“No other explanation,” Edwards commented.
“Intelligence about the summit was withheld from Leonard for fear of just such action.”
Edwards nodded gravely. “He superseded his authority.”
“His authority?” Obstat said. “He superseded his own mandate not to deploy his forces unless asked. And since when does North Africa fall within Brasília’s jurisdiction?”
General Motokoff read from a situation report. “The Army of the Southern Cross defends its actions, stating that the raid was retaliatory, in response to the assassination attempt. The group that planned and funded the attack was allegedly based in Cairo.”
“That’s a total fabrication,” Obstat said. “Why would some group thousands of miles from Brasilia involve itself in the affairs of the Southlands? And it still doesn’t explain how Leonard was apprised of the summit to begin with.”
Motokof had anticipated the question. “The ASC claims that they got it out of the woman—the sympath—who survived the Brasília bombing. This can’t be substantiated, because she finally succumbed to her injuries.”
“Very convenient,” Obstat said.
“Definitely a mole in the house,” Edwards remarked.
Obstat turned to him. “Who in the UEG and the RDF had access to our intel on Cairo?”
“The bigot list was pretty extensive. Senator Milburn and the six members of the UEG’s Ways and Means Committee, Senator Longchamps and the five members of the Intelligence Oversight Group, most of the RDF general staff, including Reinhardt, Hunter, Aldershot, Herzog, Maistroff, Caruthers, and a couple of others.” Edwards fell silent for a moment, stroking the flesh side of his face. “It’s possible …”
“Say it,” Obstat barked. “We’re only at the theorizing stage.”
Edwards shrugged. “I’d have to check on this, but Max Sterling might have been told about Cairo.”
“Cairo was supposed to be strictly need-to-know,” Dimitri Motokoff said. “How did our bigot list get so long? And who the hell would have included Sterling on this?”
“Sterling has the necessary security clearance,” Edwards was quick to respond. “Reinhardt or Hunter could have dropped something about Cairo as part of the Grand Cannon premission briefing. In the event he was obliged to conduct a field interrogation of an injured enemy, let’s say.”
Obstat considered it and shook his head. “Sterling wouldn’t betray the RDF to Leonard. He was the one who broke the story on the Brasília riot.”
“Suppose he let something slip to his wife,” Edwards said.
Motokoff eyed Edwards with blatant disdain. “You’re suggesting that Miriya Parina would sell out her own people?”
“Perhaps not ‘sell.’ Anyway, the ones in Cairo weren’t ‘her people’—they were malcontents.” Edwards gave the distinction a moment to sink in. “Look at it this way: the UEG expects her to be a model Zentraedi, right? And the malcontents are making it difficult for all the Zentraedi. So what better way for Parina to demonstrate her complete acculturation than to spill what she knew about Cairo. Sterling would have told her that the RDF wasn’t going to interfere with the summit, making Leonard the logical choice.”
Obstat snorted in ridicule. “This isn’t worth pursuing.”
Once more, Edwards shrugged. “As you say, we’re only theorizing. I don’t put much stock in it myself, but it’s apparent that someone approached Leonard or one of his officers.”
Obstat muttered something under his breath.
“It won’t happen again,” Edwards said with assurance. “Give me a few weeks and I’ll root out our double agent.”
Obstat nodded and looked to Motokoff. “What’s the latest on Cairo?”
“Blowback galore. The media are calling it ‘St. Valentine’s Massacre Two.’ Over fifty Zentraedi killed by Prowler and Mongoose missiles, including, I’m sorry to report, the operative we placed among the Shroud. The Al Azhar Mosque was completely destroyed. A few newspapers are comparing it to the burning of the Alexandria library back in Greek times or whenever it was. But running side by side with every piece condemning the wanton destruction is a piece praising Leonard for the preemptive strike. Everyone’s asking how the ASC knew about the summit when the RDF didn’t. Or why—if the RDF did know—the summit was permitted to take place. Either way, the RDF emerges the loser. At the same time, Leonard’s popularity has taken a quantum leap in the Northlands.
“The Aliens Civil Liberties Union is using Cairo to back up what they’ve been saying about restrictions on Zentraedi rights. But, the truth be told, a lot of people secretly respect the fact that Leonard is decisive and ruthless; they’re sick of the RDF’s equivocating. Most of all, the idea of an organized Zentraedi terrorist machine has people between here and Sydney taking to the streets, demanding that something be done to nip malcontentism in the bud. And the demonstrations are directed as much against the Zentraedi as they are the RDF. There’ve been some angry confrontations between Leonard’s supporters and advocacy groups.”
Obstat hung his head and exhaled wearily. “Wait’ll they get wind of this upside.”
“I thought you might like to see how things are progressing,” Dr. Bronson told Lisa as she emerged from an elevator on level five of Breetai’s flagship. The elevator was a recent installation, and the broad corridor it opened on had been partitioned from the original 90-foot-wide catwalk that ran around the perimeter of the bridge, 150 feet above the deck.
Lang had issued orders that the ship be referred to as the SDF-3, but to Lisa the leviathan still belonged to Breetai, and it was going to take more than a shiny new elevator to make her think otherwise. Nupetiet-Vernitzs was the Zentraedi term for “flagship,” and this one was more than three miles long and could accommodate upward of 100,000 crewpersons, not including space for an additional 28,900 Micronized in the stasis chamber. Though anchored in the zero-g heart of the factory satellite, the ship manufactured its own gravity.
“I think you’ll be very impressed,” Bronson said as he was leading her down the corridor in the direction of the command bubble—the so-called unblinking eye of the bridge. “It’s turning out to be a labor of love for many of those involved.”
Wherever Lisa looked, helmeted workcrews and techs were busy at tasks. The corridor was noisy with construction sounds: the sibilant roar of servowelders, the explosive thud of riveters, the whine of screwguns. Men and women consulted scrolls of blueprints or data screens filled with dizzying calculations. Waste bins overflowed with empty coffee containers and sandwich wrappings. Along the starboard bulkhead was a bank of perhaps twenty portable toilets.
Bronson halted at the hatch to the command bubble and motioned to the mushroom-shaped button that controlled it. “Admiral, if you would do the honors.”
Lisa pressed her right palm against the button. The hatch divided, and the two halves pocketed themselves swiftly and silently in the bulkhead. Her first look at the interior of the bubble was enlivened by an immediate sense of déjà vu.
“Of course, it’s a long way from completion,” Bronson said. “But, as per your request, we’ve endeavored to duplicate the layout of the SDF-1’s bridge down to the smallest details. Well, I should say ‘whenever possible.’ Changes in technology these past twenty years dictated that we make certain adjustments. But I hope you’ll agree that we’ve at least succeeded in capturing the feel of the old ship. After all, this wasn’t meant to be a simulation—some movie set—but a fully functioning command center.”
Lisa’s eyes roamed the oblong room. She turned through a full circle. “I’m amazed he let you get away with this much.”
Lang, she meant, who had argued vehemently against replicating even the look of the fortress’s bridge, citing the unnecessary redundancies that had been incorporated into the SDF-1, the physical limitations, the innovations his systems-design teams had made since the remodeling and “Human-sizing” of the Visitor. But in the end, thanks in large part to steadfast support from Reinhardt, F
orsythe, and several others, Lisa had gotten her way.
Bronson, now standing akimbo in the center of the room, was beaming. For his benefit, Lisa kept her smile frozen in place, appreciative of his efforts to cheer her. But she found it difficult to summon much enthusiasm for any aspect of the SDF-3 in the wake of news from the surface about Leonard’s preemptive strike on Cairo. Demonstrations, protests, riots … most of them directed against the RDF for failing to act. It was a classic no-win situation. Max Sterling was branded a murderer for killing fourteen Zentraedi in the raid against the Southern Grand Cannon, and Anatole Leonard was praised for leading one that ended in four times as many deaths. Spearheaded by Senator Wyatt Moran, Brasília was threatening to secede from the UEG unless the Army of the Southern Cross received the funding and recognition it was seeking.
“The Expeditionary mission could be scrubbed if public opinion shifts another notch,” Lang had said only that morning. “The cost of retrofitting the flagship alone could finance the rebuilding of both ALUCE and Sara Bases, and the construction and deployment of a dozen ARMOR-series defense platforms.”
There was nothing new in what Lang said, but hearing the words had made her feel selfish and narrow-minded about wanting to fulfill Henry Gloval’s dream. And now, as her eyes took in the alterations done to Breetai’s command bubble, she realized that the mystifying sensation of déjà vu wasn’t always a positive experience.
Glancing at the laser communication and scanner console that took up half the starboard bulkhead, she couldn’t help but picture elfin-faced Kim Young and the ever-fearless Sammie Porter; in the same way, she saw Vanessa Leeds strapped into an acceleration seat below the twin four-by-four astrogation screens, and Claudia Grant at the starboard duty station below the wraparound forward viewport …
If death was a joke God had played on Human beings, sudden death must have been God’s idea of torture. For instead of numbing the hurt, swiftness encapsulated it. Shared experiences fled into memory like eclipsed light. Sudden death left you feeling that your own life was a mere dream. That someone could be alive one moment, then lost to this world forever, was sleight of hand of the crudest sort.
Her first love, Carl Riber, killed in action on Mars; her father, killed in action at Alaska Base; Claudia, Sammie, Kim, and Vanessa, killed in action in Macross City … War had made players of everyone in the world, and given that Lisa had been in the fighting for three years longer than most, she would have thought she had a leg up on the business of dying. But it wasn’t so. She grieved daily, sometimes hourly, for those taken from her. Carl’s pacifism had lent a particularly tragic element to his death, whereas her father’s death at the site of the Grand Cannon seemed somehow fitting for a minister of war. Shortly before Rick had flown in to rescue her, she had seen her father literally derezz on screen … leaving her to deal with all the usual unresolved issues between fathers and daughters.
But there were no unresolved issues between her and Claudia; none that the two of them hadn’t discussed and processed endlessly after Roy Fokker’s death. Especially in the weeks before Khyron’s attack on Macross. Claudia had become withdrawn after Roy died, not any less a friend, but more inclined to solitude. When she ventured out, it was usually to one of Roy’s old haunts, where she would sit alone with her memories. But it was Claudia who had helped Lisa admit to herself that she was in love with Rick, and indeed find the strength to tell him. Lisa had lost count of the many glasses of Whaler and Lovely Yoshie she had lifted to Claudia during the past year. And still she wondered if she could ever forgive Claudia for saving her life that fateful day in Macross—for helping Henry wrestle her into the ejection module, under the pretense that she had more to live for than they did.
Lisa walked to the facsimiles of the duty stations she and Claudia had manned for almost ten years. Where the SDF-1’s viewport had opened on stars and sky, the command bubble’s overlooked a mile-long, 350-foot-high hold carpeted with complex arrays of alien and Human technology.
Lisa swung away from the view to regard the raised platform that would soon support the padded captain’s chair, and she thought about Henry Gloval, her long-limbed, soot-black-mustachioed Russian commander and second-best friend. She imagined him sitting there, with his white cap tilted forward over his dark eyes and his unlit briar clamped between his teeth, and she tried hard to envision herself sitting in that chair, with Captain Forsythe occupying her place and strangers at all the other stations, and she fought back tears of anguish and vague foreboding.
Was this what Rick felt every time he watched a VT take to the skies? Lisa asked herself. Wait till he got a load of the stadium-size situation room Bronson and Lang were building for him.
“If there’s anything you don’t like, Admiral, or anything you’d like to see added,” Bronson was saying, “now’s the time to let us know.”
Lisa cleared her throat and straightened somewhat. “Two small items, Doctor. I want a sign posted above the hatch that reads Watch Your Head, and I want the seatback of the command chair outfitted with a slashed-circle no-smoking symbol.”
The passenger list for shuttle flight 18–1787, departing Albuquerque Base for the factory satellite on March 23, 2016, gave the name of the occupant of seat 14 as Jeng Chiang. His occupation was listed as food service technician and his security rating was 6, which restricted him to upper levels three through six of the main body of the factory. Ratings of less than seven were denied access to the SDF-3 and its immediate environs, or to any of the secondary pods, including the numerous transfer corridors that connected them to the central body. Additional information on Chiang—available on request from the RDF’s Bureau of Investigation—showed that he was born in Hong Kong in 1990 and had lived and worked in New York City until 2010. He moved to Caracas, Venezuela, in 2011, and had been visiting Angel Falls when the Rain of Death occurred. Since then, he had worked in food preparation at the Southern Grand Cannon from May 2014 through October 2015. An interview and background check had been done in Albuquerque, where his security contract was on file.
Tall, lean, and brooding, Chiang wore round, wirerimmed glasses and parted his blond-brown hair on the right. Strapped into his seat, he had his face turned to the porthole, as had been the case since lift-off. He had endured the flight without complaint and, beyond a brief exchange of pleasantries, had said little to his seatmate.
The factory filled the view out the small window, but between it and the approaching shuttle were some twenty Zentraedi warships and the tugs that had towed them from lunar orbit to their Lagrange anchorages, attended to by reclamation crews of full-size Zentraedi. Chiang identified the dreadnoughts the shuttle passed en route to the factory docking bay: landing ship, cruiser, destroyer, command ship, reconnaissance pod, recovery pod … There was nothing extraordinary about the talent; indeed, enemy warship identification had been a hobby of many of those who’d lived in inboard Macross City. The difference was that Chiang was able to supply the Zentraedi names: Quiltra Queleual, Thiev Salan, Thuveral Salan, Queadol-Magdomilla …
The background prepared in Albuquerque made no mention of Chiang’s two years inboard the SDF-1, or of his facility with Zentraedi—though those facts were undoubtedly on file in some electronically dazzled Macross City databank.
Under the name Lynn-Kyle.
Kyle had come a long way since Macross, in any case. An advocate of peaceful solutions in those days, he was now a dissident. His contempt for the RDF had stood the test of time, but had been overridden by his abhorrence for Anatole Leonard’s Army of the Southern Cross. Leonard’s Army … like a film director insisting that his or her name be appended to the title of the work.
His dislike for Leonard had begun the previous year in Cuiabá and blossomed into full hatred after the massacre in Brasília. Kyle had arrived in Cuiabá with a group of disabused Zentraedi he had first met in Detroit. Back when he had had one foot in political activism and one in show business, managing the career of his cousin and onetime lover,
Lynn-Minmei. The two interests had merged in the “People Helping People Tour,” which Kyle had organized in the hope that music would bring Humans and aliens together. But Minmei was exhausted from the demands placed on her during the early reconstruction years, when her celebrity had reached absurd heights and people had clamored for personal appearances. The reasons were simple: Hollywood and New York had been destroyed, and few of those celebrities who’d survived the Rain—in Montana or Wyoming—had ever been big names to begin with. Kyle had been feeling the strain as well, though he hadn’t recognized it at the time. Drinking too much, losing control, disregarding all that he’d learned from years of physical and spiritual training in the martial arts. For over a year, Minmei put up with his verbal abuse, until she became so emotionally drained that she couldn’t sing.
The night he had walked out of her life was etched in his memory. He could place himself on that littered, moonlit beach in Monument, hear the mournful foghorns of the ferries, recall the words of his melodramatic harangue. He had convinced himself that he was speaking his mind when all he’d actually been doing was concocting a theatrical exit for himself, one he wanted Minmei to remember all her life. It was paramount that she experience some of the pain he was feeling.
He worshiped her that much.
Meanwhile, he hadn’t had a clue what to do next; but chance had delivered him to a saloon frequented by Zentraedi, and he had hooked up with them and hit the road south—thus missing by weeks the annihilation of Macross, the dimensional fortresses, and the dream of abandoning Earth for the stars. He remembered thinking, Now there can be no option but to live together as one race. He had no residual anger for Khyron or Azonia and the crushing he had almost sustained at their hands. They had done what they had needed to do.
He had renewed hope, and money enough to support himself and his fellow travelers on the long trip to the Southlands. They’d spent time in Mexico and Nicaragua, shipped for Venezuela, and journeyed by truck and river-boat to Cuiabá.
The Zentraedi Rebellion Page 15