"In her dream, she races down the street, her footsteps echoing the pounding of her heart. But Miriya Sterling already knows that she will be too late. That she will always be too late."

A mass of Zentraedi swarm around a food truck. The driver, clad in Army of the Southern Cross battle armor, is telling them to go home, that the food shipment ran short and there's nothing left to give them. The Zentraedi are accusing him of lying, even when he opens the truck up and shows them. "Lying Micronian!" one of them shouts. A rock bounces off of the driver's helmet as the crowd begins to get violent. Meanwhile, Miriya is in the back of the pack. "Seloy! Hirano!" she shouts. "Where are you?"

"The ending will be the same, no matter what Miriya does, but still she searches."

A rock smashes the front window of the food distribution center. Armored Southern Cross soldiers swarm out, guns at the ready. A Raidar X Destroid stomps into the street. "By authority of executive order 15-77, you have been declared an illegal assembly. You have one minute to disperse," the pilot warns the rioting Zentraedi. A single blast streaks past the Raidar X.

"In her dream, the shot crackles skyward again.

"And the slaughter begins!"

As laser fire from the Raidar X thunders down on the gathered Zentraedi, Miriya calls Seloy and Hirano's names again and awakens with a start.

It is now August, 2018 A.D. Miriya realizes she's having this same dream again and sort of wishes that she and Max had died along with the other Zentraedi in Brasilia. "At least we'd still be to--" she thinks before her train of thought is interrupted by the sound of her doorbell. She tells her visitor to enter, and she sees that it is a female Zentraedi like herself. "What do you want?" Miriya asks. All the Zentraedi woman wants is a moment of her time. "I have a message for you--from a friend," she claims. She hands Miriya a tape, telling her that fellow Zentraedi died to get this message to her. "Died?" Miriya asks. "Is this from one of the malcontents?" The other Zentraedi dismissively notes that "malcontent" is a human word, not one of theirs, and tells her that she must now go. "Please, take the tape. And listen." Miriya figures Admiral Hunter will need to know about this, but she grows curious and pushes "play". "Greetings, Miriya Parino--" she hears. At the sound of the person's voice, Miriya is stunned. "Moons of Fantoma ..." she thinks, "it can't be ..."

"In his dream, he flies like a god. He races over the tortured surface of the Earth, oblivious to the petty comings and goings below him. But Max Sterling learns, over and over again ... that even the gods can be brought low."

As Max's Veritech Fighter swoops low over a forest area, something happens and he crashes, shearing the wings off of his fighter and smacking his head in the process. He awakens on the hard floor of a cell, wondering what happened to him. "Wait--I remember now. I was flying over the Congo Quadrant ... I must've been too low--a malcontent missile got me. I remember I was nearing Oasis. The radioactive ruins would be a good place for a malcontent band to hide. But if this is Oasis, that means I have two enemies--the Zentraedi who captured me, and the radiation." Max checks his inventory and finds that his jailers cleaned him out. As he considers the possibility that they could just leave him there to rot, a bald, pudgy Zentraedi in a sackcloth outfit wielding a Micronian-sized Zentraedi-issue laser rifle orders him to move. He shackles Max and guides him to meet his commander, Chodar.

In what appears to be an abandoned underground parking garage, Chodar and his men are gathered. "See, brothers?" Chodar asks. "Without their war machines, the Micronians are helpless." He asks Max what he was doing here. All Max will say is his name, rank, and serial number. Chodar slaps him, then demands to know again. Max gives the same reply, and as Chodar prepares to slap him again, one of his comrades holds his hand back. "T'sen Chodar, jhiri trag hir tan duvvalna Miriya Parino rakk," he says, which Max roughly translates as an indication that they've recognized him as the human who married Miriya Parino. "... But they don't seem to know that I can speak Zentraedi. Don't know--or don't care. The tall one wants to take me to some sort of meeting ... can't make out the rest ..." Chodar orders Max to be returned to his cell. He is unshackled and kicked into his room, and flippantly asks for something to eat, like maybe a pizza. The door slams behind him, and he begins to ask himself what happened to the world in the past few years. "How did things get soe crazy? How did we lose control so fast?

"Nobody thought that the reconstruction would be easy, but we believed people would cooperate more after Khyron died. What a joke. The humans still resented the Zentraedi from the First Robotech War, and the Zentraedi couldn't adjust to a world where men and women lived together. When the food started to run short, the Zentraedi suffered the most. Even strict rationing didn't help much. There were riots, all over the Southlands. But the worst was in Brasilia. Miriya and I were in Zeetown that night, when Governor Leonard sent in his militia. Over a thousand Zentraedi were massacred before dawn. Miriya lost one of her best friends, and I thought I had lost her. We made sure the public knew what really happened in Brasilia, but it didn't help. Zentraedi left the cities by the hundreds, becoming bandits and hijackers. The government impounded nearly all of the Zentraedi battlepods, but the malcontents didn't need them anyway ... they started building their own mecha, from components salvaged from the old cities. One group even cobbled together an atomic bomb and used it on this city.

"Rick is so involved building the SDF-3 ... he doesn't know how bad things have gotten down here. We could wipe ourselves out, long before the mission to Tirol is launched. But then, it doesn't really matter, does it? I'll never see the SDF-3 completed, never mind going to Tirol. I just wish I could see Miriya and Dana ... one more time ..." At that thought, Max nods off, but is soon reawakened by one of his captors again. "Chodar will have words with you," he tells Max as he guides him out of his cell.

Back in the abandoned underground garage, Chodar orders one of his subordinates to give Max some water. As Max drinks, Chodar lays a deal on the table. "Our men have dismantled the cockpit of your Veritech ... If you help us identify the components, your execution will be delayed ... Otherwise, you will not leave this room alive." Max points out that it's not much of a choice, but Chodar counters that it's the only one his kind deserves. One of Chodar's men empties a bag of components, and Max tells himself to remain steady, not to react to anything that they show him. However, one of the items they've recovered is the emergency beacon from his plane. "What exactly are you looking for?" Max asks as he reaches down for it steadily. "Food? Ammo? Protoculture?" As he snaps it up, he makes a quick leap for one of their laser rifles. Chodar orders his men to stop him, but Max is faster than they are and squeezes off a shot, killing one of Chodar's lieutenants. Max races out, heading for the surface. When he makes it outside, he's surprised to find it's daytime out. He runs for cover just in time, as three of the Zentraedi make their way to the surface in search of him. From behind a crumbling wall, he manages to take out one of his pursuers, but the others spot him and try to return fire. Max sneaks behind some more cover, waiting for his pursuers to get a little closer before trying to squeeze off another shot. Unfortunately, his laser rifle is out of energy. "Give up, Sterling!" Chodar shouts. "You can't escape! There's no place for you to run to! We know every pile of rubble in this city! No matter where you hide, we'll track you down! And if you leave the city, the heat will kill you! Why prolong your suffering, Micronian? The radiation in these ruins is already eating through your bones! Give up! We promise you a quick death!

Of course, Max refuses to give up. He switches on the beacon, noting to himself that the signal is strong enough to be picked up by an RDF communication satellite. The problem is, he's not sure how long it'll take for the RDF to respond. He starts to think about where he can hide safely, when he just barely manages to duck a shot from one of his former captors. "You should have accepted our first offer, Sterling," the Zentraedi soldier tells him as he approaches Max. Quickly, Max picks up a rock, tossing it into his opponent's gut and causing him to drop his laser pistol. "You can't stop me, do you hear?" Max demands of the Zentraedi, picking up the rock again. "You can't!" The Zentraedi staggers towards his laser pistol as Max raises the rock over his head. "YOU CAN'T!" Max brings the rock down on the Zentraedi's head. "YOU CAN'T! YOU CAN'T!" Max strikes the Zentraedi in the head again with the rock, then finds his hands so covered in blood that he thinks he's going to be sick. "No!" he thinks. "You can't be sick--you don't have the time. Just get the beacon and the blaster and go! Wonder how long this gun'll last ... no, wait! I've got a better idea." Max runs into the ruins of the city, imagining the screams of the people trapped here in that moment of nuclear devastation, then imagining the Zentraedi he brutally killed just now, and wonders why this death was different from all the others he's caused in battle before. He considers that all the others have always been from a distance, from the confined cockpit of a Veritech Fighter. "This time, though, I had to get my hands dirty--I couldn't hide behind a video screen. Death is all around us here," he muses as Chodar and his last remaining subordinate tear the ruins apart searching for him. "It's too close. No," he reconsiders as they spot a shimmer from a ruined building in the distance, "that's not true. Maybe it's finally close enough." As they approach the building, it explodes and crashes on them, killing both of them. Max rigged the pistol to overload and explode. "But that's only half the battle," he says, surveying the collapsed ruin. "Now I have to wait and see if anyone heard my signal."

Time passes. A Veritech Fighter swoops down and switches to Guardian mode. It's pilot is surprised to discover who he's picking up. "Are you all right, sir?" he asks. "I just want to go home," Max replies wearily.

Two days later, in a hospital in the Argentine Quadrant, Max is talking to Rick over a live video feed. Rick says that the doctors want to keep him under observation for another day, but there won't be any long-term effects from the radiation. "I'm glad we had a chance to talk, Rick," Max says, "but where's Miriya? I made this call to her." Rick knows this, and says that's why the call was transferred to him. "I didn't want to tell you this right now, but I guess there's no good time to do it. Max, Miriya's vanished."

ARTWORK

Michael Ling comes across as a slightly more cartoony "Mikimoto lite". He presents Haruhiko Mikimoto's original character designs in a very wispy, very accurate light. He's not the most exact artist in the world, sacrificing form for style in several instances, but it all looks nice, if a bit inconsistent. The backgrounds, especially in the ruins of Oasis, are terrific, but the specific iconography of ROBOTECH is sacrificed just a bit. For instance, the harness that is a standard part of the Veritech pilot's flightsuit does not appear here. One could chalk this up to it having been removed by the Zentraedi, but it doesn't appear on any Veritech pilot throughout Ling's run on Malcontent Uprisings. The nose on the Veritech Fighter also looks kind of odd, with the black stripe on the nosecone being oversized and a little out-of-shape. However, overall, his mecha have a rather endearing lunkiness to them, especially the off-balance-looking Raidar X (or Defender, if you will; I called it a Raidar X because that's what the mecha was called when this issue was published) on page 3 and, though they're not technically mecha, the expertly renderd Southern Cross battle armors that appear in the Brasilia flashback.

The character art is just exquisite, and while it actually improves as the series progresses, it's not bad at all in this first issue. Max looks very prettily handsome, and the Zentraedi look properly thuggish. Miriya just looks perfect; I'd dare say Ling's rendition of Miriya is one of my favorites, and I'm not even as big a fan of Miriya as most seem to be. It's probably how he manages to pull off those lips without making them look weird, a talent that many manga and anime-style artists haven't perfected despite years of practice (i.e. Gregory Lane or Adam Warren, though both artists have their defenders and fans who would probably argue otherwise).

In the back are two pages of rough character sketches penciled by Jason Waltrip and inked by Doug Hazlewood that were attached to Bill Spangler's proposal, depicting Jonathan Wolff, Miriya and Max Sterling, Anatole Leonard, Seloy Deparra, and one of the Zentraedi "Stinger" mecha that comes into play later in the series. Interestingly, these hew more closely to the style of the original show than the large-chinned and more cartoonish style that the Waltrips perfected for the Sentinels comic series. On the inside back cover is a pin-up of Miriya in a strategically-cut-up-for-maximum-sexiness RDF flightsuit. Nice, though the pattern shading doesn't help make clear what parts are cut out and what parts aren't.