MACROSS DYNAMITE
Four: When It Rains

Zola

          Basara spent the rest of the week in bed, alternately watching Elma run in and out of the house between various errands or listening to her prattle on endlessly about nothing from the kitchen, bursting into snatches of song in between her ramblings. The radio was always on, and there was always music playing even if she was away. Sometimes it was the Galaxy Network Chart, which was mostly older music and even older Fire Bomber songs from before the war. Sometimes it was Zolan music. He liked that better. The language fascinated him – so like his native Japanese, and then so unlike.
          On day seven he was feeling good enough to sit up without feeling like his head was going to explode or feeling that fuzzy woolen feeling in his mouth that he was used to now after Elma had given him his daily dose of medicine. He heard her clattering about in the kitchen, and then she poked her head into the front room, where his bed lay facing the door.
          "I'm about to go to town," she chirped. "You want anything?"
          He thought for a second. "Sure," he said. "Can I go with you?"
          Her eyes went wide. "You're si-"
          "Not sick." He swung both legs down out of the covers, demonstrating that yes, he could walk without support. Sort of. "Hey, it's an improvement. I need to get out of the house."
          Elma looked dubious. "If you die, it's not my fault."
          Basara snorted. "You know, if I die, I really doubt anyone is going to mind. Definitely not your father-" He caught the look in her eye when he mentioned her father, and mentally slapped himself. "Right. Sorry."
          "It's ok," she said brightly, then frowned at him, standing there in the makeshift pajamas she'd found him from somewhere. They fit, though they were a little scratchy. "Well all right then, if you think you're well enough to go. But I'm leaving in five minutes, so you better find something to wear before we can go. It's kind of chilly outside."
          His old backpack was lying next to his bed, and he looked up to thank her for saving it and bringing it home, but she was gone from the doorway. So he simply unhooked the strap locking it closed and rummaged around, looking for something suitable, a pair of drawstring pants and his favorite sweatshirt.
          The pants were a little baggy, he discovered. Surely he hadn't lost that much weight during his time laying here incapacitated. Or maybe he had. He patted around the pockets, pulling the drawstring tight, then pulled on the sweatshirt, noting distractedly that the letters across the chest were a little faded now. Damn Mylene, always doing his laundry.
          "Ready?"
          He followed Elma out of the house, noting that the big basket she carried was almost as tall as she was, and frowned warily at the strange contraption that could be called a car, if one had a vivid enough imagination and had been raised on some planet other than Earth.
          "Hop in," she called, cranking the engine, and he seated himself gingerly on the seat next to her. The thing rattled a little bit, clanked, and then chugged off down the road.
          "You sure this is safe?" he said above the huffing of the engine. "It seems rather fragile to me."
          She made a noise of incredulity. "You flew a Valkyrie, and you're afraid of my car?"
          "My Fire Valkyrie," Basara said with great dignity, "is a state of the art custom model. It's-" he stopped.
          He'd come to Zola in his Valkyrie, parked it under a clump of trees before getting out to explore. Then he'd wandered off…been involved in that incident at the dock…Elma had found him…
          Shit.
          "Elma, do you know what happened to my Valkyrie?"
          She stared at him with big eyes, somehow managing to keep the car from overturning into a ditch at the same time. "How should I know? You're the one who flew it here."
          "Shit," he said. "Shit. Shit."
          She blinked. Then, "Oh."
          "Yeah, 'oh' would be about right. I landed it about a half an hour walk from that dock, the one where you picked me up after the gunfight, whatever that was. Would there be any chance of me getting it back, since it's probably been there for however long I've been laying injured in your house?"
          He was hoping she would laugh and tell him not to worry, that nothing ever happened there and that his Valkyrie would be as safe as if it was parked in her backyard. But instead she chewed on her lip for a second, and then stared at him. "Er," she said. "I can't guarantee it'll be there anymore."
          "I thought as much," he said grimly. "Let me guess, those people who started that gunfight like to steal things."
          "Er," she said again, and he sighed explosively, slid down in the seat until he was staring at the ceiling. Life was just not fair.
          "Never mind," he muttered. "Just…argh."
          "They're poachers," Elma said. The car jumped over a particularly large rock, and Basara found himself bounced up in the air, landing with a hard thud back onto the seat. "You should wear a seatbelt," she continued, as if poachers and seatbelts were part of the same topic.
          "Don't tell me what to do," he said, but his heart wasn't in it. His Fire Valkyrie, abandoned, perhaps stolen. He wanted to believe that nothing had happened to it, but those guys on the docks hadn't looked like happy people, and who knew what they would be up to? They probably had spies.
          He had been careless. How could he have been so careless? It was not like him, not with matters as important as the ship which had been his lifeblood and had carried him through so much.
          "Basara?"
          Her comment finally pierced its way into his head, and he sat straight up in his seat, staring at her. "Poachers?" Connecting that with something else. "You mean, whale poachers?"
          "You're smart!" she said admiringly, and he rolled his eyes.
          "Great. I come all the way out here to a foreign planet to be admired by a five-year old."
          "I'm nine," Elma informed him haughtily. "And age isn't a big factor on Zola. I can drive, see."
          The car bounced over another rock and the windows rattled, the seats shook, and he watched Elma wrestle with the wheel and finally bring the thing back under control. "In a manner of speaking," he said. "Yes, you can drive. What would poachers want a Valk-"
          She went up in the Valkyrie, I guess. She loved the whales. It was the whale migration, and she wanted to fly with them.
          Whales. Space whales.
          "Shit," he said again, grabbing her arm with one hand. She yelped and barely managed to keep the car from spinning to the side of the road, but he hardly noticed. "Elma. The poachers. They hunt whales."
          "Father tries to stop them," she said in a low voice, "when he goes up there. But of course he doesn't try and stop them because he loves the whales. He just doesn't want them to kill the whales first." Her fingers tightened on the wheel. "We all hate the poachers, but they've been around. They won't go away. The police are trying to get rid of them, but they keep coming back."
          Basara gritted his teeth. "You've got to help me get my Valkyrie back. I can't let people like that have it–"
          "Ow," she complained, and he realized he was shaking her. He let go of her arm with numb fingers, feeling something rather like desperation settle over him at the thought of having poachers flying his aircraft. His Valkyrie was a musical instrument, not a killing machine.
          "Please, Elma," he said quietly, and she must have heard the pleading in his voice, because when he looked up again, she was gazing at him with something akin to worry.
          "I'm not sure how much I can help," she said slowly. "But I know some people. And they know some other people. And, well, they can find out if your Valkyrie is still there. And then I guess we'll see. My sister's got connections too, but…"
          "It's ok," he said, suddenly realizing that she really was just a child, nine years old, living by herself with a father that loved killing more than he loved her, with a sister who no longer considered herself one, and with her dead mother nothing more than a memory. That she had handled far graver situations than a simple matter of finding a lost Veritech fighter, and he had been unkind.
          "I'm sorry," he said quietly. He wondered what Mylene would say if she knew he was apologizing like this. Probably wouldn't believe it, even if he swore he meant it.
          Or maybe she would.
          "It's all right," Elma said. "Don't worry, Basara. Let me ask around and see what I can find."

UN Spacy High Command Fleet Satellite, Earth Orbit

          "Sir, the status for all our aircraft has come in for the day. General Grayson has promised a full report by the end of the week on stats and numbers, but for now, this is all we have. I've sent you the full document, if you would like to take a look."
          "Thank you," Britai said gravely, and the hologram of his executive officer, blond and blue-eyed and very, very human, saluted crisply.
          "If that's all, sir?"
          "That will be all for right now," Britai told him absently. "When Colonel Ekustka gets back from Mars, give me a call and let me know. He should be in by tonight."
          "Yes, sir." The hologram swirled and vanished with a popping noise, and Britai slowly got up from his chair, pacing over to the window. The usual spectacular view of stars and the moon and the shipyards was simply faintly annoying today for some reason, and he sighed, turned his back and leaned against the reinforced steel of the long pillars stretching between the sheets of viewport glass. Maybe it was because that particular shipyard should have been bustling with the business of a shipyard in full production, turning out VF-19s with precision. But as of right now, there were a few sad formations of VF-11s patrolling the perimeter and not much else. The great metal shops were nearly empty, the fires gone out, the hangars gathering dust.
          No money, the UN had told Britai the last time he had asked. We would like to see the VF-19 phased in by next year, and we appreciate your effort in trying to spearhead the project. However, we have reevaluated our budget for 2052, and we simply cannot give the UN Spacy the funds that you have asked for.
          So basically, Britai had said, trying to keep his temper in check and afraid he would fail, because he was a Zentradi and no matter how hard he tried to get used to human customs, sometimes he would slip, you mean that there will be production cuts for everything else. And no VF-19s.
          And the UN representative had looked at him and said, Perhaps next year, sir.
          It had never been mentioned out loud, but everyone in command staff knew that this was simply the latest punishment handed down by the UN council on the Spacy's failure to prevent the use of reaction weaponry. Never mind that they had had no effect on the Protodeviln, never mind that a million reaction weapons could not have won the war for them. Never mind the fact that Colonel Cleric, the man responsible, had already been punished four times over for his mistake and that it would never happen again.
          Disobeying orders was disobeying orders. Britai had escaped the full wrath of the investigative board, but a few others had not escaped so luckily, and the entire UN Spacy was going to suffer for one man's mistake.
          The VF-19 production was simply a side effect of that. If it had been left up entirely to him, Britai would have had no problem keeping the VF-11s on station, in the fleet. The VF-11 was a hardy craft, capable, sturdy, dependable. They didn't have the flashiness and the stealth capabilities of the VF-19, but against an enemy like the Protodeviln, the VF-19s were not much better than the VF-11 in the end. But the UN Spacy had a deal with Shinsei Galaxy, and quotas had to be met.
          At least, that was until they ran out of money.
          General Grayson had complained. He had requested permission to complain to the Defense Council, and then when Britai had refused, he had requested permission to complain to the General UN Assembly, and then when Britai had refused again, he had proceeded to sulk. A three-star general sulking was not a pleasant sight, and Britai had in effect told Grayson to suck it up or face the consequences.
          The VF-19s had been Grayson's pet project, his point of contention during the Project SuperNova against opponents who had advocated the brainwave-controlled YF-21 and then the pilotless Ghost X fighter. He'd almost lost to General Gomez and the X, had been so close to having all the fruits of his labor go down the drain, and so when he had finally sealed the contract with Shinsei Industries, he had proceeded to roll out all the funds, leaving none for backup.
          That had become a problem shortly after the UN's announcement that defense was getting little to no budget for the year, because when Britai sat down with Finance to review their remaining funds, they discovered that much of their reserve cash had been gobbled up by Grayson's enthusiastic VF-19 manufacturing, and they barely had enough left to keep the military running.
          That meant more than just no air conditioning for the rest of the year. That meant no more VF production until further notice, and Britai did not like that at all.
          This game of Russian Roulette was getting old, and sooner or later, someone was going to point the bullet at the wrong person's head and pull the trigger. The UN thought they did not need more spacecraft. Britai would prove them wrong if he could, but he had no data to back that up, no concrete numbers, nothing but an itch down his spine that he had felt many times when he had been the Bodolzaa fleet's highest ranking commander, an itch that meant something was coming.
          The UN, unfortunately, did not take "spinal itch" on its list of reasons to consider a redistribution of budget funds.
          The hallway outside his office was dark and very warm, and he made his way down it by what seemed like the light of the stars and the moon outside, though of course that was pure illusion because there were tiny lights set in the ceiling, so dim that they could barely be seen, illuminating the corridor with an almost incandescent glow.
          The Headquarters café was deserted too, though it was mid-afternoon and there should have been at least one or two officers in here getting their afternoon coffee. Even after all these years, Britai did not care for coffee, but he had discovered a few years ago that he had an incurable weakness for chocolate sponge cake, and there was always fresh chocolate sponge cake in the bakery at this time of the day.
          "Good afternoon, Admiral."
          He stepped back smoothly from the counter, placing the plastic cover back on the cake tray before turning around, though he already knew who it was that stood there behind him at a carefully respectful distance, a polite smile on his face, with a soda in one hand and candy bar in the other.
          "Good afternoon to you, Major Konda."
          Konda hadn't aged much either over the past almost forty years. There were a few wrinkles on his face and his hair had turned gray, a sign of aging that seemed to be more prevalent among Zentradi who had been exposed more than once to micronization and then subsequent macronization, and Konda, being one of the original spies aboard the Macross, had willingly subjected himself to that maybe one too many times. There did not seem to be too many other side effects to the process, though, and Konda himself had participated in a study ten years ago concerning the topic, a study which concluded that available data was too sparse at this time to provide conclusive evidence one way or another on micro and macronization.
          Britai hadn't had much contact with Konda in the years following the war, as the former spy and his two counterparts had seemed to want to strike out on their own. It was only after the launching of the Megaroad-01 and the departure of Lynn Minmay that he had received a phone call, saying someone by the name of Konda wanted to see him. Does he know you, sir? He seems quite convinced that he does.
          He hadn't quite known what to do with the eager young Zentradi who had seemed to find his way back into the military by either fate or luck, who stood nervously on the carpet of his office and said, I don't know what I can do, sir, and I know I've been out of the military for years, but I want to help.
          And then Max Jenius had said, Project M could use a hand.
          Konda and the whole Project M department had been beside themselves with delight when the first reports from the Macross 7 had begun to come back, reports full of weird garbled characters which apparently made sense to no one but the Project M team, and had apparently been the key to saving the galaxy. The team, once ridiculed behind closed doors and sneered at by military traditionalists and Minmay nonbelievers, was making a name of their own now, and Britai was glad. Konda had worked long and he had worked hard, and hopefully, some good would come of all this.
          "I hear the UN is really ripping our throats out," Konda commented, gesturing out the window, and Britai realize that one could see the empty spaceyard from here too. He mentally made a note to have a window shade ordered before realizing that lack of funds meant that all mission-unnecessary items be cut, and window shades were definitely unnecessary.
          "You could put it that way," Britai agreed mildly, chewing a forkful of cake slowly. "I don't doubt though, that your department will find some way to squeeze by."
          Konda laughed. "Project M has never gotten much funding anyway. If not for Max Jenius, I think we would have been sunk into the ground years ago."
          Britai allowed a corner of his mouth to turn up slightly. "Maximillian Jenius is one of the few humans I truly admire," he said. "Perhaps we should write to him about this lack of funding and see what our genius has to say about the topic."
          "I don't doubt this will be all over the SpacyNet soon enough, sir," Konda said. "He'll probably have a few choice words about the matter, if I know Max. He wasn't too happy last week, as a matter of fact, when the results of that explosion at the Protoculture dig came out on the Galaxy Network."
          "Protoculture dig?"
          "The one on Varauta, sir," Konda said. "I believe we mentioned it to you three weeks ago at the staff meeting, but you've been busy hacking at the UN's necks, so I haven't brought it up since."
          Britai remembered vaguely what Konda was talking about – an archaeological find, something about Protoculture ruins. "It exploded?"
          Konda scratched his head. "No one really knows what happened. There's rumors, but I haven't found anything concrete, and before we could get our hands on the data, the Varautan tabloids got ahold of it, and you know what that means."
          "What does that mean?"
          "That means the Galaxy Network tabloids get their dirty hands all over it and blow it out of proportion. Next thing you know, they'll have stories floating around of aliens attacking Earth."
          "Not like that's ever happened before," Britai quipped, and Konda snorted.
          "Your sense of sarcasm, sir," he said, "is getting worse and worse every year you spend around these human types."
          "I try," Britai said, finishing his cake. "So this Protoculture dig. It's on hold?"
          Konda frowned. "I'm not sure, sir. I can get back to you on that if you really want to know. We've been calling Varauta, trying to get in touch with someone at the research center, but the people at UN Spacy command there apparently either don't want us to know what's going on, or they don't want to deal with it themselves, because we have been coming away empty-handed for the past week since it happened."
          Britai drummed his fingers against the countertop. "Varautan command. There's someone we have there who is quite good, isn't there? His name escapes my memory at the moment, but I specifically remember nominating this person because he'd done something extraordinary." He shook his head. "I am getting quite forgetful in my old age."
          "You mean Isamu Dyson, sir?"
          Isamu Dyson. Of course. Project SuperNova, Eden, the VF-19. "Sharon Apple," he murmured, and Konda looked at him oddly.
          "What was that, sir?"
          Britai shook his head. "Nothing. See if you can't get Dyson on the project. He'll get answers."
          "I'll try, sir. But I don't guarantee we'll get through even if we ask for him in your name." He sighed. "Seems like nothing is going right, no matter how hard we try."
          "And so the universe moves," Britai said quietly, tracing patterns on the window glass with one fingertip. "And so even the race of humans and Zentradi will come to an end."
          Konda looked alarmed. "Don't say that, sir!"
          "It was a figure of speech only," Britai said, allowing himself another small smile. "Culture, in the end, is quite useful for a number of things."
          Konda didn't look at him, looked down at the can of soda in his big hands instead, then out at the deserted spacedocks, eyes fixed on one of the VF-11 patrols that glided silently through the nothingness that was space, on patrol for an enemy that was not there.
          "There's something coming. Isn't there?"
          "You feel it too?" Britai asked, not surprised at all, and Konda's hands clenched on the aluminum can. It made a crinkling sound as its sides caved in slightly, loud and brittle in the silence.
          "I wouldn't be Zentradi if I didn't feel it, sir."
          "There are Zentradi on the UN Council," Britai said. "And yet they do not feel it, or pretend that they do not. It is a very unforgiving thing, power. It does not take like it gives, and I hope in the end that it does not take everything away that we have worked so hard to build."
          "There's still Project M-" Konda began, and Britai shook his head.
          "There is Project M, but things like Project M require a belief in something stronger than guns and starships and reaction weapons." He laughed softly. "Lynn Minmay has not even been gone from this solar system fifty years, and already her memory fades."
          "Not completely, sir. Not yet."
          He moved his hand from the glass, dropping his plate and fork into the trash bin beside the table, turning to go.
          "Not yet," he said. "But if people are so intent on forgetting, no one, not even Project M, can stop that."

Unexplored Territories, Quadrant 9, Macross 7 Fleet, City 7

          Mylene had come home the week before she was scheduled to leave for Varauta, taking a break from school to relax and to pack and to say goodbye to friends yet again, except this time it was going to be a longer goodbye because she would be gone for four months.
          Milia had raised an eyebrow when her daughter had walked into her office looking a little shy and ill at ease, with her pink hair that had used to be waist-length now swinging just a little below her shoulders, wearing a baseball cap and a t-shirt and wondering if she could use the phone.
          "This is an office, Mylene," she had said, "Not a dorm room. And you have a phone."
          "I used up my cell phone minutes," Mylene had said, a little self-righteously like she always sounded when she knew she was wrong and was trying to get out of something, and Milia had sighed.
          "And whose fault is that?"
          In the end, Mylene won, because Mylene was her youngest daughter and so far away from home now, even in the same fleet, and Milia knew it was only a matter of time before Mylene moved on like the other six girls had done before her and left her parents behind. It would be very lonely when it was just her and Max, and not even really her and Max, because he had his life on Battle 7 and she had her duties here in the City, and even though it was her last term as mayor, she could not imagine moving to the flagship to live out the rest of her days as the commander's wife.
          Max knew that. Max was fine with it, but that was because he was Max, and he hardly ever said no.
          Mylene had stayed the week at the governor's mansion, using one of the guest rooms upstairs on the third floor, and Milia found it odd to have her daughter close by her, if only because Mylene had moved out on her own so early in life that it was now a little uncomfortable to be in such close proximity with her for long periods of time, if only to see each other for dinner every day.
           "Remember to pack enough sets of underwear," she'd told Mylene, above the music blasting from her daughter's stereo system. It was so loud that she could hear it from her bedroom on the second floor, one floor down. If we get the transient facts, then we'll feel the info high…the info high…the info high... "And a toothbrush. And deodorant!"
          "For goodness sakes, Mother," Mylene had said finally. "I'm nineteen years old. I know how to pack my own suitcase!" But there was not as much sting in her voice as there had been a few years ago, and she'd looked up after her outburst and given Milia an apologetic smile. "Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude or anything."
          "It's all right," Milia said, a little stunned, and Mylene had laughed and said she had had enough packing for the night, and they had spent the rest of the night sitting on the couch, drinking hot chocolate, and watching old B rated English holoflicks dubbed into Japanese.
          The last night before Mylene left, Max came over from Battle 7 and they had a nice dinner together as a family, even odder because it was the first nice dinner as a family that they had had since Mylene had been about four years old. It was a quiet affair, and Max and Mylene had behaved, and Milia had mostly behaved as well, though there was a slight spat about the way the City 7 Defense Fleet was using their airspace before Mylene had intervened and said please could they not talk about politics at dinner.
          And now Mylene was gone.
          It was not gone for good; she would be back to the Macross 7, of course, and the dig was only a summer long. But watching that shuttle take off, disappearing into a twinkle of starlight in the distance, Milia had felt something else shatter, another little bit of herself leaving her. She was used to it now, something she had gradually grown used to ever since her early days aboard the Lap'Lamiz fleet, though she hadn't known what that empty feeling was whenever one of her comrades would fall in battle.
          There were so many people gone, now. Lap'Lamiz, commander and almost friend, who should have survived but chose to go out in a blaze of glory. Her daughters, with lives of their own. Max, though he did not know it yet, or at least would not accept that their paths had diverged years ago. Gamlin Kizaki, the man who she had seen grow from gawky teen under her guidance to headstrong Diamond Force commander to cool and confident fleet commander who no longer needed her. And now Mylene.
          Milia wished sometimes she could be like Nekki Basara, haring off on an adventure around the galaxy on a whim, a moment's notice, responsible to no one and answering to no authority. She had been like that, once, but that had been fifty years ago, and she was a Zentradi woman, static in the middle of the human universe, while everyone around her grew old.
          That would happen to Max, too, someday.
          The galaxy was wide and vast and so unexplored, but it was no longer for people like her. Max had accepted that fact decades ago, but Milia could not. It was her undoing, she supposed, her weakness, but she did not think she could survive knowing that all that was left for her too was to grow old in the cocoon she had created for herself aboard this ship, that that was the way things were, because she had left behind too many pieces of herself in too many different places, and she had to believe that there was a way to get them all back.

          There was the sound of chanting.
          There was the sound of a heartbeat in her ears, a single pulse, beating, breathing, in, out.
          There was darkness.
          She rose and fell with the current, feeling the tide pull her through waves of sound like the electrolyte currents of Sharon's machine, the machine that had made her something more than human and yet something less than a god, bending, changing, warping consciousness into something too vast to be named.
          She could not say exactly what it was that kept her moving, the inexplicable current that swept her along, only that it was like drowning in a sea of pure mad sound, because there was the weirdly thin wailing that tore at her ears and her lungs and her mind above the sound of her beating heart. It echoed strangely, as if bouncing off walls she could not see, a tune that she could not name but yet was so familiar that she knew she had heard it before.
          Somewhere.
          There was the sound of breathing in the darkness, the steady pulse of life.
          There was the voice, the voice with no name, a voice which shied away from her as she reached out for it, gently drawing her forward, saying, not yet, not yet, and at the same time, follow me.
          She followed. What else could she do?
          And then there was no longer darkness, but a clear silver light that was a beacon, and in the light she could see a throne, and on the throne there was the figure of a woman, and the woman was singing.
          There was the sound of chanting.

 
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