Fire Wall (A Robotech fanfic in progress)

[revprez]

Thought I'd try this forum out. Look forward to participating here. Peace.

* * *

PROLOGUE

[The Invid] pose a grave and gathering danger to Free Humanity and in time their murderous ambition will threaten the entire galaxy. We will respond to the unwarranted and deceitful violation of treaty stipulations and remove their occupation forces with the most deadly force. By making the collective decision to subjugate and then exterminate humanity, we are forced to respond in kind. In a war where survival is at stake, mercy is a luxury we cannot afford.

-Vice Admiral Richard A. Hunter at a UEDC press conference on Tirol, 15 June 2031 C.E.


* * *

EARTH-LUNAR SYSTEM, 42,000 KILOMETERS OFF THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
11 MARCH 2034

"SO, WE SPOT SOMETHING LIKE FIVE OR...ER...NO--MAYBE SIX. YEAH, THAT'S IT. Something like six Karbies heading zero-something-or-other-yadda-yadda magnetic just about thirty above the equator. And this guy..." Jamie shakily pointed her martini glass towards her unassuming wingman. Her free hand mimicked perfect bipedal "egg" form of the Karbarran space mecha.

"Yeah, and this guy...he solves his vector right up behind 'em and gets them dead in his sights. Anyway, we tailed those furballs for like ten minutes or something, and next thing he's got missile tone--Karbies scattering all over the place! One almost vectored right into the Fleabag! Oh, and when we got back? Lord, you should've seen the Bossman's face!"

Jamie Yumashita grinned broadly as she paused to take in all the attention. A moment later she continued enthralling the crowd with more embarrassing tales of her spit-shine, coffee-colored, baby-faced operations officer--Marcus Keyes, Lieutenant Junior Grade.

Despite the boisterous rancor emanating away from the bar, the twenty or so servicemen and women enjoying the traditional pre-action festivities barely accounted for a quarter of the typical business that tonight's remarkably empty wardroom attracted on any given day. For the most part, the crew and those Marines embarked with them tended to their own units with stockpiles of smuggled liquor and the best grub they could grab from the galley. The fliers from Marcus' squadron and a sprinkling of air controllers attached to the ship had laid claim to the forward officers mess to engage in some time-honored boozing and schmoozing before battle.

Expeditionary Aviation Command had stuffed a leaner, almost skeletal shadow of Space Carrier Air Wing Fifteen onboard a one-hundred-fifty meter claptrap originally designed to support a ten-plane deployment. As a result, the irate and cramped pilots of Strike Fighter Squadrons Four-Three-Seven and One-Two-Two, much to the annoyance of their spacer hosts, took over the mess with all overconfident swagger and sense of self-entitlement expected from people who flew solo into combat for a living with just the thin skin of a Veritech between them, the vacuum and an enemy's annihilation disc Tonight, a dozen-and-a-half junior officers crowded the "Club," a small section of the mess that doubled as a bar after-hours. About four of them listened and laughed as Jamie gleefully ripped on her friend and wingmate. Others simply smiled in amusement, and still more enjoyed Jamie's wonderful figure through the skintight uniform and their intoxicated hazes. It didn't matter that much to Marcus, whose sheepish half-grin disappeared and reappeared regularly during the course of the evening. An embarrassed expression swept over his face as Jamie wrapped up the sixtieth or seventieth story directly involving him.

Shit, Marcus' exasperation broke the surface of his thoughts, she's probably got the whole fleet up in my business!

Jamie blabbered on: "And get this. The Man works the Board over so well that we end up with fifteen of the Usual Flavor. Two weeks, no work, lots of TV, sleep and free food. Hell, if we didn't have the SANDSTORM Fleet-Ex coming up, we'd probably be flipping burgers and shipping Perry malt all over the Local Group or something. "

Jamie sloppily wheeled around in her stool towards the window, wagging an unsteady finger out into the blackness. Somewhere out there, thousands of light-years away, lay the Trianguli cluster, but nobody could be sure if she knew the way. The diamond-like bulbs of celestial light formed patterns utterly alien to this new generation of Robotech defenders. It was a rare day you ran into someone on the ship who didn't feel the same urge to see a familiar sky, even though few shared any particular one in common. Marcus threw back another slug, yearning as well for the warm summers and the moderate winters of an unassuming world hurtling along an absurd orbit through the Acrux trinary star system. A fading image of a bright, white man-made star came to mind. His ship set sail from Nord Space Naval Station, a three kilometer long, star-shaped structure that flew high in night sky for as long as he could remember. His parents had seen him off from the Golf-Echo docking bay so many months ago. The thought of his mother's strong embrace before he walked up that gangplank drew a mild shroud of melancholy down over his brow.

As the next rum shot wiped the late night reverie from his mind, Marcus looked back to his now fairly hammered commanding officer. Jamie hit yet another slug--straight from the bottle--of the highly illegal d'raa'vele, an colonial mix of Scotch and heavily fermented juices from some world with an unpronounceable name. With the Cuervo she had broken out of her private stash earlier that evening, that made something like what? Seven tanks in the last hour and a half? Marcus, his own buzz already painfully subsiding, gave up keeping count a long time ago. Jamie had to be way over the carded limit, even for a spacer on liberty and in company with a band of friendly Amazon women from New Praxis. He did manage to get the bartender to cut her off an hour ago, but so long as Jamie insisted on telling stories--and kept coyly playing with the zipper running up and down her wonderfully filled out tunic--nobody would take issue with keeping her glass wet.

Jamie didn't seem to mind when Marcus suddenly exited the mess just as the bells sounded the next change of watch. After pushing his way through the drunken revelry and out into the corridor, Marcus strolled over to the nearest intraship car stop. It didn't take long for the next cab to come whizzing up to the landing. After plopping his exhausted frame on the brown, leathery cushions of the cab's wrap around couch, Marcus took a deep breath and hoped somebody at the bar would be decent enough to escort Jamie back to Aviation Country. His squadron CO tended to get a bit friendly after only two or three shots of cheap spirits and Jamie had an "equal opportunity" reputation when it came to the sexes; that sort of behavior had gotten her in trouble more than once. Seven shots--he hoped it was just seven--of Citron and bug juice and tequila and...well, it wasn't his problem. Marcus sighed softly as the cab tore down the track towards the aft berthing spaces. Occasionally, the cab would fly close enough to the ship's hull to let passengers stare out the view ports into space. Only three days ago, Jupiter's rotund magnificence had dominated the view. Now you couldn't see much more than the pedestrian white crescent of a far smaller world in the distance--and only if you were in the right place at the right time with a magnifying glass. Soon enough, the darkened, lifeless ball beyond each passing pane would morph into the blue-white, animate brilliance of Earth, a world that not too long ago occupied only his dimmest memories and warranted even less of his thoughts.

The car stopped suddenly about halfway to Aviation Country, just a few decks below and a bulkhead aft of the command sail. A couple of bubbly female crewmen--probably just getting off from the Echo watch--piled in. Removing their gray combination covers as the car began to move, the three young girls began to gossip amongst themselves about the pre-op festivities, boyfriends, and whatnot. Then, the tallest of them turned to see Marcus gazing aimlessly out the window. Her eyes must wandered down to his collar and rank device.

"Sir!" Marcus blinked back into reality, startled by the sudden interruption,. All three women stumbled to something akin to attention. The leader dropped her service cap as she patted out some of the unsightly wrinkles in her skirt. "Sorry, Lieutenant. We just got off--"

The towering, coffee-colored and obviously flustered docksman dipped down to pick her cover, raising his hand to interrupt. Her long, flowing auburn hair remind him of--well, a lot of friendly faces he'd left behind on Ashel. "Don't worry about it, Docksman..."

"Benjamin, Sir," she smiled, swiping a tuft of hair clear of her nametag. "Docksman First Class Seylia Benjamin. This is Boatswain Second Florida Peters and Able Astronaut Ruhma Mohta, Sir."

Marcus nodded courteously. "Turning in?"

"Uh, no, Sir. We're headed for the Deck Five enlisted party, Sir. It's the last day before the Big One, and we were...well, I guess everybody's a little excited."

"Well, don't mind me," Marcus cocked his upper lip back into a weak grin. It would've been improper to invite himself. The services had relaxed their restrictions on fraternization, but the military culture was slow to change. He really didn't want to waste time getting home anyway.

The petty officer nodded respectfully before turning back to her friends. Marcus started to look back towards the transparency, but he for some reason he couldn't tear his eyes away completely from the three crewmembers. They weren't that much younger than he, still Marcus felt strangely old. At twenty-four and with only two cruises under his belt, no one with a lick of sense would call him "seasoned." Seylia Benjamin and her companions probably weren't a day over twenty, and that gave Marcus a hefty four years more time in the uniform. The young pilot frowned as morbid thoughts about the young and war filled his head.

His father had complained loudly about the youth of today's soldiers, astronauts and Marines, recalling a time when children grew up, went to school, and did things that seemed utterly mundane and irresponsible to young people these days. Then again, Captain (ret.) Terrance H. Keyes, Jr. remembered a different world than his son, one he said he wanted to see one more time before the cancer eating away at his lungs got the better of him. The former tin can skipper watched from space one fateful day a quarter-century ago as an ominous hammer from space all but wiped his family, his friends and billions of others off the face of the Earth. Still, the old man did his best to bring whatever loved ones he had left together on Ashel, and along with Mama he raised four children far and away from the terrifying remains of Earth. The eldest son followed his father's footsteps into the Navy and beyond, working his way up from a snot-nosed division officer in charge of a reactor plant to the captain's chair on the bridge of a battlecruiser. Since leaving home, Marcus often wished his father and older brother would show up in this distant part of the galaxy. So far from home, he felt stranded in a part of the galaxy as alien to him as Tirol and Ashel had been to his parents.

The intra-ship car finally arrived at Deck Five, Bulkhead Eighty Two. The three giggly crewmen filed out, still laughing and gossiping amongst themselves like high school cheerleaders. Marcus muttered something under his breath as the doors closed and the car started off to its final destination. Alone again, his blank gaze drifted up to the view screen above the sliding doors, idly studying the ship schematic displayed there. UES JOHN S. MCCAIN blazed constantly in brilliant white letters in the lower left-hand corner while the images shifted between ventral and starboard cutaway diagrams of the destroyer. Smooth lines emanating from the bow slowly split apart before converging together rapidly at the end, forming a shape akin to a measuring plumb; the aft engine assembly and primary gun on the ventral hull were merely discordant features easily ignored in abstract thought. Nevertheless, those six powerful thrusters provided enough thrust to give McCain over ten meters per second squared of acceleration. Another marker on the diagram drew two exotically shaped toroids mounted deep in McCain's interior. These mysterious machines housed high energy field generators that drew power directly from the Reflex furnaces. Guided by highly precise metrics defined and manipulated by the ship's powerful main computer, these toroids could first tap into the limitless sea of virtual particle pairs simmering in the vacuum, extract from immense positive and negative energy, and then redirect that power to manipulate space-time. The physics behind either application confounded Marcus to no end--he'd only majored in mechanical engineering and had no idea how such a feat was thermodynamically possible. Still the only thing he needed to know was that in its present mode of operation, the "gravity impeller" could drive this ship and his air wing across the length of a good sized solar system in under a month or suspend McCain over a fixed spot above a planet's surface for as long as the furnaces supplied power. When rigged for superluminal flight or "space fold," McCain could capture enlarge to macroscopic dimensions a series of quantum-sized wormholes and fly to the nearest star in less than a day. Not more than thirty years ago, people would have found the science and its sheer implications daunting, but in the present this tired young combat pilot readily took the whole matter for granted.

Marcus leaned further back into the cushion as the car rounded a the last bend in the track, turning amidships twisting about until the transparency ran against the ventral hull. The long barrels of the destroyer's massive meson gun lay only a few meters behind him. An extremely powerful particle cannon, the gun could deliver with precision an amount of firepower equivalent to a hundred kilotons of TNT from ranges of up to five hundred thousand kilometers. Marcus peered at the distant bubbles lining the gun's contours, straining to see small, the black silhouettes that toiled tirelessly in the gunnery spaces. No last minute partying for those guys, Marcus noted with pity. Somebody had to stand watch at Weapons at all times, keeping the guns hot and ready. Until the main force showed up, only five measly destroyers and a stripped down air wing stood between Marcus and his comrades and whatever awaited them on Earth.

The grandiose feel of it all--hell, it's fucking historic--nearly struck Marcus as incredulous. Right about now, the flagship of the main group, the battlecruiser Lee Teng-Hui, and her two sister ships, Ronald Reagan and Ryan Morse were probably making their exit burns out of the Jovian system and back into the safety of interplanetary space. Marcus learned that trying to fold out of Jupiter's immense gravitational and magnetic field would produce a "flashlight" effect the Slugs would be hard-pressed to ignore. Once out in the open and reasonably sure they could proceed undetected, the main battle force would then make the hyperspace jump to near Earth space. To achieve any level of surprise, the Fleet needed to assemble stealthily somewhere behind the Moon. From there, they would have to move in under rocket propulsion exclusively. Since all applications of electrogravity imposed highly conspicuous energy and mass fields on space-time, starships still relied on rockets to "run silent." In that vein, Lee, Reagan and Morse mounted four massive reaction-mass thrusters, ejecting cheaply-engineered diamond composites superheated by two massive thermonuclear kilns. Once upon a time, Marcus' squadron had been slated to deploy aboard the Navy's newest Churchill warships--the UES George Bush. Be that as it may, fate had other plans for him, like hot-bunking it with a commo specialist on an aging heap of junk struggling to support an under-strength air wing on the other side of the galaxy.

The car finally came to a halt in Airedale City, three decks by four bulkheads near the engine rooms that berthed McCain's flyboys and girls. Marcus snatched up his cover and sack off the bench and rose to his feet, shaking off the exhaustion but not the sobering headache banging away against his skull--Man, I can't believe I'm such a lightweight! Fighting his way through the rush of embarking passengers--many probably headed to the party he'd just left--Marcus sauntered onto the receiving platform and turned to the exit. But just as he squeezed through the hatch to the adjacent hallway, the tired lieutenant felt a light tap on his shoulder.

"Hey there, Marc." a startled Marcus looked up to see the squadron supply officer where the double bars of a full lieutenant hovering over his head.

"Oh fu--uh, I mean Ma'am?" Marcus stuttered as he tried to hide any remaining signs of inebriation. "I...uh...good evening, Ma'am. What're you waiting around here for?"

"Relax, Marc," Monica Lee slapped him on the back as he emerged from the hatch. "The bells rang ten minutes ago, and I haven't had two bars for more than month. How's life goin'?"

"Not so hot," Marcus groaned as he stood up.

Monica flicked his index finger to the lift just behind them. "You headed up?"

"Nah, I'm going home. Say, how'd your evolution go?"

"Well," Lieutenant Lee sighed in belated, work-related annoyance, "I think we still have to tune the targeting package for some of the mid-rangers. We actually managed to pull some bad wave guides from Supply. My newest ET fried three IC boards before Vickers figured out what went wrong. Ship Supply is being a little dictator bitch with that 0800 rule. She's gonna make us wait until tomorrow just to place the order."

"That sucks," Marcus offered sympathetically. The squadron supply officer--Lieutenant Lee in this case--was in theory responsible for running all the "pit crews" and likewise had final say on who's bird was combat ready or not. An evil thought crept down his spine as Marcus recalled the recent chewing out his plane captain had given to a none-to-attentive electronics specialist recently chopped by McCain to his division. He hoped to hell that his plane wasn't one of the ones Monica had to slave on, but then again she didn't look to mad. Guess I'm in the clear. 'Say, didn't you turn your guys in like four hours ago?"

"Just a lot of paper work," Monica sighed, so Chief Roscoe and I are the only ones up. Like I said, we're not gonna start opening up anything until tomorrow. It's only two birds."

"Sounds like you've had a rough day," Marcus clicked his lips supportively. "So what are you gonna do to unwind?"

"Get some sleep. But first I thought I'd get up to observatory--clear my head, y'know. If you're not too tired, I'd appreciate some company."

"Sounds like a plan," I got nothing better to do, anyway--except sleep. Besides, a part of Marcus wasn't ready to go to bed quite yet. The lift doors behind them swept open as he and Monica stepped inside. "Earth is in the sky tonight, right? I couldn't see it on the way in."

"Yeah, I think so. But who cares? I just want to relax. You in?"

"Hell, why not?" Marcus said a little more enthusiastically than even he expected.

"Just keep your hands to yourself, kid." A nasty grin twisted on Monica's face right before she let loose a playful blow on Marcus' shoulder.

"Who, me?" Marcus feigned protest, his smirk more sheepish than sly. "C'mon. I get more than enough on my own, enough that I wouldn't do something that stupid."

"Whatever, Keyes. Go tell it to Bunkie," Monica sneered like she knew something. Truth was the frustrated flyboy hadn't had any action since McCain left Jupiter Base five weeks ago, a fact his bunkmate, Teddy Bunkett, seemed more than eager to share with everybody embarked behind Marcus' back. Man, if Jamie ever finds out--he shuddered slightly. Fliers made for a pretty raunchy bunch, and an outsider walking through Aviator Country couldn't go five minutes without hearing someone boast about their vigor or someone else's lack thereof. When it came to the latter, Jamie, especially after a few drinks, took sick pleasure in busting other people's balls in front of the largest audiences possible. Marcus sometimes wondered if Monica and Jamie--by some cruel twist of fate they were the only two women in the squadron--would get together over makeup and curlers to discuss all the sexual deficiencies of their male colleagues.

"Hah! Now what? Bunkie couldn't score with his right hand," Too little, too late.

"Way I hear it, you're one to talk," Monica playfully drove her knuckles into Marcus' shoulder just as the lift came to a halt. "C'mon, we're here. I'd like to score a place before I pass out."

Floored and unable to shoot back, Marcus sheepishly followed Monica out of the lift and into the Officer's Observatory. They took a seat on an empty, secluded couch near the main transparency and just out of reach of some of the more annoyingly overgrown ferns. Several minutes passed in silence before a small, faint blue crescent half a million miles away slid across the vista. Somebody--Marcus didn't know who--walked over to the keypad to the right of the transparency and punched in a short code. A bright cyan box traced over Earth before stretching out to fill a good part of the center--magnifying the image as well. Marcus found the whole show unimpressive. Sure, he hadn't seen Earth since he was six, but should seeing it after so long move him some how? This was the birthplace of homo sapiens, his father and mother, and a population nearly a hundred times larger than that of the entire Diaspora. Yet he felt nothing.

After a time, he looked over at Monica; her eyes closed as she sunk into the couch--her lips slightly cocked as if she were about to start snoring. Marcus yawned as the contagion of fatigue gripped him as well. A few more minutes passed in silence, but just as he was about to doze off--

"What's on your mind, Keyes?"

"Huh?" Marcus stuttered as he shook off the sleepy haze. "Gawd...nothing. Just thinking about what my old man used to say about this place--how he'd do anything to see Earth again. I don't get it. What's the big deal?"

"What's that?"

"Well, you got to admit. It's boring"

Monica shifted a bit until she was comfortable enough to look up at the arch of white blue etching Earth's place in the sky. "Boring?"

"Yeah, boring."

"Well," Monica grinned broadly, "if you want really boring, try looking at a bulkhead for a few hours trying to put Bunkie's bird back together."

"Uh huh," Marcus smirked, catching Monica's almond eyes. "You know, I figured it was Bunkie's plane." Better him than me, he thought, almost diffidently enough to feel ashamed of it, before turning back to the transparency. "I mean it's peaceful. I just didn't think it'd be boring."

Marcus sighed as they both returned their attention to window. A few more seconds passed quietly by. "Fuck it. Things won't be too peaceful come Monday. Then again, even after we kick the Slugs off of Earth, she'll still be a ball of rock. Just boring."

"If we win," Monica sighed, leaning back and staring blankly into the void.

"Whaddya mean if we win?" Marcus shot Monica an inquisitive smirk. The Bulls had flamed Slugs on two planets, neither of which looked all that different from Earth. From where he sat, the globe beyond the glass seemed anything but threatening.

"I don't know," Monica said with a soft, yet eerily unfamiliar shade to her voice.. "It just doesn't feel right. I mean, I can't get myself to think of this as just another Slug hunt. It's just a feeling, but..."

Monica trailed off into silence, her eyes still fixed forward beyond the transparency. Marcus, on the other hand, crossed his arms in incredulity. Maybe it was the Jose Cuervo working its magic again, but he couldn't remember a time when Monica seemed so spooked.

"Don't tell me you still believe in Santa," Marcus snorted. "Santa Claus," the Fleet nickname for the legendary Queen of the Slugs, was widely believed to be the stuff of urban myth--bedtime stories conjured up to scare little children and sometimes silly adults. Monica huffed at that, playfully jabbing Marcus in the arm, but didn't say anything. She turned back to look at Earth, leaving Marcus a bit put off but too sore to do anything about it..

Several more moments passed in silence before Marcus fell back to consider his deepening anxiety. No one expected the thousands of men and women committed to Operation SPARTA to just scuttle the raw sense of uneasiness hovering in the air. Some part of Marcus felt he had the party early to worry himself to sleep, but then he ended up here. Did he really need the company? He'd come face to face with the Other in that cold, dark vacuum more than a few times before, so why did this job trouble him so much?

Marcus had long ago given up on God, ghosts, and gremlins; surely a fabled Slug Queen deserved--at the very least--nothing less than the same degree of skepticism. Sure, he conceded that the Slugs had pulled off such a bold and daring coup by taking humanity's home world. Even the Captain had said as much, but he also told his crew and the air wing about how the Earth forces had kicked Slug ass across the galaxy for ten years. So had Jamie and every spook at every briefing on this mission for as far back as he could remember. The Admiral onboard the flagship Lee even managed to work that exact point--though not in so many words--into her weekly broadcasts over the task force radio, . Marcus believed in his mates, his bosses, and most of all his Alpha fighter. The Mars Division had come to Earth prepared for anything. Come Monday, Lieutenant Keyes and the Bulls would brutally make that point permanently by knocking those Slug bastards out of space. Marcus felt so sure of it for so long that up until he'd never worried about any of the other possible outcomes.

So why am I stressing over this so much now? Marcus felt a bit ashamed for the tug of war between his gut and his head. Everybody had doubts from time to time. With expectations back home running so high, he wondered if Command would accept no less than the Division ejecting the alien infestation completely from the surface within a day or two. Then it dawned on him. Though this world meant next to nothing to Marcus personally, his mission was to free a world that, to this day, hundreds of millions of people throughout the Diaspora insistently called home.

An amused Marcus almost laughed out loud. How can I compete with that?



* * *

THE OHIO VALLEY

Just over a century-and-a-half ago, a rush of electromagnetic energy suddenly burst forth from a small, insignificant blue-white world at the edge of a great spiral galaxy. Humanity's discovery of radio broke the monotony of solar and other cosmic emissions, flooding space around the Sol system with radiant energy and carrying, for the first time in this star system's ancient history, intelligently encoded signals. With Man's mastery of the EM spectrum came the power to exchange ideas across great distances, to instantly communicate new, foreign things to strangers thousands of miles away. One by one, human science and engineering harnessed ever greater frequencies, shorter wavelengths and more powerful energy sources to yield television, x-rays, and eventually lasers and microwaves. Communities were once defined and measured by how far a man could walk or how long a horse could run. By the onset of the twenty-first century, most of humanity enjoyed the same communicative instantaneity across great distances as they did standing face to face with one another. Even as the necessary technology matured and crude radio transmitters just began piercing the confines of Earth's ionosphere, the dream of seeking out and communicating with audiences from other worlds danced around inside mankind's most fertile imaginations. Satellites and radio telescopes peered into the sky, looking for some sign of life beyond the terrestrial experience while deep-space probes carried messages of peace and curiosity out to the galaxy.

Yet by 2034, only silence remained.

To be fair, Earth's ionosphere still churned with radio activity, mostly reflections of broadcasts long since forgotten, exponentially degrading into noisy oblivion as months grew into years. Earth's gaseous cloak--and then the Collective's fierce jamming frontier--left the few transmissions that did escape corrupted and incoherent. Three years of occupation had practically decimated the civilian telecommunications industry, and the great network of satellites that once brought Earth's multitudes so close to each other had either been destroyed or fallen into decay.

If the Slugs had learned anything from their unfortunate venture in empire, it was that many of the civilizations they'd come across could be divided, isolated and subdued with relative ease. The idea didn't set in easy; the intricate, telepathic communion linking one Slug to the whole of his race naturally defied attempts by enemies to disrupt and diminish the Collective. Yet no species sufficiently intelligent to build star-faring space ships, when imbued with the will to subjugate others, could succeed in such ambition without understanding the central role communications played in nourishing resistance. Nor could any imperial power hope to simply extirpate planet after planet of their native populations and expect to inherit real estate of appreciable value.

Things as they were, the Collective fought doggedly to interdict anything and everything that enabled sizable human communities to exchange anything, whether it be through the media, travel or--in the most extreme and brutal cases--food distribution. In the early hours of the Invasion, Shock Troopers uprooted the infrastructure supporting large segments of global information network. Wireless communications towers were torn down all over North America and the smaller territorial spoils throughout the globe held by the Slugs. Earth's alien occupiers cultivated pockets of sympathy amongst the Earth humans. Ranging from the disaffected to the outright coerced, these proxies for Slug dominion went further by betraying that human capital responsible for innovating, deploying and sustaining the machines of globalization. Whatever remained, the Slugs placed under the state control of cooperative states and other polities. The irony was not lost on the astute observer. The Collective, a society once known for its centuries-long guerilla campaign against the Galaxy's previously most powerful empire, now assumed the role of conqueror and imperialist on Earth. Humanity presently existed as the sick punch-line of a sick, cosmic joke. And yet the irony did not end here.

Ten years had passed since United Earth, a global super-state unlike any in world history, deployed a massive joint task force across the galaxy on a mission doomed to failure. Poor military leadership and equally uninspiring civilian direction ended with the United Earth Expeditionary Force trapped in a quagmire shooting war with the up-and-coming, the Slug's well-entrenched Collective. Beyond the immediate political reach of the United Earth Government's broken arm, with only the Plenipotentiary Commission to grant its blessing to the policies to the Expeditionary Force leadership, the senior surviving officers of the UEF spent another two years did nothing to stop the institutional inertia that kept Earth's military struggling to carry out misguided and poorly defined objectives. This time, Earth's defenders deployed much of their strength to liberate and rebuild the Slug-occupied worlds on the coreward half of the Sagittarius Arm's inner rim--almost seventy thousand light-years away. Earth's security, the wise of that day would claim, lay in engaging threats forward across the galaxy. The next war, they'd say, would be fought over the moons of Fantoma and over the worlds not yet known to man, not over the blue-white breadbasket of human civilization.

For the second time in human history, man had bet his freedom on a thin hope. History proved no kinder.

The Robotech Masters, the tribunal rulers of a vast interstellar empire, had long quit their home planet, Tirol, to seek a mysterious energy source that had abruptly fallen into mankind's lap at the dawn of the twenty first century. These advanced star-farers followed the trail of expeditions previously undertaken by their cloned warrior servants, the Zentraedi. The world the Masters sought had defeated the greatest armada the Galaxy had ever known, even if at the cost of the planet's near-destruction. When they finally reach their destination--fifteen years after setting out from some isolated sphere of the Empire--the Robotech Masters wasted no time in releasing their terrible wrath on a hapless, off-guard Earth. The meager assets of Earth-Lunar Command, once the chronically depleted force supplier for Earth's disparate interstellar expeditions, bore the brunt of the invasion and ultimately saved Earth from the second and last assault by the Robotech Empire, but the final battle sowed seeds of evil that would come to fruition in the years to come.

The fight between the Earth forces and Tirolians at Monument City destroyed the last resting place of the alien artifact that represented Earth's painful introduction to the vulgarity of interstellar war. Once a source of great aspiration for man's most creative and innovative minds, the Superdimensional Fortress One--as Earthers had taken to calling it--had fallen as a symbol to become a portent of the misery inflicted by alien invaders. But when the Masters mothership detonated above the SDF-1's ruins, the explosion released a deeper, far greater secret. With the galaxy's supply of veritable Compound X known ubiquitously as "protoculture," the economic cornerstone of entire star nations and empires, diminishing rapidly, nothing worst could befall the Masters than losing the last Matrix capable of producing this miracle material. Pretty soon the Masters had depleted what precious little protoculture they'd horded before long journey. The wondrous material that had given their civilization everything cheap and safe nuclear energy to medicines that had kept them alive for centuries slipped through their bony, decrepit fingers.

The tragedy did not end there. The explosion scattered exotic, extraterrestrial spores into the trade winds and ultimately to the four corner's of the Earth. Within months, a new alien plant had taken root in most of North America, much of Brazil and the lands east of the Andes, and in small pockets of Eurasia. The world would soon learn a hidden power in the galaxy lay in wait for this exact moment, watching Earth-humans and Tirolians butcher each other while the Flower of Life--the sustenance of their race--proved fertile in new soil.

Six months passed before the spores spread far and wide enough to trigger the Invid's spy in space, an strange and intricate sensor that took after a small nebula--forty miles wide and thirty six long at the most. Not long after, the Slug Queen gathered the survivors of her race into a quilt she then tossed over Earth By the time the enemy had amassed at the gate, Earth's world government had no more strength or resolve to fight. Within two years, the Collective had conquered all of North America, large portions of Europe and Asia, and threatened to expand their Empire into the Southern Hemisphere. Gone were the days of scrappy, guerilla campaigns the Slugs had launched in the waning days of the Robotech Empire, lunging at its remains like a hyena on a carcass. No longer did the Collective face extinction by starvation, forcing them to seek and risk pyrrhic victory for the mere sustenance of the Flower. A sentient species that had once suffered long under the shadow of the Robotech Masters and had been only a few years ago been a rival--a defeated one at that--for the leftovers of Tirol's far-flung fiefdom now arose as the chief threat to the survival of humanity. In time, man would look for a new word to name his mind's eye image of the Slug. It didn't take long for the politicians and bureaucrats to seize on a few, ominous sounding words that had escaped the secured confines of the Robotech Masters secret language. The new name gripped the attention of the newspapers and broadcasters, penetrating both the human and Zentraedi lingua franca of United Earth's interstellar compact Human history would forever remember the five letters,. two syllables, that had come to mean Occupier, Destroyer, and the came to represent the fearful repudiation of man's child-like curiosity with the unknown

Invid.

In time, all news from the occupied territories ceased. There were no warning signs; no newspaper broadcast transmitted the final hours of human freedom. Wherever the Invid could, they knocked down that last institution of human self-determination, the free press. Some daredevils braved the deadly climb into and fall back from space to relay what they could between the Resistance and humanity in exile, but it was never enough. All the displaced United Earth Government could do was watch helplessly as their inadequate intelligence systems and news sources collapsed throughout the northern hemisphere.

Time eventually muted the panic that had seized the Human Interstellar Diaspora for months on end. In the last months of 2031, Earth's political leaders called upon the all free human beings to ready for war once again. Only this time, those who were free looked beyond their country, ethnic affiliation, and any provincial interest tied to land or any of the dividing qualities of culture. The political division of the planet that had survived two Robotech Wars a major interstellar conflict with the Invid died the minute humanity lost its home world. Though very few with the means to communicate widely commented on it, years later historians would look back and say, "this was the year mankind set aside their parochial colors and became one nation."

Yet little else about this new war differed from the last. Once again, men and women alike rallied around such familiar names as Hayes-Hunter and Reinhardt. They forgot about the failure of their leaders and warfighters to protect and defend Earth from alien invaders. They sought out the help of the Karbarrans and the other Sentinel races, ignoring the intrigues of alien allies who were ostensibly friendly yet driven by interests that did not necessarily align with United Earth's overriding objective of liberating the home world. Mankind lost interest in the quarter century of history of petty political infighting that typified Earth's one and only international--now interplanetary and interstellar--system of government, forgetting how close men of different races, who spoke different languages and prayed to different deities had bled themselves to spite global order. Instead, the great mass of free humans stood behind their leaders as they took up the task of rebuilding their military might.

Mankind answered the call to liberate Earth in droves, swelling the military's ranks to the point where the War Cabinet claimed to have put a million more astronauts, soldiers, marines, and airmen in uniform. Weapons production soared, with dozens of United Earth's cruiser-destroyer strike groups roaming the Fourth Quadrant and securing far-flung sectors of the galaxy from Invid threats lingering from the Sentinels War. Young crews gained valuable experience in combat and then cycled back to the training camps and officer candidate schools in order to teach their trades. At one point, Karbarran Robotech Factory satellite had run at less than one percent capacity, Now, over a quarter of the satellite's slips would belt out new battle fortresses, the largest yet ever constructed by human shipbuilders. Back on Earth, the UEF regulars stranded on Earth, surviving day to day under Occupation with only the help of a vigilant yet tired and depleted Resistance, anxiously awaited the return of the Expeditionary Force. In the meantime, they fought fiercely to hold the line against Invid expansion. Whenever possible, those fighting men and women on Earth would slip valuable intelligence through the Invid's tight grip of near Earth orbit to friendly bases on the Moon or Mars. When the time came, those who'd fought the enemy every inch of the way--from the Rio Grande to Macapá, Lisbon to Vladivostk--would lead the final assault on the Invid Royal Hive, codenamed Reflex Point.

Yet the view from heaven betrayed nothing, and Earth's deadly silence persevered unabated. As March 2034 crept by on the calendar, the men and women of the Mars Expeditionary Fleet Division, the first wave of the Earth Defense Expedition, steeled themselves for the upcoming battle. The Division swelled with the swagger of thousands--some of it earned, some not. A sense of the exuberance swept through the every ship, like that of conquerors returning home from a victorious campaign. The Earthers had stripped from the Slugs countless worlds in the most far-flung reaches of the galaxy..

Why would this time be any different?



* * *

All the better then, the ancient mind mused, pleased with the fat and happy approach of these new invaders.

Nevertheless, the Queen Mother took sober heed of this familiar threat bearing down on the Collective's new home world. From deep within the Royal Hive, her mind reached out to an entire race of Invid separated by air, land, sea and vacuum, sharing with them the disturbing presence of the Enemy. Her fear awoke in their thoughts, and not without reason. These beings had after all learned much of Zor, his biped sponsors and their evil machinations. This and much more she broached with the highest minds of the Invid. Then, she reached out farther and wider than ever, seeking communion with all joined to the Collective. Those who would defend the Race and the Flower waited not only for their instructions, but the loving, life affirming preamble of the Mother's voice.

My children...


* * *