Alice Harper Argus (ret.), Fulcrum: Commentaries on the Second Robotech War
At his desk in Monument City’s Robotech Re-search Center, Lazlo Zand, wand-writer in hand, made stream-of-consciousness entries in an electronic notebook. In a loopy code of his own devising, he wrote: Dana … Dana Parina … Dana Parina Sterling … Parina, Dana … Sterling, Dana … Sterling DNA … His writing hand halted and he leaned back from the screen, grinning maniacally at what his subconscious mind had conjured. Yes, yes, he thought. Sterling DNA: now there was a grail worth pursuing.
What had happened these past few months, he asked himself, that his life should suddenly seem rife with wondrous possibilities? First had come the promotion to chief of Protoculture studies, resulting from Lang’s appointment to the UEG. Next, a visit from Thomas Edwards, inquiring if he might be interested in doing some special research—developing a food additive capable of bonding to Protoculture at a molecular level, so that “persons” whose systems contained both the additive and Protoculture could be identified, perhaps even monitored, from a distance.
The purpose of such a chemical was immediately obvious to Zand: the UEG—whose interests Edwards was plainly representing—wanted Earth’s Zentraedi biochemically tagged. An acceptable response, given the upswing in acts of malcontentism. But Zand didn’t concern himself with the ethics of the UEG’s decision; what mattered was that the government had come to him. Not Lang or Penn or Bronson or Blake, but to Lazlo Archimedes Zand.
Then, most recently, who should come looking for him but Miriya Parina Sterling, wondering if he’d be willing to talk to little half-breed Dana about world events as they applied to the aliens. Mom was concerned about the effect the news might have on her daughter, and she wanted him to serve as a sort of therapist—though shaman seemed the more appropriate term, in that Parina had hinted at investigating the feasibility of somehow extracting the Zentraedi in Dana and banishing it. As if she expected him to fashion a psychocentrifuge for the kid; strap Dana into a seat, spin her into a beneficial schizophrenia, and separate out her Human and alien character traits, like plasma from blood.
Again, he left the ethical questions unanswered. If Miriya Parina wanted to deliver her daughter into his hands, who was he to dissuade her? But what had happened to bring on such a fortuitous series of developments—without his having had to indulge in any of the usual counterfeit groveling? He was still the same sleazy amoralist he had always been. Did it, then, have something to do with the ongoing experiments with Protoculture? Had Protoculture “gotten into him,” as Lang had promised it would, and were the visits from Edwards and Parina manifestations of the so-called “Shapings”?
Dana Sterling was the reason he had remained in Monument an extra week instead of returning to the Tokyo center. He wanted a crack at her before Parina’s anxiety had a chance to abate, and was even now waiting for mom and daughter to show up. When the office intercom chimed, he nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Professor Zand,” some research assistant said, “Dana Sterling is here.”
“Good, good. And the mother?”
“No, Doctor, she’s here with her … godfathers—”
“Not—”
“Rico, Konda, and Bron.”
Zand buried his face in his hands and shook his head back and forth. Those three! He’d had dealings with them in the past when Lang’s Age Determination Project was up and running, and they’d been next to useless; speaking in clichés they’d lifted from films and television, always joking around, like they were the Three Alien Stooges. Zand made up his mind to be civil to them, nevertheless, and on rendezvousing with them in the neurology lab said how splendid it was to see them again.
“Ah, I bet you say that to all the aliens,” said the stout one, Bron, who was sporting a PWF gimme-cap.
“No, really, it’s a—”
“Hey, Doc, you hear the one about the woman who takes her husband to the doctor because he thinks he’s a chicken?” This, from the tall one with purple hair, Konda.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve no time for—”
Rico, wiry and mercurial, high-fived him. “ ’T’sup, Zandman.”
Little green-blond Dana was standing among them, regarding Zand warily. “Dana,” he said, approaching her with a big smile, “I’ve heard so much about you.” As he was squatting, making himself her size, she punched him square in the nose—hard enough to smart if not draw blood. His eyes began to water and he pinched his nostrils shut. “Bell, dat basn’t berry nice, was it?”
“I don’t wanna talk to you,” she told him.
“I’m sorry to hear you say that, because your mommy wants us to talk.”
“My mommy’s always making me do stuff I don’t wanna do.”
“But I promise it won’t be so bad. I just want to ask you some questions about your house, and what you do when you’re at home.”
Dana looked to her godfathers for counsel, and the three of them nodded. “Go ahead, Dana,” Bron said, “talk to the skinny doctor with the funny hair.”
She was beyond precocious, he told himself as he was leading her back to his office. Mature enough to field word associations, perhaps even a multiphasic personality evaluation or a thematic apperception test. Zand’s imagination swirled at the thought of the family portrait Dana would draw. And, of course, he would have to order CAT, PET, CT, and nuclear scans, ultrasounds, EEGs, computed tomography studies, a full physical workup …
“So, tell me, Dana,” he said when they were seated next to each other in his office, “do you ever get angry?”
“Sure, I do.”
“And what makes you angry?”
“Doing what I don’t wanna do.”
“And what do you do when you get angry?”
She picked up his favorite paperweight—a fossilized chunk of amber he had purchased in
Mexico twenty years earlier—and threw it against the wall, where it shattered. Zand made a concerted effort to keep from grimacing—or crying. He swallowed hard and found his voice. “And does the anger seem to come from any place special in your body—your head, your tummy, your—”
“Here,” she said, pointing to her right fist, which she suddenly hurled at him, striking his jaw a glancing blow.
Zand shook the stars from his vision. “What are your feelings toward your daddy?”
“He’s neat.”
“Yes, he is neat. But anything else?”
“He cooks and cleans and washes the clothes.”
“Very interesting, Dana. And do you love him very much?”
“Sure.”
“More than you love your mommy?”
“Only when my mommy leaves me in the snow for too long.”
Zand looked puzzled. “She leaves you—”
“But I don’t get mad—just wet. And I always know when she’s going to do it.”
“Do you mean that you sometimes know what’s going to happen before it happens?”
“Yep.”
“Do you think you could teach me how to do that?”
“Maybe. If I can poke you in the eye first.”
Zand ignored the remark. “Do you know what ‘Zentraedi’ means?”
“Adopted.”
Zand sat back in his swivel chair. “Are you Zentraedi?”
“Half of me is.”
“And which half is that?”
“The half that’s gonna die.”
“We’ve been betrayed,” Niles Obstat said to the innercircle members of the Special Operations Group—Dimitri Motokoff, T. R. Edwards, and the officers of the Southlands, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia desks. A week had passed since Anatole Leonard’s Cairo attack, and the intel group was meeting in its nondescript though heavily secured building in suburban Monument City. “There’s a double agent loose in the RDF or the UEG.”
The Zentraedi Rebellion Page 14