Battle Cry

by Jack McKinney

  "Yes, Captain. And about Commander Hayes...and Lieutenant Hunter and his men?"

  "Enter their names on the list," Gloval responded flatly. "Missing in action and presumed dead."

  Roy Fokker seldom visited Macross City, and when he did it was usually at Claudia's insistence-dinner somewhere, a movie, or the Miss Macross pageant a while back. It wasn't that he didn't like the place, just that he had little use for it. Its presence onboard the SDF-1 had all but undermined the ship's original purpose. The SDF-1 was to be Earth's guardian and defender, not surrogate or microcosm, and certainly not decoy. As one of the men (along with Dr. Lang and Colonel Edwards) who had first explored the ship shortly after its arrival on Earth, Fokker had a profound attachment to her. But the spacefold accident and this resulting city had devitalized that attachment, and for the past year Fokker had come to feel more the hopeless prisoner than anything else.

  His motivations for visiting the city today, however, had nothing to do with entertainment or a lover's obligation; he was here because duty demanded it of him. Rick had been MIA for almost two weeks now, and there were people who had to be told.

  Two weeks missing in action, Roy told himself. Was it still too early to grieve, or was it too late? Wouldn't he be able to feel the truth one way or another in his heart? Their friendship went so far back...Pop Hunter's flying circus, the fateful day Rick had turned up on Macross Island, their first mission together

  What was the use of tormenting himself? When he did search his heart for feelings, he found his "Little Brother" alive-this was a certainty. And yet,

  his mind would ask, what were the odds they would ever see each other again? The SDF-1 was a million miles from that area in space where Rick and the others had last been heard from, way beyond the range of any VT. And did it ease the pain any to think of him as a prisoner? The Zentraedi weren't likely to hold him hostage, not when they had an entire planet at their disposal. So maybe it was better to believe the worst, accept his death and get the grief behind him. Then he could at least remove himself from this timeless agony and begin to court the future once again.

  It might have been the need for partnership in grief that led Roy to seek out Minmei. He, too, had been attracted to the blue-eyed Chinese girl from the start, and he liked to think that there was some special bond there, even though Minmei rarely acknowledged it by words or actions. But that wasn't her style, anyway. Especially now that she was on the brink of stardom. In fact, the "Queen of Macross" was going to be headlining a concert at the Star Bowl on Monday night.

  Soon she was coming down the sidewalk toward him, flanked by two of her woman friends and looking the starlet part in some sort of green military-chic shorts outfit, complete with epaulets and rank stripes. Roy recognized it as the piece she'd worn for the Defense Force enlistment posters that had begun to show up all over the city.

  Roy had been waiting for her outside the White Dragon. As she approached, he straightened up to his full height, tugged down on his belted jacket, and waved to her.

  She came at him with a big smile, increasing her pace and excusing herself from her friends. Right off, she wanted to know if Rick was with him.

  He returned the smile, strained though it was, and suggested they take a walk together. She looked at him questioningly.

  "Why, Roy? What's happened?" "Come on, walk with me a minute."

  She pulled back when he tried to take her arm.

  "I don't want to take a walk, Roy! What's happened? Where's Rick? Has something happened to Rick?"

  Roy faced her, placing both hands on her shoulders, towering over her.

  He met her eyes and held them as he explained.

  Halfway through his explanation she was shaking her head, refusing to believe him. "He's dead!"

  "Minmei, listen, please don't think he's dead-we don't know that for sure."

  Roy was doing just what he had promised himself he wouldn't do. And she was inconsolable. She twisted free of his hold.

  "I don't want to hear anymore! You're a liar, and I hate you!" She glared at him, turned, and ran off.

  Her friends offered him sympathetic smiles. Roy stood with them, feeling utterly helpless. He sucked in breath and tears and clenched his teeth.

  Minmei ran to their bench in the park.

  It was a special bench, set apart from the others in Macross Central, tucked away on a small subtier of its own overhung by the full branches of an oak tree and surrounded by flowering plants and thick buses. It was almost a secret place, curiously unfrequented by park users, with an incredible view of the city spread out below and the closest view possible through the enormous starlight in the ship's hull. Rick used to say that it was their balcony "with a view of forever."

  They spent many long hours here-after their two week ordeal together, before Rick had joined the Defense Force, and before Minmei had been crowned "Queen"...She had listened to Rick talk about the horrors of space battle, his victories and defeats, his fears and dreams. And he had listened to her fears, her plans for the future, her song lyrics, her dreams.

  And now...

  Why did this have to happen? Why, when everything in her life was so wonderful, did tragedy have to visit? Why did this collision of dream and reality always have to occur?-as if no good fortune was possible without a balancing amount of evil. What sort of god would have set such a

  mechanism in motion?

  Face to face with that portion of the universe revealed by the starlight, Minmei began to cry. Later she would bang her fists against the rail of the balcony and curse those stars, then sink back against the wooden slats of the bench and surrender to her sorrow. And ultimately she would retrieve from her handbag a penlight she carried there, and, aiming it toward the ship's bay, she would click it on and off, again and again, a light signal into "forever" of her undying affection for him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Spirit does not willingly abdicate its throne. The Big Bang was Spirit's first rebellion against form-its imprisonment in matter. Subsequently it fought humankind's acceptance of fire; it battled against steam; it contested electricity and nuclear power; it raged against Protoculture...War is Spirit's attempt to attain freedom from matter, its effort to remain autonomous. Wars are waged to prevent matter from becoming too comfortable or complacent. For it is Spirit's divine purpose to someday abandon its vehicle and transcend, to reunite with the Godhead and suck the universe back into itself.

  Reverend Houston, from the foreword to Jan Morris's

  Solar Seeds. Galactic Guardians

  Protoculture is technology's royal jelly.

  Dr. Emil Lang

  Unknown to Breetai or his crew, there was a stowaway aboard the Zentraedi flagship-a Micronian Veritech ace named Max Sterling.

  Sucked into space through the hole in the hull created by Rick Hunter's self-destructed Battloid, Max had unknowingly duplicated the walk Breetai had undertaken along the outer surface of the ship sometime earlier. Breetai, however, was familiar with the manual air lock mechanisms, so he merely had to let himself in; Max had to discover a way in. Fortunately he had stumbled upon an unclosed breach in the hull-the fried bristle sensors surrounding the hole gave evidence of a previous explosion-flown himself into an empty bay, and, returned to Battloid mode, made his way into the ship through an unlocked hatchway. His gatling cannon had been left in the hold, his lasers were burned out, and he had scarcely half a dozen rockets left. Max was operating on willpower, driven by the hope of rescuing his friends.

  The interior of the flagship was a labyrinth of corridors and serviceways, some well lighted and maintained, others dark, damp, and in varying states of disrepair. But luckily, all of them had been deserted.

  Until now.

  Max was at the intersection of two corridors-curved ceilings, large overhead light banks-peering around the corner when he saw the alien enter. A private, Max guessed: standard-issue drab highrise-collared uniform, a round cap with an insignia. He moved the Battloid back a step
and scanned the area. A short distance down the corridor behind him was what appeared to be a utility closet with a curved-top hatch. He made his way to this as quickly and quietly as he could manage, threw the bolt, and secreted the mecha inside. Shut off from the corridor, Max had no way of knowing which route the Zentraedi had taken, so the look of surprise on the alien's face upon discovering a Battloid in the utility closet was no greater than the startled look on Max's own.

  For what seemed like an eternity they both stood there marveling at each other, until Max's training brought a decisive end to it. He executed a sidekick with the Battloid's right foot that caught the Zentraedi's midsection, instantly doubling him over. Gathering up the unconscious private in the Battloid's right arm, Max stretched out the left, grabbed the door bolt, and slammed the hatch shut.

  He was puzzling over what to do with the guy, when all at once the cockpit indicators began crying out for attention. He checked the readouts but still couldn't make sense of anything: All systems were functioning, and there didn't seem to be any immediate threats to the mecha, environmentally or otherwise. So what was going on?

  Then Max glanced at the astrogation displays. The temporal sensors were spinning wildly-the flagship was folding!

  Max watched as hours and days began to accrue on the gauge. He slumped into his seat and waited...

  The emergency spacefold which had catapulted the SDF-1 and Macross

  City clear across the solar system had been Lisa's first; and, as such, there hadn't been time to...well, look around. It had also been a relatively short jump through space and therefore a brief one through time. But for this, her second trip through the continuum, the temporal indicator built into her suit registered the equivalent of fourteen Earth-days. Wherever the Zentraedi were going, it was a long way from home.

  Lisa had plenty of time to look around.

  It was nothing like she had expected, nothing, in fact, like she had been trained to expect. The stars did not so much disappear as come and go. She couldn't be certain, however, that it was the same stars that were rematerializing each time. The heavens seemed altered with each fade, as though someone had snipped frames from a strip of film, editing out the transitions from event to event. The energy umbrella that kept her and the others confined to the grid prevented her from observing flux details in the laboratory, but when she looked at Rick or Ben, she noticed a slight shimmering effect that blurred the boundaries of objects; occasionally, this effect intensified so that there was a sense of double focus to everything: the form of the past, the form of the future, distinct, discrete, unable to unite.

  In real time, one Earth-day elapsed; and as the flagship began to decelerate from hyperspace, the past twenty-four hours took on a dreamlike quality. Had she slept through most of it, dreamed a good part of it? Or was this some new condition of consciousness yet to be named?

  Lisa, Rick, and Ben stood at the edge of their small world, watching the stars assume lasting form once again. These were alien configurations to their eyes: brilliant constellations of suns, dwarfs and giants, three planets or moons of some unknown system, all against the backdrop of a gauzy multihued nebulosity. And something else-something their unadjusted vision labeled an asteroid field, so numerous were the dark objects in that corner of space.

  "What are those things?" asked Ben.

  "Space debris," Rick suggested. "We might be near their home base." Lisa squinted; then her eyes opened wide in amazement.

  Not asteroids, not space debris, but ships: amorphous ships as far as the eye could see, ships bristling with guns, too numerous to count, too numerous to catalogue-scouts, recons, destroyers, cruisers, battle wagons, flagships. Thousands of ships, millions of them!

  "The enemy fleet!"

  It was too much to take in, but Lisa used the microvideo recorder the aliens had overlooked to capture what she could.

  More than a year would pass before they learned the exact count; a day of reckoning...

  The flagship was now closing on a dazzling cluster of lights, a kind of force field that housed an immeasurable asymmetrical fortress their senses refused to comprehend.

  But they soon had other issues to confront. Without warning, the energy umbrella had been deactivated and the circumstances of their world redefined. They had wondered how their captors had been able to provide them with food and drink served on human-size plates, with cups and utensils in proper proportion. But there would be no such comfort for them from this moment on.

  Two giants now stood on either side of the grid, which turned out to be some sort of specimen table. Could anything have prepared them for the assault of sensations that followed-the deafening basso rumble of the giants' voices, the sonorous roar of their mecha and machines, the intensity of the corridor lights, the overpowering smells of hyperoxygenated air, stale breath, sweat, and decay?

  They were transferred to a second platform-a hovertable directed through the corridors by their jailers-and ultimately to a gleaming conference table as large as a football field. There were banks of overhead lights and several chairs positioned around the table. Lisa noticed that amplifiers had been strategically positioned here and there-the better to hear you with, my dear! And one by one their interrogators entered the room and sat down.

  The first to arrive was a male scarcely half the size of those Zentraedi

  they'd seen. A slightly hunched back was evident beneath his blue cowl; swollen joints and outsize hands and feet suggested some sort of birth defect. He had an inverted bowl of henna hair thick as straw concealing a deformed cranium, uneven bangs bisecting a high forehead above a drawn face, and bulging, seemingly lidless eyes with pinpoint pupils. He was carrying notebooks, which he placed on the table next to a light-board device; this he activated as he sat down, bending forward to regard his three prisoners analytically.

  Next to enter the chamber was the immense soldier Rick had battled in the hold; there was no forgetting that faceplate, no forgetting, that malicious grin. Trailing behind him were three more males of differing heights, wearing identical red uniforms, not one of them as short as the disabled Zentraedi or as tall as their commander. They took seats at the far end of the table.

  Lisa was wondering who or what was going to fill the empty seat between the commander and his adviser; when the answer to her whispered question arrived, she was at once sorry she had asked.

  "How many sizes do these guys come in?" said Ben in amazement.

  The grand inquisitor stood well over eighty feet tall and wore a solemn gray robe with a high upturned collar that all but enclosed his massive, hairless head. The heavy brow ridge, pockmarked sullen face, and wide mouth gave him a fearful aspect, and when he spoke there was no mistaking his meaning.

  "I am Dolza," he began. "Commander-in-Chief of the Zentraedi. You will submit to my interrogation. Should you choose not to, you will die. Do you understand me?"

  Rick, Ben, and Lisa looked at one another, realizing suddenly that they had failed to elect a spokesperson-for the simple reason that they hadn't expected an actual session with the enemy. The fact that they would be able to communicate with the Zentraedi gave them new hope.

  Lisa secretly activated the audio receiver of the microrecorder, while Rick stepped forward to speak for his group.

  "We understand you. What do you want from us?"

  Dolza turned to the dwarf. "Congratulations, Exedore, you have done well in teaching me their primitive language."

  Exedore inclined his head slightly.

  "Why do you continue to resist us, Micronians?" Dolza gestured to the male on his right. "Surely Breetai has already demonstrated our superiority."

  Rick pointed his finger at the one called Breetai. "You launched the attack on us! We've only been trying to defend ourselves for the past year-"

  "Immaterial," Breetai interrupted. "Return to us what is rightfully ours-Zor's ship."

  "'Zor's ship'? If you mean the SDF-1, that's our property. It crashed on our planet, and we rebuilt
it. You-"

  Dolza cut Rick off. "It is as I feared," he said to Exedore. "Tell us what you know of Protoculture. You-the fat one."

  Ben gestured to himself questioningly. "Me? Forget it, high rise. I don't know anything about it."

  "Tell us what you know of Protoculture!" Dolza demanded.

  "You deny that you've developed a new weapons system utilizing Protoculture?" Exedore wanted to know.

  Rick turned to his companions and shrugged. The questions kept up, increasing in volume, until Lisa decided she'd had enough. She stepped forward boldly and held up her hand.

  "That's enough! I will no longer submit my men to your questioning!"

  Dolza raised what he had of eyebrows. "So the female is in charge here." He sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers as he did so. "You underestimate the seriousness of your predicament, Micronian."

  And with a wave of his hand the room was transformed.

  Lisa, Rick, and Ben were suddenly in deep...space! At least it appeared that way: Here were the stars, planets, and tens of thousands of ships they had seen upon defold into Zentraedi territory. And yet they had not moved from the table, and Dolza's voice could still be heard narrating the

  phenomenal events occurring in that unreal space.

  Photon charges were beginning to build up in several of the fleet ships; they were taking aim at a planet not unlike Earth in appearance...

  "We are in possession of sufficient power to destroy your world in the blink of an eye," Dolza was saying. "And if you need proof of that, behold..."

  As lethal rays from the battle wagons and cruisers converged on the living surface of the planet, a glow of death began to spread and encompass it; and when that fatal light faded, a lifeless, cratered sphere was all that remained.