Back thrusters engaged, he shook two lockjawed Hellcats from his legs and hopped himself over-a skirmish line of Odeons, twisting around as he landed to bring the suit's chest-mounted impact cannon into play. He opened all the Power Suit's communications frequencies and boosted the gain to maximum volume, reveling in the sheer insanity of the moment. Hadn't he found himself on Fantoma? Found love there, a sense of new beginnings? But the voice made it clear that the Zentraedi had played host to the Masters' Imperative for far too long to simply outgrow it and Breetai understood that death was at hand. He tried to convince himself that he wasn't the being who had succumbed to those transvid images that he had outgrown his conditioning. To recognize that the truths one had pledged to honor and die for were no more than the engrammed fears of a demented circle of madmen.īreetai remembered the first time he had seen Minmei Miss Macross, then-and her movie role he would take to heart. To hear those sounds for the first time and experience the tumult they stirred to find oneself suddenly stripped of meaning and purpose, set adrift in a black tide of indifference. Breetai experienced what it must have been like to be on any one of those five million doomed ships. And the effect of hearing it now reawakened memories of their genocide, just as Fantoma's mines had reawakened memories of their bio¬genetically engineered birth. But even though the voice had missed Breetai's Zentraedi on that occasion, it had infiltrated and traumatized their collective psych as sure as any archetype. Breetai and his crew, like sailors saved from the sirens' call and traitors, too, to their commander¬in-chief, to the Masters and the Imperative. Minmei's song seemed to be attacking them from all sides from the hive complex and its surrounding broadcast antennae, from the etiolated high ground of the planet itself.īreetai's flagship had been spared the paralyzing effects of the voice during Dolza's attack on Earth. Breetai had ordered the nets shut down, but that did nothing to mitigate the effect of Edwards's subtle stroke. Ahead of him, squads of Scrim and Crann were moving into flanking positions, hoping to sweep the stragglers up into their kill zone. But he was too busy defending himself against Inorganics to dwell for long on the irony of the situation.īattlepods were stumbling and going down all around him Hellcats leaping in to claw away at plastron shields or gnaw at the war machines' armored limbs. I’ll post Breetai’s entire death scene, because my issues can’t really be understood without it.īreetai could almost appreciate Edwards's use of Minmei against them. And it was so easy to understand why I wonder why it took me this long to sit down and look at it, when I never had any illusions about the perfection of the novels in the first place. I’ve always read that scene with a slightly uncomfortable mix of heartstring-tugging and the sense that something was not rightĪnd once I actually sat down and looked at that death scene in more depth, my interest, if not crumbled, began to feel a lot more hollow. I have to admit it: I’ve grown to like Breetai as an individual character and not just part of the Zentraedi-philosophical-ideal machine, which naturally leads to a closer look at his portrayal in the various continuities.īreetai’s (and Britai’s) various treatments are a lot more of a mixed bag than Exedore’s (and Exsedol’s) various polarizing fates, which is pretty strongly apparent in Breetai’s death scene in the Robotech novels.
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