Empire's End

For the Robotech Masters and their empire, their defeat on Earth had been total. The destruction of the Masters' flagship above SX Point 83 *(Editor's Note: the buried ruins of New Macross City)* had included the deaths of the Robotech Masters, the unquestioned rulers of their empire. And without them, that empire simply had no purpose for existence.

It was the end of a desperate, do-or die gambit where the Masters had put everything on the line and failed. For the Masters, their situation represented a worst case scenario where everything had gone wrong for them at once. The most immediate was the depletion of their own Protoculture reserves; having become locked into a protracted war with the Armies of the Southern Cross, the Masters had been burning through their reserves far faster than expected. While the ASC's naval offensives had resulted in a gross loss of lives and warships, they had forced the Masters to expend those reserves to protect themselves.

The second was the degenerating condition on board their ships caused by that depletion. The Masters' control over their cloned civilian castes was breaking down as they became more and more restless, unstable and emotional, conditions at odds with their normally orderly and structured lives. This was caused by a number of factors, but the inability to maintain bioenergy indexes (*Editor's Note: A factor tied to both the Clones' existence as Triumvirates and the Protoculture used in their creation)* was key among them. Acts of outright rebellion, while rare, were occurring at a far higher rate than was normally acceptable, and were even reaching into the upper castes of their society, such as the Muses.

The final problem was a third factor tied to their objective. The Flowers of Life stored inside the ruins of the SDF-1 had begun to bloom, which if left unchecked, would result in the Protoculture Matrix that they had sought degenerating into uselessness. Furthermore, the blooming of the Flowers would inevitably attract the attention of the Invid to seek it out. The Masters were keenly aware that the arrival of the parasitic aliens would result in their own destruction, and as such, they had to act quickly to avoid that outcome.

The Masters' plan was to declare everything that they had left, from the lowest-caste clones to their fleet of Motherships to be expendable. The only things that would be spared was their own ship and its crew, which would be vital to the completion of their plan.

Every available asset would be used in one final offensive against the Southern Cross, aimed at tying up as much of their force as possible across the world and in near space. First, those portions of their civilian populations who's Bio-Energy levels were below a certain threshold were jettisoned into space; in an uncharacteristic act of mercy, those thrown into space were either packed onto non-functional ships or placed in stasis inside EVA suits first. Many of those who were still on the motherships were then conscripted into service through the use of combat stims that drove them into berserker states.

While the Masters' fleet engaged the Southern Cross above Earth, their armies descended onto the planet below. Their targets were seemingly random; military bases, population centres, factories, farms or anything else that would attract the attention of their opponents. Aside from their ubiquitous Assault Dropships and Bioroids, the Southern Cross also needed to deal with suicidal rushes by drugged-up infantry who seemed to be immune to pain. In some cases, these forces were used to simply pin the defenders into place before subjecting them to bombardment that wiped out both forces.

In the meantime, the last Mothership, containing the Masters, broke through to SX Point 83 and attempted to seize the Protoculture Matrix. In this last effort they failed catastrophically; not only were they killed and their ship destroyed, but the Matrix was destroyed along with it. Furthermore, the explosion scattered the spores of the Flower of Life to the wind, allowing it to spread across the planet.

Before that happened, there was one final act of mercy for those on-board. A group of Southern Cross Soldiers had managed to get inside the ship, and had managed to liberate thousands of clone civilians. Commandeering a fleet of assault ships, they were able to flee the doomed mothership before its demise and give those clones a chance at a new life. And even if it was an uncertain one, it would be one where they were free to live as individuals, not Triumvirates and not the unwilling pawns of the Masters.

With the destruction of the Mothership, many of the Tirolian forces on the ground simply stopped fighting, as if some switch had been turned off. This mostly happened among those forces made up of low-level Bioroids and civilian conscripts who were being more or less blindly thrown into the fight. In space the situation was not so fortunate; the remaining Motherships still had their higher-caste supervisors who kept fighting until the very end. Every last one of the Motherships was either destroyed in space, or fell to Earth and broke up. The majority of the Tirolian fleet followed suit, although many simply fought until they ran out of power.

This left tens of thousands of Tirolians, most of them civilians, stranded on Earth. The majority of them simply surrendered peacefully, having no desire to fight left. Most of those ended up in makeshift refugee camps scattered across the globe, although efforts at resettlement saw most of those relocated to North America. Likewise, the remnants of the Southern Cross' navy were able to recover some of those that had been ejected into space and reunite them with the other refugees. There they came under the leadership of Musica, one of the last surviving Muse clones, who did her best to keep them safe and orderly as they tried to come to grips with the destruction of their society. Worse still was the looming fear of what was to come.

However, there were still some surviving higher-caste leaders and officers who continued to wage war for a dead empire. Renegade Bioroid and Clone forces staged often random attacks across the world, many of them having little purpose other than to sow chaos and kill humans. The disintegrating global situation meant that they simply became a part of an ever increasingly fractured world, with few sparing the resources needed to hunt them down while they were more focused on other concerns.

The Tirolians in North America did not have any voice to what was left of the UEG, but at the same time, they had powerful allies. Dana Sterling, a war hero in her own regard, used her connections to Johnathan Wolfe  to devise a plan to evacuate the surviving Tirolians from Earth. However that plan that was not executed until after the beginning of the Invid Invasion. The majority of the Tirolian clones left Earth with her, ironically to return to Tirol, a world most of them had never even seen.

Conversely, those renegades left behind were simply hunted down and annihilated by the Invid. While there have been unconfirmed reports of operational Bioroids in the far corners of the world, it is more likely that there are simply no Tirolians left on Earth.