Force of Arms

by Jack McKinney

  "Have you given any thought to taking in a little cash for a change?" he snarled.

  She came to her feet, the jacket clutched to her. "No, I haven't!"

  If it was going to be another argument, she decided, this time she was going to get a few things off her mind. "This was supposed to be a benefit concert for those poor people who're trying to make their lives work in Granite, not some big-deal career move for Lynn-Minmei!"

  She had him, and they both knew it. All at once his ranting sounded like empty talk. He was suddenly contrite. "Aw, c'mon, Minmei. You know I didn't mean anything like that." It was not quite a whine, but somehow it only made her detest him more.

  She knelt and began picking up the things he had spilled, brushing dirt from them. "We're getting paid like everyone else is, in the things that keep us alive. I think we should show a little appreciation."

  That made him cough on the mouthful of brandy he was chugging. He almost finished the bottle, and his mood swung end for end, as quick as his martial-arts moves used to be.

  "Appreciation? I should appreciate the great military mentality that brought us to this?" He opened his arms as if to embrace the blighted world. She straightened and met his stare. "Earth was attacked, and it fought back. I don't want to hear anybody knocking the military. If it hadn't been

  for them, I wouldn't be alive right now. And for that matter, neither would you."

  So, we come to the core of the matter, he thought blearily.

  That moment on the SDF-1, with a planet dying at his feet and great fleets slaying one another while he kissed her, was two years behind him. And yet it played over and over in memory, as fresh as if it had happened that afternoon.

  The secret that glowed in him like a reflex furnace, the one Kyle would never be able to bring himself to admit to her or even put into words to himself, was that he had exulted in that moment even as he had been repulsed by it.

  He had loved it! He had been taken by the drama completely, swept up in the battle. He had cast aside every conviction he ever had and gloried in what was happening. He had hoped with all his soul for human victory.

  His father had been a soldier; both family restaurants had catered to the military trade. Lynn-Kyle scorned all of that, scorned military and government and authority in every form. And yet when it had come down to a question of seeing his planet and people die, he had been out there rooting for the home team, as red of fang and claw, as contemptible, as any of them.

  He had never lost a fight since his father had pummeled and shamed him into learning the martial arts. Indeed, he'd become a very genius of unarmed combat. But this contest with himself was one he felt fated to lose. As he hated himself, so he had come to make Minmei hate him.

  He had seen that the military, with the SDF-1 and Macross as a power base and Breetai and his Zentraedi as allies, was destined to be the force that reunited the planet. Nevertheless, he resisted it every inch of the way, going deeper and deeper into despair as the vast egalitarian movement he had envisioned dwindled away to a few pitiful holdouts.

  So if this was going to be the argument that had been building between Minmei and Kyle for so long, let it be so. He turned his face to an ugly mask with an elaborate sneer. "You're breaking my heart." He swallowed the last of the brandy.

  You're breaking my heart.

  Twenty yards away, behind a broken piece of cornice at the top of a rise, Rick Hunter squatted with his back against cold stone and listened to Minmei and Kyle.

  He sat still as a rock or one of the pieces of dead mecha that now littered the world.

  "Must you keep drinking?" Minmei said. "It's getting out of hand!"

  Kyle upended the bottle and let the last few droplets fall on soil that hadn't tasted moisture in two years. Then he tossed it high, launched himself through the air in a reverse spin kick, a ki-yi yell coming from deep within him, turning twice, and popped the little brandy bottle out of existence like a trap shooter.

  Pieces of dark glass landed at Minmei's feet. She watched Kyle steadily. "Did that make you feel any better about yourself?"

  How can she wound me so easily with just a word or two? he wondered in confusion.

  His mood swung again, and there was an endless affection in him for her. She was, after all, the sum of his life. All he had ever really accomplished, Lynn-Kyle saw now, was getting Minmei to love him.

  But Minmei's mood was riding a different swing. "Whatever you think of the RDF, there are a lot of fine men and women in it," she said levelly. "Much better people than you are right now."

  A moment that might have been a reconciliation and a new start was gone forever. Kyle ran the back of his hand across his mouth again. Al! right; we might as well have it all out.

  "What's that crack supposed to mean?"

  Minmei was actually shaking a fist at him. "It means they're trying to rebuild Earth, while all you can do is drink and feel sorry for yourself!"

  "Is that so? Well, I've done a pretty good job of takin' care of your career, little Miss Superstar!"

  She had been loud a moment before; her voice was quiet now. "Maybe we'd better split up then, Kyle. So you can look after your own career." She gathered her pink jacket around her.

  She had been hurt until her endurance was all gone, and now she only wanted to hurt in retaliation. "I didn't realize I owed it all to you, Kyle."

  He had his hands out in fending-off gestures. "Wait, wait. I didn't mean-didn't mean I wanted to split up our partnership." "Partnership" was a weak word for what they'd had, but somehow the vocabulary of love was steamrollered by the vocabulary of argument. He felt something slipping away even as he made the choice of words.

  She drew a long, deep breath, looking him in the eye. "Maybe not, but it's what I meant."

  The compass of Lynn-Kyle's emotions swung a last time, and his mouth resolved into a straight, thin line. "Okay, go! Who needs you?" He kicked the empty carton high into the air.

  Rick Hunter didn't know exactly what to feel. The fact that Kyle had alienated Minmei might have been enjoyable from a distance, but it was harrowing to see at close range.

  And then there was the whole question of going out and intervening. Rick had no illusions about being able to take the tall, cobra-fast martial-arts expert hand to hand, and he had forgotten to bring along the survival pistol from his VT's ejection pack.

  Suddenly the rover radio buzzed in its thigh pouch. "Commander Hunter, come in please!" It was Vanessa's voice, sending from the rusting, soggy-footed SDF-1.

  He had turned the volume down low when he came out to the edge of the wastelands, following leads to find Minmei. Now he held the rover up to his ear. Minmei and Kyle didn't seem to have heard a thing.

  He thumbed the transmit switch. "I'm here."

  "Sir, you're directed to lead your flight to New Portland. A residential

  district is under attack by several Zentraedi malcontents."

  "Malcontents." That was what the new world government was calling them so far. But those who had sworn the Zentraedi warrior oath and turned their back on human society were a lot more than malcontents. They had only to walk out into the wasteland and keep going, find the right wrecked ship. If they were lucky, they would find arms, mecha, rations, water, and shelter.

  Rick poised for a moment in a pain so precise that it defied any random theory of the universe. Most of what he had come to believe in impelled him to get to New Portland with all possible speed.

  Everything else told him to stay there, because this was the moment he could win Minmei back.

  But he thumbed the rover's transmit button again. "What weapons?" "Three battlesuits and four pods, a total of seven," Vanessa's voice

  came back. That wasn't exactly several, the way Rick saw it, but he had to admit that things probably looked a little different from a worldwide coordinating nerve center like the SDF-1.

  These were Zentraedi who had defected to the human side in the Robotech War. They were onetime allies. He
held the rover's voice pickup close and said softly, "It'll be taken care of. What's the status on Skull flight? Over."

  "They are curtailing their current sweep and will rendezvous with you in New Portland. Out."

  He shut off the rover before the sound of static could betray him. He raced off toward his ship. It was a kind of liberation to have some crisis so pressing that he could forget about Minmei for a while. He left the two Lynns to their own devices, and somehow he couldn't help wishing them the worst.

  As his VT took off in Guardian mode, Rick saw the tiny, distant figure of Kyle go down on both knees before Minmei. She turned and opened her arms, cradling his head to her breast. Rick hit the throttle, and his VT left a trail of blue fire across the sky.

  Lisa stared up through her window at the rotting hulk of the SDF-1. Beneath it was a thriving, growing city, but its presence put everyone in mind of the war.

  "Hmmph! What a view!" As a morale builder, she was wearing a tight blouse with a high, upturned collar. Every once in a while she permitted herself to catch a glimpse of herself in a full-length mirror there in her quarters and admit, not bad!

  The SDF-1 wasn't bad to look at either, really. The more so because the SDF-2 would be lowered into place, back to back with it, in another day or so. Lang and his disciples had worked out some way to move the sealed enigmatic engines from one to the other. Lisa had heard the briefings, could sort of understand the mathematics Lang scrawled all over every flat surface that came to hand, and had faith in him, but she still thought her new assignment was an unknown quantity.

  The comset birred for her attention. She picked up the handset. In seconds she had word of the New Portland raid from Vanessa and was hurrying for the door.

  Sunset had come, and a freezing rain, as the Zentraedi ransacked New Portland. They had cut a swath of destruction from the diminished Lake Oswego to the once great Columbia River.

  The pods fired and devastated without mercy. Local militia and police were victims just like the civilians; in the first hours of their rampage, the alien malcontents slew over four hundred men and women of assorted constabularies, police departments, and guard units.

  They set buildings afire with a mere brush of their plastron cannon; they trod houses and people flat underneath their pods' huge, hooflike feet.

  Now they loomed, three abreast, in the center of New Portland as black smoke roiled around them and the screams of the dying echoed through the rain-washed streets. Blood ran in the gutters.

  Down from the night swooped the VTs of Skull Team under Ransom's

  command. Robotechnology made them all-weather fighters, as dangerous in blackness as they were in light.

  "Nobody fires unless they have a confirmed target; there're civilians down there," Ransom said.

  Just then New Portland came into view, burning like a skillet of molten metal, smoke funneling up from it to form thickening layers that threw back red light.

  Bobby Bell began, "My God! This is horrible-"

  "Shut up, Sergeant," Ransom cut him off. "All VTs form up on me. Let's get down there and stop this thing. And watch your fare!"

  Jeanette LeClair and her best friend, Sonya Poulson, ran through the rain-slick streets of New Portland hand in hand, shivering in the frigid rain, crying for the loved ones who had died, pulses hammering because death was at their heels. Jeanette's birthday a month before had made her eight years old; Sonya's, four days later, had brought them even.

  Behind them, a Zentraedi Battlepod stumped around the corner, kicking a traffic light through a brick wall and snapping power lines, then turned its guns on them.

  Jeanette fell, and Sonya wanted to keep running but found that she couldn't. She dashed back to her friend, trying to help her up, but she fell instead, and the two of them sprawled on the rain-washed cobblestone street as a huge round metal hoof came down at them. They wept, held each other close, and waited to die.

  The pod paused in the act of trampling yet more victims. The armored, lightbulb-shaped torso turned, as if listening to something. Jeanette and Sonya could hardly know that it was receiving an urgent message from one of its fellows.

  "Warning! Warning! Enemy fightercraft approaching! Form up to take defensive action!"

  The two little girls looked up at the ridges and features of the huge hoof and realized it was pulling away. In moments, the pod had turned and

  grasshoppered off for some destination they couldn't even guess at, riding its foot thrusters.

  Moments later, thunder came down through the sky as Skull Team VTs arrived at full throttle. The two girls helped each other up. Buildings shook and windows broke to the sonic boom as the RDF fighters swept in vengefully.

  The girls' voices were very small in the middle of all that, but they cheered nonetheless.

  The pods chose straightforward battle, charging out in a group, firing the primary and secondary cannon mounted on their armored chest plastrons.

  That suited Skull Team just fine; they flew down through the intense ground fire in Guardian mode, like eagles for the kill, gripping their chain-guns.

  "Let's hit 'em," Ransom said.

  "Sure, but we've gotta lead 'em away from the city!" Bobby Bell yelled.

  He was right, and the formation split even while it exchanged fire with the rampaging pods. The Guardians turned back, and the pods, firing with every gun, rocketed and kangaroo-hopped after.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  For the Zentraedi, peaceful life and a disengagement from their warlike culture was, after all, a profound struggle, a sort of sublimating battle into, which they could hurl themselves. For a time they were content with it, as they were content with any other conflict.

  Is it any wonder, though, that with the battle won, so many of them began to fall prey to a frustrated restlessness? The fight for peace can be a noble one, but as history and legend tell us, the warrior-born should beware the disaster of total victory.

  And so should those about him.

  Zeitgeist, Alien Psychology

  In the foothills at the outskirts of New Portland, the VTs stopped running and the mecha clashed in earnest.

  Almost by instinct, the pods came abreast to set up a firing line. The Guardians dove at them, and the bluewhite lances of energy beams jousted against streams of high-density slugs lit by tracers.

  A concentrated salvo of alien cannon fire took off the left arm of Ransom's Guardian. "These dudes really wanna fight," he said grimly. He looped, trying to manage the damage, and unleashed a spread of Stilettos at them.

  No more tromping on little girls, bozos! Let's see you pick on somebody your own size!

  "This could be defined as dereliction of duty, Commander," Lisa's voice said in Rick's ear.

  "What're you talking about?" "Where were you?" she said icily.

  "Uh, on recon." Guilt made him snappish. "It's within mission guidelines. Why, any objections?"

  Back in the command center, she looked down at the latest satnet locater profiles of military aircraft. He had been grounded at the edge of. Granite City. No surprise.

  "I object when you jeopardize the lives of the men under your command, Hunter."

  He couldn't help it; the accumulated experiences of the day just made him lose control as no cool, competent combat flier is supposed to. "What's your goddamn problem, Lisa?"

  "Your men are in combat, and you're supposed to be leading them, you unutterable moron!" she yelled into the mike, then snapped it off.

  Well, there. They had had a grand argument over a command commo net about everything except what was really driving them apart. What satisfaction.

  She stalked away from the commo console. "Oh, that man."

  "Take cover, take cover," chanted Vanessa in a whisper to the rest of the Terrible Trio.

  "I wonder what Commander Hunter did to cause the blowup this time." Sammie blinked.

  "Whatever it was, it looks like he'll be on a steady diet of cold shoulder when he gets back," Vanessa replied.r />
  Kim took off her headset and turned to them. "I dunno; d'you think she really loves him?"

  "D'you mean to say you haven't heard the latest gossip?" Sammie almost squirmed in her eagerness to tell it. "They say she cleans his quarters. Yeah, yeah, cleans! While he's away on patrol. And he doesn't even take her out or anything."

  The Terrible Trio thought poisonous thoughts about the male gender.

  Kim fanned herself gently with her hand. "It's hard to believe Lisa would get herself roped into something like that. She's too smart!"

  Sammie caught her arm. "But wait; that isn't all!"

  "Ixnay," Kim murmured, turning a sidelong glance. "We're being

  watched."

  "Uh-oh." Sammie hastened to put her earphones back on.

  Lisa looked at them resignedly. Go ahead, girls; I don't blame you. I guess it is funny.

  The pod's cannon hosed concentrated fire into the storm-wracked night sky. The Guardian sideslipped and counterfired with its autocannon.

  "Won't these characters ever give up?" Bobby Bell gritted.

  But there was a certain fear to it. Zentraedi who had returned to their warrior code, their death-before-defeat belief system, were enemies to be reckoned with.

  And then there was a familiar face on an instrument panel display screen. "How you guys doin'?" Rick Hunter asked with elaborate casualness. It was the heritage; he was flying into the middle of a red-hot firefight, and he looked like it was all he could do to stay awake.

  "Boss, look sharp," Bobby shot back. "These boys are murder."

  Rick's VT dove down through the rain in Guardian configuration like a rocket-powered falcon. "It's okay. I'll take over now. Ransom, Bobby; all of you drop back and stay out of sight."

  He went in at them as he had gone in at hundreds of pods-thousands-since the day he first stepped into a VT cockpit. He wove through their fire, rebounded from the ground, and sprang high overhead on Robotech legs.