Part 1 Sojourn

Chapter 1


Captain Vanessa Leeds liked fold travel. It was ironic, given that her first space fold was the roughest anyone from Earth had ever been through, and had stranded her and her crewmates on the SDF-1 a full year's journey away from their homeworld. Certainly most of her own bridge crew on the Jeanne d'Arc made no secret of their distaste for the time spent in the gaps between reality. They disliked the distortion of one's sense of time and place, the constant blur on the edges of every object, as if they were on the verge of separating into a double image. It was not unlike when Vanessa used to get a new set of glasses, and had to adapt to that awkward feeling that the world was skewed. Many of her crew experienced nausea within the first few hours, or developed migraines that came and went. The sick bay staff always topped off their stock of motion sickness medications right before a fold jump.

There was more. The passage of days was uncertain. The true duration of a fold could be calculated and counted, but the perception of that time was something else. A fold lasting days might feel like a few hours, even as the shipboard chronometers advanced wildly. The best that could be done was to avoid overly long folds, because it was impossible to determine when to relieve crew from their watches, except by subjective judgements about their fatigue and alertness.

Of course, there was also the disconcerting blankness of fold space. The reassuring thrum of the ship's Reflex furnaces, and the vague sense of forward motion, clashed jarringly with the unwavering bright white light visible at all times through the ship's viewports. The crew always joked about 'waiting in the White Room'. The most stoic endured it in silence, while the rest muttered their complaints to each other and obsessively watched the chronometers, until the blessed blackness of real space surrounded them again.

But Vanessa loved it. This was her dream, after so very long, after shattering wars and the near extinction of the human race. Her place in the Pioneer Mission had been threatened by revolutions, battle, betrayals, and her own wounds, to both body and heart. How could the physical discomforts of a space fold bother her after enduring all of that? To her, a space fold was a ritual and a promise. New vistas opened, and the beauty of the Universe was spread before her. And when the spell was completed, she was always greeted by sights no human from Earth had ever witnessed through their own eyes - nebulae, black holes, pulsars, binary stars, supernovas, and new worlds, though none of them had yet been blessed to support life.

"Standby for defold operation," Ensign Reda Sertos, the Jeanne d'Arc's helmswoman, announced from one of the forward bridge station. Her voice was quivering with anticipation as she bounced in her seat, setting her long pink pigtails bobbing. She detested fold travel perhaps more than any member of Vanessa's bridge crew. The endless inaction was a sore test of patience for a woman who had once handled a Zentraedi frigate with all the nimbleness of a starfighter.

"Lieutenant Abargil, air group status?" Vanessa's long time friend and executive officer, Allison May-Reyes, prompted.

"Air group status is green, Commander," Amine Abargil reported back cooly from the station to the left of Reda's, with only a nasal hint of his lyrical Moroccan accent in his voice. "Gold Saber squadron is in the ready launch position."

"Tell my husband to steer clear of trouble out there."

The too-serious Abargil kept his eyes forward so no one could see his embarrassment. "Reply from the CAG." He swallowed, clearly stifling a groan. "'No need for concern, I'm not the one with Hazard for a call sign.'"

May snorted, and the rest of the bridge crew chuckled. Years of deployment together in deep space had relaxed some of the military formality of the REF crews, and the couple's banter had become another tradition at the end of each fold to an uncharted star system.

"Station status, please," Vanessa ordered, smiling even as she refocused the attention of her crew.

"Tactical, ready, ma'am Weapons, green. Main drives, green. Secondary systems, green," Lieutenant Commander Duy reported from just behind the helm and flight direction officer positions. His tone was soft, confident, and carried easily across the compartment.

"Communications, preté," Ensign Garo, seated at the portside facing station said, exaggeratedly rolling the 'r'.

"French, this time, Ensign?" Vanessa asked.

"Mais oui!" the polyglot Zentraedi officer replied exuberantly.

"Just be sure I can understand you," Vanessa added, still smiling.

"Á vos ordres, Capitaine!"

Vanessa waited, then cleared her throat. Nothing. "Sensors?" she finally asked, her tone sharpening.

Ensign Penelope Aster, at her station opposite Garo's, huffed and turned to look over her shoulder, her waist length, shiny black ponytail whipping around behind her. "Sensors ready, Captain!" she finally answered in an exasperated voice, looking down her aquiline nose at Vanessa.

"Ensign!" May snapped.

"But there's nothing to report! You know we're in a complete whiteout! I won't be able to tell if the sensors are even really working until we defold."

Vanessa took a few steps toward Penelope's station. The woman was intelligent, attractive, and very good with sensors operation and analysis. She was also vain, impatient, and disrespectful. Weeks had passed since she came aboard with the other transfers during the ship's last visit to Space Station Liberty, and she had made little progress fitting in with her crewmates. Vanessa tried, as she always did, to answer her attitude with a mix of firmness and patience.

"You're right, Ensign. I am well aware of how a space fold affects our sensors." She raised her voice to carry to the rest of the crew. "But we are about to defold into an uncharted system. We could find anything waiting for us. Enemies. New friends. Dangers none of us could have predicted. So I need to know that every member of my crew is sharp and mentally prepared to respond the instant we arrive. Am I understood?"

Penelope blushed and lowered her head. "Aye, Captain. Understood."

"Good."

The hatch slid open with a hiss. "Admiral on the bridge!" May sang out.

"As you were," Admiral Mbande ordered curtly, so as not to disrupt the crew at their defold stations. The ship's science officer, Doctor Jacob Priest, followed behind her before the hatch shut.

"Admiral, would you care to address the crew?" Vanessa asked.

"I think not, Captain. This is your ship, and your bridge. I imagine you may have a few words to share."

The tall, sharp-featured woman had changed little since the day she had greeted Vanessa so coldly aboard the ARMD warship Armor 7 in Earth orbit, almost seven years ago. Mbande had been the captain then, a sub-Saharan woman who fought for the anti-UN forces before Earth's catastrophic First Contact brought about an armistice, and an opportunity to join the UN Spacy. Vanessa had been a fast-tracked command trainee, and an interloper when they met. In the intervening years, a respectful working relationship had developed between admiral and captain, but Vanessa wasn't sure that they would ever become friends. The admiral scrupulously kept to the domain of strategic operations and the disposition of Task Force 2 as a whole. She carried herself with a calm aloofness, and today was no exception. "Very well," Vanessa said to her superior, and turned to the comms station. "Ensign Garo?"

"Parlé, Capitaine!"

Vanessa took up the offered hand set. Her bridge crew were all watching her as she squared her shoulders.

"All hands, this is the Captain. We are about to defold in an uncharted star system. Astrographic scans indicate a type G star, like Earth's, and a planet within the zone that can support life. We are now on the leading edge of the Pioneer Mission. Most of you have already heard what I'm about to say, but for those of you who are new to the crew of the Jeanne d'Arc, I think it bears repeating. With each new fold, each new star system, we renew our hope for discovering life, and making peaceful contact with our peers in our galaxy.

"The ultimate goal of the Robotech Expeditionary Force and the various carrier groups assigned to the Pioneer Mission is to usher in a new era for Earth society, one of exploration, colonization, and contact with other species. Most of all, to protect our homeworld by ending the state of war between Earth and the empire of the Masters, and bringing freedom to the Zentraedi warriors that they created in an attempt to dominate countless other worlds."

Vanessa paused and swept her gaze across the attentive faces of her bridge crew, one more time, then looked at the bright orange numerals that were still rapidly ticking over on the main chronometer. "Be ready for anything when we arrive, but be always mindful of our hope for the peace and safety of Earth, and our dream of finding our place among the stars. That is all."

She passed the handset back to Ensign Garo, and the final preparations for defold began in earnest.

"A pretty speech, Captain," Mbande murmured.

Vanessa arched an eyebrow, but didn't rise to the bait implied by the admiral's tone. It was an old argument, one that they had both largely given up trying to win. Vanessa's military record, combined with the devastating battle attrition of the last ten years, had launched her from a lowly ensign on the SDF-1's bridge to captain of her own battlecarrier in an absurdly short amount of time, and she knew she was seen as a dreamer and troublemaker by some of the REF high command. Vanessa didn't condemn Mbande for her focus on military preparedness and basic pragmatism. The woman was not heartless. She and her former crew on Armor 7 were only alive because she had refused to allow them to throw their lives away when the Zentraedi global assault wiped out the rest of Earth's defense fleet in a matter of seconds. Vanessa respected and trusted her superior, but she would always seek to counterbalance the cold mechanical calculus of military decision makers.

"Commencing defold!" Ensign Sertos called out, the excitement in her voice making the announcement almost an invocation. Vanessa kept her face composed, but she held her arms stiffly at her sides, nervously drawing the blue thumb of her cybernetic hand across her synthetic fingertips.

Every object on the bridge split into a vertigo-inducing double image, then snapped back into place. Vanessa squinted as the bright white glow through the viewport intensified until it was almost blinding, and then abruptly they were surrounded by the dark void of deep space again. The numerals on the chronometer stopped their rapid count.

08:37:35 02/14/2021

"Defold operation complete!"

A collective indrawn breath was released. Everyone's eyes began to adjust to the sudden change in lighting, and where there had been blackness, Vanessa could see first the warm yellow light of the system's primary star, then the reassuring blue glow of the triple thruster arrays of three of their Banshee class destroyer escorts ahead of them, and finally, the immense expanse of distant lights cast by far away stars.

"Sensors!" Vanessa demanded.

There was no hesitation now. Ensign Aster knew exactly what was expected of her. "Red Zone, clear! No spacecraft within our threat envelope! No stellar bodies in near proximity!"

"Mister Abargil, launch ready fighters! Begin patrol of the nearest sectors!" May ordered.

"Ready fighters launch, aye!"

"Tout est clair, Capitaine! All vessels confirm safe arrival and clean sensor sweeps!" Ensign Garo reported.

"Excellent. Science?"

Doctor Priest was already monitoring one of the secondary stations. "Phobos will have probes launched in a few minutes. They're just determining the most promising courses to lay in. I'll keep you apprised of their telemetry."

The fifty year old native of Manhattan had a warm voice and a slightly distracted smile. His skin was the color of dark coffee, and he kept his face and crown clean-shaven at all times. Vanessa had lobbied hard to convert one of the task force's destroyers into a science vessel, and to add a scientist to her crew's senior staff. Mbande was not the only flag officer to scoff that she was treating the Pioneer Mission like an episode of 'Star Trek', and she had argued back just as hard that their situation was exactly that, and it would be foolhardy for Earth's fleet to advance into the unknown without dedicated scientific support. Eventually Admiral Hayes herself stepped in and came down on Vanessa's side of the argument. The kind, thoughtful, and intelligent Dr. Priest, who acted as liaison for the science vessel Phobos, and filter for the enormous amounts of data generated in each new star system, had never given her cause to regret sticking her neck out. Even Mbande had warmed to the man.

"I'll look forward to your report, Doctor," Mbande said with a nod of acknowledgement. She turned to Vanessa. "I'll be going to the Operations Center to oversee deployment of the task force, Captain. Carry on."

"I'll keep you informed, ma'am."

The tension level on the bridge dropped a few notches with the admiral's departure, and the crew turned to the routine tasks of charting a new star system and ensuring that the task force's ships had an effective fighter screen in place to protect them, and electronic warfare craft monitoring for potential threats. But the next report brought every officer and technician back to full alertness.

"I'm getting returns on long range scans, Captain!" Penelope Aster reported. "A lot of them!"

Vanessa leaned over the ensign's station, placing a hand on the back of her seat. "Ships?"

"Definitely. Everything from small mecha up to space stations. But none of them are changing course."

"A ghost squadron?" May wondered, joining them. The Pathfinder task forces had encountered many of those while searching for the borders of the Masters' empire. Thousands of Zentraedi ships had been stranded by the destruction of their Grand Fleet, without sufficient energy reserves to fold to one of the shrinking number of fleet depots or factory satellites. Eventually those energy reserves ran out, and life support with them, leaving serpent green warships, rimed with ice, adrift on the void, each one a crypt for its crew of frozen Jotuun. The previous year, Task Force 2 ran across a destroyer which still had enough power for a mere dozen of its cryostasis chambers. The bewildered giants inside had been recovered and repatriated to Earth, but there was little they had been able to tell their rescuers beyond the details of the horrific slow death of their squadron in the months after they lost all contact with their headquarters.

"Not exactly like a ghost squadron," Penelope said distractedly. "They aren't usually scattered this widely. I'm trying to identify them."

"Have you tried interrogating their IFF with the codes we were given?" Vanessa asked.

"I know how to scan unidentified ships, Captain," she replied in scathing tones. "No response. Their transponders must have failed too."

May scowled at the prickly technician, who was now leaning over her scope and fiddling with the filters, but Vanessa shook her head at her XO. Even after many years, it was hard for her to let go of her old bridge position. She knew she had a tendency to micro-manage her sensors operators.

"Ok, I'm getting some results from LIDAR," Penelope said, her annoyance now replaced by excitement. "Bringing it up on the main screen."

A fuzzy image of washed out greens, blues, and yellows appeared on the monitor above her. Vanessa recognized the familiar cross-section immediately. A rounded, cone-shaped bow, with a wider rear thruster assembly, and bulging hull features like stretched blisters.

"Zentraedi frigate, Tou-Redir class," Penelope announced.

"So it is a ghost squadron," May said.

"No," Penelope disagreed. "Take a look at this." She brought up a new image. This ship was on a similar scale, but it was narrower, boxier. "It doesn't match any recognized hull profile, I even checked the records of decommissioned Zentraedi designs."

"Wonder what those horn-like projections are," May murmured, pointing at the four odd structures jutting from the unknown ship's bow.

"There's more," Penelope said. "There's a space station at the L5 point of that planet in the primary's life supporting zone. It masses about twenty percent more than Space Station Liberty."

There were impressed murmurs and quiet whistles at that. Space Station Liberty was big enough to provide dry-dock facilities to half the REF. This space station was roughly the shape of an elongated tulip, with more of the horn-like structures built into the upper superstructure.

"It's beautiful, really," Vanessa said, thoughtfully. "Lieutenant Sertos? Ensign Garo? It's not in the database, but does anything look familiar?"

Reda brought up the images at her own station and examined them, touching a painted fingernail to her pink lips. "I don't recognize them. There is something familiar about the space station… like, similar hull structures? That other ship, I'm not sure. It would help if we could get a look at the thrusters or the interior. You have to understand, though, the Zentraedi armada was a force of conquest, not a police force. We were deployed outside the empire except for extreme emergencies."

Vanessa nodded. The regimented, indoctrinated Zentraedi soldiers mixing with a normal human society was what had led to almost half her crew being micronized Zentraedi volunteers in the first place.

"Ensign Garo?"

"Je suis desole, Capitaine, I can't say for sure. I agree with the Lieutenant. They're not Zentraedi, but it's like they could be, what would the right term be… cousins?"

"So we might have actually reached the border of the empire?" Vanessa wondered. It would be an amazing achievement, after four years of fruitless searching. "Do you have anything else, Ensign?"

"Nothing, ma'am. I'm not detecting any broadcasts. The only signals I'm getting are stellar background noise and our own fleet's traffic."

"Then we have a mystery. Get to work everyone. We may have found the border of the Masters' empire at last, and I want to know what happened here."


The information began to filter in - long range scans, telemetry from scientific probes, and flybys carried out by the fleet's squadrons of veritech Lightnings. Admiral Mbande was being cautious, and with good reason. It had only been a few months since the Jeanne d'Arc's sister ship, Washington, and ten other warships and fleet tenders were lost in action just a few light years away. Washington encountered a massive, fully automated construction project at the edge of a mineral rich asteroid field in a system empty of planets. The task force discovered great machines that were laboriously mining and assembling asteroids hundreds of kilometers across to create one of the Masters' incredible factory satellites. At one time, hundreds of those satellites had constructed and maintained the seemingly inexhaustible fleets of the Zentraedi. The fate of most of those satellites, after the destruction of the Grand Fleet and the decline of the empire, was unclear.

The crews of the Washington's task force, in their eagerness to investigate, inadvertently triggered a defense system of unimaginable power. A single, badly damaged destroyer folded back to Space Station Liberty, to report the annihilation of the incomplete factory satellite and every other ship of Task Force 3. Mindful of this disaster, Mbande ordered her own ships to maintain a safe distance from any potential dangers- the dozens of derelict ships, space stations, and orbital platforms, and especially the planet of interest. Days passed as data and observations were collated. and the picture that began to form was a grim one.

Vanessa, the doctor, and Admiral Mabande were standing over a holo-table in the Jeanne d'Arc's Operations Center, a large, vaulted compartment deep within the battlecarrier's hull. The admiral's empty command pulpit rose up a whole level above them, and billboard sized monitors dominated the octagonal chamber. Unlike the close quarters and familiarity of the bridge and its crew, more than a score of officers and technicians were scattered among rows of ranked stations, constantly monitoring and reporting on the status of the fleet's ships, communications traffic, and sensors readouts. Vanessa was the captain, but this was the Admiral's domain.

"No signs of life," Doctor Priest repeated.

"How can that be?" Vanessa asked. "The surface images are clear. That planet has cities as large as any surviving on Earth. The biggest space station could have supported tens of thousands of people. There are over a hundred ships and space facilities, and probably more in the asteroid belt we haven't identified yet. Even accounting for the craft that show signs of battle damage, somebody should be out there."

Priest shrugged amiably. "I'm not saying there's no one alive out there, just that there are no signs of life. No signs of anything moving under its own power, or any active power sources, for that matter. No signals from any intelligent source."

"Tell me about the planet," Mbande prompted.

Priest manipulated the holo-table controls and brought up an image taken from a distant orbit. The world was an almost featureless, dusty tan coloration, though continent spanning cloud formations slowly drifted over the surface in picturesque whorls. The white polar caps reflected the type G star's warm sunlight brightly. The ocean's were smaller than Earth's, and they looked sluggish, their color a brown so dark it was almost black. Vanessa didn't assume that another planet, even one that could support life, would be a close match to Earth in appearance, but something felt wrong. Even with ninety percent of its surface devastated by the Rain of Death, her homeworld looked livelier than this.

"Near-Earth conditions," Priest narrated, as green-lettered data streams flowed along-side the planetary view. "Gravity .95 Earth standard. Average global temperatures are cooler, but not as cold as the new colony on Sanctuary. There are megastructures on each land mass that we think were atmospheric processors, to make the atmosphere breathable, but obviously, those are defunct now. Best estimate of the population was one hundred to two hundred fifty million.

"What happened to them?" Mbande asked, eyes locked on the semi-transparent image.

"We think there was a war," Priest said simply. "Or at least, an attack. There was some kind of bombardment using a mix of Reflex weaponry and fusion based warheads. There are impact sites from large ships or space stations that fell from orbit- more than a hundred we've identified so far. One of them massed twice that of the abandoned one we detected upon defold. Dangerous radiation levels, and a nuclear winter. The heaviest dust clouds would only have dissipated in the last few months. The science team estimates the attack took place some time in the last nine to ten years."

The two senior officers shared a glance.

"So, it happened within months of the destruction of the Grand Fleet," Vanessa stated.

"One of the working theories is that there was a rapid collapse of the empire, following the destruction of their main armed force," Mbande noted.

"But this is… barbarism. Who would do this, and why?" Vanessa wondered.

"Protoculture."

Vanessa's skin crawled at the single word spoken by her science officer. Protoculture. The greatest enigma of the Robotech War. The SDF-1's arrival and crash landing united Earth, and revolutionized every field of scientific research and technological advancement. The secrets supposedly hidden aboard it were the mysterious prize that launched five million warships to their destruction. Protoculture was more than a form of advanced and highly efficient energy generation. The Zentraedi held it in awe as the source of power, life, and knowledge. A prize worth dying for, worth annihilating entire worlds to gain possession of, for their Masters… or for themselves. But no Zentraedi alive, not even wise Exedore could explain its true nature.

In the aftermath of the Apocalypse, Earth's people scavenged the wreckage of a galaxy conquering armada, gathering Protoculture generators in plenty, enough to fuel their world's reconstruction and interstellar ambitions for decades. But Doctor Lang, Earth's greatest scientific mind, had been unable to reverse engineer the process. There were seeds inside the sealed casings of the generators, but there were unknown elements of the strange plant's life cycle that did not exist on Earth. The Zentraedi called them the 'Flower of Life', in hushed tones, when they were even willing to speak of them at all. Further, the energy matrix which held the Flower's seeds in stasis, preventing them from germinating, and which gave off staggering amounts of surplus power as a byproduct, could be observed, but could not be created by any process that Earth's greatest minds had attempted.

The battlefortress which became the SDF-1, sent to Earth by the long-dead renegade genius, Zor, had supposedly carried the so-called 'Protoculture Matrix', or more accurately, a factory capable of nearly unlimited production of Protoculture generators. But the factory was never found. The great mission launched by the Masters to preserve their Protoculture hungry empire, and which had nearly destroyed Earth and Zentraedi alike, seemed to have been in vain. With the SDF-1 and Vanessa's dearest friends and crewmates entombed beneath millions of tons of rubble these last seven years, the riddle of Protoculture remained unanswered. The Robotech Expeditionary Force utilized the fruits of the Protoculture - Reflex furnaces and fold drives, variable fighters and other Robotech weaponry, but the almost superstitious awe of the Zentraedi was infectious, and many REF soldiers were reluctant to even invoke the term 'Protoculture.'

"Explain," Mbande ordered, frowning.

"It's the lack of power sources," Priest answered. "The planet is devoid of them. There are no alternative energy sources our analysts can identify. No nuclear power plants, solar panels, tidal or wind generators, no fossil fuel pipelines or refineries. Not all of the ships and space stations in the system suffered battle damage, many of them were crudely cut open just forward of their drive sections, presumably to remove their generators.

Vanessa swallowed against the sick feeling that had been rising in her the longer the briefing continued. "Are you suggesting someone carried out genocide against the inhabitants of this system simply to loot their energy supplies?"

"A society of Protoculture addicts," Priest said softly, with a sad smile, "holding together the unraveling threads of their civilization by the most extreme means."

Vanessa turned to her superior with a resolute expression. "Admiral, we've been investigating for two days, without encountering any kind of threat. We need answers. I'd like authorization to visit the planet's surface."

Mbande regarded her, weighing caution against necessity. She gave a short, sharp nod. "Granted."

"I'll form an-"

"If you say 'away team', Captain," Mbande interrupted, "I'll send someone else down in your place."

Vanessa smiled sourly, not sure if, after all these years, the Admiral had finally made a joke. "I'll form a landing party. We'll proceed to orbit immediately, and launch in the morning. I'll forward a mission profile to you for your approval."

"Plan it well, Captain. We are not just here to explore. Do not forget that we are in a state of war, and the Pioneer Mission is a combat operation."


Next chapter… Tomb World, a faraway shore, and ruins of empire...