The Final Nightmare

by Jack McKinney

  The captain of the Salamis and most of its officers were dead. Captain Komodo was now in command, and he knew he rode a death ship. His engines were about to go, and there was nothing he and his crewpeople could do but make it count for something.

  Salamis rode its failing drive straight into the enemy's fire.

  All engine readings were far into the red; the destroyer escort trembled. "I love you, Nova," Komodo whispered.

  Salamis vanished in brilliance.

  "Okay! Everybody run for it!" Marie commanded. The A-JACs heeded her, zooming away in all directions.

  Marie was beginning to think she had miscalculated. Maybe she misjudged the spot or perhaps Emerson simply wasn't coming back. Then an enormous globe of ball-lightning leapt into existence near the enemy, and cometlike sparks flew outwards from it.

  Even though the explosion of Emerson's reentry was nothing like the release of energy the decay of a natural black hole would have produced, it

  was enough to vaporize the enemy battlewagon. In another moment Tristar floated alone in space, as Marie laughed aloud and Emerson prepared to rejoin the expedition's main force.

  Supreme Commander Leonard put on a self-satisfied look as he passed word of Emerson's victory along to the UEG council, taking as much of the credit for himself as he possibly could. But inside, he seethed. He must have victories of his own!

  When he was back in his offices, though, a phone call brought welcome news that turned his day around.

  "That was Cromwell from R&D," said his aide, Colonel Seward. "They've completed modifications on that targeting system they got from the trooper in ATAC. Mass production and retrofitting have already begun; they've got their special units on it now."

  Then we can start preparation for my attack plan! Leonard exulted. He said to his gathered staff, "Gentlemen, the time has come to strike the telling blow, and capture or destroy the enemy flagship, using both Earth-based forces and the ALUCE contingent.

  "Inform General Emerson I want him back here on Earth A.S.A.P He'll be my field commander on this one."

  Run the gauntlet again, Rolf! Your luck has to give out sometime!

  "Listen up, everybody!" Dana's tone was so upbeat that the 15th knew this briefing wasn't just some joystick info-promulgation. They gathered round her, there in the repair bay.

  When she had them quieted down from the usual griping and groaning about being interrupted, she motioned to Bowie and said, "Your friend Rolf-that is, Chief of Staff Emerson-has arrived at Moon Base ALUCE with his expeditionary force."

  She saw Bowie's breath catch, but then, with deliberate effort, he put on a bored expression. "Oh, yippee-pow. Now we can do some more

  fighting."

  "What's it all mean for us, Lieutenant?" Angelo broke in, seeing that Dana was vexed by Bowie's reaction and wanting to keep things on track.

  That somehow triggered the strac side of her personality, the hardnose officer so unlike the wild rulebreaker. She put on her best CO expression and said tightly, "Squad fifteen, Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, will stand-to and make ready to participate in an all-out assault on the enemy flagship to take place in approximately forty-eight hours, Major General Emerson commanding."

  She let the gasps and exclamations go on for a few seconds, then cut through them. "As you were! Fall out and follow me."

  Grumbling, they hopped onto the drop-rack, the conveyor-beltlike endless ladder that carried them down to the motor pool levels to their parked Hovertanks. As soon as they jumped clear of the drop-rack, they saw that someone else had been at work there-at work on their own sacrosanct mecha, in violation of every ATAC tradition.

  Odds and ends of components and machinery and one or two forgotten tools were lying around. They gave her betrayed looks, knowing now why they had been given other work details to keep them all off the motor-pool levels.

  "They've all been retrofitted and augmented by R&D for extended space combat capability," she recited the briefing that had been given her. "Get used to them. You'll find instruction manuals and tutorial tapes in each tank. We will all run individual in-place drills and dry-fire practice from now until chowtime."

  The 15th was only grumbling a little now, because they were fascinated with what had been done to their vehicles. The mecha's lines had been changed only a little, but the 15th could see that the detection and targeting gear was newer and more compact, more long-range. Life-support and energy systems were smaller and much more effective, too. The space saving was mostly due to upgraded firepower and thicker armor.

  They spread out, looking admiringly at the tanks but not trusting them

  yet. Dana herself was uneasy about this sudden mucking around with the 15th's mecha, but she had her orders, and she thought that everything might go all right.

  "Good; you're here," someone said behind her. She turned, and found herself facing Lieutenant Brown, decked out in his tailored TASC uniform. "Looks like it's gonna be fun, doesn't it?" he added.

  "You're coming along on this party," Dana said, not making it a question.

  Brown's handsome face twisted into a droll smile. "Gotta prove I'm not a screwup, don't I?" He looked around and spotted the Livewire. "Hey, Louie! Congratulations; I heard you're the one who dreamed up the new targeting systems."

  Dana turned, saw that Louie was hunkered over the control grips and computer displays in his cockpit-turret. He didn't respond to Brown's hail. She turned back to the TASC flyer. "Y-you mean the simulator gizmo?"

  "They told me it was for simulation training," Dana heard Louie's trembling voice. He was still bent over his controls, his back to them.

  Sean was lounging in his tank, the Bad News, reveling in its now-enhanced power, checking out the VETS "pupil pistol" target acquisition and firing system. "First-round kill every time," he assessed; Louie heard him, and groaned aloud.

  "Shut up, Sean!" Dana screamed at him, her voice almost breaking.

  Something snapped inside Bowie. What if the Robotech Masters had run short of fighters in the wake of Emerson's apocalyptic victory? What if Musica or someone like her was sealed into the ball-turret control module of the next blue Bioroid to find itself in his gunsight reticle?

  "I'm through with this!" Bowie howled, veins standing out in his neck and forehead. "There're Humans like us in those Bioroids and they're not our enemies! And we're not theirs, can't any of you understand that?"

  Dana started to calm Bowie down, but before she could get out more than a few vague, soothing words, she heard a rattle and felt waves of superheated air behind her. Dana and the rest of the 15th turned around

  and saw Louie Nichols with a thereto-rifle in his hands, its bulky power pack lying on the permacrete at his feet.

  His eyes were unreadable behind the dark, reflective goggles, but he was trembling all over. "Those bastards from R&D never even asked me; they just lied, picked my brain, and did what they were planning to do all along. Like we're the clones; like they're the Robotech Masters!"

  He shot a lance of brilliance at the motor-pool wall in a test-burn; alloy melted and small secondary fires started. He figured he had enough power in the rifle to burn the cockpit out of every tank and then go hunting for Cromwell and Gervasi.

  "Like we're a bunch of experimental animals," Louie cried at his squadmates desperately, swinging the thermorifle's bell mouth this way and that to keep them all back.

  He had joined the Southern Cross because he believed in it, but the mind and the products of the mind belonged to the individual, to do with as the individual saw fit; that was the first order of his convictions. Or else, what was the point of all this fighting? Why were the Human race and the Robotech Masters not one and the same?

  "We're not just slaves or puppets or lab animals!" Louie shrieked, and put another spear of furnace-hot brightness into a partition, melting it, setting it alight, to keep back an overeager PFC who had been edging toward him.

  Lab animals, the phrase registered in Dana and lodged there, becau
se it set off images and reflexes on the very limits of the perceivable. I know what it feels like to be one!

  Angelo started for the corporal one small step at a time.

  "Louie, the balloon's already up. Emerson and the rest go, whether we do or not. All you can do this way is give the goddamn aliens a better edge."

  Dana winced at the aliens reference and leapt forward to shove Angelo aside, the strange evocations of Louie's words still moving her. She leveled her gaze at berserker Louie.

  "Go ahead, Louie." She jerked a thumb at the tanks. "Flame 'em all."

  Angelo was making confused, contrary sounds. She went on, "If you can't do it, then I will!" She walked in Louie's direction, only slightly out of the path of the thereto-rifle's tracer beam. The beam wavered on her, away, and back.

  Then she was before him, and he turned the nozzle aside. "They lied to us," Louie said, lowering the barrel.

  "I know," she answered gently, taking the weapon from him and turning it once again on the tanks.

  Angelo stepped into her line of fire. "You swore an oath!"

  "So did they, Angie," she said evenly. Dana turned to burn her own Hovertank, Valkyrie, first. But she found another figure in her way. Zor gazed at her through the heat waves of the thereto-rifle's pilot.

  "I understand this war from both sides; maybe I'm the only one who ever will," he told her. "And humanity mustn't lose, it mustn't lose, do you hear me? Listen, all of you: I know what the Bioroid clones feel when they die. I've died before-and I'll die again, as we all will. The difference is in how we'll live, don't you see? And for that, I'm willing to fight. And even to kill.

  "Dying is a natural thing, sometimes it's even a mercy. But living as a slave-that can make dying seem like a miracle."

  He was before her now, almost whispering the words. Dana turned the muzzle of the thereto-rifle up toward the ceiling. Zor pried it from her fingers and deactivated it, just as Louie ran from the motor pool.

  "The war must end, but the Robotech Masters must not win," Zor said to them quietly, putting the rifle aside.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hwup! Twup! Thrup! Fo'! Alpha! Tact'l! Armored! Corps! If yo' cain't git yo' mind tame, Better play some other game!

  Marching-cadence chant popular among ATAC drill sergeants

  In their flagship, the Robotech Masters showed no sign of their dismay as the Clonemasters assessed the damage they had suffered in Emerson's doomsday victory.

  Many of their combat vessels and blue Bioroids were gone, along with much of the materials that were to have gone to mecha construction. "We have begun emergency production of the new, augmented Triumviroid mecha, my lord," Jeddar was saying, "giving each the power of an Invid Fighter. It lies within our ability to produce many of these and they are superior to anything the Humans can field."

  The Masters studied the Triumviroid, a red Bioroid similar to the one Zor Prime had piloted. With one of the horned Triumviroid Invid Fighter spheres in each ball-turret control module, they would have, in effect, hundreds of Zors-hundreds of duplicates of their most capable fighter and battle lord.

  "This is our crowning achievement." Dag leered, studying the enormous fists and weapons. "Utterly invincible."

  Bowkaz pronounced his evaluation, "The Humans' Battloids will be worthless against it."

  And Shaizan contributed, "Finally, the Protoculture will be ours."

  The gleaming red armored immensity of the straddlelegged Bioroid loomed above them, so massive that it seemed it could tear worlds apart. The Masters were sure that they were destined to succeed.

  There was, however, a tacit silence among them on the matter of the Humans' aspirations, which might be contradictory.

  The ALUCE forces had repaired their mecha and licked their wounds. At Emerson's order, they lifted off again, to rendezvous with him for what the Human race hoped would be the knockout punch of the war.

  Earth and the moon shook to the drives of Southern Cross battleships; the Black Lions and some twenty-five thousand other soldiers looked to their weapons and waited and wondered whether this would be the day they died.

  At Fokker Base, Marie Crystal, who had come with Emerson on his harrowing broken-field run back from the moon, prayed for her own soul and those of all the men in her unit. Then she rose, armored like Joan of Arc, and got ready to lead them forth to slay and be slain.

  In a mess hall near a launch pad at Fokker Base, there was little for the 15th to do except sit and wait. Their tanks were already loaded, nobody seemed to feel much like talking, and the squeaking and scraping of body armor was the only sound. Serenity seemed to be inversely proportionate to rank. Dana felt the weight of the world on her shoulders, while the latest transferees were trying to bag a few z's on the floor.

  They had been listening to the Bitch Box-the PA speaker-drone on for hours. Who was supposed to go where, cautionary notes about final maintenance-and more ominously, chaplain's call and final offers from the Judge Advocate General's office to make sure wills and deeds were in order.

  Dana looked out the mess hall window, at the scarred, alloy-plowed spot on a distant hillside where the Robotech Masters' flagship had crashed a lifetime-a month?-before.

  "C'mon," she murmured to the PA. I don't mind dying, but I hate to wait! "Let's get this turkey in the oven!"

  Sean, wandering past seemingly by accident, patted her glittering steel

  rump. "Easy, skipper."

  She spun on him and would have taken a swing at him if he had been closer. Did he think she was so incapable that she needed his imprimatur to run her squad? Dana didn't have time to think of anything more subtle or telling, so she barked, "Squelch it, dipstick!"

  They were both sweating, teeth locked, ready to punch each other for no good reason-except that they were about to go into battle, to shoot or perhaps be shot by total strangers.

  Bowie bounded to his feet, despite the weight of his armor. "Stop it. We only have one enemy, and that's the Robotech Masters. We should be thinking about that." He said it with the uncomfortable knowledge that he couldn't even take his own advice; he, too, was preoccupied, but in a very different way.

  Angelo was checking over the mechanism on his pistol. "Think, schmink! Why don'tcha all quiet down and think mission?"

  "Angelo is right," Zor said quietly.

  Louie snorted, "That's easy for you to say, Zor. But us Humans get emotional, especially when it comes to gettin' killed."

  Zor didn't rise to the taunt. "You're right: I'm not Human. I wish I could remember more than I do, but I recall one thing clearly. I was far less than I am now, when my mind was ruled by the Robotech Masters."

  "I want to destroy them to make sure that never happens to me or anyone else. I'd gladly give my life to ensure that. If you knew what I was talking about, you all would, too."

  Nobody said anything for a few seconds. They had all been in combat too many times to have much tolerance for gung-ho speeches, but something quiet and sure in Zor's voice kept them from mocking him.

  "I'm impressed," Angelo said, to break the silence. There were a few grunts and nods of the head, about as close as the 15th could come to wild applause at a time like this.

  In their flagship, the Masters gazed down at the Scientist triumvirate.

  "We observe the Humans' preparations," Shaizan said. "And their apparent intention to use such crude tactics is difficult to rationalize. Do you detect any indication that they are preparing to fight the Invid Sensor Nebula should it attack them?"

  The Scientists floated close on their satellite Protoculture cap. Elsewhere in the cavernous compartment, the Clonemasters, Politicians, and other triumvirates stood on their drifting caps and watched silently.

  Dovak, leader of the Scientists, answered, "According to our monitorings and intercepts, they plan nothing against the Nebula, but they are mounting an all-out offensive against us."

  The Masters pondered that. Perhaps the primitives below were ignorant of the danger of the Invi
d. But that hardly seemed likely, especially since the Zentraedi who had defected to the Human side in the First Robotech War would have been well aware of it, and of the Nebulae. Perhaps the Humans were hoping for aid from the Invid.

  If so, they hoped in vain; the Invid had a mindless hatred of any species but their own.

  In any case, the Humans plainly would not constitute a buffer or third force should the Invid arrive; their civilization and perhaps all life on their planet-except the Matrix would in all likelihood simply be swept away.

  And if they weren't ready for the Invid and in control of a replenished Matrix by then, the Robotech Masters would be destroyed as well.

  Finally the orders came. Dana grabbed up her winged helmet with its long alloy vane like a Grecian crest.

  "All right, Fifteenth! Saddle up! C'mon, move out!"

  Out on the launch pad, Nova managed to steal a few moments from the frantic activity of ensuring a trouble-free embarkation, to meet with Lieutenant Brown.

  "I was sorry to hear about poor Komodo," he told her. "I know it was awkward for you but-you made him happy, Nova. Don't ever regret that, no

  matter what."

  She had almost decided not to meet Dennis, fearing that her farewell might be a jinx. She struggled to say something.

  "Just take care of yourself until I see you again," he smiled.

  "Isn't that my line, Dennis?" She felt as if she might start shivering.

  He shrugged his armored shoulders. "Nothing to worry about. 'Just another day in the SCA.'" The stock Southern Cross Army crack didn't sound so light, though.

  She had a hard time understanding just how she had come to care so much for him, especially in the midst of all the craziness about Zor and the sadness over Captain Komodo. At first it had to do with her guilt over messing up his clearance. Later she admired him for the way he took the fall for Marie Crystal's stunt-driving exhibition, and for his role as getaway driver in Dana's demented matchmaking scheme.