ZOIDS: WHITE SHADOW


PROLOGUE:

THE GAME


CENTRAL CITY PLAZA, LIBERTY CITY
THE GAME: T Minus 00:00:02:23

The Great Ultrasaurus stood above Liberty City, as proud sentinel keeping guard, a loving father looking after its children; the buildings that stood all around in a five hundred kilometre radius.

It stood in the heart of Liberty City, in the centre of the city plaza, a clear circle of concrete, studded with statues of heroes from the Great War, the symbol of Zoid Battle Commission power.

The morning was calm, the sky clear and blue, the sun beating down on the plaza, and the marketplaces that were just beginning to open for day's trading. The Ultrasaurus' silver metallic skin glinted in the sunlight, representing to all sixty-seven million of the city's population the strength and power of the ZBC; it invaded their lives, it provided their food, their water, their entertainment, their health care.

Liberty City would be the first place where this domination would be challenged.

Challenged for the first time since the End of the Great War, and the subsequent Reconstruction. The ZBC had said that the Reconstruction was just to get Zi back on track, the largest and most expensive civil engineering project of all time.

Indeed, this had been only a secondary goal of the Zoid Battle Commission Reconstruction and Rebuilding Front. The first had been to establish unquestioned, and unquestionable, domination over the vast areas devastated by the War. They had suppressed freedoms, crushed all opposition, and herded their citizens into massive walled cities such as Liberty.

Zoids had become heavily controlled, either operated only by the ZBC, their approved Zoid Battle Teams, and the many underground groups that had sprung up.

These underground groups had tried for years, decades, to overthrow the dictators that had installed themselves aboard the space station high above Commission City, the capital of the ZBC's new empire. Each and every one had been wiped out. Destroyed. Their members were arrested, tortured, executed, and their families were packed off, never to be seen again, while their Zoids were confiscated, and their bodies were interred within them in massive vaults beneath Commission City, toured by millions of students every year who were indoctrinated in how brilliant, how munificent, how benevolent the ZBC were.

Today, the True Revolution would begin.

It would be lead by one man, easier to hide than an army.

It would start when a tent in the marketplace of Liberty City, the ZBC's recruiter's station, where young men and women, indoctrinated almost since birth to serve the Battle Commission, and, by extension, the Greater Good, until death, would explode in a billowing explosion.

A bomb had been placed in the sewer beneath the giant tent, one that would be detonated by the man who would lead the revolution pressed a button.

That man pressed it.

THE GAME: T Plus 00:00:00:00

In the city plaza there was a flash, and a roar, and it seemed as though Hell itself opened up, and swallowed the tent, the veterans and displayed Zoids into a maw of blackness, before that light swelled into an unbelievable billow of broiling black and orange flame. Then it was over, black smoke still hanging in the air, and burning Zoid Battle Commission banners fluttering in the breeze. Twenty nine people lost their lives in the explosion, each and every one of them experienced Zoid pilots and veterans of the ZBC.

That night, the President of the Commission, the de facto emperor of Planet Zi, made an announcement to the people of his Empire; that they were safe, that the man behind this most heinous act, and his organisation, had been destroyed. That anything that may have happened wouldn't. It was over.

The truth, however, was that the man was alive and well. The truth was that he had no organisation, and it was not over. It was just beginning.

Only one thing the President had said was true. The people of Zi were safe.

The Zoid Battle Commission, its army of drones, its leadership, and its President, were not.

The Game was on.