Robotech 21 - Before the Invid Storm by Jack McKinney

Author:Jack McKinney [McKinney, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2010-12-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ALUCE had its share of deserters following Leonard's decision to turn the facility into a Southern Cross base. Many of the decamping scientists, engineers, and technicians ended up in the Southlands, bringing with them not only their expertise but in many cases apparatus and supplies, including shuttles and construction robots liberated from ALUCE before the military arrived. And much of the state-of-the-art equipment would find its way to the Starchildren, who put it to immediate use.

Weverka T'su, Aftermath: Geopolitical and Religious Movements in the Southlands

In central Argentina, southwest of Buenos Aires, under the retractable wings of a massive dome that had somehow escaped the Masters' notice despite its outward similarity to an Invid hive, sat an almost-completed, lozenge-shaped ship its builders hoped would one day take them to the stars. Assembled over the course of ten years by cadres of engineers, designers, and specialists of every discipline—some of whom had participated in the reconstruction and retrofitting of the SDF-1 on Macross Island—the ship had been christened Napperson's Hope, after the woman who had originally conceived the project.

A Robotech systems analyst who had studied under Emil Lang, Kaaren Napperson had become convinced—long before the Zentraedi attack of 2009—that Earth was destined to find itself embroiled in a lengthy and ultimately Human-fatal war, brought about by the controlled-crash arrival of the Visitor—the SDF-1. Caught up in the SDF-1's inadvertent jump to Pluto, however, Napperson had spent two years on board the ship she had helped restore; the following three working on the ill-fated SDF-2; and the next four in the null-gee center of the factory satellite, overseeing the transformation of Breetai's flagship into the SDF-3. It was only in 2019 that she had literally come down to Earth and relocated to the Southlands; and it was there she had gathered the personnel who would begin work on the ship of her dreams—a ship without weapons of any sort, whose purpose was to house and preserve at least a few specimens of the Human species before time ran out.

The so-called Starchildren had not begun as a cult; the news media were to blame for the name, which found common acceptance after Napperson's perhaps inevitable affiliation with the Church of Interstellar Retribution. Regardless, as word of the project spread, more and more people wanted to lend a hand in its realization, until there were more people living and working in the vicinity of the dome than the ship within could ever accommodate. And even when this became apparent, people weren't dissuaded from coming. Thanks to the lottery Napperson had devised, everyone stood an equal chance of making the final cut of twenty-five hundred passengers. Many believed, as well, that if one ship could be successfully launched, then that ship could be duplicated, and that eventually there would be space for any and all who wished to quit the planet before war reduced it to a barren, hopelessly irradiated ruin.

The Starchildren's motto—"Space for any and all"—referred as much to the lottery as to the fact that the cultists had no real destination other than the void between the stars.

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