Robotech

by Jack McKinney

  Sean caught her thoughtful tone and looked her over. “What exactly are you thinking about?”

  She gave him a closed-face look. “Basic military strategy.” She rose, took a few paces, then turned back to them. “C’mon, Louie, we’ve got work to do!”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  Lazlo, my valued colleague,

  It falls upon me to leave now with the SDF-3 expedition, and falls to you to stay, for reasons we both know.

  But I ask you to keep in mind the fact that my Awakening to the Protoculture was in some measure accidental, while yours was fully aforethought, and that certain intents and purposes in you are at times very strong.

  I exhort you to remember that you will be dealing with HUMAN BEINGS, and to work contrary to their wellbeing will be in some measure, always, to work at cross purposes with the Protoculture. Please don’t let the eagerness to plumb the depths of Protoculture distort your thinking.

  Your friend,

  Emil Lang

  WHEN DANA APPEARED AT THE ROBOTECH RESEARCH LAB with Louie in tow, she had the impression that Drs. Cochran and Beckett were looking at her rather strangely, at least at first.

  But she shrugged it off; research types were always off somewhere in a world of their own. Besides, Louie had them totally fascinated with his idea in short order. First thing she knew, Louie was sitting at Beckett’s main computer terminal with the doctors looking on, bringing up diagrams and displays and equations and computer-generated images to explain and verify his analysis.

  “It’s only a theory, I admit,” he said as the computer illuminated various parts of a grid-diagram of Zor’s vessel. “But after all, no scans show any central power source, am I right?”

  Cochran nodded, lower lip between his thumb and forefinger, staring into the screen. Louie went on. “But I, um, I accessed the intel computers and I found what’s gotta be a bio-gravitic induction network.”

  The computer showed it, a convoluted array like a highway system or blood vessels, picked out in neon red. “There seems to be some kind of perpetual bio-gravitic cycle; the Protoculture quanta are simultaneously attracted to and repelled by one another. Kinda like what’s going on in the sun, if you want to put it that way, gravity and fusion fighting it out in a sort of equilibrium.”

  Dana tried to get a word in edgewise, but the three men were completely caught up in their tech-talk.

  Beckett did sneak in a sidelong look at her, though. How had Dana, of all people, come to be the one to find this Louie Nichols, this gem-in-the-rough genius/weirdo? Of course it was again in total defiance of any coincidence, and Beckett had renewed awe for Protoculture’s power to shape events.

  “It appears to effect these two strong mega-forces,” Louie said.

  “Through phased bonding!” Cochran comprehended, grinning from ear to ear.

  Dana was tired of hearing about the framistat field connected to the veeblefertzer anomalies. “So if we destabilize this equilibrium of yours, we’ll knock the whole ship out of whack, right?”

  They frowned at her coarse language, but Louie shrugged. “Yes. At least theoretically.”

  She looked to Cochran and Beckett. “Then you find the right spot and we’ll see that the job gets done!”

  Cochran hedged. “I don’t think the chief of staff will choose you for the mission, Lieutenant. Not with your track record.”

  But inside he was wondering how Zand could let the girl run around loose like this, constantly daring aliens to shoot her cute blond head off. She was the very core of so much of Zand’s work and planning.

  Ah, but that’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it? he seemed to hear Zand lecturing. It’s Protoculture that shapes events, and living beings interfered with it or sought to hamper it only at their own peril.

  Zand, and even the great Lang, had realized this very early on; only by being observers of events and learning the innermost secrets of Protoculture—the ones that had died with the original Zor—could they ever hope to reach a point where they dared try to maniputate its greatest powers.

  Dana was saying cheerfully, “Oh, I beg to differ. The Fifteenth is the perfect choice for this mission!”

  Getting Bowie to agree to help her talk Emerson into letting the 15th take the mission was only slightly more difficult than getting a mule into high heels. But he saw that the rest of the 15th was all for it, so he gave in at last.

  In Emerson’s office, Dana, Bowie, and Louie held their collective breath while Emerson studied the data. “Sir, we’ve finally got the weapon we need to hit the Robotech Masters where it hurts,” Bowie prompted.

  Emerson brought his chair back around. “It’s an insane mission. Hopeless. And we can’t spare the pilots or VTs.”

  Dana gave him her best wide-eyed look. “But who said anything about Veritechs? Looks more like a job for Hovertanks, I was thinking, General.”

  Emerson moaned inwardly and wished for the days when he could paddle them when they had been bad and send them to bed without supper. And there had been quite a few of those.

  But that was before the days when they were soldiers who had sworn an oath of duty. And before the days when the Robotech Masters had come to grind the Earth to rubble beneath an iron heel. “You think you can do it?”

  Her gaze was level now, her nod slow and sure. “Yes, sir.”

  Emerson rose. “Good hunting, people.”

  Again the fighters went up, but this time they were as cautious as they could manage to be, firing from a distance, putting more emphasis on evasive maneuvers than on accuracy. Once more the glowing, throbbing hexagonal webs appeared. Dana thought how much like powerveined snowflakes they looked.

  The snowflakes moved, as they had before, to supply coverage to heavily attacked areas, leaving others more lightly guarded. It was something intel had noted on the first assault; the time had come to use it.

  The shuttle pilot flying the mission was a chill cube; when a stray Masters cannon round grazed the fuselage of his ship, he said offhandedly, “Just a flesh wound, pards. Goin’ in.”

  He stood the ship on its side to make it between two of the spiral ziggurat megastructures on the deck below, then flew along a trench, well aware that a speed slow enough to make a combat drop was too slow to dodge enemy flak. He shrugged and kept flying. “Made it through,” he thought to mention to the ATACs back in the drop bay, as if telling them that the mail had arrived.

  “Outta the frying pan,” Dana heard Sean mutter into his helmet mike. Then the pilot gave the order to open the drop bay door, and they were looking out at the onrushing techno-terrain of the mother ship’s upper hull.

  The Hovertanks’ engines were already revving. The ATACs roared out in order, dropping into deployment pattern as they descended to the hull.

  “Everyone accounted for?” Dana, in the lead, asked. She was trying to take in everything at once, looking for AA emplacements and other wicked surprises, spot her target, see how the battle was going, and make sure Valkyrie was functioning right.

  Angelo, farther back, reported, “Roger that; everybody’s in position, Lieutenant.”

  The ATACs barreled along, lining up on their leader according to assignment. “All right boys; you know the drill.”

  They did; it was Sterling-simple. They were to follow Dana’s targeting program, pierce the hull, and expose that bio-gravitic network. Then they would concentrate fire, disrupt the energy highway system, and put the mother ship’s lights out.

  Unless any of ten thousand things went wrong. Bowie sang out a Southern Cross Army refrain, “Just another day in the SCA!”

  They stayed in a long trench for cover, and had good luck for an astoundingly tranquil ten seconds before trouble reared its armored head. “Uh-oh, we got company,” Sean noted. Four Bioroids had dropped down into the trench, far ahead, to block their way. Dana found herself holding her breath, wondering what color they were.

  Well, if Big Red’s in my way now, it’s his tough luck! She
made an obscene reference to what the Bioroids could go and do. “Forget ’em! It’s that system we’re after! Close up behind me!”

  They did, and Dana hit emergency thrust. She dodged the enemy mecha’s shots and was upon them before they got their bearings, bowling them over with the solid weight of her tank, not bothering to shoot. All were blues. The 15th howled like werewolves and followed her on toward the target.

  “The shuttle got in under their defensive shields,” Rochelle told Emerson. “We register a running firefight on the upper hull, sir.”

  Emerson inclined his head in acknowledgment but didn’t take his eyes from the displays.

  Bioroids closed in from both sides and behind, but none were on their Hovercraft, and so it remained a road-race. Trooper Thornton heard Sean’s warning but couldn’t dodge in time, and a wash of annihilation discs blew out and folded Bioroid hand in its nacelle under his tank’s left rear armor skirt.

  “Been hit, Lieutenant,” Thornton drawled, trying for damage control. But the decrease in speed let two Bioroids catch up to him; they dropped feetfirst onto his ship, disintegrating it in a fireball, and kept on coming.

  “Louie! Battloid mode!” Dana called.

  The Bioroids were fighting on their home ground, but the ATACs had the advantage of velocity, adrenaline, and a desperate need to carry out their mission. Dana and Louie mechamorphosed in mid-turn, and went rocketing back at the enemy as ultratech knights, weapons blazing. This time they used the main battery, the heavy Gladiator cannon that was usually stored in the Battloid’s right arm but could be brought forth in extreme need. Everything around them seemed to be happening in slow motion.

  They got the first Bioroid as it was still charging, the second and third when the enemy mecha stopped to shoot it out, and the fourth when it sought to withdraw and had its route blocked by a dikelike structural feature.

  “Better luck next time,” Dana bade the last to go, but as it went it toppled into a sort of utility groove. Its explosion set off another, greater one, and the groove became a crackling, Protoculture-hot version of an old-time blackpowder fuse.

  Dana gasped as the eruption raced along the groove, sending up a curtain of starflame behind it, blowing armored deckplates high moving as fast as any Hovertank. The racing superfuse reached a low, pillbox feature on the hull and went up like a roman candle.

  “Louie, did we do it?”

  Louie’s helmet gave him a buglike look, but beneath it he was smiling wide.

  “Yes, ma’am! We’ve found the bio-gravitic network!”

  “Let’s get it!” She raced in with a dozen and more Battloids covering and bringing up the rear, moving like veteran infantry, or SWAT cops. They fired with all the staggering power the Hovertanks could bring to bear; Bioroids, unused to such house-to-house, room-to-room type-combat, were at the disadvantage, and took all the losses then.

  One Bioroid almost blasted Dana, but she stumbled out of its way and Angelo got the Bioroid instead, shooting it off a tall tower so that it fell a long way to the hull, somersaulting, like something out of an old western.

  Dana came up with her Battloid’s head hanging over the brink of a shaft exposed by the exploded pillbox. The shaft was so deep that she couldn’t see the bottom.

  “You found it, ma’am,” Louie observed. “Down there’s the processing field that manages the energy equilibrium. If we blow up the equipment down at the field intersection locus, we’ll destabilize this whole damn garbage scow.”

  Dana had regained her feet. “Let’s do-it-to-it!” She studied the diagram Louie was sending her, and armed the heavy missile she was carrying for the purpose. All of them had one—just one apiece—but Dana wanted this shot to be hers.

  Nearby, the 15th was in a furious firefight with the Bioroids as more and more enemy reinforcements showed up. The weapons beams spat and veered, seeking targets; the annihilation discs flew.

  Sean yelled, “Dana, we’ve got ya covered, but there’re more ’roids crashing the party!”

  “Hang on!” She adjusted the range on the missile, and its dial-a-yield for maximum explosive force. Alien discs began ranging in around her, and Louie turned the Livewire to give more covering fire. “Lieutenant, I really suggest you hurry!”

  “Jump, all you guys! Go! Don’t wait for me!” She released the missile and watched its corkscrew trail disappear down into the blackness. Then she turned to propel herself into space with the strength of her Battloid’s legs and the thrusters built into its feet, breaking out of the surface gravity field around the upper hull. She saw that the other Battloids were already in the air. As she went, her instruments registered a direct hit.

  The Bioroids were trying to shoot down the ascending Battloids when the column of white light and raw destruction shot from the shaft, like Satan’s own artillery spewing forth. The Battloids were already up and speeding away from it, but the Bioroids closing in on the shaft to see what damage had been done got a final, horrific surprise.

  The gush of unleashed energy set off explosions in and around the shaft; a dozen blues were whirled away like leaves in a hurricane, molten metal, dismembered by the force of the blast, twisted into unrecognizable shapes as the volcano of energy blew higher and higher.

  “Looks like you knew what you were talking about, Louie,” Sean said in a subdued voice, thinking what they were all thinking: the explosion surpassed all estimates and projections; if they had hung around for another few seconds, the 15th would have been history, too.

  Then everybody was making ribald praise of the Cosmic Units as the shuttle came into view, right on pickup vector. Dana looked at the lapsed-time function on her mission displays and realized in shock that the whole thing had taken only a few minutes.

  “We see you, transport; get ready to take us aboard.” Her elation was complete, for now.

  Dana and the rest of the 15th, the Cosmic crews, and the TASC fliers could all see the secondary explosions ripping along the mother ship’s hide as the ATACs dove aboard the shuttle. Furious fires burned out of control, becoming thermonuclear bonfires in the escaping atmosphere; the monster ship swung to in accordance with whatever motive forces it employed; its orbit decayed at once.

  Dana watched over an optical pickup patched through from the shuttle bridge. She felt vast satisfaction, a quelling of her own fear and self-doubt.

  Then the satisfaction retreated; the moment she touched down she would have to begin getting and training replacement personnel and mecha. It was plain the 15th would be needed again very soon.

  Because the mother ship was beginning a long, controlled fall toward Earth.

  “It’s breaking up!” Emerson exclaimed, watching the relayed image.

  “Only peripherally, sir,” Tessel noted, reading another display.

  “I never would’ve believed it,” Rochelle commented quietly. He turned and called out a command, “Ready-reaction force, stand by for immediate deployment!”

  “Once you have Zor’s landing point plotted, seal it off and ring it in with defense in depth,” Emerson instructed quietly. “Air, ground, subterranean listening equipment—everything!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Emerson watched the listing mother ship, a wounded dinosaur helpless to stop its plunge. Bigger than a city, it settled toward a final resting spot in the hills above Monument City. Emerson wondered if that was by calculation. He was beginning to abandon all faith in coincidence.

  The controlled crash didn’t destroy the mother ship, nor did Emerson expect it to; that would have been too much to hope for. It loomed like a colossal glacier of metal, silent and challenging.

  Very well, he thought. Challenge accepted.

  He turned to Rochelle. “Oh, and Colonel.”

  “Sir?”

  “Tell the Fifteenth to stand down for a little rest; they’ve earned it.”

  METAL

  FIRE

  FOR REBA WEST, JONATHEN ALEXANDER,

  TONY OLIVER, AND THE DOZEN OTHERS


  WHOSE VOICES BROUGHT THESE

  CHARACTERS TO LIFE.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  EXEDORE: So, Admiral, there is little doubt: [Zentraedi and Human] genetic makeup points directly at a common point of origin.

  ADMIRAL GLOVAL: Incredible.

  EXEDORE: Isn’t it. Furthermore, while examining the data we noticed many common traits, including a penchant on the part of both races to indulge in warfare…. Yes, both races seem to enjoy making war.

  From Exedore’s intel reports to the SDF-2 High Command

  ONCE BEFORE, AN ALIEN FORTRESS HAD CRASHED ON Earth …

  Its arrival had put an end to almost ten years of global civil war; and its resurrection had ushered in armageddon. That fortress’s blackened, irradiated remains lay buried under a mountain of earth, heaped upon it by the very men and women who had rebuilt the ship on what would have been its island grave. But unbeknownst to those who mourned its loss, the soul of that great ship had survived the body and inhabited it still—an entity living in the shadows of the technology it animated, waiting to be freed by its natural keepers, and until then haunting the world chosen for its sorry exile….

  This new fortress, this most recent gift from heaven’s more sinister side, had announced its arrival, not with tidal and tectonic upheavals, but with open warfare and devastation—death’s bloodstained calling cards. Nor was this fortress derelict and uncontrolled in its fateful fall but driven, brought down to Earth by the unwilling minor players in its dark drama….

  “ATAC Fifteen to air group!” Dana Sterling yelled into her mike over the din of battle. “Hit ’em again with everything you have! Try to keep their heads down! They’re throwing everything but old shoes at us down here!”

  Less than twenty-four hours ago her team, the 15th squad, Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, had felled this giant, not with sling and shot, but with a coordinated strike launched at the fortress’s Achilles’ heel—the core reactor governing the ship’s bio-gravitic network. It had dropped parabolically from geosynchronous orbit, crashlanding in the rugged hills several kilometers distant from Monument City.