The Zentraedi Rebellion

by Jack McKinney

  Each craft would be piloted by two Scavengers who had volunteered for their mission—indeed, who had vied for the honor of suiciding for the cause. Khyron’s name wasn’t mentioned when the final choices had been made. The Backstabber may have been the first Zentraedi on Earth to surrender his life and the lives of his crew to ease the psychic burden of the disaffected, but the Scavengers owed him no tribute. The Stingers would fly for the glory of the Quadrano.

  Marla Stenik was one of the twenty-five who had made the trip to the lab. The rest of the Scavengers, along with some fifty males representing half-a-dozen bands, had remained in camp to engage the RDF and buy time for the highland contingent. When Kru Guage and Vivek Bross had failed to return from her pursuit of Miriya Parina, Marla knew that the last days were upon them. Parina would reach Mexico or some other city, and soon enough the assembled might of the Robotech Defense Force would descend on the Scavengers’ cloud forest camp.

  Weeks earlier Marla had tried to dissuade Seloy from summoning Parina, sensing even then that the tide was about to turn for the rebellion. Parina had fought against her Quadrano comrades during the War’s final battle, and there was no reason to believe she would act differently this time—certainly not as a result of what had happened in Brasília or Cairo or Arkansas. If Parina had been at all sympathetic to the cause, she would have come unbidden long ago. Marla recognized, however, that Seloy had felt compelled to contact Parina because of Hirano—even if Marla had no real grasp of what it was to be so devoted to another person that one would risk everything for that person. Seloy wanted her son to live, no matter what became of her; and who better to guarantee the boy’s survival than Parina, who herself harbored a hybrid in the Human world?

  Motherhood obviously had its own Imperative.

  The highland laboratory was a windowless, three-level rectangle of aluminum and concrete that ran on solar power and converted energy gleaned from a nearby waterfall. On a rise behind the main building was a small graveyard where the research staff had buried some of their dead after Dolza’s Rain, bolts from which had struck near enough to irradiate the entire area but leave the structure intact.

  Xan Norri was in charge of overseeing the impregnation of the shuttles with the Human-harmful virus sustained by the lab’s climate-control devices. Each Stinger would be armed with as many shuttle-stocked missiles as could be spared. In the event that the Stingers were engaged before they reached their target cities, the missiles were tasked to launch and disperse their payloads over population-rich areas, in the hope that infection of even a few Humans would lead to eventual systemwide contagion and mass death.

  Xan was too important a resource to squander on the mission, but default leaders such as Marla were easily procurable, and so she had volunteered to fly—to sting Brasília, in sweet revenge for the injustices Leonard and the Army of the Southern Cross had committed against Zentraedi throughout the Southlands.

  Standing just now at the cloven feet of her Stinger, watching as the mecha’s missile nacelles were loaded, Marla heard rumbling sounds to the east. The thin mountain air was saturated with water, impatient for stormy release, but she knew that it wasn’t thunder she was hearing but the echoing report of weapons.

  Jonathan Wolfe was suddenly back to being a student. Because Centaurs were useless in the rugged terrain surrounding the Scavengers’ camp, RDF command had assigned Wolfe, along with Packers Bartley, Malone, and Ruegger, to observe in four prototype Hovertanks piloted by members of a special mecha detachment out of Albuquerque Base. Ugly and cumbersome, with rounded, downsloping deflection prows, the reconfigurable ground-effect vehicles were fashioned of heavy-gauge armor in angular, flattened shapes and acute edges. In standard mode, they rode on a powerful cushion of self-generated lift. Mechamorphosed, they became squat, two-legged, waddling particle-beam cannons the size of houses.

  Even so, Wolfe would have preferred his antiquated Centaur. Not only had he forgotten how to be an attentive student, but the Hovertank unit had been assigned a subordinate role in the mission, safeguarding the lower valley while Max Sterling and the Skull Team attacked the camp itself.

  Though only days removed from the events in Cavern City, Wolfe was like someone fresh from a nightmare. The epidemic had been contained, but the city was not likely to recover. When word had arrived from Max Sterling of Miriya’s reappearance and RDF Command’s plans for an offensive, the Pack had been shipped north to Mexico for a briefing. Catherine and Johnny were there now. Monument City looked to be the next stop for Wolfe, providing he didn’t seriously screw up in the meantime.

  In the end, the Pack had only been allowed to breach the quarantine because Cavern had effectively become the property of the Southlands. More importantly, in the wake of the internecine exchanges between the Pack and the Southern Cross, Anatole Leonard was especially eager to see Wolfe leave. It was of some consolation, then, that the field marshal had been denied the chance to participate in the offensive against the Scavengers.

  There was some furious fighting going on upvalley, but it might as well have been a video game for all the impact it had on the Hovertank unit. Wolfe was surprised to see so few Stingers in the sky; mostly what the Hover’s cameras found were Tactical Battlepods. Conventional wisdom would have dictated pounding the hell out of the camp and attacking by land, but Command’s principal concern was the virus, and they didn’t want anyone going to ground until the place was secured, or in the unlikely event of a full-scale surrender by the malcontents.

  Wolfe had his eyes glued to the video screen when the Hover’s scanner console issued a chorus of beeping sounds, and the pilot—a thick-necked former VT jock named W. T. Super—swiveled his backless seat to face the threat-assessment display.

  “Major paint, bearing two-niner-zero, south-southeast,” he said for Wolfe’s benefit.

  Wolfe left his seat to study the screen over Super’s shoulder. “Don’t tell me we’re finally going to get to put this thing through the paces.”

  “Sorry to dash your hopes, Captain, but whatever’s headed this way is too big to be a Stinger or a Battlepod.”

  “Cyclops recovery ship?”

  “Bigger.”

  Wolfe stared at the radar signature for a moment and cursed. “That’s a goddamned superhauler. It’s Leonard.”

  “Position us in the thick of the fray,” Leonard ordered the air cav commander of the superhauler from his seat in the gondola. “See to it the Skull are forced to take the fight elsewhere, even if it means taking flack from the pods. And make certain those Hovertanks remain where they are. Pin them down with fire if you have to.”

  Leonard paused, then looked expectantly at the leader of the commando unit.

  “Rappel lines readied,” the woman said without having to be asked.

  Leonard nodded. “I want us down on the ground before these RDF idiots can do any more damage.”

  The view from the gondola encompassed the entire precipitous eastern face of valley, on which the Scavengers’ camp was perched like an eagle’s nest. Several of their thatch-roofed huts were in flames, as were sections of outlying wild forest where RDF mecha had crashed.

  “Computer projections based on available data indicate approximately one hundred and sixty enemy forces,” a tech reported from his duty station. “Most of them are bunkered east of the camp.”

  “Child’s play.” Leonard snorted in satisfaction. He could well imagine how surprised Sterling and his VT wingmen were to see him there. Even now, the command net was noisy with the pilots’ confused squawkings.

  “Acknowledge them, but offer no replies or explanations,” Leonard told the communications chief.

  Again, he owed T. R. Edwards for the advance intel on the RDF’s strategy. But rather than allow Edwards to risk compromising himself, Leonard had instructed him to furnish General Reinhardt with the location of the research lab the RDF was so desperate to obliterate. If giving up the place would increase his chances of extracting what he wanted from the
camp itself, they were welcome to it. He had no designs on the lab, in any case.

  In exchange for agreeing to Rolf Emerson’s request that Sterling be released from Cavern City, Leonard had been promised access to portions of Miriya Parina’s top-secret debriefing. As anticipated, Emerson had declined to apprise him of the location of the Scavengers’ camp, but he had divulged certain things about Parina’s escape, including the fact that malcontent leader Seloy Deparra was dead.

  On learning of her death, Leonard had been torn between delight and sorrow. As much as he’d wanted to, he hadn’t asked about the child; to do so might have tipped his hand. He took it as a good sign, however, that Parina hadn’t mentioned a child. Hirano was alive, in the custody of some other Zentraedi, to be sure, but alive nonetheless.

  The boy was centermost in his thoughts when he rappeled into the jungle camp, amid the clamor of the superhauler’s batteries as they punished the surrounding area. Had Seloy told Hirano who his father was? Had the boy told anyone? If not, would he come to accept Leonard as his parent? Could the Zentraedi in him be expunged by love or by punishment?

  Leonard hit the muddy ground awkwardly, encircled by ten of the best the Army of the Southern Cross had to offer. No antihazard suits, no gloves or rebreathers now; what the Southern Cross had for the malcontents—or any other alien pretenders to Earth’s crown—was far more deadly than anything the Scavengers had for them.

  “I want a captive,” Leonard yelled above the roar and clatter of the guns, the ear-smarting detonations of air-to-ground missiles.

  Half the team scattered to carry out his command. Much of the camp was in flames, the immediate area strewn with alien corpses shot or burned beyond recognition. East of where Leonard had dropped, two Skull VTs had set down as Battloids and were wading through the wreckage, taking fire and answering it with glowing, superheated autocannons.

  The malcontent Leonard’s commandos returned with five minutes later had pallid skin and shaggy black hair. Smeared with mud and blood, she had empty bandoliers strapped across a flat chest. Leonard grabbed her by the front of her filthy sweatshirt and snarled into her face: “The child. The male child that was with Deparra.”

  The Zentraedi met his minatory gaze with defeated eyes and gave her head a mournful shake. “Dead. Dead with Deparra.”

  Leonard trembled. “You’re lying. Where is the boy?”

  “Killed by Parina. Dead.”

  Leonard felt faint. “Show me,” he said. “I want to see the bodies.”

  The woman pointed to the platform of a tall, wooden structure—an observation tower. “Up there.”

  He stepped behind her and shoved her toward the tower. They walked between smoldering huts and worked their way around the burning trunk of a fallen tree. Leonard ordered her to ascend the tower’s ladder ahead of him.

  “In the tradition of those who live in these forests, we left the bodies for the carrion birds to pick clean,” the Zentraedi explained as she climbed. “On the ships of the Grand Fleet, the bodies of warriors were recycled. Is this not the same thing?”

  “Climb,” Leonard told her.

  But she refused to go any higher, and made room for him to pass her on the ladder. “Look for yourself.”

  Stepping onto the platform, he saw that she had told him the truth. He screamed, then fell to his knees. “Damn you, Seloy! You had no right. You had no right to bring my son into this!”

  Then he unclenched his fists long enough to unholster his weapon and shoot the alien off the ladder.

  As she had requested, Miriya was on loan to the Twenty-third Squadron for the attack on the research laboratory. No matter the outcome, the final battle had to pit Zentraedi against Zentraedi. Not only because of the danger the virus posed to Humans, but because of what the battle would signify to the world. If there was ever to be a chance for a lasting peace between the planetary races, the Zentraedi had to prove that they could police themselves.

  The laboratory was a white-and-terracotta speck on a vast, mostly treeless plateau. And they were there—the Scavengers with their Stingers—just as Miriya knew they would be. At the briefing in Mexico, much had been made of the Twenty-third’s role in the overall attack plan, and of how the squadron should comport itself. The RDF, ordinarily bent on adhering to the rules of civilized warfare, wanted the Scavengers stopped at all costs. Assuming the Stingers were already loaded with the virus, it was vital that they be destroyed there, close to the jungle from which the virus had sprung, rather than in proximity to any inhabited areas. And if that meant striking by surprise—preemptively, as the Southern Cross had done time and again—than so be it, and the media be damned.

  The Scavengers had been caught unawares by the Twenty-third’s dawn raid. Early on, though, the Stingers—serving as hulking bipedal antiaircraft arrays—had mustered an effective defense, preventing the VTs from getting close enough to the facility to do much damage. Now, however, the mecha were fast depleting themselves of warheads, and a few had lifted off, not to engage but to escape, or perhaps to make for remote targets. Each one that managed to avoid the aerial melee quickly found itself pursued by two or sometimes three Veritechs.

  Miriya’s undisclosed personal strategy didn’t include her becoming part of a chase team. She landed her VT west of the laboratory complex and immediately scrambled out of the ship. Fearful that the main building would soon be targeted, the nonpilots among the Scavengers were beginning to scatter across the barren landscape, but three Stingers were still on the ground, their pilots hurrying to complete prelaunch procedures. It was toward this group that Miriya raced, weapon in hand, eluding fire and generating plenty of her own in return. She was no longer in the grips of the bloodlust that had secured her escape from Seloy’s camp; her purpose now was not merely to survive but to conclude. Victory by itself would not be enough for Earth’s Human population. Unfettered by an Imperative, Humans required catharsis and resolution, a sense that wrongs had been righted, that the scales of justice had been balanced. The situation wanted a prisoner who could be brought to trial.

  And Miriya knew she had found that prisoner when she spied Marla Stenik.

  There was nothing dramatic or especially heroic about the capture. Miriya shot Stenik’s copilot as she was ascending the ladder to the Stinger cockpit; then she simply trained her handgun on the weaponless leader of the Scavengers.

  Stenik almost appeared to have expected it. “At least permit me the honor of a warrior’s death, T’sen Parina.”

  “You will have that honor,” Miriya told her. “But not here.”

  The answer puzzled Stenik. “Where, then?”

  “Where your death can be a public spectacle. And where I can be your public executioner.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  That the [Malcontent] Uprisings ended with a whimper instead of a bang was in keeping with the overwhelming sadness of those years. Was there a positive side? Yes, I say, in that the Zentraedi survived as a race. Those that died on Earth were pawns in a much greater battle. For, in fact, the Uprisings were the last stand of the Imperative.

  Lisa Hayes, Recollections

  In early November 2018, exasperated by years of having had to cater to the fragile egos of on-air celebrities, the executives of the Monument Broadcasting System announced that the Evening News co-anchor team of Hollister and Hyson would be replaced by a computer construct, designed and programmed—in line with MBS specifications—by cybertechnicians of the Tokyo Robotech Research Center. The brown-haired, blue-eyed, somewhat-androgynous-looking computer-generated hologram, known simply as “the Anchor,” made its network debut on November 21 that same year, garnering the biggest ratings and largest audience share the show had received in more than five years.

  “In what is generally agreed to have been the decisive moment of the Malcontent Uprisings, a joint force of RDF and Southern Cross personnel swooped down on the Andean stronghold of the group known as the Scavengers and dealt the rebellion a death blow,
capturing its leadership and thwarting a diabolical plan to infect the world with a deadly virus.

  “Now, three months later, the reverberations of that unqualified win are finally being felt. Today, in the clear skies over New Mexico, Scavenger leader Marla Stenik, and the so-called ‘Butcher of Oasis,’ Jinas Treng, were—in the parlance of the Zentraedi—‘allowed to run’ against RDF captains Miriya Parina and Breetai Tul. Found guilty last month of insurrection, terrorism, and thirty-four separate violations of the Reconstruction Powers Act, Stenik and Treng were removed from solitary confinement on Albuquerque Base to an undisclosed location elsewhere in New Mexico, where—as dictated by the Kara-Thun ritual—each was returned to full size and given a fully armed and operational Tactical Battlepod.

  “Breetai Tul, on his first downside visit since 2015, chose a Battlepod as his weapon, while Miriya Parina, in a symbolic gesture, elected to remain Micronized and to pilot a Veritech.

  “The Kara-Thun, or ‘Death Dance,’ is a form of trial by combat, in which convicted Zentraedi have an opportunity to avoid sentencing by besting their opponents in one-on-one challenges. Such was not the case today, however, as Parina and Tul assumed quick control of the lethal contest and defeated the renegades. MBS will broadcast footage of the aerial ‘death dance’ as soon as it is made available by the RDF.

  “And so, at long last, Stenik and Treng have been executed, ending the fervent debate that attended their captures and trials. In a statement issued only hours ago, Miriya Parina expressed her hope that the Kara-Thun would demonstrate the Zentraedi’s thorough repudiation of the actions of the Malcontents, and mark the beginning of a healing process that would ultimately reunite Earth’s two races.

  “Today also marked the UEG’s official recognition of the Army of the Southern Cross as a full partner in the newly created Earth Defense Force. The aging armament of the Southern Cross will be replaced by a new generation of Protoculture-driven reconfigurable mecha, and it will be entitled to equal say in the construction of the Mars and Lunar bases and the deployment of Space Station Liberty and a network of defense platforms. As of January first, Anatole Leonard’s new rank will be Commander-in-Chief of the Southern Armed Forces, and there is some talk of Leonard’s opening a secondary headquarters in Monument City.