Southern Cross

by Jack McKinney

  Earlier that day she had led the 15th in a triumphant joyride up a curving concrete access ramp; now she crouched in an alley beneath it, in a part of the city where, she hoped, she could pass as just one more vagrant.

  Sitting near the pile of refuse that concealed her cycle, hugging herself to conserve body heat, Dana sat with her back against a brick wall and tried to figure out what to do next. Eventually, she knew, she must return to the base and face the charges that would be brought against her; she just wanted some time to think things through. She was reassessing her entire concept of what it meant to be a commander.

  Dana sighed and looked up at the cold, diamondbright moon, and wondered whether Humans-whether she-would be fighting and dying there soon. If there was a war coming, as everybody was saying, she didn't have too much to fear from the MPs or a court-martial; the Southern Cross Army would need a capable young Hovertank officer too much to let her moulder in stir for very long. Besides, there was General Emerson, family friend and unofficial guardian, and though she hated the idea of asking for help, his influence could work wonders for her.

  But she would be leading men and women into battle, and possible death; she must not make any more misjudgments. She hated being mocked and wronged, and she longed so very much to connect with something-perhaps her squadmates would be like the family she had never

  really known.

  She sighed, pulling a holobead from an inner uniform pocket. Thumbing it in the dimness of the alley, she looked again on the image she had seen ten thousand times before.

  There was Max Sterling, the greatest VT pilot who had ever lived, pale and boyish, with oversize corrective glasses and blue-dyed hair. Next to him was Miriya Parino Sterling, the woman who had commanded the Zentraedi's elite Quadrono Battalion, reduced from a giantess to Human proportions by a Protoculture sizing chamber, a woman with the predatory look of a tigress, and all the sleek beauty of one as well.

  But they clung to each other lovingly, and between them they held a happy, blue-haired baby. Dana.

  And now they're-who knows? she thought. She looked at the stars and reflected, as she did almost every night, that her mother and father might be beyond the most distant of them. Or might be dead. Few communications had been received from the SDF-3 expedition to find and deal with the Robotech Masters.

  Dana pressed a minute switch, and the holobead showed its other image. An odd-looking trio stood there: Konda, tall and lean, with purple hair and an expression that said he knew something others didn't; Bron, big and broad, with such strong, callused hands and yet such a sweet, gentle nature; and Rico, small and wiry and fiery, dark-haired and mercurial.

  Dana looked on them fondly; in front of them stood a Dana who was perhaps five, her hair its natural yellow color now, grinning and holding Bron's forefinger, squinting because the sun was in her eyes. The 15th's new-perhaps former, by now-CO heaved another sigh.

  Konda and Bron and Rico were former Zentraedi spies, shrunk to Human size, who had fallen under the spell of Human society. Max and Miriya left with Rick Hunter, Captain Lisa Hayes, and the rest of the expedition in the SDF-3, and there was a certain lapse of time there that Dana couldn't account for and had been too young to remember-things that even General Emerson wasn't too forthcoming about. But eventually the

  erstwhile spies, learning that for some unexplained reason Max and Miriya had been persuaded to leave her behind, appointed themselves her godfathers.

  A strange upbringing it was. No other person in history had been subjected to both Human and Zentraedi attitudes and teachings from infancy. The ex-spies were really only enlisted men, not well educated even for Zentraedi, whose whole history and lore were a Robotech Masters' concoction. Still, they taught her everything they could about her mother's people, and took better care of her than many natural parents could have done, in their own slightly bumbling, endearing way.

  All the rebel Zentraedi-the ones who had defected to the Human side only to turn against the Earth again-had been hunted down while Dana was still an infant, and all the rest but her godfathers had gone along with SDF-3. Eventually the last three, her godfathers, passed away, almost at the same time. She was never certain whether it was from some Earthly malady or simply a vast loneliness; their three human loves, Sammie, Vanessa, and Kim, had died with Gloval and Bowie's aunt Claudia in the SDF-1's final battle. The ex-spies had never taken others.

  With the trio gone, it was government youth shelters and schools for Dana once more, often with Bowie as her companion because Rolf Emerson simply couldn't have children along with him. And then, in time, there was the Academy. But when Dana heard bitter words about the innate savagery of the Zentraedi nature, she thought back on the one-time giants who had shown her such a happy family life, at least for a little while.

  She deactivated the holobead with a stroke of her thumb, leaning her head back against the coarse bricks, eyes closed, taking in a deep breath through her nostrils. There were the distant lights of apartments, where families were getting together for dinner after a day of workaday life.

  Dana let her breath out slowly, wishing again that she could be one of them, wishing that the holobead images could come to life, or that her parents would come home from the stars.

  There was a sudden whimper and the hollow bounce of an empty can

  nearby. She was on her feet, reflexively ready for a fight. But there was no enemy there. It was, instead, a quite special acquaintance.

  "Polly!"

  She stopped to gather the little creature up, a thing that looked like a mophead, its tongue hanging out. It might have passed for a terrestrial dog until one took a closer look. It had small knob-ended horns, eyes that were hidden beneath its sheepdoglike forelock-but that were definitely not the eyes of an Earth lifeform-and feet resembling soft muffins.

  It's a pollinator, Bron had told her gently the first time she was introduced to it. That's how she had given the thing its name, even though she had no idea whether Polly was male or female.

  She never found out just. how the ex-spies had come across the affectionate little beast; they had promised to tell her in the "someday" that had never come. But she had learned that Polly was a magical creature indeed.

  For instance, Polly came and went as it pleased, no matter if you locked it in or tied it up. You would look around, and Polly would just be gone, maybe for a little while or maybe for a long time. It reminded her a little of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and later, another old-time book title she came across, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

  The pollinator was her first adult-style secret, since her godfathers told her she must never mention it to anybody, and she had kept that secret all her life. Apparently, Polly was part of some miraculous thing, but she never found out what. Polly had managed to find her for brief visits four or five times since the death of Konda, Bron, and Rico.

  "Did you hear me thinking about them?" she murmured, petting the XT creature, pressing her cheek to it as it licked her face with a red swatch of tongue. "Didja know how much I can use a slobber on the face just now?" Her tears leaked out no matter how she tried to hold them back. "Looks like we're both gonna be cold tonight."

  She wiped her cheek, smearing the tears and dirt. "I can't believe I let things get so far out of control."

  But somehow she felt less terrible. She managed to fall asleep, the pollinator curled up warmly against her. The dark dreams that came to her at times, filled with terrors that were both nameless and otherwise, stayed away this time.

  But she had her strange Vision again, as she had had on rare occasions ever since she could remember. In it, a vortex of purest force swirled up from the planet Earth like the funnel of a cyclone; only it was a cyclone a hundred miles in diameter, composed of violent energies springing from sheer mental power. The uppermost part of the mind-tornado reached beyond Earth's atmosphere, then it suddenly transformed into an incandescent phoenix, a firebird of racial transfiguration.

  The crack
ling, radiant phoenix spread wings wider than the planet, soaring away quicker than thought to another plane of existence, with a cry so magnificent and sad that Dana dreaded and yet was held in the powerful beauty of this recurring dream. Her Vision was another secret she had always kept to herself.

  As Dana stirred in her sleep, something came between her and the streetlights. That struck through to a trained alertness that had long since become instinctive; she lay utterly still, opening one eye just a crack.

  Looming over her was the person of Lieutenant Nova Satori of the Global Military Police. Backing her up were a half-dozen MP bruisers cradling riot guns. Some sort of dawn was trying to get through clouds that looked like they had been dumped out of a vacuum-cleaner bag. The pollinator was no longer lying against Dana.

  Nova was enjoying herself. She was turned out in the MP dark-blue-and-mauve version of the Southern Cross dress uniform, her long blue-black hair fluttering and luffing against her thighs like a cloak, caught back with a tech ornament like Dana's.

  In Nova's quick dark eyes and the heart-shaped face there was the canniness of both the cop and the professional soldier.

  "Well, good morning," said Nova with a pleasant purr. Funny how you run into old buddies when you least expect it, Dana reflected, and rose to

  her feet in one smooth move. She and Nova went back a long way. Dana put on her best Miss Southern Cross Army smile. "Well, Lieutenant Satori! How ya been? You're out early!"

  Dana gave a completely false laugh while looking over possible escape routes as Nova said in a Cheshire cat voice, "Fine, just fine."

  Polly was nowhere in sight, and there were no avenues of escape.

  Uh-oh.

  In Southern Cross HQ, high up in one of the buildings that looked like crusaders' war-standards, the army's command center operated at a constant fever pitch, a twenty-four-hour-a-day steam bath of reports, sensor readouts, intelligence analysis, and system-wide surveillance.

  Scores of techs sat at their consoles while diverse duty officers and NCOs passed among them, trying to keep everything coherent. Overhead, visual displays flashed on the inverted dome of the command center ceiling, showing mercator grid projections, models of activity in the Solar System, and current military hotspots.

  On one trouble-board, ominous lights were blinking. An operations tech covered his headset mike with the palm of his hand and yelled, "Cap'n? Come take a look at this."

  The ops captain bent down over the tech's shoulder and examined the screen. There was a complete garble of the usual computer-coded messages. "It ain't comin' from the space station, sir," the tech said. "It's like somebody's messing with satellite commo, but who? And from where, if you

  catch my drift, sir."

  The captain frowned at the display and doublechecked the alphanumerics. Then he spun and barked, "Get General Emerson over here ASAP!" The message was being relayed ASAP-as soon as possible-before he was done speaking.

  The tech looked up at the ops captain. "What d'you guesstimate, sir?

  Y'figure it's those-"

  "Let's hope not," the captain cut him off.

  Space Station Liberty was like a colossal version of a child's rattle, hanging endlessly at Trojan Lagrange Point Five. It was humanity's sole link with the SDF-3 expeditionary force that had set out either to negotiate an end to hostilities or beat the Robotech Masters into submission.

  Messages had been few and far between, but hope still thrived. Or at least it had until the Robotech Masters came.

  A command center tech covered his mike and called to an operations officer, "Sir, I have a large unidentified paint."

  But Major General Emerson, Chief of Staff, Ministry of Terrestrial Defense, was in the command center by then, and came to bend near the tech and the all-important screen. The ops officer, a captain, knew when it was politic to take a back seat to a flag-rank officer. Which was almost always.

  Besides, this was Rolf Emerson, hero of a dozen pivotal battles in the Global Civil War, the Robotech War, and the Disorders that followed them. For all of that, he was soft-spoken and correct to the lowest-ranking subordinate. The word was that he would have been supreme commander-would have been a UEG senator for that matter-long since, except that he hated political games. In the final analysis he was a GI, albeit a brilliant one; the men and women under his command respected him for it and the politicians and supreme staff officers resented him, determining that he would never get another star.

  But he was far too valuable to waste, so he was in the right place at the right time on a day when the Human race needed him badly.

  "Put it up on Central Display, please, Corporal," Rolf Emerson requested quietly.

  The object and its trajectory and the rest of the scanty data appeared on the billboard-size central display screen. There was a single soft whistle. "Big, bad UFO," Emerson heard a thirty-year vet NCO mutter.

  "Fast, too," an intelligence major observed; she grabbed up a handset and began punching in codes that accessed her own chain of command.

  "Sir, d'you think this has to do with the shootout out by Moon Base?" the captain asked.

  "Still too early to tell," Emerson grated. The captain shut up.

  The tech reported, reading his instruments. "According to computers, the UFO is a powered vehicle and it's on an Earth-approach vector, estimated time of entry in Earth atmosphere one hundred twenty-three minutes, forty seconds...mark. Visual contact in approximately three minutes."

  "Give me a look at this thing," Emerson said in a low, even voice that people around him had come to recognize as one that brooked no failure. People jumped, babbled computer languages, typed at touchpads, made order out of chaos. Not one of them would have changed places with Emerson. The atmosphere in the command center had officers and enlisted ratings loosening their tunic collars, coming to grips with the fact that the Main Event might just be coming up during their watch.

  "We need to see what they look like," Emerson said to a senior signals NCO who was standing near. She was his imagery interpretation specialist, and she went to work at once, coordinating sensors and imagery-interpretation computers.

  At a Southern Cross communications and sensor intel satellite, sensor dishes and detection spars swung and focused. Information was fed and rejiggered and processed, nearly a billion and a half (prewar) dollars worth of technology going full-choke to process data that ended up in front of a reedy young man who had been drafted only eight months before.

  Colonel Green, one of Emerson's most trusted subordinates, barked, "Corporal Johnson, talk to me! Haven't you got anything yet?"

  Johnson had gotten used to the brass screaming at him for answers; he had become imperturbable. He had gone from being a weird technofreak highschooler through a basic training that still gave him nightmares to a slot as one of the few people who truly understood how Liberty's equipment worked.

  So Colonel Green didn't rattle Johnson; he had had to introduce any

  number of brass hats to the stark facts of reality. The instruments would show what they would show, or not, and there were only limited things Humans could do about it. The first thing you had to teach officers was yelling louder rarely helped.

  "One moment, sir." The female imagery interpretation NCO came over to watch.

  Johnson worked at his console furiously, more a magician than a technician, and was rewarded with a raw, distorted image. The officers looking over his shoulder would never appreciate how much finesse that had taken, but the senior sergeant did.

  Then it was gone again. Johnson punched up the recording of the intercept and put it up on the huge main screen. "Sir, I had a visual but I lost it. Countermeasures maybe; I dunno. Playback on screen alpha.

  Something was out there all right, something enormous and blockish and headed for Earth, something with more mass than anything Humans had ever put in the sky. Something whose power levels made all the indicators jump off the scales, and made all the watching Southern Cross higher-ups clench jaw
muscles.

  "Wish we could see that thing better," Colonel Green muttered. Whatever Johnson had picked up, it was artificial and fast-moving; the zaggies in the sensor image kept it from telling them much more.

  And it's coming right our way, Emerson contemplated.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The importance and power of the Global Military Police-the GMP-was directly attributable to the near feudal nature of Earthly society at that time. The GMP constituted the only truly worldwide law-enforcement organization, and was a check and balance on those who had at their disposal the tremendous power of Robotechnology. As a result, the GMP was an organization with its own war machinery, combat forces, and intelligence network.

  A career in the GMP was a possible road to swift personal advancement, but the recruit had to say farewell to all outside friendships; such things could no longer exist for him or her.

  S. J. Fischer,

  Legion of Light: a History of the Army of the Southern Cross

  "What could that thing be?" Colonel Green burst out. Emerson was already way ahead of him, wondering what the hell might lie in the lee of the moon.

  "Accelerating," Johnson said. A fine sweat had appeared on his brow. The display symbol for the intruder was marking its progress with integrals coming much more quickly. It was coming at Earth fast; it was nearly upon Liberty.

  Just then there was a tremendous surge through all the sensor/commo apparatus, after which many indicators went dead.

  "Playing for keeps," Green observed.

  An op near Johnson turned to yell, "Sir, we've lost commo with Liberty: voice, visual, everything on the spectrum."

  "Patch in whatever you have to, but keep that bogie in sight," Rolf said in measured tones. He turned to Lieutenant Colonel Rochelle, his adjutant. "Get everything you've got on red alert. Get all the ready-reactions set for possible XT warfare. Prime the Hovertanks especially, and the VTs. Gimme