Not everyone was eager to share the planet Earth with the Zentraedi survivors of the First Robotech War. There was little prospect of a lasting peace, as the tensions in the Southlands gave rise to two opposing forces, and each vowed to fight until the other was eradicated. Caught beween the two rivals was the Robotech Defense Force. Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, Max and Miriya Sterling, Breetai, and others who would all have their parts to play in the period that came to be called the Malcontent Uprisings....
Release date:
April 30, 2014
Publisher:
Del Rey
Print pages:
208
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2015 began much as any other year in recent memory: a Zentraedi attack left yet a third version of Macross in ruins; friends died and were buried; and Rick Hunter found himself hopelessly conflicted, if not by love this time, then by rumors of promotion and his dark imaginings of things to come.
Altaira Heimel, Butterflies in Winter: Human Relations and the Robotech War Spring’s first sunrise brightened a bleak landscape, pockmarked with craters and crazed with fissures opened by weapons of destruction. In the Northwest Territory, where a rain of Zentraedi annihilation bolts had incinerated countless acres of fir forest and hardened vast expanses of sand to glass, stood thrice-born Macross City, Earth’s burgeoning capital only three months earlier and now its most recent casualty of war. Hurricane-force winter storms had been no kinder to the place than Khyron had, and with the early thaw had come an understanding of just how much damage the city had sustained in the moments before its frigid burial.
From a rostrum that once had been a segment of elevated highway, a middle-aged man with a noticeable Germanic accent was addressing a sizable crowd of Robotech Defense Force personnel and civilians. The only way to tell one from the other was by the RDF unit patches adorning the sleeves of the soldiers’ antihazard suits.
“The sudden deaths of friends and loved ones affect us more profoundly than the near death of an entire world,” the speaker was saying. “And it is those loved ones—those teammates, techmates, and comrades—that we seek to honor today, on the occasion of this sad assembly.”
His name was Emil Lang, and he was Earth’s preeminent mathematician and physicist. Robotechnology’s chief proponent for more than a decade, he was seldom at a loss for words, but much of his address that day had been written for him by Lisa Hayes. She was Admiral Hayes now, in the wake of the destruction of Macross City and the Superdimensional Fortresses 1 and 2, and the deaths of Admiral Henry Gloval and dozens of the RDF’s highest-ranking officers.
Few among a crowd estimated to number ten thousand were aware that Lang’s were borrowed words, though Rick Hunter knew as much, because he had been with Lisa when she composed them two months earlier.
“Lang wants to know what I would say if I’d been chosen to deliver the memorial,” Lisa had explained at the time.
Rick understood how Lang might be nonplussed by the assignment; commo of the nontechnical sort didn’t come easily to the Wizard of Robotechnology. And yet who better to memorialize Gloval, Claudia Grant, and the rest than the man most responsible for the reconstruction of the SDF-1? The Earthman most responsible, that was. To another went credit for the ship’s original design and engineering: the Tiresian Zor, in whom Robotechnology itself had its beginnings.
Lisa’s contribution notwithstanding, Lang’s sentiment was genuine, and it spoke to everyone in the crowd. Several of Rick’s closest friends had died in Earth’s protracted war with the Zentraedi—some in deepspace, some in Earth’s wild blue yonder—and each of those deaths had touched him more than the devastation visited on the planet as the culmination of that conflict. Rick was willing to accept that he, like so many of Earth’s survivors, had been living in staunch denial of the cataclysm. But if that were true, then Khyron’s surprise attack on the dimensional fortresses and the city that had grown up around them had constituted a long-overdue wake-up call.
Those sections of Macross that hadn’t been atomized during the attack, had been rendered uninhabitable by radiation, thwarting early plans for salvage operations and memorial services. Readings hadn’t subsided to safe levels until late February, and then there was the snow to contend with—snow that had commenced on the night of the attack and continued unabated for two months, almost as if nature had fashioned a microclimate to hasten the cooling. March’s sudden melt loosed avalanches that had blocked the pass between Macross and Monument City and had turned the valley floors to sludge. Even now, Rick’s Veritech—a VT-1S configured in Battloid mode—stood to its ankles in thick mud.
Rick thought the de rigueur antihazard suits a touch belated, given that one-quarter the city’s population had been dosed with radiation on emerging from the shelters—Rick, Lisa, and Minmei more than most. In addition to the sixty-six hundred dead who had been aboard the fortresses or providing mecha support, over five thousand civilian residents had died, most within days, some as recently as that morning. Bodies had been retrieved by the planeload, but it had been decided that there would be no coffins. General staff’s plan called for Lake Gloval to be filled in and made a common grave site—a shrine. Though a shrine none would dare visit for at least ten years to come.
Macrossers, however, were nothing if not war-hardened, and most would have braved the residual fallout suitless to honor those who had flown endless against-all-odds missions in their behalf. Rick would have numbered himself among that noble group, but as an RDF captain, commander of celebrated Skull Team, he was obliged to attend as both man and mecha—“crafted,” as the Veritech pilots put it.
Skull—the lot of them in Battloid mode—was deployed along what remained of the concourse linking the downtown mall to the flight deck of the SDF-1’s Daedalus forearm. Ghost, Vermillion, and Indigo teams were similarly arrayed along the parallel concourse that fed the Prometheus. Both appendages were actually Thor-class supercarriers that had been grafted onto the fortress some five years earlier, at the start of the War against the race of giant warriors known as the Zentraedi. Rick, seated NBC-suited and neural-capped inside Skull One’s ultratech cockpit, was ten city blocks west of the slagged half-mile-high hulks of the SDFs 1 and 2; the former, dismembered and decapitated, was up to its chest in the mud-filled crater that had been the lake, the twin booms of its truncated main gun raised in an attitude of humble entreaty.
No more, it seemed to be saying to the early morning sky. Let it end here.
Looking west, Rick could see across the rooftops of block after block of burned-out buildings clear to the elevated roadway that was serving as a stage for the long-delayed ceremony. By telephotoing the VT’s exterior-mount videocams, he could bring into sharp focus nearly every hooded face on the makeshift rostrum: Dr. Lang, Professors Lazlo Zand and Sheamus Bronson, Macross Council politicos Milburn and Stinson, Chief Justice Justine Huxley, and Mayor Tommy Luan. Elsewhere stood Brigadier General Gunther Reinhardt, generals Maistoff and Motokoff, full-bird colonels Caruthers and Herzog, and Major Aldershot.
Rick spent a moment contemplating his pending promotion and shuddered at the thought of being lofted into the numbing company of all that assorted brass. He would just have to decline any advancement in rank, he told himself. Appeal to the aging flyboy in Reinhardt by saying that while he was flattered by Command’s confidence in his leadership abilities, his place was and would always be with the Skull.
He reasoned he had a good chance of pulling it off. Providing that Admiral Lisa could keep from getting involved.
“In conclusion, let us at least try to embrace a constructive perspective,” Lang was saying. “Let us try to view the coming years as a bridge to the future, however uncertain. We are a forward-looking race, and it is our faith in the future that will guide us …”
Lang was finally winding down—and just in time, Rick decided. For what had begun as a remembrance of the dead had deteriorated into a eulogy for Lang’s precious dimensional fortresses and his plans for constructing an SDF-3.
And so when Vince Grant succeeded Lang at the podium—towering over it—he concentrated on remembering his sister, Claudia. And when Lieutenant Mitchell took the microphone she remembered enlisted-ratings techs Sammie Porter, Vanessa Leeds, and Kim Young, all of whom Mitchell had relieved at one time or another on the fortress’s bridge. Cat crew officer Moira Flynn read off the names of hundreds of pilots she had waved into battle, and Dr. Hassan, chief surgeon aboard the SDF-1, recalled acts of unsurpassed bravery.
And when Lisa Hayes spoke … Well, when Lisa spoke about what it meant to have served under Henry Gloval—the father she would have preferred—and about Claudia Grant, her closest friend and sister-in-arms, not even the MBS broadcasters could keep their deep voices from faltering.
“Skull,” Rick barked into his helmet pickup, as sobs filtered through the tactical net. “Present arms!”
The crowds turned to the half-buried ships. The technoknights of Skull, Ghost, Vermilion and Indigo raised their autocannons in salute, Veritech teams screamed over the lake, disgorging payloads of hothouse flowers, and the massive guns of a dozen MAC II Destroids offered thunderous praise to the dead. A reclamation crew positioned on the rail-gunned shoulders of the SDF-1 unfurled a huge banner bearing the RDF insignia: an encircled, curved-sided diamond suggestive of a fighting kite.
Sunlight gleamed off the battered alloy surfaces of the SDF-1.
There had been talk of a closing address by Exedore, but the general staff had had a last-minute change of mind and the Zentraedi ambassador’s shuttle flight from the factory satellite had been canceled. Khyron’s raid—though in no way undertaken in the name of all the Zentraedi—had brought about a resurgence of hatred for the race with whom Humans were now forced to share the Earth. Bron, Rico, and Konda—the first of the aliens to defect during the War— had been ordered to remain in Monument City and satisfy their grief by watching live coverage of the funeral.
Their absence was nearly as conspicuous as that of Lynn Minmei.
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