Battlehymn

by Jack McKinney

  Inside one of the pods the three operatives received word of the imminent Micronian counterattack. Rico and Bron were standing on the seat, each positioned at one of the projecting levers that controlled the mecha. Konda was down below near the foot pedals. Bron held a communicator in his hand; through this he was in touch with the rest of Rico's band of micronized would-be deserters.

  "Are you ready?" he said into the mike. "Our moment has arrived." "To our deaths, or our rebirth!" said Rico in a rallying cry.

  The three raised their hands in salute to one another.

  Rico grew serious. "Once inside the fortress, we'll have to take care." "The wrong place at the wrong time and we could be killed-by

  Micronians or Zentraedi," cautioned Konda. "We'll have to stay out of sight until the proper time. Then we'll abandon the pod and lose ourselves among the people of the population center."

  "He's right," said Bron getting back on the mike. "I'll pass the word."

  The Macross Amphitheater was shaking and quaking-not to thunderous applause or the rhythm of the band but to the frenzied beat of war. Half of the Star Bowl's 30,000 had fled for shelter at the first warning sirens, and many more began to filter out as the sounds of battle invaded the ship, but a surprisingly large number remained-mainly those who were guided by the past, the unfortunate ones who continued to believe that Macross would always be immune to attack.

  Minmei was introducing a song when the first major jolt was felt. She cried out as she almost lost her balance, and this started a wave of panic in the audience. Suddenly the diehards and risktakers were having second thoughts. People were screaming and rising halfway out of their seats in dismay, as if to get a general fearlevel reading before making up their minds to exit or stick it out.

  Kyle could almost smell the panic brewing. He took to the stage in a leap and ran to Minmei's side.

  "Minmei, you've got to keep singing," Kyle told her.

  Only moments before he had been watching Minmei's performance from the wings, fascinated by how her mere presence could overshadow the war. And now he glimpsed a way that her power might be put to good use in lulling the audience back into a state of calm.

  She turned to him, panic in her eyes, smudges of run mascara beneath them. "What?" she said, not comprehending.

  "Gimme that," he said, taking the mike from her hands. "Hey, everybody, we're going to continue the concert, so please take your seats. There's no reason for panic. We've all been through this before. So please calm down and return to your seats. Minmei's going to go on with the show."

  Another jolt rocked the ship, and the screaming escalated. Minmei had her hands over her ears, but Kyle was shaking her by the shoulders and telling her to sing.

  "In your strongest voice!" he told her.

  She looked up at him, wide-eyed and childlike, but nodded her head. "Be courageous and sing," Kyle said calmly. "You can do it." Reluctantly she took the mike and stepped forward on trembling legs.

  She walked out of the stage's inlaid five-pointed star and perched herself on the edge. The band, taking this as a cue, gave her an intro. She motioned them to pick up the tempo and began to belt out "Stagefright." People returned to their seats. Minmei turned and winked at Kyle. He smiled at her and mouthed: "You're great!"

  On the bridge, Lisa Hayes gave the word. With a little luck the destruction of the lead ship would result in an explosion that would take out the others as well.

  In space the right arm of the SDF-1 drew back and hurled itself forward, as if it were alive...

  CHAPTER TEN

  "What you fail to grasp is that Commander Breetai's decision to allow the SDF-1 to retreat was entirely in keeping with the Zentraedi tradition of open warfare, that is, move and countermove. It was most certainly not a tactical blunder...Moreover, it is for precisely this same reason that it never even occurred to Commander in Chief Dolza to hold the planet Earth hostage for the return of Zor's ship. Through no fault of your own you imagine this to be unthinkable. Which, then, is the more barbaric of the two races-yours or mine?"

  Exedore, as quoted in Lapstein's Interviews

  The steel-plated bow of the supercarrier Daedalus punched through the nose of the Zentraedi flagship.

  It was an encounter of mythic proportion, worthy of inclusion in that short list of eternal struggles-angel and demon, eagle and snake, snake and dragon: a giant techno-knight in gleaming armor, its fist locked in the jaws of a deep-space armored leviathan...

  The two-foot-thick bow plate of the Daedalus swung up and away from the body of the ship, its massive top-mounted hinges groaning in protest. Unseen servodevices locked while others disengaged, motors whined, and hydraulic couplers hissed in a symphony of mechanization. A triple-hinged forward rampart unfolded itself into the hold of the Zentraedi, ship while a fan of brilliant energy was loosed from Destroids in the carrier belly. Structural piers and pylons were blown away; girders and tie beams slagged in the infernal heat. Supply crates and storage tanks exploded, filling the air lock with concussive sound and deadly fumes. A bulkhead just inside the breach was holed by concentrated firepower.

  Golden alloy-armored Destroids now began to descend the ramp, their lasers at rest. They were early products of Robotechnology, bipedal and nearly as tall as Battloids but somewhat cumbersome-looking, with large

  square feet and skeletal laser-gun arms. Following their programmed directives, the three-man units moved into the hold and took up positions for a second and more lethal assault. But they were not quick enough.

  Battlepods suddenly leaped from places of concealment and opened fire. Pulsed beams tore through the thin skins of the mecha, dropping them in their tracks. There were attempts to return fire, but the situation was instantly beyond hopeless. The Destroids were vastly outnumbered and easily overrun; minutes after the skirmish erupted, their silent forms were heaped at the base of the ramp.

  Then the Battlepods reversed the order, taking to the ramp and making for the Daedalus. By this time, however, word of the defeat had reached the carrier command center, and the arm of the SDF-1 was already retreating, ripping out the steel tendrils the flagship defense systems had attached to it in an attempt to seal the breach. There was barely time enough to insert a quarter of the battle-ready pods. As the final few hopped gracelessly into the carrier hold, the ramp folded, retracted, and slammed shut.

  The Zentraedi had been given no clear-cut orders, save to enter the Micronian ship and inflict as much damage as they could without destroying it. Breetai's hope was that at least some of the pods would make it to the bridge of the fortress and effect a capture of the commanders. Short of that, the pods could attempt to incapacitate the ship's reflex drives.

  Some of the Zentraedi soldiers, however, had their own ideas.

  Once inside the Daedalus, in an orgy of indiscriminate destruction, they began to fire at everything in sight. Provisions, mecha, vehicles, and Gladiator teams were wiped out. Techs left their stations and picked up weapons to combat the intruders, but not one lived to give details of the battle. The Zentraedi hurled fire against the control towers and communications stations, incinerating systems and personnel with equal abandon. The hangar areas of the carrier were fully aflame by the time the pods took to the main corridors of the SDF-1.

  They still had no idea where they were going, but it was easy enough for anyone to tell where they had been. A path of utter destruction led from

  the supercarrier, up through the right arm of the fortress and into its heart-Macross City itself. The pods moved wantonly through service corridors, extending their reign of death. Coveralled techs were fried by bolts of unleashed fury; shaking hands reached out weakly for comlink phones and panic buttons but seldom found them. Meanwhile the pods continued their sweep. The Zentraedi were finally repaying the Micronians for two years of frustrating defeats. The mecha soldiers were so caught up in vengeance that not one of them noticed the disappearance of several of their number-a group of awkwardly piloted pods that s
eemed curiously loath to engage in battle.

  Captain Gloval's leg shook uncontrollably while he awaited Lisa's reply. "Come on, Lisa, come on," he said, hoping to hurry along the flow of data.

  She was bent over her console, fingers flying over the keyboard. "I have no contact at all with the Daedalus, sir. It's as if it doesn't exist!"

  Something was very wrong. The oblate bow of the Zentraedi warship filled the bay of the bridge, dark green in color, menacing, enormous. It looked to Gloval as if a whale had mistaken the arm of his ship for a giant fishhook. But the calculated collision had not worked out as planned. Whatever the firepower unleashed by the Destroids, it had not been sufficient to affect the cruiser. In fact, the ship was still hurtling forward, now pushing the fortress along in front of it. And the bridge had lost contact not only with the Destroid squad but with the entire supercarrier garrison as well.

  "Pull the fortress back!" Gloval shouted suddenly. "All power astern and redeploy the shield energy!"

  As Kim and Sammie relayed continued commands to engineering and astrogation, the fortress began to vibrate to a steady bass drone. The engines were powered up and engaged; then the contained explosive fire of the reflex core erupted from the ports of the pectoral thrusters, carrying the ship away from its aggressor, pulling the Daedalus arm free of the flagship's hold.

  Gloval breathed a sigh of relief.

  The fortress responded with an unprecedented sounding of Klaxons and alert sirens.

  Claudia was on the comlink; she lowered the handset and turned to face the command chair, a look of unmitigated terror contorting her face.

  "Enemy Battlepods have entered the ship through the ramming arm!" Gloval's eyes opened wide. "The enemy's on board?"

  This had happened only once before, when an overeager Zentraedi pilot had given chase to Max Sterling's Veritech and battled it briefly in the streets near Macross General Hospital.

  "The Daedalus is on fire," Claudia continued. "The pods are attacking Macross!"

  "Quickly! Patch us into the civil defense network!"

  The captain and his crew turned their attention to the speaker system, hoping against hope.

  "Ten enemy pods on Lilac Street," said a horrorstricken voice. "We're trying to hold...Aargh!"

  "This is area B control-we can't seem to hold them back, we need help-" "...retreating from the Tenth Avenue gate. We're getting our-"

  "Switch it off!" Gloval shouted from the chair. He dropped his head and said weakly, "God help us all."

  Destroids, Spartans, and Gladiators were waiting for the Battlepods when they reached the outskirts of Macross City. For those battle-weary residents who had yet to reach shelter, the attack would recall a similar one two years earlier. But this time they knew their enemy. This time they knew how much they had to fear.

  Bent on nothing less than complete destruction, the pods advanced through the street, blue fire spewing from their upper and lower guns, panicked pedestrians scattering beneath their hooved feet. Explosions launched fragments of glass and steel into the artificial air and tore gaping holes in the streets, exposing raw power lines and rupturing water conduits.

  Raining showers of electrical sparks, store signs dangled dangerously from fractured rooftops. The facades of buildings fell and burned, sending up clouds of dust and thick smoke.

  A pod, its twin guns blazing, stepped out from behind the remains of a clothing store to face off against a Gladiator positioned at the end of the block. Bursts of blinding fire were exchanged again and again until both pod and mecha exploded, while elsewhere rockets fell and flames spread. A massive multibarreled autocannon swept along Macross Boulevard, sending ground-to-air heat-seekers against airborne mecha. EVE's star-studded sky veneer was stripped away, revealing in stark detail the naked terrors of war.

  Not all the pods were blasting away, however. Some were actually looting the shops for souvenirs, raking in whatever appeared intact with the mecha's grappling hooks and waldo gloves. Two of the pilots got a fix on an external sound source that was similar to Minmei's "singing"; and the pair moved off together, homing in on the Macross Star Bowl.

  Inside, Minmei was still on stage, wedded to her audience in some sort of unrehearsed litany of song.

  Without accompaniment, she sang, "To be in love..."

  And they chanted: "Stagefright, go'way, this is my big day."

  She was grasping the mike tightly in both hands, though she was certain that the power had gone off. But her face betrayed no fear. Kyle was standing stiffly by her side, his fists clenched, urging her to go on. From what she could tell, the city beyond the amphitheater rim was engulfed in apocalyptical flames; thick black smoke was billowing toward the ceiling of the hold, and a light rain seemed to be falling from the overhead water-retrieval system. Electrical power had shorted out in most areas of the stadium. The spots were off. The band had fled. And those in the audience who weren't singing were crying. It felt like the end of the world.

  Then, all at once, two Battlepods appeared on the upper tier of the amphitheater, their cannons aimed ultimately at the stage, and she dropped the mike.

  Kyle stepped forward and raised it again to her mouth.

  "You've got to continue singing, Minmei. Give it all you've got!"

  He put his arm around her, and she found the courage to pick up where she'd left off. The audience followed her; she believed they would have followed her anywhere.

  "Now, don't be afraid," Kyle was saying into her ear. "They're not going to hurt us."

  And it truly seemed that way for an instant-as if the pods were just part of the audience-until a bolt of blue energy flashed overhead and struck the upper reaches of the stage canopy. It had not been launched by either of the pods and was in fact a stray shot from outside the amphitheater. But that made little difference. The crowd panicked. And worse still, the blast had loosened one of the large overhead spotlights. For a second it looked like it wouldn't fall. Then something snapped and gave way, and down it came.

  Kyle spied it in the nick of time and moved in to cover Minmei. He succeeded perfectly, taking the full force of the impact on his back, the spotlight driving both of them violently to the floor.

  Outside the fortress, things were not much better. The SDF-1 had managed to put some distance between herself and the Zentraedi warships, but furious space dogfights were continuing. Rick was locked into the vacuum equivalent of a scissors finesse with the Officer's Pod that had been hounding him since the word go. Each time he tried to break or jink, the pod stuck to his tail, loosing cannon fire, and now here was Lisa on the right commo screen vying for his attention. Fortunately, Max had been monitoring the aircom net and was coming in to give Rick some relief. Sterling came in low under the Officer's Pod and chased it off with Stilettos; Rick angled himself out of the immediate battle arena and went on the net to the fortress bridge.

  "In the ship?" Rick repeated in disbelief.

  Lisa reaffirmed it. "They're destroying everything, Rick. Return to base immediately!"

  Minmei! Rick screamed internally. "Lisa, have they hit the amphitheater? You've got to tell me!"

  "I don't have a status report, Rick. Just get back here on the double." As she signed off, Max appeared on the left screen.

  "I'm with you, Commander," said Sterling. "I'll follow you home." Which was easier said than done.

  First the two Veritechs had to navigate a web of pulsed fire laid out by the Officer's Pod and its three cohort ships, then direct themselves through the continuous bombardment the fortress was receiving from the enemy warships. Rick raised the bridge and asked Lisa to see to it that one of the SDF-1's ventral docking ports was opened for their entry; it would have been not only a longer route to Macross via the Daedalus or Prometheus but a more dangerous one as well. No one in fact had ever piloted a VT through the arms of the fortress.

  Rick rehearsed his moves as he closed on the air lock; he visualized a map of the city streets and began to plot a course, almost as if
allowing the mecha to familiarize itself with the plan.

  Skull One and Skull Two zoomed into the fortress, unaware that four Battlepods had followed them in, Khyron's Officer's Pod in the lead.

  Miriya was as surprised as anyone to see Zentraedi mecha in the streets of Macross City, and just now she was possibly the only person alive in those streets. Most of the Micronians had taken to the shelters long ago, but many had remained in the amphitheater to witness the workings of some sort of psychological weapons system. For some unknown reason the Battlepods had also chosen to concentrate their might there, and as a result the Micronians had sustained heavy personnel losses. In addition the pods had laid waste to much of the surrounding city. Fires continued to burn, explosions could be heard and felt from all quarters, and a steady rain of embers, soot, and debris fell from the ceiling of the enormous hold.

  Miriya had been one of those who remained unsheltered in the amphitheater. She had been trailing the longhaired Micronian warrior ever

  since the populace had turned out in such force to honor him at the trans-vid screening of his battle records. It seemed likely that the female warrior shown in those trans-vids was the same one who had drawn such a fanatical following to the amphitheater. The vocal noises she emitted had been discomfiting; they had left Miriya feeling debilitated and ill at ease, much as she had felt upon recognizing that the female warrior was in some way the consort of the longhaired male!

  Until moments ago Miriya had been convinced that the male warrior was the one who had defeated her in battle, but something had happened to alter her thinking. She had seen him crushed by the falling illumination device and, while working her way down the aisles toward the stage, had spied a blue-trimmed Micronian fighter streak overhead. Certain that she recognized the mecha, she had taken to the devastated streets to watch the pilot of that ship in action against her allies.