Robotech Rebirth: The Macross Saga

Prologue

Disclaimer: I do not own the characters and universes that I am about to mangle around for my own amusement – sadly Robotech and assorted characters remain the property of Harmony Gold – I am merely borrowing them and make absolutely no profit from their use. As a result, please keep the legal attack dogs – also known as lawyers – firmly muzzled and on a leash.

Authors Note: This is my attempt to reboot and reimagine the events of the Robotech series. While this particular story will be naturally focused on the first of the three sagas' I will be attempting to weave all three together far more coherently than they were in the original show.

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Prologue

I have become Thanatos, God of Death, Zor thought as he stood alone on a platform a complex holographic display around him revealing the battle that was raging in orbit. The small group of Zentraedi warships – a mixture of cruisers, destroyers, and a single battlecruiser – that had been assigned to support and escort his ship was engaged in a ferocious battle with three large globular vessels that nearly continually spewed both streams of battle mecha and bolts of superheated, exotic plasma. Lance like beams of coherent destructive energy and missiles flew back at the three spherical ships – impacting against powerful gravitational-electromagnetic defence fields that glowed and sparkled under the streams of radiant coherent energy but so far were withstanding everything that the Zentraedi were throwing at them.

The same was not true of the Zentraedi warships. Despite there thick layers of dispersive armour all of them were beginning to sustain damage, the bolts of the Invid weapons punching deep into there hulls before detonating as anti-particles in the plasma reacted with the normal matter of there hulls. The swarms of fighters and battlepods that the Zentraedi had launched to confront the enemy mecha were doing much better as were the Zentraedi point defences – the Invid machines were as always far more lightly armoured, thus they withered and died easily under the photonic caress of lasers – but for every mecha they shot down the Invid launched more.

It was a sight he had seen thousands of times on a thousand battlefields across the length and breadth of the dwarf galaxy that was the only home his species had ever known.

The war between his people, there Zentraedi warrior servitors and the Invid had been raging for over two hundred years now. A war that had been set in motion, however unwittingly, by him when he had first set foot on Optera and met the then seemingly primitive Invid. There he had made his greatest discovery and made the first of his many great mistakes, taking some of the Flowers of Life from the planet had been the first. Creating the protoculture matrix from them, unleashing a power upon the galaxy that nobody had been ready for and nobody – not even he – could truly control. Of course, he hadn't realised that at the time, in his arrogance and overconfidence he had thought, had genuinely believed, that the sons and daughters of Tirol could control the power of the protoculture. Control it and use it wisely.

Such a fool he had been and this war had ultimately been the result.

"Lord Zor," a deep, rumbling voice said from somewhere behind him. Zor turned to see a new holographic display had pixeled into existence revealing the face of Breetai – the Zentraedi commander who had been entrusted with his safety.

"Yes Breetai," he asked.

"Forgive me for disturbing you my lord but I must inform you that Invid landing craft are heading towards the base," the blue-skinned Zentraedi replied. "I advise that you return to your ship and launch immediately."

So, the time has come to finally begin the end of this, Zor thought. "Not yet," he said knowing that he needed both the Invid and the Zentraedi as distracted as possible if he was to make his move. It would likely be his last, he knew that Nimuul and the other Robotech Masters would execute him the moment they learned of his actions, but it had to be done. The cycle of warfare and violence, that had decimated dozens of worlds and killed hundreds of millions and turned countless more sentients into homeless refugees, would not end, not while the protoculture matrix and the Flowers were within the grasp of those who should never have held them in the first place.