Another teaser up for commentary.  This is from an idea-in-progress, and Lou
and I thought it would be fun to draft it.  No dialogue, just the thoughts
of a Zentraedi warrior turned petty outlaw...

-The Reverend Prez


Excerpt from Robotech: Cradle by Presley Cannady


IT IS A DIFFICULT THING TO KILL.
    At least for humans.  It seemed puzzling at first, until one learned all
of the qualifications.
    First, humans�like T�sen�did not normally kill out of cold blood.
During their twentieth century, cold-blooded murder had seen a rise in
frequency and brutality unmatched in any century, yet it remained
proportionally representative of the motivations that had driven human
beings to kill millennia before.  For one, most murders fell in a category
that could roughly be considered accidental.  A burglar slaying an alerted
houseowner, a mugger killing his victim.  Murders in the heat of passion, as
they were so inaccu-rately labelled, involved some willfullness of the
perpetrator; they did not, as the fiction presumed, require a close
relationship between the victim and the murderer.  Premeditated,
cold-blooded murder�by the humans� definition�formed a small percentage of
the homicides reported to law enforcement agencies across the world;
sociopathic violence was by definition a rariety, or the product of some
drastic circum-stances that made it an integral characteristic of an
isolate, deprived community.  These bloody reckon-ings were often carried
out within a secret community; one which saw its best interests maintained
in se-crecy.
   Humans did not consider killing in war murder.
   Indeed, they had various rules about who could be killed and under what
circumstances, but in war, the humans poets�and some of their military
writers�knew better.  In war, the humans became like T�sen to a point.  The
horror and disgust only reared their ugly heads when the tempo of the
killing increased or decreased.  Maintain a steady rate, and they became
jaded to it after a time.  It was a lot like the condi-tioning, only much
less thorough and far more costly.
   Indeed, learning about the resistance to killing in humans had taught
Mireb much about himself.
   There were poets and writers he had read over the past two years which
had stunned him with their poignant accuracy in depicting human emotion.
There were others, however, who disgusted him with their ignorance.  He had
seen humans, and had measured them by a ruler that no mere human being could
have.  When it came to killing, they were not as naturally inclined to it as
their �great thinkers� had sup-posed.  They were not vicious, evil, greedy
beings prone to destroy.  No, destruction was an attitude that had to be
ingrained into their minds; even the T�sen could not admit that their
purpose was wholly de-structive.  They sought a constructive path, serving
their Masters.  Humans used destruction to serve con-structive means,
although humanity�s hand often stayed when the T�sen would not have.
Perhaps it saved them from destruction�surely, no less than ten of this
world�s accursed years ago, they had avoided blasting themselves out of
existence with weapons of no military value whatsoever.
   Well, Mireb reconsidered, no value until we arrived.
   Mireb sighed as the thirty-year old Plymouth Horizon bounced along Route
17, plowing its way through the mid-December snow to its intersection with
the New Jersey Turnpike.  The old highway, which would have been an
interstate in a few more years had the recent unpleasantness been adverted.
After a three hour drive from the work camps around Syracuse, Mireb came as
close as he would to regretting blasting the hell out of this miserable ball
of rock.  As he passed what had once been a very small city�Monroe�on the
southern edge of the semi-rural Hudson Valley, he wondered exactly what in
God�s name�after uttering human expressions for nearly five Earth years,
they now came to mind habitually�would lead the Careb cell to signal their
northeastern �fundraisers� for a meeting.
   He came to the old tollbooth station, empty for four years now�the New
York government had aban-doned it soon after they abandoned the rest of
upstate.  When Buffalo and the City had closed their limits to refugees,
they had taken their new isolationist fervor to expel nearly three-quarters
of the Zentraedi that had sifted into the area right after the war.
   The New Jersey Turnpike dipped south and turned back north as it ebbed
slowly Eastward.  At least this patch of road was properly paved; Mireb
suspected his Plymouth�s shocks might not hold for much longer.  No matter,
the Careb had tremendous resources in the city.  They would either repair
his car free of charge or provide him with another.  After all, unlike
humans, Zentraedi looked after one another.
    That was what made them so different from humans.  We would never kill
our own kind.
    As he approached the fork between the City and Mahwah, New Jersey, Mireb
found solace in this thought.

*  *  *

Vribon Derwok raised the garage door, allowing his friend parked his paultry
Plymouth in something that resembled shelter.  The sun was finally piercing
through the thick grey overcast, but not by much.  Snow still settled
heavily upon the city as it passed over onto Long Island.  His gaze slowly
drifted to that of the Mannhattan skyline, distant yet clearly visible from
his Queens residence.  At one time, the lights of all those towers would
have made it visible even to an observer in orbit, which forced Derwok�like
many of his kind living in the city�to ponder a single question.
    How did we miss this?
    It was a fair question, yet it had an insanely insipid answer.  Dolza�s
first strike had been devastating, but sporadic.  Entire landmasses were
rendered inhabitable, yet coastlines�for the most part�were left untouched.
Perhaps it was because worlds where water existed in such abundance were
rare, and the Zentraedi were used to clearing large, landlocked areas before
moving to the seas�where their particle beams could do no real good.  More
likely, the Commander in Chief had decided to focus on military
in-stallations with �strategic orbit capabilities.�  Historically, most of
these sites were inland, located under deep, mountains or inside cavernous
recesses.  Earth had been different, though, and the Zentraedi had never
developed significant intelligence on the disposition of her forces.  While
a number of UNDF bases were destroyed in the near-destruction of the
Midwestern United States, the hollowing of Europe and Af-rica and the
fire-gutting of Asia, the ports still survived.  In fact, almost four-fifths
of the UNDF�s warm water ports had escaped intact.
    A second strike would have clearly doomed this planet�s dominant species
to extinction, but they man-aged to strike back before that could happen.
The humans and their pathetic, traitor allies.  Stunned mo-mentarily by the
horrific...newness of human culture, they had penetrated the defenses of
their mothership and destroyed the Zentraedi command and control capability.
A cheap shot, to use the human appellation, although Derwok doubted they
would ever call their �great victory� anything so demeaning.  Still, they
had only prevailed at a devasting price.  Just over three hundred million
had survived the first Zentraedi strike outright.  Of that figure, more than
eighty percent were lost in the aftermath.  Roughly sixty-five million
humans survived outright, and eight million of those survivors were New Yorkers.
    That had been their blessing, for New York City had a cultural mixture
unlike that of any other sur-viving city.  If any of the world�s ethnicities
had been drawn to the brink of extinction, some of the few remaining
survivors were almost certain to be found somewhere in the ethnic barrios of
Queens or Brooklyn or Manhattan.

*  *  *


+-----------------+-<The Badass Reverend of Funk Prez>---+
|    Presley H.   | Political Science / Computer Science |
|    Cannady II   | and Electrical Engineering Undergrad |
|<revprez@mit.edu>| at the Mass. Institute of Technology |
+-----------------+-<Anime Manga Development Group>------+
|_|"The art of war is of vital importance to the state"|_|