Robotech: Before the Invid Storm

Book 21: Robotech

by Jack McKinney

Genres: Media Tie-In; Military Sci-Fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

SHIP OF DREAMS!

The second Robotech War ended without victors. The Masters had been defeated, but the Army of the Southern Cross had suffered devastating losses, with Earth's cities reduced to rubble.
Then a heavily armed warship arrived from Tirol and instantly became the object of intense rivalries. To the survivors of the United Earth Government, it was a spear they could hurl into the Invid Sensor Nebula. To the decimated Southern Cross forces, it was the weapon they needed to use against the impending Invid invasion. For the Starchildren it represented escape from their planetary prison, and the Shimada Family wanted it neutralized before it sabotaged their hopes for a peaceful solution.

But no one knew just how dangerous the ship could be. No one, that is, except for its commander, Colonel Jonathan Wolf of the rag tag freedom fighters known as the Sentinels, and Dana Sterling, heroine of the war with the Masters. And Dana had her own agenda...

Set between The Final Nightmare (Robotech #9) and Invid Invasion (#10), BEFORE THE INVID STORM reveals the struggle for control of the dreadnought from Tirol.

Release date: April 30, 2014

Publisher: Del Rey

Print pages: 208

Sample

CHAPTER
ONE
 
As a species enslaved to time, we are wont to package history in tidy bundles. And so we find ourselves at the mercy of commentators who speak of First, Second, and Third Robotech Wars. And we are forced to listen to those same voices obsess about the generation of Henry Gloval, the generation of Rick Hunter, and the generation of Dana Sterling … When, in my humble opinion, there was only the War that began with the arrival of the Zentraedi and ended with the departure of the Invid; and only one generation that lived through it: the generation of the lost.
Jacob Remy, Robotech
 
 
Misa Yoshida sipped green tea while the Robotech Masters’ flagship fell to Earth, the whole of its starboard side aglow. A swarm of Logans and aged Veritechs trailed in seemingly slow-motion pursuit, like wrathful wasps spilled from some unseen orbital nest. Missiles of every conceivable type tore from the pylons and launchers of the reconfigurable fighters, fires blossoming against the instrument-studded backbone of the holed and deteriorating battlewagon. Silent explosions, both surface and internal, hurled building-size chunks of slagged alloy into Earth’s already debris-littered atmospheric envelope. Some of the pieces struck and obliterated entire squadrons of Southern Cross mecha, but the chase continued unabated.
 
Veteran pilots of the First Robotech War could recall the devastation wreaked by the SDF-1 during its gradual dive to the surface, thirty-one years earlier. And the flagship—ravaged by fire and beckoned by gravity—was twice the size of that uninvited end-of-the-century visitor.
 
The digital feed from the robot news cameras was superb. Misa could almost believe that she was witnessing the scene through a viewport on one of the orbital weapons platforms, rather than watching it on wallscreen in the comfort of her spacious apartment in underground Tokyo. At twenty-two, she had only been alive for the catastrophic conclusion of the war against the Zentraedi, but she had often screened archival video of their attack on Macross Island, various encounters between the SDF-1 and the ships of Breetai’s fleet, and, of course, the battle against the alien armada. Granted, scant footage had survived the Rain of Death, but nothing she had seen rivaled what the War Channel had been presenting since the arrival of the Robotech Masters, a year earlier.
 
Sometimes Misa found herself concerned that she didn’t know what to do about the emotional desensitizing wrought by her hours and hours of viewing. A year ago she had been crying herself to sleep every night, but lately it seemed as if the war was taking place on a different world. Change channels and you could still find movies, sitcoms, sumo-bot wrestling, and exercise infomercials. In large part, that was because much of the war had been fought in space, and there was little any Earthbound citizen could do but support the efforts of the Army of the Southern Cross and shed nightly tears for the dead. In fact, most of the world was eager to perpetuate the illusion that what was happening above would have no impact on life below.
 
From the start, it had been assumed that the city targeted by the Masters would reap the whirlwind. While sovereign nation-states like Brasília, Mexico, and Rome had not been ignored by the Masters’ weaponry, Monument City—in the Northlands—had taken the brunt of their ire. Headquarters of the United Earth Government, the Army of the Southern Cross, and the Global Military Police, Monument was without doubt the most important city in the world and arguably the most prosperous, though by no means the most populous. It also had the distinction of being the closest city to the war memorial that was thrice-born Macross, whose three Human-made buttes marked the resting places of the SDF-1 and -2, and the cruiser that had carried the Zentraedi warlord, Khyron Kravshera, to his death. And—as with the Zentraedi themselves—the SDF-1 had once been the property of the Masters, dispatched from their grasp by a renegade scientist named Zor.
 
Still, no one could explain why Tokyo, of all places, had escaped attack. Perhaps it was simply that the largely underground city hadn’t offered much of a target for the Masters’ laser cannons and lesser batteries. Or perhaps the Masters were under the impression that by sparing Tokyo they were sparing the life of Dr. Lazlo Zand, with whom they had been in brief contact three years earlier, and were unaware that Earth’s chief Protoculturist had been relocated to Monument.
 
Whichever the case, Tokyo’s exclusion from the war had only heightened Misa’s sense of guilt; and so she kept the wallscreen on-line day and night, in the spirit of remote participation—to remain, if nothing else, informed about the war.
 
And just now the war was being brought down to Earth.
 
“We take you to the outskirts of Monument City,” a news reporter was saying, “for an update on the latest in a series of ruinous developments …”
 
Misa set her tea aside and leaned toward the wallscreen.
 
Thousands of people were fleeing Monument—and with good cause, since a sizable portion of the city was in flames. Bioroids, the saucerlike mainstay of the Masters’ fleet, were dropping in waves on Monument and on nearby Fokker Aerospace Base, clearing a path for the flagship, which was descending toward Macross’s triad of mounds. Two towns at the outermost perimeter of the city had already vanished in a thermonuclear inferno.
 
The War Channel’s use of the phrase “live from Monument City” struck Misa as ill-advised.
 
“And this just in … We have now confirmed earlier reports that Major General Rolf Emerson had been taken prisoner by the Masters. It now appears that the chief of staff of the Ministry of Terrestrial Defense has died inside the Masters’ flagship, of wounds sustained aboard the Tristar, during yesterday’s counteroffensive …”
 
She hugged herself and swung away from the screen, tears welling in her eyes as she stared out the window at subterranean Tokyo. She knew Emerson—indirectly, as it happened—through Southern Cross fly-boy Terry Weston. Terry had been Misa’s roommate and constant though much older lover, until his recent reenlistment in the Tactical Armored Space Corps and his upside transfer.
 
More than the War Channel, it was Terry who had kept Misa and her closest friends apprised of the ASC’s small victories against the Masters. These were victories that owed much to the efforts of the 15th Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, an elite Hovertank unit, which had engaged the enemy in space and on the ground, and on at least two occasions had infiltrated the enemy flagship itself. In command of the 15th was none other than Dana Parina Sterling, who, as well as being famous as Rolf Emerson’s ward and the only offspring ever to result from a Human and Zentraedi mating, had also been a previous—and much younger—lover of Terry’s.
 
At times, even Terry hadn’t been able to separate the misinformation from the disinformation, but he had relayed to Tokyo whatever scuttlebutt reached his ears. For example, that the Global Military Police had managed to insert an espionage operative among the clone population of the Masters’ ships. And that the Masters—until recently—had been tiptoeing around Monument City because of some Protoculture-manufacturing device concealed inside the SDF-1. The latest rumor to come down the well was that the Masters had issued an ultimatum to Supreme Commander Leonard that humankind either abandon Earth, or find itself caught in a war between the Masters and their enemies, the Invid.
 
If anyone could have negotiated an accord with the aliens, it would have been Rolf Emerson, Dana Sterling’s guardian. And now Emerson was dead.
 
Tears coursing down her cheeks, Misa gazed absently at the huge fiber-optic display screen on the wall of the neighboring residential tower. The telepresence known as EVE had once dominated that and other screens, but EVE was long gone, gone with Zand and his Protoculture research facility, from which Zand’s conversations with the Masters had taken place. With nothing but advertisements running on the screens ever since, was it any wonder that Misa preferred to stay tuned to the War Channel?
 
Moth to a flame, she returned her attention to the news …
 
Dead, too, by all accounts, were Anatole Leonard and Chairman Wyatt Moran. Word had it that Leonard, the Supreme Commander of the Army of the Southern Cross, had blundered definitively at the end, and, by rejecting Emerson’s plea to consolidate all ground-based forces, had allowed the Masters’ flagship to slip through Monument’s defenses.
 
Cameras positioned near the Macross memorial relayed a dazzling close-up of the spade-fortress, as three segmented appendages extruded themselves from the ship’s underside. From each appendage came a zigzagging beam of light as bright as a solar prominence, which cleaved the tallest of the mounds, displacing avalanches of trees, boulders, and dirt from its flat top, ultimately exposing the headless corpse of the SDF-1 itself. The beams intensified and merged, and more of the dirt and debris that had been heaped on the Super Dimensional Fortress fell away or was incinerated.
 
But just when it was beginning to look as if the Masters were intent on levitating—if not resurrecting—the fortress, the flagship abruptly powered down, tipped to one side, and exploded.