Southern Cross

by Jack McKinney

  "Just a second," Dana tried to say, but it came out, "Mnff uh ff-uh." Meanwhile, at the end of an eternity, the engine burn was over, and she felt a moment's zero-g as the shuttle's artificial gravity cut in.

  Dana lowered the magazine, blood rushing back into her white face in a furious blush. She had a feeling she was in for some black and blue from her close encounter with haute couture.

  "I'm fine!" she tried to say brightly.

  Borgnine's copilot, who looked about thirteen years old, leaned over to inform his boss, "Computers say we're coming up for a new course correction."

  Borgnine frowned. "What? That's much too soon. Marie, what d'your internal computers show?"

  "We'll check it out and get right back to you," she said. Ideally, they would have bucked the problem back to Earth, but the Masters' interference had already put them beyond communication range.

  Marie took time out to chuckle, "Hey, Dana! How'd that facial feel?"

  Both shuttles jettisoned the spent solid-fuel boosters as the crews worked to find out why Borgnine's computer was acting up. The Potemkin's autopilot seemed adamant that a course correction was needed, and the overrides didn't seem to be dissuading it.

  "I have more bad news," Bowie said quietly. "The invaders are comin' our way. Only this time there are two of them, two mother ships."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At this moment my hand is bleeding; I crushed a glass in frustration because I can't find out what is going on up there-none of us can! And yet I can tell something has happened to Dana, is happening to her, by means that are my secret to guard.

  Ah, the Protoculture, it demands so much in return for revealing its mysteries! My life is a tiny price to pay. And Dana's, even less.

  Dr. Lazio Zand, notes for Event Horizon: Perspectives on Dana Sterling and the Second Robotech War

  Marie turned to Bowie. "How soon can we get that transmission off?"

  Bowie, who was responsible for making the actual transmission, did not think things looked very good. "I'm not picking up anything from them yet, Lieutenant." And the laser hadn't even been deployed yet. It was a very tight one, for the long shot to Liberty; it had been presumed that it would take some time to establish contact, and there didn't seem to be much of that.

  "Hurry it up; we've got company coming," Marie said, and went back to her flying.

  Borgnine's shuttle carried no special apparatus; it was an escort ship. Moreover, there was little he could do to help anybody now, with his computers leading a life of their own. And all the time, the alien leviathans closed in on the shuttles.

  Then, despite anything Borgnine and his crew could do, his engines fired. "Cut your engines! Retrofire!" Marie hollered into her mike. It did no good; Potemkin accelerated, directly toward the Masters' monolith that loomed on its vector.

  No one could tell whether what was happening was some explainable glitch-some damage done during the Bioroids attack, perhaps, and not detected-or something the Robotech Masters had instigated. It didn't

  matter; the shuttle blazed toward the invader like an interceptor missile.

  Borgnine tried everything he could think of, to no effect. Engines would not shut down, retros wouldn't fire, computers wouldn't listen, and altitude jets were insistently silent.

  "C'mon, girl, steady. Steady now," Borgnine implored his ship.

  A separate warning system computer flashed red lights and alarm whoopers, saying in its emotionless female voice, "Danger, danger. Collision alert. Collision is imminent, repeat, imminent."

  "Lieutenant Crystal, I've got a runaway here," he told Marie. "Nothing we can do." Still, they tried everything they could think of.

  An invader ship-the Robotech Masters' flagship-grew huge before them as they bore down on it. "Be informed: this might be enemy-induced. You're on your own. Good lu-" The shuttle slammed into the alien supership at max velocity; the impact and the detonating weapons, fuel and power systems, made an explosion that lit the faces of Marie and her copilot hundreds of miles away.

  Marie instinctively put in a transmission to Earth, to inform them of the Potemkin's death, just in case they were receiving down below.

  Dana stood frozen by the sudden destruction of so many men and women, hearing Borgnine's last words. You're on your own.

  "Why...why couldn't we...help them..."

  But even more than the shock of the crash, she was frozen by this first close look at the alien flagship. It, too, seemed a remembered thing from an impossible recollection. Superimposed on it was the blank, enigmatic vision of the red Bioroid.

  She sat trembling like a leaf at her station, only partially hearing Marie's biting reply. "Nothing we could do, you know that. We're all volunteers, remember? To tell you the truth, Lieutenant, I expected better of you. Now, shut up and do your job!"

  "Enemy's now at eight hundred miles and closing fast," Heideger said matter-of-factly. There was no point in trying to outrun the swift aliens, and besides, Challenger IV had a mission to perform.

  "Potemkin appears to have been destroyed, sir," the announcement came in the command center.

  "What about Challenger IV ?" an operations officer asked. "Information limited due to enemy jamming, but the mother ships

  appear to be closing on the remaining shuttle."

  At a distance of four hundred miles, the flagship launched assault boats.

  Bowie still had no contact with Space Station Liberty. "Lieutenant, take over fire control," Marie ordered.

  But Dana could only sit, trembling, eyes frozen on her instruments and the pistol-grip fire control. Before her were overlapping images of the alien ship, of the assault craft, and the Bioroid-every moment of her combats against it came back in overwhelming detail, shutting out all other thought. And on the periphery of her awareness were emotions to which she could put no name.

  Bowie looked at her worriedly, but there was no time to stop to find out what was wrong. "I show enemy craft at one hundred miles and closing."

  Angelo had swung around in his acceleration chair. "Lieutenant, she said 'take command.' Dana? C'mon, snap out of it!"

  "Save it, Sergeant," Marie cut him off. "I'll take fire control. Gunners select targets and fire as soon as they're within range."

  The assault ships started pitching at longer range than that of the shuttle's guns, but soon the two forces were sufficiently close to each other for both to be throwing out everything they had. The shuttle had a defensive shield that protected it from immediate damage, but the shield couldn't last long under the pounding it was taking.

  Marie, Angelo, and the others bent to their guns-all except Dana. The firing controls were standard Robotech setups, as familiar to the ATACs troopers as to the TASC pilot.

  The assault craft spread out. "They're trying to surround us!" Marie called as the twin-barreled gun mounts swung and threw out torrents of

  flaring disc bolts, the enemy answering with the same. "Take evasive action," she added to Heideger.

  "Trying, Lieutenant," he said evenly, but the wallowing shuttle was no match for the attackers.

  "Sir, enemy vessels are surrounding Challenger," a command center officer relayed the news.

  "Has it been hit?"

  Nova Satori, watching the displays at Colonel Fredericks's side, dreaded the answer. She might have little use for Dana's and Marie's lack of discipline, but Nova was behind them one hundred percent right now, and rooting silently.

  "Heavy activity out there, sir, and we're still not getting reliable sensor readings-we can't be sure."

  Nova watched the screens and waited.

  "One coming your way, Sergeant!" Marie yelled.

  "I see 'im," Angelo said distractedly, poised over his scope and pistol-grip control stick. He led his target and got it dead center; it vanished in a cloud of superheated gas.

  "Good shooting!" Marie called. At that moment another bandit drilled a line of holes along the shuttle's port side.

  "Shields failing," Heideger said. "
Still no contact with Liberty or ground control." Another close one shook the spacecraft.

  Marie realized abruptly that Dana wasn't firing. "Sterling, what's the matter with you?" A quick look told her Dana wasn't hurt. "Come on, defend your sector! We need you!"

  Got to...get hold of myself, Dana kept repeating as if it were an incantation. But she couldn't move, hypnotized by the visions assailing her. By sheer force of will she compelled herself to say, "Yeah. I'm okay."

  All at once her trance turned to an all-engulfing fear. I shouldn't be here! I can't handle this! I'll let everyone down!

  Marie was up, to swing Dana's chair around and slap her hard across the face. "Snap out of it! Stop acting like a coward!"

  Dana sat, dazed. Marie turned to Heideger. "Get someone else up here to man these guns!" She jumped back for the pilot's seat.

  Dana was staring at the firing control as if she had never seen one before, and another energy disc impact sent the shuttle lurching. "Missed him!" Angelo yelled. "Dana, he's coming around to your side."

  More were doing the same; the aliens had realized that Dana's sector was a vulnerable point.

  The lurch had thrown Dana against the fire-control grip, and she clung to it by reflex. She instinctively thumbed the trigger button over and over. The assault craft broke off its attack run as her fire nearly nailed it.

  "It's nice to have ya back." She heard Angelo's grin in his tone as she fought to center the gunsight reticle on the assault craft.

  What was I doing? I could've gotten us all killed! But she thrust the thought aside as the bogie came around for another pass. The reticle centered. Your time's up, chump!

  She thumbed the trigger again and again. The assault boat suddenly wobbled off course, leaking flame, and explosive decompression turned the leak into a brief whoosh, like a blowtorch. The crippled invader disappeared beneath the shuttle.

  More enemy ships had been coming in at Dana's field of fire, and thinking it a soft spot, crowded together. She picked off another, and damaged a third as they sought frantically to evade.

  "Good shooting, Lieutenant," Angelo admitted.

  Heideger got the shuttle back under control and stabilized the damage while the others tried to drive back the assault ships and Bowie made desperate efforts to get a bearing on Liberty.

  "I think the only way we're gonna do it is to get the shuttle back on a steady course," he said.

  "We're closing with the mother ship," Marie informed them. There wasn't much hope of evading. "Everybody get ready."

  Dana waited at her station; it had been a good try, a good try.... A gallant final fight.

  She wondered where the targets had gone. Then Heideger called out, "The assault ships are withdrawing. They appear to be breaking off the attack."

  The shuttle's guns went silent and the crew sat stunned, not believing that they were still alive. "I don't get it," Dana blinked. Nobody else did either.

  But Angelo reported, "I'm picking up a directed force field on the mother ship. I think it's a charged particle beam projector."

  Suddenly, enormous hyphens of energy were blazing all around them, monster discharges like nothing the Humans had ever seen before. But it seemed the megavolleys were so enormously powerful that they were far less accurate than the flagship's other weapons.

  Or maybe they're just playing with us again, it occurred to Marie. We'll know in a few seconds. She hit the ship's thrusters, accelerating as quickly as she dared-straight for the flagship. "Now, if we can just get in under it before it gets us!"

  The bright comets of the Masters' superweapon cascaded around the shuttle as Marie wove and sideslipped with all the skill at her command. There were shouts and objections from everybody else on the flight deck.

  "There's no such thing as 'out of range' to that particle gun!" Marie cried. "We'll have to get in close, where it can't get a fix on us!" The shuttle shook and seemed to want to come apart. "Brace yourselves!"

  The Challenger IV dove in at the flagship, homing in under its vast belly. Far above, they could make out something like an enormous fish-eye lens between the hyphens of destruction it spewed forth. Then all at once the shuttle was in an area of peace and quiet, out of the megaweapon's field of fire. The Bioroids, of course, had pulled way back once that big Sunday punch let loose. The shuttle was zooming along all alone.

  "Nice move, Lieutenant," Angelo conceded.

  She headed in under the gargantuan ship's belly, weaving in and out of

  the superstructural features. "This is just a breather! There are still those AA cannon that got the Redhawks." And, they all knew, the Bioroids probably hadn't exactly headed home for the locker rooms, either.

  Marie shed most of her speed with a retro-burn, steering with extremely wasteful thruster blasts that couldn't be avoided. The shuttle zipped along with the mother ship's underbelly only a few dozen yards overhead. It wove between a stupendous grotto of the insectile communications spars, like a cruise through some eerie undersea city. It passed among upside-down tuning-forklike things as big as high-rises, and downhanging Towers of Babel.

  "Looks clear through there, Lieutenant," Heideger said, pointing. Angelo forgot to breathe for a while, looking around him at the screens,

  the viewports. The briefings hadn't done the vessel justice. "This thing's gigantic," he understated.

  Marie nodded to herself as she wended the ship along. She murmured, "I-I've never seen anything like it...." It felt more like being in a submarine than a spacecraft.

  "Say again, Lieutenant?" Dana piped up.

  Marie turned a scathing look on her. "Paying complete inattention to practically everything today, are we, Lieutenant?"

  Dana looked contrite. Marie glanced beyond her. "Hey, Bowie! Any luck getting a beam through?"

  Bowie worked away. "Not a chance. No line of sight. Besides, all these electronic echoes and all this energy clutter are frying the avionics."

  "Any word yet, young man?" Commodore Tessel called in the command center.

  A tech replied crisply, "Well, sir, we're showing something on the sensors, but we aren't sure what it is. We're getting sloppy images, and the interpretation computers can't sort them out."

  Sean Phillips and Louie Nichols entered the command center. Nobody had invited them, but Emerson noted their entrance, did not object, and his

  subordinates let things stand as they were. "Anything from the Challenger?" Sean asked Nova Satori quietly, anxiously.

  The command center was a restricted area; she had no idea what favors were called in or Phillips's wiles had been used to gain entry, but Nova knew she should be chasing the two ATACs troopers out.

  It just didn't seem right, though, with so many dead and so many more, perhaps, about to die. "We're getting distorted signals, so we're not sure what's happening," she told Sean.

  "There," the tech said just then. "I think that's them! But-the reason our signal's distorted is because they're so close to one of the enemy mother ships. "Hell's own bells! It's right on top of them!"

  The shuttle was barely drifting along. "Staying tight as possible," Marie said, tight-Tipped.

  "Creepy silences. Man, I hate creepy silences," Dana muttered.

  "I suppose you'd rather have them shooting at us again?" Angelo shot back.

  "Don't worry; ground-pounders!" Marie said tartly. "There'll be lots more shooting, and soon." The three ATACs frowned at that; they were armored troopers, not leg infantry ground-pounders.

  Marie hunched forward in her chair; the shuttle was coming to the end of the flagship's underbelly. "Get ready to try for contact again."

  "Ready and waiting," Bowie said evenly.

  "Everybody look sharp," Marie said. "I'm taking us up for a look-see."

  She hit the main thrusters and zoomed up from underneath the immense flagship. Immediately, two of the chandelier-bulb cannon swung into place and sent out tangled vines of green-white destruction.

  "Oh, now they manage to find us, now tha
t we're not hiding." Marie laughed scornfully, taking the shuttle through evasive maneuvers. "On your toes, all of you! We'll be getting company!" Still, the fact that the enemy seemed to have lost track of the Challenger, once the shuttle was close in underneath was not to be forgotten.

  "Alien assault ship on our tail," Angelo called out.

  "And I'm picking up two more coming in on our flanks," Dana added.

  But the alien ships refrained from firing this time. There was still more that the Robotech Masters wished to know about these primitive Earthlings, creatures like missing links really, who had in some unfathomable manner wiped out the giant Zentraedi.

  The launch bays of the assault ships opened, and Bioroids zoomed forth.

  Marie had partial shields back, but she zoomed in low to the flagship's upper hull, skimming it, so that the enemy cannon couldn't be depressed low enough to hit the shuttle.

  The Bioroids, on the other hand, had trouble getting a clear shot, swarming as thickly as they did; they ran the risk of hitting their own ship or one another.

  "Bowie, resume contact-scan," Marie ordered.

  "Roger; scanning," Bowie responded. The laser-contact with Liberty required enormous precision. That would mean that Challenger IV was going to have to do less maneuvering, at least for a little while. And that in turn meant that somebody was going to have to keep the Bioroids away from the shuttle; repel them perhaps, or better yet, decoy them.

  "Take over," Marie told Heideger. "I'm going to suit up." She began making her way to the rear cargo bay, and her Veritech.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  You can't get somebody in your sights in combat without spending a lot of time after that wondering if you're in somebody else's.

  Remark made by Dana Sterling to Nova Satori