Macross Fan Fiction ❯ Firewall ❯ Prologue

[The Invid] pose a clear and present danger to the Earth in particular and the galaxy as a whole. The entire Hive may consider my statement as official as any formal declaration of war. 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.

* * *

Cislunar Orbit, 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 Karbie Tempests heading zero-something-or-other-yadda-yadda magnetic over Gestalt -- just about thirty above the equator. And this guy..." Reika 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 -- y'know, same place as Reggie's Spot -- and trails behind 'em for eight minutes. Then, everybody hears this fucking missile tone rip over the tac-net. Those Karbie bastards fell right out of formation and damn near vectored into their Fleabag. When we got back -- Lord, if you'd seen the Bossman's face -- I thought he was gonna drum our asses right outta the Navy!"

Reika Yumashita grinned broadly and paused, taking in the attention before continuing to further harangue the crowd with more embarrassing tales of her spit-shine, coffee-colored, baby-faced operations officer -- Marcus Keynes, Lieutenant Junior Grade.

The officer's mess was remarkably empty tonight, with probably less than half of its usual occupancy around this fairly busy evening time. For the most part, people were attending division and department parties in smaller facilities. Expeditionary Aviation stuffed a leaner, skeleton Reserve Carrier Air Wing Fifteen onboard a one-hundred-fifty meter claptrap originally designed to support a ten-plane deployment. Since then, the irate and cramped pilots of Strike Fighter Squadrons Four-Three-Seven and One-Two-Two had taken the mess hostage, much to the annoyance of their hosts. 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 Reika gleefully ripped on her friend and wingmate. Others simply smiled in amusement, and still more enjoyed Reika'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 Reika 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 fuckin' fleet up in my business!

Reika blabbered on: "Yo, but get this shit. The Man works the Board over so well they slap us with just fifteen days of the Usual Flavor. Fifteen days, damn it; no work, just sleepin' and eatin' for free! We coulda licked nuts from here to Karbarra and still end up getting drummed outta the Navy. But then Commander -- er...Captain...er...whatever. Bossman Riccardi really went to bat for us. Hell, if it hadn't been for the Sandstorm Fleet-Ex coming up, we'd've ended up ferrying Peryton rum-crates from Jirai to Haydon IV."

Whipping in her stool towards the viewport, Reika guessingly wagged an unsteady finger in the general direction she thought lay the Trianguli cluster -- not that she could point it out amongst the diamond like pinpricks of the utterly alien celestial-scape. Most of the officers here felt at least some urge to return to the protective berth of Tirol's gas giant host, Fantoma, or the more familiar worlds of the now-defunct empire of the Robotech Masters. Even Marcus yearned a little for the warm summers and the moderate winters of Alpha-1 3 A, or just Ashel for short, a small, unassuming yet highly unlikely Earth-like planet with an even more unlikely orbit through the Acrux binary star system. The blue-white marble the fleet now was creeping up on just didn't elicit any sense of familiarity or longing within Marcus. Instead, his thoughts longingly rereturned the bright, white man-made star, the Nord Space Station, hanging in Ashel's night sky, a lasting testament to the advancement of Terran space engineering. Marcus missed his parents most of all, and sometimes almost regretted volunteering.

Marcus's attention turned back to his squadron CO. Reika slugged down yet another shot of highly illegal d'raa'vele, an A-ruthe'usal colony mix of Terran Scotch and heavily fermented juices. Counting the vodka she had broken out of her private stash earlier that evening, that made what...seven tanks? Marcus, already feeling his buzz subsiding, couldn't remember. Reika was getting close to her carded limit, but Marcus could only watch with mild embarrassment as his squadron commander barreled down Administrative Punishment Lane. He talked to the bartender and hour ago and got him to cut her off. Still, as long Reika insisted on telling several more stories (and kept playing coy with the zipper running up and down her tunic's breast) someone would always have a free drink handy.

Reika didn't seem to mind when Marcus suddenly exited the mess. Stepping out into the corridor, he proceeded to the nearest intraship car, tossed his bookbag on the wrap around couch and plopped on the brown, leathery plush seat. Sinking into the soft padding, he took a deep breath and frowned as he recalled the more awkward points of tonight's experience. He seriously hoped that someone of decent character would escort Reika back to Aviation Country and have the heart and dignity not to try anything. His squadron CO tended to get a bit friendly after only two or three shots of cheap spirits. That sort of behavior had gotten her in trouble more than once. Seven shots -- he hoped it was just seven -- of Citron and d'raa'vele...he didn't want to think about it. His mind instinctively switched back to the upcoming mission on Monday, even though thinking about it really didn't help matters all that much.

"Well, we're finally here," Marcus grunted softly as the cab raced pass a long transparency running along the ship's hull. Only three days ago Jupiter's rotund magnificence had dominated the view, but now he could only see a small, white crescent creeping in on itself as the sun set over its shrinking, crater-marked curvature.

Suddenly, the car stopped, just a few decks below and five bulkheads aft of the command sail levels. A couple of bubbly female crewmen -- probably just getting off from Echo shift -- piled in. Removing their grey 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 nearly jumped out of her seat. Nearly dropping her cover, the tallest crewmen turned to her friends, frantically tapping both on their shoulders. They both whipped around and within a split second all three of them were stumbling to something akin to attention. "I'm...well, we're just...sorry, Sir. We just got off -- "

Marcus turned to face the flustered docksman, raising his hand to interrupt. Her long, flowing auburn hair remind him of another face he had left behind. "Don't worry about it, Docksman...er..."

"Benjamin, Sir," she smiled. "Docksman First Class Seylia Benjamin. This is Boatswain Second Florida Peters and Able Astronaut Ruhma Mohta, Sir."

"Just getting off?"

"Uh, yes, Sir. We're heading to the crew party on Deck Five, 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 for them to invite him. The services had relaxed their restrictions on fraternization, but the military culture was slow to change. "Have fun."

The petty officer nodded respectfully and turned back to her girlfriends. Marcus started to look back towards the transparency, but he for some reason he couldn't help but watch the three crewmembers out of the corner of his eye. 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 could call him "seasoned." Docksman Benjamin and her companions probably weren't a day over twenty-two, and that gave Marcus a hefty two years over them in the uniform. The young pilot frowned as morbid thoughts filled his head.

His father had often rambled on about the obscenely youthful age of today's servicemen, recalling a time when children could live normal lives instead of rushing to fill in the perpetual vacancies in military service. Commodore (ret.) Jermaine H. Keynes II had seen a different world than his son, and probably would not live to see that world returned to humanity. The Commodore had watched from space as his family was all but wiped out one fateful day a quarter-century ago. He and his wife had done their best to keep the survivors together, raising four children of whom two had chosen to serve. The oldest had followed his father's career path, taking command of a battlecruiser squadron -- at thirty, the youngest flag officer in the history of the United Earth Forces -- to chase Invid from one end of the galaxy to the other. Marcus's older brother was not here, however, and the young lieutenant felt alone and lost in a part of the galaxy as alien to him as Tirol had been to his parents.

The intraship car stopped at Deck Five. The three crewmen filed out still excited and giggly, leaving Marcus to himself. He muttered something under his breath as the doors closed again and the car continued -- this time uninterrupted -- to its final destination. In the meantime, Marcus studied the ship's schematic embedded on the viewscreen over by the sliding doors. The display showed a ventral and dorsal view in the larger frame on the left and a bow-facing cutaway on the right. UES John S. McCain glowed in brilliant white letters in the lower left-hand corner. For a junior officer like Marcus, the McCain was a choice assignment. Her destroyer hull differed little from the Flight 1 and 2 Arleigh Burke production models. The vessel's guiding lines conformed to the shape of a flattened and stretched measuring plumb. Smooth curves that emanated from the the bow point suddenly cut-off at the engine assembly. The six powerful thrusters provided with enough thrust to redline at one gravity of acceleration. Within the bowels of McCain Engineering lay two exotically shaped toroids. Within the mysterious innards of these machines, high energy field generators coupled with the Reflex furnace and guided by highly precise metrics defined and manipulated by the ship's powerful main computer tapped into the energy of the universe's vacuum flucuations to manipulated space-time. The theoretical physics behind zero-point-energy catalyst engines and gravity drives it still confounded Marcus. The lieutenant knew little of the high physics that governed the their operation. Besides, the only thing he needed to know was that the drive could propel this ship and his air wing across the length of a good sized solar system in twenty hours flat.

Marcus leaned further back into the cushion as the car rounded a the last bend in the track -- he just hit midships and was now running along the ventral hull. Just a few meters below him -- barely visible through the viewport -- lay the destroyer's meson gun. A powerful particle cannon, it could effectively accurately deliver the firepower equivalent of a hundred kilotons of TNT at ranges of up to five hundred thousand kilometers. Marcus peered at the distant bubbles lining the gun's contours, straining to see the small, black silohuettes working late 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 him and whatever awaited him on the mysterious planet below.

He had been in-system for barely a week, yet tonight he felt as if time were about to stand still. It was almost unbelievable -- hell, it's fucking historic. The flagships of the main task group, the Lee Teng-Hui and the Ronald Reagan, were making their exit burns out of Jupiter orbit. Once clear of Jupiter's immense gravitational field and confident nobody was watching, they'd jump to hyperspace and meet the Scout Group in Earth orbit. Marcus wondered how anyone could think about concealing a Churchill-class battlecruiser. Both the Reagan and the Lee mounted four massive reaction-mass thrusters, ejecting cheaply-engineered diamond composites superheated by two massive Reflex fusion furnaces. Unlike his new home, those colossal mainstays of the task force's line of battle used anti-gravity pods to accelerate their thruster's ejecta. From what datasheets he could decipher, the Lee and the Reagan could easily outrun anything in the Fleet. Of course, the Flag was patient enough to trudge along side the slower, older destroyers, frigates and Horizont assault shuttles making up her thick, protective screen. The main battlegroup would continue to maintain lightspeed contact with the McCain and the scout group, arriving only when the scout group's senior CO decided the coast was clear. "The sooner the better" had become the McCain's unofficial mantra.

The car came to a halt in Aviator Country. Marcus stood up, collected his bag and stoop up. Squeezing through the flow of passengers into the shuttle, he finally stepped onto the receiving platform. Just then, someone tapped him on the shoulder.

"Evenin', Keynes."

Cocking his head violently upward, Marcus quickly connected the voice with the squadron supply officer for SVFA-437.

"Monica? Er...Lieutenant?" he bumbled about. "I thought you were still on duty?"

"Don't sweat it, Marc. Echo shift ended ten minutes ago. It's 0400, closing time. How's your division?"

"Still have to fine tune the targeting package for some of the mid-rangers. We had to start all over again."

"Damn," Marcus acknowledged sympathetically. The squadron supply officer nominally ran the "pit crews" and had the final say on who's bird was combat ready or not. An evil thought sent chills down Marcus' spine as he recalled the recent chewing out his leading petty officer had to give to a none-to-attentive electrical technician the McCain had lent his crew. Marcus 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?"

"We had a lot of paperwork tonight, so Chief Donaghey 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."

"Aight." Marcus shifted the bookbag up onto his left shoulder when his line of sight suddenly latched onto the garden under the observatory.

"Say, whatcha up to right now?"

"Well, I was about ready to hit the rack. You?"

"Thought I'd hit the observatory. I'd love some company."

"Sounds like a plan. Earth's in the sky tonight, right?"

"I think so, but I don't really care. I just want to relax. You comin'?"

"Sure, why not," Monica nodded, but then a nasty grin twisted on her face right before she let loose a playful blow on Marcus' shoulder, "but keep your hands to yourself, sonny."

"Who, me?" Marcus protested. "C'mon, Ma'am. I get more than enough play to keep my mind off fraternizing with a senior officer."

"Uh huh, tell that to Bunkie," Monica sneered, making young Marcus Keynes genuinely blush. Truth was that he hadn't had any since the McCain left Jupiter Base five weeks ago, a story his bunkmate, Teddy Bunkett, apparently had been kind enough to spread around his back. Man, if Reika 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 sexual prowess or someone else's lack thereof. When it came to the latter, Reika, especially after a few drinks, wasn't afraid to rain on your parade no matter how many people were around.

"Hah! Now what? Bunkie can't even get his right hand in bed," Too little, too late.

"You're one to talk, or so I hear," Monica. "C'mon, Keynes. I do need to get some sacktime before tomorrow.

And with that, the two strolled the last five meters together towards the Officer's Observatory. They took their seat in a comfortable couch close to the main transparency, just out of reach of some of the more annoyingly overgrown ferns. For the first few minutes, they just kept to themselves, Marcus staring out the transparency at the glowing blue crescent filtering in from the port side and Monica lying back with her eyes closed, as she was about to fall --

"What's on your mind, Marc?" Monica broke the silence.

"Huh?" Her real voice broke Marcus' seemingly empty gaze. "Uh, I was just thinking about how I used to globe-watch back home all the time. I never really liked it. Nothing really interesting about it. It's just kinda funny that I'm able to zone out just looking at something so...well, boring."

"Oh. Why'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. Wanna switch jobs?"

"Funny," Marcus smiled, meeting 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. You know, they say if you looked at Tirol from space, even when we were kicking the Invid off of her, she looked dead quiet. Optera, too. I didn't think they meant boring."

Marcus looked back out the window. "Ah hell. Shit won't look too peaceful come Monday."

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

"Whaddya mean if we win?" Marcus looked at the planet hovering "above" him. It didn't look terribly impressive. Not at all threatening. Still, what Monica had just said did make the view appear a little bit more eery-looking.

"I don't know," Monica said softly as she turned her head away. "This just doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like just another slug hunt. There's something really messed up about this one."

"Still believe in Santa Claus?" Marcus remarked. Santa Claus was the Fleet nickname for the Regis, who was likewise widely believed to be the stuff of urban legends and space stories designed to scare children and silly adults.

"You're funny, kid," Monica smirked. "C'mon, don't tell me you've stopped believin' in Christmas!"

Marcus chuckled weakly. In all honesty, he too felt uneasy about the upcoming mission. Nobody expected the thousands of young men and women committed to Operation Sparta to feel otherwise at ease, not on the eve of something as important as this -- something unlike anything many that had come this far had ever experienced. He waited in silence for the calm, uninteresting face of his father's birth world to pass out of sight. It would look just as peaceful and quiet as it did in the pictures, of that he was sure. It would be tomorrow's violent interruptions of the empty vacuum that would strike him with fear of the other.

Still, he consoled what anxiety his training hadn't suppressed by holding up that which he knew was fantasy against what the Fleet knew was real. Marcus didn't believe in God, ghosts, or Santa Claus. He sure as hell didn't believe in any mythical Queen Slug. Intel had good, solid information this time. The Captain had said so. His Squadron CO told him and every other officer and enlisted man in the squadron during this past afternoon's situation briefing. The Admiral on the Lee had said so over the task force radio. The Mars Division was ready for anything. Come Monday, they'd kick the Invid off this world, just as the Expeditionary Forces had done on countless others. They would prevail. They would win -- of that Marcus was sure.

For Monica, it was a different story Marcus could see that she did not share his confidence. Not that it mattered -- everybody had doubts from time to time. The largest Invid occupation force since Peryton lay some five-hundred thousand kilometers away. Naturally even the best of them sometimes got pre-op jitters, even a certifiably passionless stoic like Monica Lee. The spread of sunlight over the Earth's western horizon finally widened enough for Marcus to make out some of the planet's continents. It was a peaceful place. Come Monday, they'd make it an even better place.

It'd be over tomorrow. No surprises. Clockwork.

* * *

The Ohio Valley, Earth

Some time ago, too distant in the past for the short memory of that generation brought up under Occupation, space had brimmed with electromagnetic activity as trillions of man-made signals of all wavelengths shot out from the surface of a small, trifling blue-white world somewhere in the interior swing of the Orion Arm. For most of Earth's history, only cosmic rays bouncing off the atmosphere beams of solar radiation, reflected by the crust, and a few naturally occurring wavelengths in between littered the local vacuum. Then, just over a century-and-a-half ago, am sudden explosion of radio activity suddenly filled the void with barely coherent noise. After a few decades, millions on millions of radio waves, microwaves, light beams, and even a x-rays and some gamma radiation fled from the surface into deep space. It wasn't too long before small, man-made satellites would contribute to the radiating energy that Earth had become.

Had man known the consequences of radiating his position to the galaxy at large, perhaps he would have been content to remain an isolated species. However, hindsight was a luxury. Many young species had taken that route, only to meet up with extermination or subjugation at the hands of some brutal expansion. Others escaped total destruction, struggling to rebuild from the ashes.

In 2034, there was only silence.

Actually, a lot of radio activity still churned in Earth's ionosphere, degrading into noise as the months grew into years. The few transmissions that radiated out of the atmosphere were so severely corrupted and suppressed by Slug jammers that no radio telescope could possibly pick it out against the background noise. Still, the volume of RF traffic had decreased appreciably over the past three years, and most orbital satellites had either been destroyed or already cycled through their power cells and began life anew as space junk. Anyone looking down at the blue world, would see a serene calm absent for nearly two centuries.

Isolation -- the Slugs had learned that lesson of empire-building very well. Despite their vast inexperience in occupying foreign worlds, the Slug royals at least understood that star nations could not coordinate without elaborate lines of communication, the Slugs worked tirelessly to interdict that crucial element of any functioning state and fighting force. Humanity, weakened and weary, survived to see the war against the Slugs took a horribly ironic turn. A society known for its guerilla war against the Fourth Quadrant's most powerful empire just to survive had now taken on the role of conqueror and imperialist. Earth and her native children had become the sick punch-line of a cosmically disturbing joke.

The irony continued. Ten years had passed since United Earth 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 Robotech 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 against Slug-occupied worlds on the coreward half of the Sagittarius Arm's inner rim.

And Earth paid an immense price for their complacency.

United Earth depleted its Home Fleet in a massive effort to save Earth from a second Tirolian attack. The spread of the Flower across the Great Lakes attracted an Slug sensor nebula that had hugged Robotech Master's trail all the way back to Earth. Not long after, the Slug Queen had spun together the survivors of her race into a quilt she then tossed over Earth. When they attacked, Earth;s world government had no more strength or resolve to fight. Within two years, the Collective's new empire had stretched across North America, Europe and Asia threatened to pour into the Southern Hemisphere. No longer did the Slugs run a scrappy, would-be empire lunging after the remains of a dying Empire. No longer did their race lay on the verge of extinction, risking Pyrrhic victories for the substance of the Flower. Now the Slugs had emerged from the shadow of the Robotech Masters as the chief threat to human existence. In time, a new word -- one few words to escape the well-secured confines of the Robotech Masters; secret language -- gripped the attention of the newspapers and broadcasters, and eventually was ingrained in humanity's collective memory: Invid.

Eventually, all news from Earth ceased. There were no warning signs; no newspaper story or television update recorded the final hours of human freedom when the Invid knocked down that last institution of human self-determination -- the free press. Some escaped behind the Earth forces lines on planet and in space to deliver what information they could to the Resistance, but it was never enough. All the UEF could do was watch helplessly as their inadequate intelligence collection systems collapsed throughout the northern hemisphere. It took time, but the panic that had settled over human settlements spread throughout the galaxy finally calmed down, and in the last months of 2031 the exiled government called upon the Human Diaspora to ready for war once again. And once again, humanity rallied around such familiar names as Hayes-Hunter and Reinhardt. They forgot about the UEG's failure to protect and defend Earth from alien invaders. They sought out their allies, ignoring Karbarran intrigues aimed at securing the strong-armed, galactic influence they once exercised. They lost interest in the UEF's petty schisms, forgetting how they once almost tore the Expeditionary Force apart. Instead, free humanity stood behind their leaders as they took up the task of rebuilding their military might.

Mankind answered the UEF's call in droves, swelling the military's ranks to the point where the War Cabinet could claim to have put a million more astronauts, soldiers, marines, and airmen in uniform. Weapons production soared, with dozens of heavy cruiser battlegroups roaming the Fourth Quadrant and securing far-flung sectors of the galaxy from the lingering Invid threat. 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 half capacity, Now, the satellite's slips would belt out new superdimensional fortresses, the largest of human design yet. Back on Earth, the vigilant Resistance on Earth, rallying about the most secure advanced attack bases in the South, worked tirelessly to hold the line against Invid expansion. When they could, the Earth-bound forces shuttled valuable intelligence through the UEF's back to the space-side, forward operating bases on the Moon and Mars. When the time came, those who'd fought the enemy for every inc -- from the Rio Grande to Macapá and gained the most experience killing Slugs -- would lead the final assault on Reflex Point -- the Invid Royal Hive on Earth.

In early March of 2034, the Mars Division of the Robotech Expeditionary Forces left from its secret rally point near Acrux, the southernmost member of the Southern Cross constellation and merely two hundred lightyears (less than a week's journey) away. They arrived in system with the exuberance of conquerors who had just returned home after an extended campaign, and not even the silence of humanity through this part of space could muffle their triumphalism. They had beaten the Slugs throughout the farthest reaches of the galaxy.

Why should this time be any different?

* * *

All the better then that it should be too late for Man before he discovers out how utterly wrong he is.

With a new threat to the Collective's new found power looming nearby, the Queen Mother of the Invid took heed of it and from deep in her Home Hive, she telepathically alerted her entire race to the disturbing presence of the Enemy -- a threat cast in the Shadow of the Masters. It was an arrogant, but expected and even necessary view of her enemy. She'd learned not to overlook any threat, no matter how seemingly subtle, so long as it posed even the most remote possibility of danger. Her fear was not without reason. After all, the humans had learned and accomplished much since Zor's curse landed on their planet.

Well, so had the Collective. With that last thought, her mind reached out to them all.

My children...

* * *