The Zentraedi Rebellion

by Jack McKinney

  Ahmed Rashona, That Pass in the Night: The SDF-3 and the Mission to Tirol

  “I can’t believe you’re actually going through with this,” Catherine Wolfe told her husband as he was stuffing his duffel with clothes selected seemingly at random from the bedroom closet.

  “You’ve seen the reply from RDF Command,” Wolfe said. “What choice do I have?” The response to his report had been a month coming and contained just what he had expected to hear.

  “Oh, I see: since the RDF has ignored your requisitions, you have no choice but to supply this place with the mecha it needs.”

  Catherine was pacing the tiled floor at the foot of the double bed, and Jonathan’s black canvas duffel was propped against the night table. Johnny was in the adjoining room, immobile in front of the interactive TV the Wolfes had purchased in Albuquerque before leaving for Venezuela—a transition-easing surprise for their son. The four-room, sparsely furnished apartment was in a new building at the western terminus of Cavern City’s soon-to-be-completed monorail line. Because the canyon was somewhat wider there, the claustrophobic feel of downtown was tempered; and what with the trees, the neat houses, the churches and shopping centers, the area had an almost suburban air.

  “Monument isn’t dismissing the requisitions. But it might take months for any mecha to arrive, and we’ll be defenseless until then.”

  “So is that your fault? You were sent here to evaluate the situation, not to fortify the city.”

  “Cavern’s our home, Cath. This trip to Mexico’s no more than I’d do for any place we lived.”

  She smirked. “The town hero. What are you going to do for your second act—run for mayor?”

  He glowered at her, then let go of the anger. “There are twelve Centaur tanks sitting in the armory that only need a few parts to get them running. I’m certain those parts are available in Mexico because Mexico’s old Volkswagen factories were turning out their own version of Centaurs at the end of the century. And since I’m the only one whose studied the things, it makes sense for me to go.”

  Catherine folded her arms under her breasts. “Who, may I ask, is paying for this little shopping spree?”

  “The city council is paying for most of it.”

  “Most?”

  “We might be required to cover some of the travel expenses—but I’m sure we’ll be reimbursed.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re unbelievable sometimes.”

  “You want me to go overland, Cath? Fine. I’ll be back in a month instead of a week.”

  She didn’t respond immediately, and when she did her tone had softened. “Is it dangerous?”

  “No more than dealing with black marketeers anywhere. But instead of looking for ration coupons or luxury goods, I’ll be looking for tank parts.”

  “Then take us with you.”

  Wolfe showed her an imploring look. “Come on, Cath. There’s always a chance something could go wrong. Having to think about your safety would be a distraction.”

  “As distracting as thinking about my happiness, I’ll bet.”

  Wolfe pretended not to have heard the comment. “Anyway,” he said, “I’ve already got company for the trip.”

  “Who?”

  “Malone. The one you said looks like he should be fronting a rock band.”

  “Good choice, Jon. And be sure you check out the nightclubs while you’re there.”

  “Cath—”

  “But then, you’ve always been good at making friends, haven’t you? I mean, we’ve been in Cavern for less than two months and you’ve already formed a clique. What was it Geena Bartley called it—a pack? Now you can just leave me to rot here.”

  Wolfe’s eyes flashed anger. “If you rot here, it’ll be by your own choice.” Remembering that Johnny was in the next room, he lowered his voice. “I know you had your heart set on a transfer to Portland or Monument, but that didn’t happen, so I suggest we both make the best of it. Johnny’s adapting, and you’d get used to the climate if you didn’t try to fight it. Besides, this place is wide open with possibilities—for jobs, for friends, whatever.”

  “Friends like Geena Bartley and the other wives of Cavern City’s noble garrison of Robotech defenders? Gee, maybe I should join a parent/teachers group while I’m at it, or swear allegiance to the Church of Recurrent Tragedies?”

  “You knew this was my life,” Wolfe seethed.

  She nodded. “That’s true, Jon. I’m just wondering what happened to my life. You weren’t the only one with plans.”

  “So make them happen here. You could start by taking the job Mayor Carson offered you.”

  She smiled wanly.

  Wolfe tightened the drawstrings of the duffel. “I promise, when I get back from this mission we’ll sit down and figure out a plan.”

  “What kind of plan?”

  Wolfe shrugged. “If you’re not happy here in two years, I’ll agree to apply for a transfer.”

  “Wrong,” she said. “I’ll give it one year; then I’m gone.”

  “Down there,” Narumi said, pointing to a clearing in the forest far below them. “Two hours to be there.”

  Bagzent exhaled slowly and ran the back of his wrist over his sweat-beaded brow. Two more hours—he could surely endure that much. But for the past ten days, it had been torture keeping pace with the aborigine who had led him through hundreds of miles of forest to the meeting place specified by the Senburu females. Now, standing on the limestone rim of the basin that hid the Senburu camp, Bagzent allowed himself a relieved exhale for the first time since departing the Xingu.

  “We go,” Narumi said, setting off at a brisk clip on sturdy brown legs that carried him effortlessly through the thickest vegetation. Bagzent nodded to his comrades—the two other remaining members of Khyron’s Fist—and hurried after the Indian, down into the bush, down into the tangled biomass that was the green heart of the Southlands.

  For all the adversities—heat, rain, swollen streams, stinging insects, barbed trees—Bagzent had come through the journey with an unanticipated appreciation for the planet on which he and so many Zentraedi were marooned. An appreciation and something more, something his mind had been striving to define these past few days. Early on he thought that perhaps the sameness of the forest had left his mind hungry for visual information in the same way his body hungered for nourishment. But slowly he began to realize that what he had taken for sameness was in fact the opposite: living diversity raised to an unfathomable magnitude. Each plant and tree and airborne or crawling insect fitting into the whole like the interconnected parts of some grand machine. Birds eating fruits, then shitting the seeds which would grow new trees, yielding more fruit for those same birds … Animals feeding on the flesh of other animals … Flora that exhaled gases necessary for the survival of the fauna … Snakes living out their infancy in earthen tunnels excavated by armies of leaf-cutting ants … Other ants nesting inside the thorns of trees … Vines that provided drinking water, trees that provided nourishment … It was impossible for him to conceive that Amazonia hadn’t been fashioned by Masters like those on Tirol, and yet Narumi insisted time and again that Earth had no Masters; that even the Micronians that inhabited the planet had had nothing to do with its fashioning, but were themselves only part of the whole, and were, like Earth’s other living things, at the mercy of foul weather, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and the impacts of meteors. More, that the jungle had evolved—shaped itself over eons—guided only by the thoughts of a rarely seen, intangible being Narumi called Wondrous Spirit.

  All this was incomprehensible to the Zentraedi, and especially baffling to one who had known only the insides of Battlepods and warships and rarely the surface of worlds. And coming as it did, on the heels of the Fist’s Pyrrhic victory at the Grand Cannon, the experience of interconnectedness had begun to erode his convictions about warfare—to undermine the destructive fervor hardwired into him by the Imperative.

  If order was inherent to the world of Wondrous Spirit, w
hose bidding did the Zentraedi do by fomenting disorder?

  Whatever the answer, Bagzent had found himself asking continual questions of Narumi and the other Indian guides, eager to know the taste of each fruit, to learn which trees supplied timber for construction and which supplied leaves for medicine, to identify the forest’s animals by their deposited scat. His respect for the aboriginals was unbounded, for like the Zentraedi, they existed in the moment and they lived their lives with a sense of fierce determination. Unlike the Zentraedi, however, Narumi’s people were not without personal and collective histories, nor did they answer to an embedded Imperative. At all times they seemed to know their place in the physical world; without them, Bagzent and his comrades would be lost to the forest …

  Entering the Senburu camp two hours later, Bagzent saw that several other malcontent bands had accepted the females’ invitation. Already present were representatives from the Steel Wind, the Shroud, and the Crimson Ghosts, all of whom had been guided to the basin by either aborigines or rough-and-tumble Humans who made the jungle their refuge.

  Bagzent recognized most of the male warriors, but only a few of the Senburu females. Xan Norri he had met years ago in Macross, when she was working for—and perhaps providing sex to—the Robotech scientist Harry Penn. The petite and combative Marla Stenik had spent time at the Xingu camp. Vivik Bross and Seloy Deparra—Senburu’s apparent leader—he knew by reputation as Quadrano aces under Azonia.

  The camp was much more elaborate than the one Khyron’s Fist and others had hacked from the northeastern jungle bordering the Xingu River. The women had taken over an abandoned gold-dredging operation and had refurbished the processing plant and some of the heavy equipment. Employing bulldozers and cranes, they had erected several tall buildings and cleared a landing strip suitable for small planes. The accomplishments were both daunting and humiliating to the men—none less so than the centerpiece of the camp: a deliberately modified Queadlunn-Rau battle suit, accoutered with three times the usual number of autocannons and twice the pulse lasers. The 55-foot-tall weapon retained its humanoid appearance, though the twin-lobed top-mounted booster pack and suggestion of gunturreted head made it look like the offspring of Power Armor mated with Robotech Destroid.

  Bagzent kept one eye on the thing through the rest of the day and throughout the long night, getting little sleep as a result. The following morning he managed nonetheless to summon enough energy to drag himself to the briefing the Senburu had scheduled.

  “We’ve decided on the name Stinger,” Seloy Deparra announced, once everyone had been fed and gathered round the alloy-clad, cloven feet of the hybrid mecha. “The reason we haven’t afforded it a Zentraedi name should be obvious to all of you who understand the nature of terrorism: we want the Humans to be on speaking terms with this weapon”—she gestured to the Stinger—“because we plan to introduce it as a recurring feature in their lives.”

  Deparra explained that the battle suit itself had been salvaged from a crashed destroyer, of which there were many studding the forest in the vicinity of the Senburu camp. Bagzent had noted several on his way in, though he doubted he could make his way to them again without Narumi’s help. The RDF-mecha parts welded and riveted to the battle suit had been supplied and delivered by Zentraedi operating in Freetown.

  “And certain parts have come to us indirectly from the factory satellite,” the Senburu leader continued, “by means that are better left undisclosed. Our goal, in any case, is to make these available to your groups so that you can conduct your raids with more resources to tap than the boldness of the Imperative.”

  Deparra motioned everyone away from the mecha; then, on her signal, the Stinger launched from the clearing and jinked through a series of lightning-quick maneuvers.

  “Six autocannons, a quartet of high-speed triple-barreled pulse lasers, flight speed equivalent to that of the Veritech, limb strength equivalent to that of the Gladiator, missile capacity greater than that of the Spartan and Excaliber combined …”

  Bagzent tried to follow the Stinger’s aerial gyrations, but the attempt left him dizzy and even more disheartened.

  “Modifications to the inertia-vector control system make it unmatched in maneuverability by current Robotech mecha,” Deparra added.

  The Stinger performed a low-level flyby and landed.

  “What do we have to do to get one?” a member of the Shroud asked with suspicion.

  Deparra’s sloping eyes found him in the crowd. “For now, all we’re asking from the male groups is assistance in locating parts—any Destroid, intact or disabled, will suffice—and financing to pay for what can’t be procured by salvaging. This means that some of you may have to engage in commonplace robberies in place of unadulterated mayhem. Just remember: the goal is to render our enemy terror-stricken. Once we’ve accomplished that, we can begin to formulate our demands.”

  Deparra lifted her face to the mecha. “Each of our prototypes has outperformed its predecessor.” Lowering her head, she scanned the audience, fixing briefly on Bagzent. “The time has come to test one on a live target.”

  Take Manhattan as it was before the Rain, and roof the whole island over at the height of the Empire State Building. Next, extend the walls of most of the buildings up to the ceiling and obliterate all the windows and doorways and architectural adornments. Efface all setbacks so that the building walls become sheer and featureless. Now remove the cars, the parks, the people and their pets, dim the lighting to a phosphorescent glow, and raise the gravity slightly above Earth normal. The result would approximate the chase shaft that bisected the ovoid central body of the factory satellite between the ceiling of level seven and the systems-clad floor of the bridge, a five-mile-long technodungeon of dendritelike relays, arterial-like conduit, and ligamentlike cable, serviced and policed by an array of bipedal and airborne robots. Not the sort of place a rational person would choose to visit, let alone solo, but Lynn-Kyle had never considered himself rational, and he functioned best when alone. Granted that the vastness of the space could send even the most intrepid of explorers to the edge of agoraphobic panic, but Kyle had immunized himself to all unreasonable fears by learning to think of the thousand-foot-high chase as a kind of crawlspace—for someone Godzilla-sized, to be sure, but a crawlspace nonetheless.

  It was fourteen hundred hours factory time and Kyle was on his lunch break. The cafeteria for service providers was two levels down, but he had stopped there only long enough to be observed by several coworkers before riding an empty cargo elevator up to level six. His rating didn’t permit him to ascend beyond six, but a Human member of the alliance who worked security on seven had been waiting for him at the elevator and had stayed with him all the way to the retrofitted ladder and hatch that accessed the chase. The climb alone had taken five minutes.

  Kyle had a battery-operated miner’s lamp strapped around his head and a large bucket-style pack on his back. Shown the route by Elmikk a week earlier, he moved quickly, fingertips in constant contact with the towering walls at his left side.

  Under normal conditions the outer walls would have run straight from one end of the shaft to the other. But the same glitches that had shut down mechaa production the previous year had somehow deluded the factory’s central computer into believing that the chase had been penetrated by non-Zentraedi interlopers, and as a consequence security partitions had risen from the floor, dropped from the ceiling, and slid from the walls, turning the chase into a veritable maze. Huge reservoirs of drinking water or lubricants had been drained dry, smaller basins had been filled; conduit systems had reconfigured; some areas had been misted with acid or flooded with toxic fumes. There were places where the temperature was subzero, other places hot with radiation. The route Elmikk and his cohorts had explored and mapped avoided the worst of the danger zones, though Kyle understood that the configuration of the bulkheads would surely change if the main computer went back online. And the factory’s robot defense units, quiescent the past year, would mob
ilize.

  The route took Kyle past examples of some of those units: a 42-foot-tall Destroyer, whose reverse-articulated legs had walked it into a corner; four crashed, silent assassin “Buzz-Bot” airborne robots; and several multi-armed precision engineer drones—also grounded—which featured optic and sensor arrays for locating and tracking intruders by heat, motion, and sound.

  As things stood, Kyle had two roles in the smuggling operation he had helped organize: he was the first to see the “shopping list” carried up the well by Humans who interfaced on the surface with the Senburu group, and he was the one who made the pickup of Protoculture microcells and passed them on to carriers who smuggled them down the well. Theofre Elmikk was tasked with filling the list, but the actual procurement was done by a team of vacuum-deployed aliens under Elmikk’s command—giants who worked outside the factory, dismantling derelict Zentraedi ships. Once the smuggled parts made planetfall—at Denver, Albuquerque, Monument, or other ports of entry—they were muled to the Senburu’s Southlands mecha facility by Humans or alien members of the alliance.

  For one trained in the arts of stealth, purposeful swiftness, and fearless concentration, the labyrinthal trip from the ladder-fed hatch to the drop point—a distance of just over one mile—required ten minutes. Having already logged eight round trips that week alone, Kyle made it in nine minutes. He glanced at the luminescent dial of his watch: 14:38. He had to be back at his food-processor station in the kitchen by no later than 15:15. He would be late if the drop wasn’t made in the next five minutes.