Prologue
In 1999 a huge asteroid had crashed on the island of South Ataria in the Pacific halfway between the Californian coast and Hawaii. The governments of the United States of America and Japan, immediately bordering on the site of the impact, commented on the incident with short press releases that managed to hide the enormous extent of the event only for a few days. The celestial body entered our atmosphere at an impressive speed by momentarily moving the planet Earth from its axis. The night of June 3, 1999, half of the earth's population got a night of nearly 72 hours. Complete darkness on one side of the globe, luminescent twilight on the other side. Terrible earthquakes devastated the Pacific area as a swarm of space debris spilled from the sky like lava. An apocalypse that would be remembered as The Night of the Great Visitor.
What the inhabitants of Earth could not have known, and did not know until several years later, is that the great visitor was not a space body, an asteroid that had accidentally crossed the earth on his insane journey at hypersonic speeds, but a spaceship one kilometer long, a deformed and imposing biotechnological monster, equipped and armed to host operating units of a size disproportionate to the human being. Command centers, weapons, control monitors, even living quarters were organized to house giants. Although no type of alien life was found on the ship, it was clear that that sort of fortress was the work of a highly evolved civilization that somewhere in the galaxy was engaged in conflict. The Visitor was a warship. A large, frightening spaceship that carried a sinister nameless threat in its belly, between its majestic bulkheads and its infinite and dark corridors. The governments of the terrestrial nations soon realized that this was a problem that could not simply be ignored. After carefully concealing the visitor's entity and identity from the citizens of the planet, they devised a plan to exploit the technology of that alien ship in a desperate race against time, before its legitimate owners came looking for it or had a reason to do it. A team of scientists from the United States, Russia, Germany, England, Japan and France came together under the code name of OTEC to study alien technology and organize a type of weapon capable of fighting it. Within a year, the representatives of the UN and the heads of state of the main world powers decided after exhausting emergency summits to establish a joint terrestrial government that would have dealt with the emergency of an alien attack in due course. In July 2000 the plan for the unification of nations was publicly announced: at the same time the military forces of all the states would contribute by enlisting their best combat and intelligence units in a new branch created specifically to defend the earth: the RDF (Robotech defense forces). Academic and scientific soldiers from all ranks of the militia would have had full access to the new robotic technology systems created on the basis of the studies carried out on the Great Visitor. In the future, it was hoped as far as possible, they would be in charge of the terrible task of defending the human race. Unification of the land was difficult, as many governments disapproved of this type of political and military centralization, and the protest riots soon degenerated around the world into guerrillas and terrorist acts that within six months turned into a real civil war that spread like a leopard from East to West involving militarized governments as well as groups of armed political resistance and mercenaries employed by multinationals and political figures against the GTU (United Earth Government), a dark period of almost 4 years dominated by terror and from uncertainty: where the only sign agreed upon across the globe was the terrible curfew that darkened the cities and suburbs, the fishing and peasant villages, the small tourist villages and the metropolises at sunset. Then, the beaches and oceans disappeared swallowed up by a darkness without an horizon and only the highest peaks of the secular trees could perhaps touch the pale light of the stars, cold and distant millions of kilometers away. The windows of the houses were sealed, the dim light of led lamps accompanied the nights of mankind in the four years of the terrible Unification Wars.