[Author's drivel to follow]

	"I'll never get these guys ready," Dan whined to his room. He was
tired, incredibly tired, tired down to his bones. Over the course of the
last two days he managed to get six hours of sleep, set up so that no
more than thirty minutes at a time was spent sleeping. Drilling,
simulating, practicing. Each one had a specific 24 hour period for Able
and Bravo groups alike. Unfortunately, Dan had to watch both groups.
	The first day so many things went wrong it was almost laughable. The
launch system had screwed up, tangling the massive support beams and
nearly spilling Shrike 1 and 3 onto the rest of the flight group. Shrike
4 spent the first half of the training flight at half power due to
equipment failure. The wing-mate groupings were scrapped and new ones
put together every hour.
	The second day had been the worst. After the debacle on the flight deck
Dan sent Able back to the simulators to train, while working on Bravo.
Bravo's first attempt at launch had been comical. The new equipment,
though field tested, had never been used all at once. A faulty insulator
fried Shrike 8's navigation computer, resulting in a state of the art
star fighter that tumbled uselessly for half an hour. 
	The third day, Dan managed to get both Able and Bravo into space, in
one piece. The machines worked perfectly and the wing-mate situation had
stabilized. To Dan's relief, the skirmishes he had planned on scrapping
went off without a hitch. And so after six hours of dog-fighting and
training, Dan was finally about to go to sleep.
	Dan sat down idly at his keyboard, deciding if he wanted to write
Sakura or not. A power surge had wiped his computer at some point during
the Three Days of Hell and now had no idea what Sakura's message had
contained. 
	More than anything Dan wanted to talk to her. Email really didn't cut
it for this kind of conversation, one that required vocal contact at
least. He remembered Sakura helping him during the first couple of weeks
of Command School, when he had felt the worse about being railroaded
into command.
	Now he was a commander of sorts. It felt good, he admitted, shutting
down his computer and turning off the light. His habit of changing in
the dark stemmed from the time he and his mother spent in other's houses
after his father had died and the bank closed. They stayed at friends'
houses for almost a year until his mother found work. 
	Now it was old habit for him to strip in the dark and walk to his bed
without trouble. As he laid down in bed he felt the deep fatigue that
gripped him slip away. Not the physical fatigue; his body would need ten
or more hours of sleep before he would be back to normal. But his mind
wasn't tired.
	Dan forced his eyes shut, and tried to soothe his mind. It didn't work
too well, but he eventually fell into a shallow, restless slumber. His
dreams drifted disjointedly from place to place. They settled on a scene
he wouldn't forget for a long time. 
	The Orbital Ring was burning under heavy fire from the battle pods.
>From Dan's vantage point, floating in space some distance from the Ring,
he saw a single Valkyrie tumble through the vacuum, portions of its hull
burning as laser fire bombarded it. A pair of pods swept in low, their
weapon mounts blazing, but the Valkyrie managed to dodge any more
serious harm. In a feat of piloting that Dan was vaguely envious of, the
crippled ship managed to destroy the two 'pods with burst from the chain
gun. Amidst the wreckage, the Valkyrie finally died, the pilot barely
managing to eject.
	The pilot's body, limp in its spacesuit, tumbled towards Dan. Please
don't be Sakura, Dan thought, filled by an irrational fear of seeing her
body limp and dead before him. He could barely make out the lettering on
the suit's front. Wesley C. Winters.
	Dan woke with a start. A glance at his chronometer told him he'd been
asleep for almost 8 hours. He felt strangely good. He glanced over at
the computer, the dream still vivid in his mind. Dan stood and turned
the terminal on, a familiar feeling filling him as he followed the hunch
in his dream.
	Other dreams had helped him solve some of the mysteries in his life.
They were never psychic, but rather his subconscious mind puzzling
problems that the conscious couldn't. Sometime Dan never realized the
problem faced him until a disturbing dream brought the answer out. He
dug up the personnel files on Lieutenant Winters, searching for the
description of the Orbital Ring Engagement.
	He read the debriefing of one Lieutenant Winters, fascinated at the
differences between his dream and reality. Winters hadn't been alone;
he'd been flying with his wing-mate, Sarah Anderson. Anderson never made
it back. Winters' injuries had been so severe he'd been shipped in
stasis to the Medical platform orbiting the moon. Dan tried to imagine
what it would be like to lose Sakura, but couldn't wrap his mind around
the concept.

	 Deep among the rocks tumbling chaotically in orbit around Jupiter, the
Zentradi force moved into place. A pair of light warships nestled behind
one of Jupiter's pseudo-moons while two dozen battle pods used the
streaming magnetic field between the giant Red Planet and the moon Io to
cover their presence. Two commander's pods took up station in the
vestigial ring that idled peacefully with a single custom suit of battle
armor overlooking the whole operation.
	Less than a half light second away was their target, which showed up on
their sensors as a modified Bulk Freighter registered as the Damocles. A
target that until shortly had been surrounded by up to a dozen smaller,
much stealthier craft. The Zentradi fleet had no idea what was aboard
the isolated ship, only that it was a scouting force for their hated
oppressor, Earth. 

	In the upper atmosphere of Uranus something moved. It was a large
vessel, unlike anything in the solar system. In fact, ships of this sort
had never reached into this portion of the galaxy before. Among the
ammonia vapors and trace pockets of carbon, the vessel leached the
necessary elements to repair and refurbish itself from its long trek
through space. 
	The ship extended a network of hair thin fibers, more than a hundred
kilometers on a side as it spun around Uranus, using the sensitive
material to locate the prize it had been searching for since its
creation. It would be years before the Invid scout ship would locate the
dense concentration of Protoculture that marked the location of the
Matrix, but in the first week of its operation it located a much smaller
reading, with characteristics it associated with the enemy. 
	The scout ship continued to leach raw materials from the gas giant,
with a new purpose. It would synthesize enough forces to deal with this
concentration of Zentradi Protoculture. In the mean time it would
continue taking its readings. If the ship's brain found any traces of
the Matrix then it would send word to its mother. 

	"We've got hostile targets, vectoring in from Io's magnetosphere!"
reported the sensor tech as Jonah swiveled his chair to face him. "Look
like battle pods, maybe a dozen and a half."
	"Shrike 2 and 7 are in revolver," Lt. Winters reported, using the slang
term for the ready launch position. "Shall I launch them?"
	Jonah turned to face the main tactical screen, considering a moment.
Small groups of battle pods did still roam the space lanes, using piracy
to support themselves. And the Damocles was, for their purposes, a bulk
freighter.
	"Hold off on launching the fighters. Get the rest of the group ready to
go, though. Ensign Lewis?"
	"Sir?" the communications officer asked. 
	"Contact the attacking pods. Do your best 'I'm just a freighter'
impersonation."
	"Yes sir."
	"Gunnery!" the captain called out, forgetting the young woman's name
for the moment. "Get ready to deploy the defense turrets, but don't let
them pick up any weapons emissions."
	"Roger." The woman began furiously working on her controls. By the time
she hit her last button, the Damocles would be a warship in a
freighter's clothing, ready to deploy her hidden weapons turrets at the
command of her crew.
	In the fighter bay there was no chaos. Six days of preparation had paid
off in spades, Dan thought as he watched his men climb into their
Shrikes. Nothing went wrong as the techs checked measurements and fine
tuned occasional pieces of equipment.
	"Gentlemen," Dan said over the Able and Beta channels, "lets keep it
tight and make no mistakes. Everyone okay with that?"
	"Yes, sir!" came the various replies.
	"Okay. There's around two of them for each of us, so I expect some kill
markers next to your names when we come back."

Drivel:
	A few words on the timeline-> This story takes place inbetween the
departure of the SDF-3 for Tirol and the arrival of the Robotech
Masters. The Invid presence is my own creation. For more information on
the Shrike and other new vehicles, check pt. 3 or 4, which contain tech
reports on the new equipment I've developed for this story. 
	I'm skipping over a couple areas of conflict in this story (namely
between the EDF and Southern Cross) but the scope of this story is
actually quite limited. I'm going on break for a week starting monday,
so I doubt part seven will be done until I get back. 

All characters(except Rick Hunter) are mine, the setting is another's
and this should not be viewed as an attempt to profit of their work. 

Once again, for more like this (and several things completely different)
please visit www.brandeis.edu/~jmele or drop me a line at
jmele@brandeis.edu 

Jerico
"I write good. My momma said so."