Southern Cross

by Jack McKinney

  that would leave Moon Base and the other scattered Human sentry posts in the Solar System cut off, ripe for casual eradication.

  The indicators on his instruments suddenly waffled; either the enemy had been obliged to channel power away from jamming and into weapons, shields, or whatever, or the signal-warfare countermeasures computers had come up with a way to punch through a transmission. A dim, static-fuzzed voice from Liberty acknowledged.

  The Moon Base op opened his headset mike and began sending with frantic haste.

  "Space Station Liberty, this is Moon Base. Flash message, I say again, flash message! Five bogies closing on you at vector eight-one-three-slash-four-four-niner! You may not have them on your scopes; they have been fading in and out on ours. We didn't know they were here until we got a visual. Possible hostiles, I say again, possible hostiles. They're coming straight for you!"

  In the Liberty Station commo center, another op was signaling the duty officer that a flash message-a priority emergency-was incoming, even as he recorded the Moon Base transmission.

  When it was done, he turned and exercised a prerogative put in place during the rebuilding of Earth after the Zentraedi holocaust. There wasn't time for an officer to get to the commo center, evaluate the message, get in touch with the G3 staff, and have a red alert declared. Every second was critical; the Human race had learned that the hard way.

  No op had ever used it before, but no op had ever faced this situation before. With the decisive slap of a big, illuminated red button, a commo center corporal put the space station on war footing, and warned Earth to follow suit.

  He tried to piece together the rest of what the Moon Base op was saying just as he spied a watch officer headed his way. The op covered his mike with his hand and called out, "Red flag, ma'am! Tell 'em to get the gun batteries warmed up, 'cause we're in trouble!"

  The commo lieutenant nodded. She turned at once to a secure intercom,

  signaling the station's command center. Klaxons and alarm hooters began their din.

  "Battle stations, battle stations! Laser and plasma gunners, prepare to open fire!"

  Armored gunners dashed to their posts as Liberty went on full alert. The heavily shielded turrets opened and the ugly, gleaming snouts of the twin- and quad-barreled batteries rose into view, traversing and coming to bear on the targets' last known approach vector.

  Near the satellite fortress, a flight of patrol ships swung around to intersect the bogies' approach. They were big, slow, delta-shaped cruisers, slated for replacement in the near future. They were the first to feel the power of the Robotech Masters.

  The five Robotech Master assault ships came, sand-red and shaped like flattened bottles. The leader arrowed in at the Earth craft, opening up with energy cannon. A white-hot bolt opened the side of the cruiser as if gutting a fish. Atmosphere and fireballs rushed from the Human ship. Within it, crewmen and women screamed, but only briefly.

  The Masters' warcraft plunged in, eager for more kills.

  "I can't raise any of the patrol cruisers, ma'am," the Liberty Station commo op told TASC Lieutenant Marie Crystal. "And three of them have disappeared from the radar screens."

  Marie looked up at the commo link that had been patched through to her by the commander of the patrol flotilla with which her Tactical Armored Space Corps fighter squadron was serving. She nodded, her delicate jaw set.

  She was a pale young woman in battle armor, with blue eyes that had an exotic obliqueness to them, and short, unruly hair like black straw. There was an intensity to her very much like that of an unhooded bird of prey.

  "Roger that, Liberty Station. Black Lions will respond." She ran a fast calculation; the flotilla had diverted from its usual near-Earth duties when the commo breakdown occurred, and was now very close to Liberty-close enough for binocular and telescope sighting on the explosions and

  energy-bolt signatures out where the sneak attack had taken place, beyond the satellite.

  "Our ETA at your position in approximately ninety seconds from launch." He acknowledged, white-faced and sweating, and Marie broke the patch-up. Then she signaled her TASC unit, the Black Lions, for a hot scramble.

  "Attention all pilots. Condition red, condition red. This is not a drill, I say again, this is not a drill. Prepare for immediate launch, all catapults. Black Lions prepare to launch. "

  The decks reverberated with the impact of running armored boots. Marie led the way to the hangar deck, her horned flight helmet in one hand. There was all the usual madness of a scramble, and more, because no one among the young Southern Cross soldiers had ever been in combat before.

  Marie boarded her Veritech fighter with practiced ease, even though she was weighted down by her body armor. The scaled-up cockpit had room for her in the bulky superalloy suit, but even so, and even after years of practice she found it a bit more snug than she would have liked.

  The Tactical Armored Space Corps' front-line fightercraft had been decreased in size quite a bit since the Robotech War because they no longer needed to go to a Battloid-mode size that would let them slug it out toe-to-toe with fifty-foot-tall Zentraedi warriors or their huge Battlepods.

  Her maint crew got her seated properly and ready to taxi for launch. As Marie sat studying the gauges and instruments and indicators on her panel, she didn't realize how much like a slim, keen-eyed Joan of Arc she looked in her armor.

  Strange, she brooded. It's not like I thought it would be. I'm anxious but not nervous.

  Crewpeople with spacesuits color-coded to their jobs raced around, seeing to ordnance and moving craft, or racing to take their places in the catapult crews. They, too, tended to be young, a part of Robotechnology's new generation, shouldering responsibilities and facing hazards that made them adults while most of them were still in their teens. Even in peacetime,

  death was a part of virtually every cruise, and the smallest mishap could cost lives.

  The Black Lions launched and formed up; the enemy ships turned toward them but altered course at the last moment, launching their own smaller craft.

  "What are those things?" Second Lieutenant Snyder, whose callsign was Black Beauty, yelled when the enemy fighters came into visual range, already firing.

  Gone were the simple numeral callsigns of a generation before; Earth was a feudal hegemony of city-states and regional power structures, bound by virtually medieval loyalties, under the iron fist of the UEG, and the planet's military reflected that. So did the armor of the Southern Cross's ultratech knights, including Marie's own helmet, with its stylized horns.

  "Shut up and take 'em!" Marie snapped; she hated unnecessary chatter on a tac net. "And stick with your wingmen!"

  But she didn't blame Black Beauty for being shocked. So, the Zentraedi are back, she thought. Or somebody a lot like them.

  The bogies that were zooming in at the Black Lions were faceless armored figures nearly the size of the alien invaders who appeared in 1999 to savage Earth and initiate the Robotech War. These were different, though: They were Humanoid-looking, though insectlike; Zentraedi Battlepods were like headless alloy ostriches bristling with cannon.

  Moreover, these things rode swift, maneuverable saucer-shaped Hovercraft, like outlandish walking battleships riding waterjet platforms.

  But they were fast and deadly, whatever they were. The Hovercraft dipped and changed vector, prodigal with their power, performing maneuvers that seemed impossible outside of atmosphere. Up until today that had always been a Veritech specialty.

  About twenty of the intruders dove in at a dozen Black Lions, and the dogfighting began. Fifteen years had gone by since the last time Human and alien had clashed, and the answered prayers that were peace were suddenly vacated.

  And the dying hadn't changed.

  The small volume of space, just an abstract set of coordinates, became the new killing ground. VT and Bioroid circled and pounced at one another, fired or dodged depending upon who had the advantage, maneuvered furiously, and came back for mor
e.

  The aliens fired extremely powerful energy weapons, most often from the bulky systems packages that sat before them on their control stems. That gave the Lions the eerie feeling that a horde of giant metallic water-skiers was trying to immolate them.

  But the arrangement only looked funny; incandescent rays flashed from the control-stem projectors, and three TASC fliers died almost at once. The saucer-shaped Hoverplatforms turned to seek new prey. This time they demonstrated that they could fire from apertures in the bodies of their saucercraft as well as those in the controlstem housings.

  "Black Beauty, Black Beauty, two bogies on your tail!" John Zalenga, who was known as White Knight, called out the warning. "Go to turbo-thrust!" Marie spared a quick glance to her commo display, and saw Zalenga's white-visaged helmet with its brow-vanes on one side of a split-screen, Snyder's ebony headgear, like some turbaned, veiled muslim champion's on the other.

  But before Snyder could do anything about his dilemma, the two were on him, their fire crisscrossing on his VT's tail. Marie heard the fight rather than saw it, because at that moment she had the shot she wanted at a darting alien Hovercraft.

  VT armament had changed in a generation: gone were the autocannon and their depleted transuranic shells. Amplified laser arrays sent pulses of destructive power through the vacuum. Armored saucer-platform and armored alien rider disappeared in a cloud of flame and shrapnel.

  Marie's gaze was level and intent behind her tinted visor. "We lost Black Beauty; the rest of you start flying the way you were taught! Start flying like Black Lions!"

  Outside of a few minor brushfire conflicts over borders, the VTs of

  Marie's generation had never flown combat before. Certainly, Aerial Combat School was nothing like this: real enemy fire and real friends being blown to rags of sizzling flesh and cinders, with the next volley coming at you.

  But Marie's voice and their training put the Lions back in control. The survivors got back into tight pairs, covering one another as the Bioroids came back for another run.

  "Going to Guardian mode," Marie bit out, her breath rasping a little in her helmet facemask. They were all pulling lots of gees in the hysterical maneuvering of the dogfight; as trained, they locked their legs and tightened their midsections to keep the blood up in their heads, where it was needed. The grunting and snorting for breath made the Black Lions' tac net sound as if some desperate tug-of-war were in progress.

  Marie pulled the triplet-levers as one; her VT began changing.

  None of the intricacies of mechamorphosis mattered much to the young VT leader with a sky full of bogies coming at her. All Marie really cared about was that when she summoned up her craft's Guardian configuration, the order was obeyed.

  She could feel the craft shifting and changing shape around her, modules sliding and structural parts reconforming themselves, like some fantastic mechanical origami. In moments, Veritech became Guardian, a giant figure like a cross between a warrior and a space-battlecruiser, a sleek eagle of Robotechnology.

  "Got you covered, White Knight," she told Zalenga. "Here they come." The Masters' battle mecha surged in at them, the flashes of their fire lighting the expressionless insect eyes of the Bioroids' head-turrets.

  But the next joust of spaceborne paladins was very different from what had gone before. The Guardian had most of the speed of a Veritech, but the increased maneuverability and firepower that came from bringing it closer to anthropomorphic form. More or less the form of the Bioroids.

  But more, Marie Crystal thought her craft through its change and its actions. The secret of Robotech mecha lay in the pilot's helmet-the "thinking cap," as it had been dubbed. Receptors there picked up thought

  impulses and translated them into the mecha's actions. No other control system could have given a machine that kind of agility and battle-prowess, which seemed more like those of a living thing.

  Marie dodged one Hovercraft's fire, neatly missing that of the thing's companion, darting like a superalloy dragonfly. She controlled her mecha with deft manipulations of the gross motor-controls-hand and foot controls there in the cockpit-but more important, she thought her Guardian through the firefight. Mental imaging was the key to Robotech warfare.

  The lead Bioroid was firing at a place Marie's Guardian no longer occupied. She blasted it dead center with an almost frugally short burst of intense fire, a hyphen of novafire that was gone nearly before it had begun. The Bioroid erupted outward in fireball demise.

  She ducked the backup Bioroid's cannonade, too, and wove through it to fix the alien mecha in her gunsight reticle and shoot. The second Bioroid was an articulated fortress-bulbous-forearmed, bulbous-legged-one moment, and a superheated gas cloud headed for entropy the next.

  The other Black Lions weren't slow to pick up on the new tactics. Some went to Guardian mode, and one or two to Battloid-the Veritech equivalent of the Bioroids-while one or two remained in Fighter mode. The Bioroids simply could not adjust to the smorgasbord of Earthly war-mecha suddenly facing them.

  Tables turned, and it was the invader mecha that disappeared in spheres of white-hot explosion. Then it became apparent that they had had enough; like oily, scuttling beetles, the two or three survivors hunkered over their control stems and fled.

  A controller from the Lions' cruiser got through to them just as they were preparing to mechamorphose and pursue the enemy until none were left.

  "Black Lion Team, break contact! All Veritechs, break contact! Let 'em go for now, Lions, and return to the ship at once."

  The ballooning explosions began to die away; Marie gathered up her unit unhurriedly, enjoying mastery of the battlefield.

  But she knew that the tactics that had won the Lions this day's fight might not be as effective next time. And she knew, too, that the force her team had faced was probably a negligible number in terms of the enemy's total strength.

  She thrust the thought aside. Today was a victory; embattled humanity, cast into the eye of the storm of interstellar Robotech warfare again, had to relearn the skill of taking things one moment, one battle, one breath of life at a time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was Bowie I'd legally taken as my ward, his parents being among my closest friends, but it was often Dana who gave me greater cause for worry. With her mixed parentage and the grief she sometimes got about it, she was often torn between two distinct modes of behavior, the sternly military and the wildly anti-authoritarian.

  And, none of us really know what it was Lang, and later Zand, were doing to her in those experiments when she was a baby. We suspect it had something to do with Protoculture, and activating the alien side of her nature.

  But Zand knows one thing: he knows how close I came to killing him with my bare hands that day when I came to take baby Dana away from him. And if anything ever happens to her because of what he did, Zand's fears will be borne out.

  From the personal journal of Major General Rolf Emerson

  Like most Southern Cross military facilities, the place was roomy. The devastating attacks of the Zentraedi had seen to it that Earth would have no problems with population density for some time to come.

  This one was a large, truncated cone, an airy building of smoky blue glass and gleaming blue tile, set on a framework of blue-tinted alloy. The architecture had a nostalgic art-deco look to it. It was big even though it served only as barracks to a relatively few people; much of the above-ground area was filled with parts and equipment storage and repair areas, armory, kitchen and dining and lavatory facilities, and so on. In some ways it was a self-contained world.

  Mounted on its front was an enormous enlargement of a unit crest, that of the Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, the ATACs, and beneath that the squad designation: 15.

  The crest was lavish, almost rococo, with rampant lion and unicorn, crown, gryphon, stars, shields, and the rest. The viewer had to look closely

  to see that one element of what was supposed to be crossed machetes looked more like...rabbit ears.
The 15th had an old, gallant, and highly decorated past but a reputation for trouble, and for deviltry as well. The origin of the rabbit ears in its heraldry had a hundred different versions, and quite possibly none of them were true.

  Inside, in a unit ready-room, there was an unusual level of banter going on, with almost a celebratory air. The same alarm that had disrupted Dana's graduation day proceedings, as word came of attack from space, had taken the ATACs off a peacetime footing.

  Dana and Bowie had spent a week with the 15th, getting ready for the follow-up attack that never came. But at least there was no more falling out for silly make-work details or drudge jobs from the duty roster; the 15th had made sure it was ready to go, then had been ordered to stand-to and remain in barracks pursuant to further orders.

  In civilian terms, it was a little like a small lottery win. The troopers of the 15th were napping or reading or chatting amiably to one another or watching vid. Bowie Grant was fooling around at an ancient upright piano that someone had scavenged for the 15th over a decade before; by diligent work he had gotten it back in tune, and now played it with eyes closed. On his torso harness and arm brassards were the 15th's crests.

  Near him, Louie Nichols listened indifferently to the music while he cleaned and reassembled a laser pistol. Totally synthesized synaptic-inductance music with enhanced simu-sensory effects was more to Louie's liking; the lanky corporal was a sort of maverick technical genius given to endless tinkering and preoccupation with gadgetry.

  Still, Bowie's music wasn't too bad for primitech stuff, Louie decided. Bowie was liked well enough after a week in the 15th, but he was still a bit of an oddball, like Louie himself. A man who looked out at the world through big, square, heavily tinted goggles-few people had seen Louie's eyes, even in the shower. Louie had decided Bowie was a misfit and therefore somewhat of a kindred soul, and that Dana was a bit of the same. So he had taken to the 15th's newest troopers.