The Final Nightmare

by Jack McKinney

  But there was something more to it than that, something that had to do with the indestructible good humor with which he faced every misfortune. She just felt that in some ways he was a kinder, a better person-more compassionate-than she could ever pretend to be.

  The warning hooters were nagging. "Gotta go," he said.

  He turned to leave, but she caught his wrist. "Dennis, be careful. Do that for me?"

  He nodded with a handsome grin. "Count on it. See you soon."

  She nodded, watching him as if he were some apparition. She couldn't quite work up the nerve to tell him, Come back safe to me, because I seem to have fallen in love with you.

  He was trotting toward his transport, and she had to hurry to reach a bunker. Drives boomed again, and the next phase of the Second Robotech War began in earnest.

  The forces from ALUCE came on, unopposed. The Masters refused to react to Humanity's drawing gambit, and played a waiting game. Earth's strikeforce positioned for attack.

  Dana found Bowie down in the cargo hold where the 15th's Hovertanks were secured for flight. It took some prompting to get him to open up, but when he did the words came out in a flood

  "Since I met Musica and Zor, I don't feel the same about fighting those Bioroids! The people in them just aren't to blame! It's like one of those ancient armies where they drove innocent captives in first, to be slaughtered, to gain a tactical advantage!"

  "Bowie, I understand. There's nothing wrong with what you're feeling-" She had put a hand on his shoulder but he shook free, batting it aside. "I'm right on the edge, Dana, and I haven't got my mind right, don't you

  understand? I can't handle it anymore! I'll let you all down!"

  That was serious talk, because everyone in the 15th knew-as all soldiers know-that you don't take that hill for the UEG council, the Promise of a Brighter World, or Mom's fruitcake. No; you do it for your buddies, and they do it for you.

  "Bowie, we've always been straight with each other, and I'm telling you: I get those same feelings, too."

  "But Dana, that doesn't tell me how to deal with it! Ahhh! So, there it is. Nothing you can do about it, Lieutenant. I'm gonna have to sort this one out for myself."

  "I'm only part Human," she blurted. "I, I guess I'm related to Zor and the rest, in a way. I don't like the idea of killing any of the clones, either. But Bowie, think about the alternative. Remember what Zor said!"

  She threw her arms around his shoulders, pressing her cheek to him. "We can't let that happen to Earth, Bowie," she whispered, "and we can't let that happen to the Fifteenth."

  A few weeks before, the Masters' fleet would have disintegrated the impudent Human attack. Now it fought for its life, its energy reservoir failing to a point where the battle was horribly even and attrition seemed to be the not-so-secret weapon.

  Terran energy volleys and alien annihilation discs crosshatched, thick

  as nettles, as the Human strikeforce closed in.

  The 15th cranked up and sealed their armor, preparing to follow Dana's Valkyrie into the launch lock. They got word that their tactical area of responsibility-their TAOR-had been increased by 50%, because the 12th squad had been blown to bits along with everyone else aboard the battlecruiser Sharpsburg when enemy salvoes fund it.

  The earth fleet threw everything it had at the enemy, but the news that came to Emerson, watching stone-faced from his flagship, was bad.

  "Missiles, solids, energy-nothing seems to be doing them much damage, sir," Green told him.

  There was no sign of the hexagonal "snowflake" defensive fields the Masters had used before, but what Green said was undeniably true. Ordnance and destructive force equivalent to a good-size World War was being tossed at the lumbering invaders, to no avail.

  "It might be some kind of shield we haven't seen before, or it might just be their hulls," Emerson replied. But their I wasn't much room for fancy changes of plan or pauses to consider now; the huge operation was, by its own size and weight, all but unstoppable.

  "Press the attack," Rolf Emerson forced himself to say, trying not to think of the casualties but only of what would happen to Earth if he and his fleet failed. He had seen excerpts from Zor's debriefing, and the monitoring of Zor's comments about life under the Robotech Masters.

  "Hit them harder," Emerson said, "and get ready to send in the fighters, then the tanks."

  Going in close, risking the furious-bright particle beams of the teardrop-shaped invader batteries, the Earth ships poured down torrents of fire at them. Tube after tube of the heavier missiles, Skylords and such, gushed forth flame and death; racks of Swordfish and Jackhammers emptied, only to be reloaded for another fusilade.

  Marie Crystal, ready to lead the TASCs out, sent a silent thought to Sean, to take care of himself.

  A close, highly concentrated missile barrage that cost the Terran forces a destroyer escort and the crippling of a frigate somehow opened a gap in the alien flagship's hull. It happened just as the 15th was about to leave the launch lock, and their mission changed in a moment.

  There was little G3 operations could add to the standing orders. Get inside there and disable them! Distract, neutralize!

  The Hovertanks, compact as enormous crabs or turtles with all appendages pulled close, dropped on the inverted blue candleflames of their thrusters.

  The rent in the enemy's upper hull was as big around as the 15th's barracks; a gaping, irregular hole, sides fringed with twisted, blackened armor seven yards thick, streaming black smoke and atmosphere like a funnel. It was slightly forward and portside of one of those mountainous spiraled ziggurats Louie insisted on calling "Robotech Teats."

  It would still be a tight squeeze for a whole Hovertank squad, and Dana didn't like the idea of being crowded together fish-in-a-barrel style. But there was no telling when the gap would be closed by some repair mechanism, no time to pause and reconsider. At her order, the ATACs dropped slowly toward the hole, for a close pass before paying their housecall.

  No Bioroids anywhere, Dana registered. I don't like it, Angelo told himself.

  "A different tactic now. How strange," Shaizan said, sounding more puzzled than perturbed.

  Dag turned away from the crystalline pane, where he had been observing the Hovertanks. "This is an unexpected opportunity," Dag said, as the descending mecha swung slowly past the ruptured hull behind him.

  "Yes; I believe it is time to test the new Invid Fighter," Shaizan concurred.

  Dag turned and barked, "Scientists! Quickly!"

  That triumvirate, having been high among the looping arteries and carryways of the ship's control systemry, descended now on their cap. "Yes, Masters?"

  "Deploy our Triumviroid Invid Fighters against those Human mecha out there at once."

  "At once!" The Scientists soared off to obey.

  Bowkaz, watching the 15th come around for another close pass, closed his thin, atrophied hand into a fist, the spidery fingers unaccustomed to such a strong gesture. "Amazing! These missing links actually think they can triumph against us!"

  In a large compartment in the flagship, an infernal fantasy landscape had been created. The translucent pink room consisted of high-arching carryways and Protoculture arteries, with clusters of globes that resembled grapes, of all things, at their intersections.

  Far below the energizing and monitoring systemry, the Invid Fighters reared, standing in threes, insects by comparison but cyclopean giants in terms of the war raging on the outside.

  The Bioroids' chest plastrons were open, shoulder pauldrarns raised, helmet beavers lifted to expose the ball-turrets in which their pilots would sit, in yogi fashion.

  Dovak's voice came, "Vada Prime, triumvirates of the Invid Fighters, to your mecha! Haste! The Human prey is near!"

  Light poured in from the arch intersections where the grape clusters hung; it illuminated triads of young male clones, the Vada Prime, red-haired but bearing a strong resemblance to the original Zor. They stood, back to back, where the extended chest pla
strons of the mecha met like lowered drawbridges.

  "Prepare for utilization against the Humans and their blasphemous concepts, their individuality! Obliterate them!"

  "Three will always be as one!" one Vada leader chanted. That was the essence of the Invid Fighter systems: the transference of power, awareness,

  thought-Protoculture energy-back and forth among the members of each triune unit and its mecha, on a millisecond basis, This occurred so that each machine and pilot would be triply effective in the telling moments of combat, which were themselves relatively few.

  "One for three and three for one. In thought, action, firepower, and reaction," Dovak intoned. "Remember this, Vada Prime!"

  The Vada Prime clones retreated to their globular control sanctuaries, and prepared to hunt down the Hovertanks.

  Dana led the 15th in a low approach vector, ready to go down into the hole in the enemy flagship's hull, hoping things went better than they had the last time the 15th entered the Masters' metal homeworld.

  But things became complicated even before the tanks could enter; giant figures on Hovercraft rose up out of the smoking abyss of the hull breech. Dana couldn't help but feel dismay when she saw what was ahead. Red Bioroids!

  Three, four-six that she could see, and perhaps more in the smoke. She tried not to surrender to despair. Six red Bioroids! "New targets ahead," she said, trying to sound confident.

  The 15th bore in at the Triumviroids, the downsweep of their front cowlings and the halogen lamps tucked beneath them giving the tanks the look of angry crabs about to settle a grudge. The tanks broke right and left and up and down; they needed maneuvering room.

  The enemy split up and jumped them, firing from weapons in their control stems, and from the disc handguns, lashing streams of annihilation discs this way and that. Dana saw what she feared: they were all as fast and deadly as Zor was, operating in perfect coordination. She fought her recurring image of a complete rout.

  Three of them went for a tank that had gone low, like cowboys chasing a wandering heifer, bringing their discus sidearms to bear. Dana saw with a start that the Hovertank was Zor's Three-In-One.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The politicians who kill troops But leave no babe unkissed!

  They'd none of them be missed, They'd none of them be missed!

  Bowie Grant, "With Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan"

  Dana yelled, "Zor, get out of there!"

  Zor had the presence of mind to retro, rather than try some fancy maneuver or an uneven firelight. The reds' shots stitched the flagship's hull, passing through the airless spot where Zor would have been. He escaped with only a spiderwebbing of his canopy, the effect of a grazing shot.

  "That was close, but I'm all right," he said calmly.

  An A-JACs unit had found a bowside cargo lock blasted open by another Terran barrage; the mechachoppers zipped in at it like angry wasps, under the same romp-and-ruin orders as the ATACs.

  The command came to the Vada Primes from Dovak. "A new enemy combat group is attempting to enter the flagship. Readjust battle plan and destroy them at once."

  It took the A-JACs a fatal few moments to realize that they were being attacked by mecha far superior to their own.

  One A-JAC was blasted as soon as it came in, going up like a Roman candle. A second, already standing by the opened hull, was riddled and fell apart in fragments. The reds came in, maneuvering and firing in perfect cooperation. The A-JACs' counterfire had no effect on the Triumviroids' battleshiplike armor.

  "We're no match for them in these A-JACs!" Lieutenant Brown yelled to the few survivors left in his team. "Everybody pull back! Evasive maneuvers!"

  Dana had her own plan of action. She sent her Valkyrie leaping high, imaging a change, her helmet sensors picking up the impulses and guiding her tank through mechamorphosis.

  Components slid, reconfigured, rearranged; the tank went to Battloid mode. It stood in space, a Robotech Galahad, taking as its rifle the altered cannon that had rested along the tank's prow moments before. She landed on the hull to make her stand, feet spread, rifle/cannon strobing. Angelo and Bowie landed next to her in the same humanoid mode.

  Three reds swept in in echelon, their fire well coordinated, promising to sweep the Battloids before them. Angelo remembered what he had learned about the blue Bioroids. He stopped pouring out heavy fire and took deliberate aim.

  He hit the lead Triumviroid's faceplate; it shattered, spilling atmosphere and ruin. The thing's Hovercraft began to waver gently, and the red itself went immobile.

  "I got one! Hey Lieutenant, go for their faceplates!"

  But as Dana looked around to see what was going on, the red's ball turret exploded, the body of its Vada Prime pilot tumbling out into vacuum, breath and blood stolen away in a red mist.

  They're humanoids, she saw. They look...just like Zor.

  But she said, "You all heard Angie! Faceplates! And make every shot count!"

  Bowie prepared to fire, but a vision of Musica called him, and he froze. Three more reds came in low over a hull projection, firing so as to scatter the gathering Battloids, and one burst knocked Bowie's tank from its feet.

  Dana and a trooper named Royce were almost shoulder to shoulder, putting out a heavy volume of fire, to cover him. The red broke off and banked away.

  "You all right, Bowie?"

  His Battloid began to lumber to its feet. "I think so."

  "Then start shooting, god damn you! Bottom line: They're programmed to destroy you."

  Sean was isolated, his fireteam partner just a conflagration and a memory, the enemy closing in. "Somebody get these 'roids offa me!"

  The answer came in the form of an angel of death; the Triumviroid so close to nailing him flew apart in a coruscating detonation. He picked himself up off the hull to see an A-JAC hovering loose. "Huh? I'm dreaming! I'm dead!"

  Marie Crystal was on the 15th's freq. "Neither, hotshot." "Marie?"

  "That's right, Phillips, you lucky swine you. You're about four hundred yards from your squad, at one hundred seventy degrees magnetic. Get back to 'em and stay alert! I...I don't want to lose you, Sean."

  "I won't forget you said that. And I won't let you. What d'you wanna name our first kid?" She could hear the smugness in his voice but didn't mind a bit. His Battloid dashed away at top speed as Dana rallied her command.

  Marie switched off her mike. "I won't forget," she whispered. Then she broke left, to try to help suppress the murderous AA fire from the teardrop cannon.

  The interior of the flagship was a Hovertank job, and A-JACs, Veritechs-no other mecha had any place in it.

  Dana and the first of her 15th leapt right down into a cobra pit.

  Her transmissions were patched directly through to Emerson; the ATACs were Earth's best hope now. "General, we're pinned down in the entrance gap by heavy fire from red Bioroids! We're about at a standstill and request assistance-A. S. A. P!"

  Emerson was out of his command chair. "We've got to force the enemy mecha back and make that entrance bigger. Any suggestions?"

  Green was giving him a dead-level look. "Ramming them is the only way, Rolf."

  It didn't even take Emerson a second to make up his mind; Earth could never mount another assault like this, and it was make-or-break time.

  "Then make ready to use this ship as a battering ram at once."

  Emerson's crew acted instantly, and still it looked as though it wouldn't be soon enough.

  If the enemy mother ship's fire had been as intense as it was when the Masters first arrived in the Solar System, the Human battlecruiser would have been holed and immolated as soon as it came close to the invader. But great hunks of armor and superstructure were blasted away from the enemy ship, and Emerson's flagship was able to stay on course, bearing down on its enemy.

  And it provided a welcome diversion, permitting Dana's troops to break contact with the devilishly fast and powerful Invid Fighters and scatter. Even the Triumviroids' power wasn't enough to sto
p the heavyweight Earth dreadnought.

  The wedge-shaped bow drove into the long rift in the invader; the impact sent Bioroid and Battloid alike sprawling and bouncing across the hull. Dana had no idea what power it was that generated gravity on the surface of the enemy ship, but she was grateful for it then-grateful not to be sent spinning into infinite blackness.

  With the outer armor breached, the battlecruiser experienced less resistance from the mother ship's internal structure. Bulkheads and decks and vast segments of systemry were crushed or bashed aside as secondary explosions foamed around the cruiser like a fiery bow-wave.

  Then Emerson's ship was through, having lengthened and deepened the hull breach to three times its former size, all the way through to the mother ship's port side. As the battlecruiser lifted clear, more explosions from the alien lifted the armor even further, as if peeling back aluminum foil.

  Dana got word from the cruiser that the entryway was clear, and for the moment the reds were nowhere to be seen. She hated the thought of leading her command down there where so many explosions had already gone off, but this was the only chance to go through the opening.

  "Let's do it, Fifteenth! Follow me!" The 15th, all in Battloid mode,

  dashed toward the opening, huge metal feet pounding against the hull, rifle/cannon ready. Angelo was close behind Dana, and then Bowie. Sean Phillips, Zor, Louie Nichols-those were all of the squad that got through.

  Several others were annihilated right at the verge of the gap. Still more raced for cover. The sum accomplishment of the biggest Human offensive of the Second Robotech War was to get exactly one officer and one NCO and four enlisted men of ATAC aboard the enemy command vessel.