Genesis r-1

by Jack McKinney

  Rick looked down and smirked. "I'm not worried. If you can learn to fly one of these things, I sure can."

  Roy snorted, "Don't be so modest!"

  When Rick was in the pilot's seat and Roy was in the rear seat, Roy handed Rick a red-visored Robotech flight helmet.

  Rick turned it over in his hands, examining the interior. "Whoa, what kind of helmet is this? What's all this stuff inside?"

  "Receptors. They pick up electromagnetic activity in your brain. You might say the helmet's a mind reader, in some ways."

  The receptors were just like part of the helmet's padding: soft, yielding-no safety hazard. But Rick wasn't so sure he liked the idea of having his head wired. "What're they for?"

  "For flying a Veritech, buddy boy. You'll still handle a lot of manual controls, but there are things this baby does that it can only do through advanced control systems."

  Rick hiked himself around in his seat and leaned out to look back at Roy. "Look, I saw your guys flying, remember? What's so special about these crates that you have to wear a thinking cap just to steer one?"

  Roy told him, "The real secrets aren't supposed to go public until the politicians are through with all their blabbing, but I'll tell you this: The machine you're sitting in isn't like anything humans have ever built-it's as different from Mockingbird as Mockingbird is from a pair of shoes.

  "Because you don't just pilot a Robotech ship, Rick; you live it."

  On the main reviewing stand high above the crowd, Senator Russo stood at the speaker's rostrum, his voice echoing out over the throngs, amplified so that it reached to the farthest shores of the sea of people. Flags snapped in the wind, and the moment felt like a complete triumph.

  "This is the day we've all been looking forward to for ten years! The Robotech project has been a tremendous asset to the economy of Macross City and to the welfare of our people!"

  Captain Gloval, standing to one side with a few other dignitaries, tried to keep from yawning or simply throwing up his hands in disgust. So far, all Russo and his cronies had done was take credit for themselves and do some not-too-subtle electioneering.

  Gloval cast a critical eye at the weather and gave it his grudging approval. He was impatient to launch; various other Earth military forces were already deployed in space, patrolling and awaiting the start of the SDF-1's first space trials. But the politicos didn't care who they kept waiting or what careful timetables they spoiled when they had the spotlight.

  A liaison officer came up the steps at the rear of the reviewing stand and approached Gloval as Russo went on. "More important, though, is the fact that the technology developed here will benefit all mankind, now and in the future. And I need not mention what it means to the defense of our great planet, Earth!"

  The liaison cupped his hand to Gloval's ear and said, "Excuse me, sir: urgent message from the space monitoring station. A strange flash of light and an explosion, tremendous radiation readings, accompanied by irregularities in solar gravitational fields."

  In spite of the warmth of the day, Gloval suddenly felt cold all over. "The same sort of event occurred ten years ago. You know what happened then, don't you?"

  The aide was trying to conceal his fear, nodding. "That's when the alien ship arrived."

  Gloval assumed the icy calm of a seasoned captain. "Better check it out. Come with me."

  Gloval was descending the platform steps as Russo announced what a great honor it was to introduce the commander of SDF-1, Henry Gloval.

  For once, Russo didn't know what to say. "Come back here! You have to make a speech!" he shouted.

  Gloval never even looked around. The time for speeches was over.

  On the SDF-1 bridge, the women who were the battle fortress's heart worked furiously to make some sense of the sudden chaos around them.

  "What's going on here, anyway?" Claudia demanded, trying everything she could think of to interpret her instruments and reassert some control over the ship's systems.

  "Claudia, give me a readout!" Lisa called calmly. All around her, the bridge was a din of alarms, flashing indicators, malfunctioning controls, and overloaded computers.

  Claudia looked up from her hopeless efforts. "Every system on the ship is starting up without being turned on!"

  Unprecedented, impossible-to-interpret mechanisms had self-activated in the ship's power plant-the great, sealed engines that not even Lang had dared open. And the many different kinds of alien apparatus connected to it were doing bewildering things to the SDF-1's structure as well as its systems, making the humans helpless bystanders.

  "The defense system is activating the main gun!" Claudia reported, horrified.

  Far off at the great starship's bow, gargantuan servomotors hummed and groaned. The huge twin booms that made up the forward portion of the ship moved to either side on colossal camlike devices. The booms locked into place, looking like a fantastic tuning fork. The ship's reconstruction had the bow high up now, pointed out above the end of Macross Island's cliff line at the open sea.

  Lisa's mind raced. The main gun had never been fired; no one was even sure how powerful it was. That test was to be reserved for empty space. But if it salvoed now, the ensuing death and destruction might well be greater than that created by the ship's original crash.

  At the same time, everyone aboard could feel the supership shifting slightly on the massive keel blocks-the monolithic rests on which it lay. Warning klaxons and horns were deafening.

  The SDF-1's aiming its gun, Lisa realized. But at what target?

  "Shut down all systems!" she ordered Claudia.

  Claudia, trying the master cutoff switch several times to no effect, looked at Lisa helplessly. "It doesn't work!"

  A sudden glare from the bow lit the bridge with red-orange brilliance, throwing their flickering shadows on the bulkhead behind them.

  Around and between the forward booms, tongues of orange starflame were shooting and whirling and arcing back and forth. The fantastic energy cascade began sluicing up the booms toward their tips, sparks snapping, seemingly eager to be set free.

  And still Lisa could think of nothing she could do.

  Just then the hatch opened and Gloval hurried in so quickly that he bumped his head on the frame. He didn't spare time or his usual swearing at the people who'd refitted the largest machine ever known for not providing a little more headroom.

  "Captain, the main guns are preparing to fire!"

  Gloval assessed the situation in seconds, but Lisa could see from his expression that he was as much at a loss as she.

  "I can't control them!" Claudia told Gloval. "What'll we do?"

  Lisa absorbed a terrible lesson in that moment. Despite what they might teach in the Academy and the War College and Advanced Leadership School, sometimes there was nothing you could do.

  The energy storm around the booms had built to an Earth-shaking pitch, a noise like a million shrieking demons. Then huge eruptions of destructive energy streaked off the booms.

  The bolts streamed off into the distance, thickening into a howling torrent of annihilation, a river of starflame as high and wide as SDF-1 itself, shooting out across the city.

  Lisa expected to see everything in the volley's path consumed, including the gathered populace.

  But that didn't happen. The superbolt went straight out over the cliffs and over the ocean, turning water to vapor and roiling the swells, raising clouds of steam that wouldn't settle for hours. The shot was direct, the curve of the Earth falling away beneath it as it lanced out into space.

  And just as Lisa Hayes was registering the fact that the city still remained, intact and unharmed-that her father was down there somewhere, still alive-new information began pouring in on scopes and monitors.

  The Zentraedi heavy cruisers, closing in on the unsuspecting Earth, barely had time to realize that they were about to die. By some unimaginable level of control, the blinding shaft of energy split in two.

  The twinned beams holed each heavy cruis
er through and through, along their long axes. Armor and weapons and hull, superstructure, and the rest were vaporized as the beams hit, skewering them. They expanded like overheated gas bags, skins peeling off, debris exploding outward, only to disappear, blown to nothingness, an instant later in globes of bright mass-energy conversions.

  From his command station, Breetai watched impassively, arms folded across his great chest, as the projecbeam displayed the death of the two heavy cruisers.

  "Now we know for sure: The ship is on that planet!" This time he didn't bother soliciting Exedore's advice. "All ships advance, but exercise extreme caution!"

  The Zentraedi armada took up proper formation, ships-of-the-line moving to the fore, and closed on the target world.

  Clouds of superheated air blew out across the ocean; gulls cried in the aftermath of the SDF-1's single volley.

  Gloval was at the bridge's protective bowl-its "windshield"-his face all but pressed against it, scanning through the steam and fog. He breathed a prayer of thanks that the city was unharmed.

  "Some sort of magnetic bottling," Sammie reported, focused on her work. "All the force was channeled directly out into space, except for some very marginal eddy currents."

  "We have control over all systems again, sir," Claudia announced calmly. "What happened, sir?"

  Gloval suddenly felt old-older than the ship, the island, the sea. He wasn't about to speculate aloud, not even to his trusted bridge gang, but he was just about certain he knew. And if he was right, it put the weight of a planet on his shoulders.

  CHAPTER SIX

  While Captain Gloval gets admittedly deserved credit for his handling of the disaster that day, male historians frequently gloss over Gloval's straightforward statement that if it weren't for the women on SDF-1's bridge, their nerve and gallantry and professionalism, the Robotech War would have been over before it had fairly begun.

  Betty Greer, Post-Feminism and the Global War

  The ground had stopped shaking, and the sky was clearing. The Veritech fighter stopped its trembling dance, and Rick Hunter caught his breath. The air seemed a little hotter in his lungs, but not terribly so.

  He called back to Roy in a subdued voice, "Wow. What were all those fireworks about?"

  Fireworks! Roy thought. 'Fraid not! Aloud, he said, "I dunno. I better go check. Wait here; I'll see what's goin' on."

  He put aside his flight helmet-the "thinking cap," as Rick had called it-and hiked himself up out of the fighter cockpit. If what Roy feared the most had come to pass, Rick would be as safe where he was as anywhere else. And he'd also understand why some people could spend their lives preparing for war.

  "The space monitor report's coming in," Sammie sang out. "It shows what our gun was firing at."

  "I have it here, Sammie," Lisa cut in, studying her monitors. "Two large objects, probably spacecraft, origin unknown, on Earth-approach vector, approx two hundred miles out."

  Gloval was nodding to himself without realizing it. The ship could be raised or lowered, the booms traversed for-what, a few insignificant minutes of arc? And the SDF-1 hadn't been moved, except to lift it onto the keel blocks, since it crashed. The range was incredibly long, making for a greater field of fire; but still, such a shot, such a series of events, could only come about with some forewarning, or intuition, or-We forgot that whoever built this vessel had to some extent mastered time; could, perhaps, see through it. Could see this very moment?

  "Both objects were struck dead center by the beam and were destroyed-disintegrated," Claudia said. "Orbital combat task forces are deploying for defense, with Armor One and Armor Ten-sir? Captain Gloval?"

  Sammie, Vanessa, Kim-they exchanged looks with one another as Lisa and Claudia traded facial signals. Gloval was laughing, a deep belly laugh, his shoulders shaking. Claudia and Lisa saw that they were both thinking the same thing: If Gloval, their source of strength and calm, had lost his grip, all was lost.

  "Captain, what is it?" Lisa ventured. "What are you laughing about?"

  Gloval stopped laughing, crashing his fist against the observation-bowl ledge. "It was so obvious! We should have known! A booby trap, of course!"

  Claudia and Lisa said it at the same time, "Booby trap, sir?"

  "Yes, it's one of the oldest tricks in military history! A retreating enemy leaves behind hidden explosives and such."

  He clamped his cold pipe between his teeth. "The automatic firing of the main guns means that enemies have approached close enough to be a threat to us." He drew his tobacco bag out of the breast pocket of his uniform jacket.

  "Captain Gloval!" Sammie was up out of her chair. Everyone turned to her, wondering what the new alarm was.

  "No smoking on the bridge, sir!" Sammie said. "Strictly against regulations!"

  Claudia groaned and clapped a hand to her forehead. Lisa reflected, Nothing throws Sammie.

  "I was just holding it; I wasn't going to light it," Gloval said defensively. The unreality of the situation retreated with Sammie's interruption. There were both good things and bad things about having one's bridge crew be like family.

  But doubts were past now. Gloval barked, "Hot-scramble all fighters and sound general quarters! I'm declaring a red alert!"

  Down below, the crowds milled uncertainly as helos and other aircraft veered away to report to battle stations. Suddenly, launch crews were scrambling to get Veritechs into the air. Out on the carriers, all catapults were busy, while the SDF-1's own warcraft rushed up from the ship's interior and groundside runways to establish a protective shield overhead.

  Out in the void, armored spacecruisers, human-designed vehicles incorporating some of the principles learned from Robotechnology, moved their interceptors and attack craft out of the bays and into fighting position.

  It wasn't long before the swarm of human defenders had sensor contact, then visual sighting, on the aliens; the Zentraedi wouldn't have had it any other way.

  A Scorpion interceptor pilot reported back to Armor One over the tac net, "Enemy approaching on bearing niner-zero. We are engaging. Commence firing!"

  Scorpions and Tigersharks and a dozen other types of Earthly combat spacecraft, ranging up to the mammoth Armors themselves, rushed to close with the aliens' first attack wave.

  Missiles-Stilettos and Piledrivers and Mongooses-were launched at extreme range so that all but the glows of their drives were lost to sight until the blackness blossomed with the spherical explosions characteristic of zero-g, the bursts overlapping one another, thicker than a field of dandelions.

  The Zentraedi ships-of-the-line forged through the intense fire with few losses, closing the gap in seconds. The formations broke up to lock in a fierce, pitched battle.

  The Armors launched all their missiles. Lasers, kinetic energy weapons-rail-gun autocannon and such-were the other main Terran weapons. The Zentraedi's were far superior; their warcraft simply outclassed the defenders', whose design involved fewer Robotech innovations.

  Earth's forces fought with savage determination, but the unevenness in technologies was instantly apparent.

  Aboard the alien command ship, Breetai studied the engagement solemnly in the projecbeam images and monitors, listening to his staff's relayed readouts with only a small part of his attention.

  "Very heavy resistance, sir," Exedore observed.

  "Yes," Breetai allowed. "But why are they using such primitive weapons? Our lead ships have broken through. It's unbelievable, this sacrifice they're making! Some sort of trick, no doubt."

  Exedore considered that. "Yes, it is puzzling."

  Breetai whirled on him. "It makes no sense, then? Even to you?"

  "There has to be a reason, but it's beyond me. Surely, the Robotech Masters-"

  He was interrupted by an urgent message from the tech at the threat-prioritization computers. "Commander Breetai! Two enemy cruiser-class vessels are approaching; they could be the ones who launched the missile bombardment."

  Breetai smiled, but his single eye was chi
lly. "Destroy them!"

  Specially designated main and secondary batteries opened fire: phased particle-beam arrays and molecular disruptors, long-range and fearsomely powerful.

  Armor Two was hit on the first volley as hundreds of spears of high-resolution blue fury ranged in on it. It tried to evade the barrage; house-size pieces of armor and superstructure were blown from it. Many of the smaller defending craft were completely disintegrated.

  Breetai, waiting for effective counterfire, lost patience. Perhaps the foes' hesitation to use reflex weaponry fit into some strange plan, but to forgo use of any advanced technology, to sacrifice troops to this kind of slaughter, was perverse.

  Incredulous, Breetai wondered if somehow this victory was going to be far easier than it had seemed when that first mighty bolt rose from Terra. "Those idiots behave as though they don't even know how to use their own weapons! Full barrage, all cannon!"

  The Zentraedi command ship cut loose again with all forward gun turrets. Armor Two was instantly holed through in a hundred places, the enemy beams penetrating it like ice picks through a cigar box.

  Hull integrity went at once, and internal gravity; hatches and seals blew, and space began sucking the atmosphere from the cruiser, tossing crew and contents around like toys. Still more hits made a sieve of the pride of the orbital defense command and destroyed its power plant. A moment later it disappeared in a horrendous outpouring of energy, while lesser ships all around it met a similar fate.

  Lisa, more pallid than ever, kept her voice even as she reported to Gloval: "Armor Two is destroyed and Armor Ten is heavily damaged, sir. Other losses extremely heavy. The Orbital Defense Forces are no longer even marginally effective. Alien fleet is closing on Earth."

  Gloval sat in his command chair, fingers steepled, chin resting on pressing thumbs. "I had hoped this moment wouldn't come in my lifetime. SDF-1 kept us from exterminating ourselves and let us achieve worldwide peace, but now it has brought a new danger down upon us. We face extinction at the hands of aliens whose power we can only guess at."