A WW I biplane had perhaps fifteen gauges and instruments, a WW II fighter some thirty-five or so. By the time of the Global Civil War, a front-line fighter-bomber had approximately four hundred indicators, readouts, and so forth. Robotech mecha made those planes look as simple as unicycles. Is it any wonder that the RDF, and the Southern Cross Army that took its place, had little use for people with fast reflexes and the rest of it, but who couldn’t image, couldn’t think their mecha through a fight? It was the only conceivable way of controlling such an instrumentality.
And even that wasn’t always enough.
Zachary Fox, Jr., Men, Women, Mecha:
the Changed Landscape of the Second Robotech War
The conventional armored vehicles and self-propelled artillery at the base did their best to send up defensive barrages, but the Bioroids were too agile and their counterfire too devastating. The Bioroids wove down through the tracers and solid-projectile fire, and then opened up.
Blasts from the discus-shaped hand weapons sent the field pieces and battle tanks up in violent ruin. The missile batteries didn’t have any better luck; more Bioroids came in at low angles, taking them out with highly accurate fire.
Pilots scrambled to their planes, horrified that they had been caught on the ground by the incredible speed of the alien attack. Men and women with one foot in the cockpit, or just lowering the canopy, or beginning their taxi, were incinerated in their exploding aircraft. Whole lines of parked ships disappeared in tremendous outlashings of energy. Armored leg infantry, bravely attempting to defend the base with small arms, were mowed down on strafing runs.
The Bioroids began cutting the base to ribbons, determined to turn it into one huge funeral pyre, beaming down communications and sensor towers, strafing barracks, savaging every target they saw.
One of the few TASC units to make it upstairs was Marie Crystal’s. She formed up the Black Lions, then brought them around to do whatever they could in the face of the appalling counterattack.
They spied a flight of blue Bioroids led by the red. “Okay, nail those bastards!” she yelled; the VTs went in. But the Bioroids on their flying platforms were fearless and capable; they came head-on, knocking down first one Lion, then another.
But the VTs got on the scoreboard, too; Marie waxed a blue thoroughly, saw it fall in burning pieces along with its broken sky-sled. Another blue fell like a blazing comet, and the dogfight intensified. But Marie had a moment to notice that the red leader had disappeared, had gone on, she supposed, to direct the attack on the base.
But she couldn’t break loose to give chase; just then two more blues jumped her.
Far across the valley, on the outskirts of Monument City, the 15th watched smoke rise from the airfield. It was obvious to them all now that the attack was completely concentrated there, but they received no orders to move in the midst of the turmoil. Dana could only guess what a madhouse the command center must be at the moment. Apparently nobody had stopped to think that the Hovertanks were needed. That, or the message had never gotten through.
“Those dirty, murderous—” Bowie grated.
Dana made a decision. “Let’s mount up.”
That left Sean and Angelo to stare at her in amazement while she scrambled aboard her gleaming Valkyrie. Other 15th troopers raced to get rolling.
As Valkyrie eased forward on its surface-effect thrusters, Angelo moved to block the way. “No! Have you gone crazy?”
Dana throttled back, the tank settling, the pitch of its engines dropping. “Outta my way, Sergeant.”
“We’re assigned to protect this sector, Lieutenant. Or have you forgotten those orders?”
She stared down at him from her cockpit-turret. “What, so they can rip us apart one unit at a time? The commo nets are useless, and there is such a thing as personal initiative.”
Angelo lowered his head like a bull to glare at her. “Our orders are to wait right here.”
She gunned the tank again. “Then you can wait here, and remind ’em of that at my court-martial, Angie.”
The big sergeant had to dive aside as the 15th followed Dana, screaming off to the battle. Sean, arms folded, was watching him. “You know she’s gonna end up right back in the brig,” Angelo said bitterly.
“Assuming we still have a brig.” Sean smiled. Then he was boarding the Bad News. “See ya later, Sergeant.”
Angelo was left to scratch his head, dumbfounded, as Sean hurried to catch up with the others. Then he heard another voice, a very strident one.
“Lieutenant, you are deserting your post! Return at once! Acknowledge!”
Nova Satori was pulling up on an MP Hovercycle, her blue-black hair billowing behind her under the confinement of her goggle band. She was yelling into a radio mike. With the communications systems so completely bollixed up—both from confusion and damage done by the raiders—she had been pressed into service as a messenger.
“Get back here or face a general court-martial!” she called, but she stopped the cycle near Angle’s tank; it was pointless to try to follow the 15th when they were moving at full speed—especially into the middle of a pitched battle.
Angelo shook his head in resignation. “Then you’d better draw up papers on me, too, Lieutenant.” He jumped to his tank, the Trojan Horse, ignoring her outcries.
Big shuttles and transport ships, tiny recon fliers, hangars, and repair gantries—they were all equal targets of the blue horde. And the defenders were becoming fewer and fewer.
Trying to see through the smoke in the cockpit of her damaged VT, Marie plunged toward the hardtop. She had become an ace and more in the course of the attack, but number six had her number, and got a piece of her just as she finished him.
She managed to throw the switch and do the imaging that sent her VT into Battloid mode. It reconfigured just in time, foot thrusters blaring as it ground in for a standup landing.
As was often the case with Robotechnology, damage suffered in one mode was less critical in another, and the very act of mechamorphosis seemed to help the craft cope.
But she was no sooner at a standstill than enemy blasts gouged the runway all around her. The red Bioroid, like a stooping bird of prey, plunged at her. The Battloid’s thrusters gushed, and she leapt it high.
Gotta take him out! They raced at each other, firing.
“I copy.” Green turned from the phone to Emerson. “The airbase is putting up only scattered resistance, sir. It could fall at any time.”
Emerson wondered what would happen if it did. Would the aliens try to annex it—set up ground operations? Or would they simply plunder what Protoculture they could find and torch the whole installation?
Leonard and the other higher-ups had been adamant that the Hovertanks be used to protect population centers rather than deployed to Fokker Base, where Emerson wanted them in the first place. But now the top brass were out of contact, communication virtually nil, and Emerson had room to use his own personal initiative.
“Bring in the Hovertanks. Get the Fifteenth over there ASAP.”
“Even ‘as soon as possible’ isn’t soon enough, sir,” Rochelle observed. “It’ll take too long to get a message through and redeploy them.”
“Try anyway!” Emerson snapped. Rochelle rushed to obey.
“Sir, shall I inform all units to be ready to evacuate the base?” Green hazarded the question. Emerson just stared at the tactical displays.
Marie and the red Bioroid played out their deadly game of high/low hide-and-seek as Bioroids and VTs clashed, fired, and were destroyed on all sides.
Marie’s Battloid landed and glanced around the repair area in which it found itself, a big pulse laser gun held like a pistol in its cyclopean fist. “Okay, where y’at now?” she murmured.
She didn’t have to wait long for a reply. The red came swooping over a building at her. The Battloid sprang up to meet it; as in a joust, they passed within arm’s length of each other, firing away, dodging each other’s fire.
But when Marie landed, the knees of her mecha gave way, cut in half by the red’s energy shots. The Battloid crashed down on its chin, dazing her. She fought back the wooziness, popping the canopy and dragging herself out.
She pulled off her helmet and shoved it aside, then froze. The red had settled its Hovercraft right in front of her, and she was staring up the barrel of the discus-shaped pistol, a barrel as big as a storm drain. Marie watched, unmoving, waiting for the end.
But it wasn’t the end either she or the red had expected. A cannon bolt came in, a thin one at high resolution set for long-distance work. The shot didn’t quite take off the end of the Bioroid’s arm; it missed by only a few feet.
Still, it threw up smoke and rubble, and appeared to stagger the red. Marie hugged the hardtop, shielding her head. Then she looked up, and saw where the shot had come from.
The 15th was lined up abreast and waiting. Dana stood up in her cockpit-turret, surveying her handiwork proudly as the red Bioroid pivoted to face her. She waved. “Over here, ya big metal dink! Can’t ya even tell when somebody’s shooting at you?”
As she hoped, the Bioroid rose on its platform, forgetting Marie, and rushed at her. Dana was back in her tank in a moment, the Valkyrie going through mechamorphosis to Gladiator, the rest of the 15th emulating her.
Dana’s next salvo missed the red but knocked it waffling off course, nearly out of control. The rest of the ATACs were shooting at the blue Bioroids that surged in at them. The massed main batteries of the 15th skeeted alien after alien out of the sky; the air shimmered with heat waves at the vast forces unleashed. Thick smoke from the burning base and the exploded mecha billowed through the air. The squat, massive Gladiators volleyed and volleyed, picking off more invaders while keeping the rest at bay with their tremendous volume of fire.
The red Bioroid dropped from its platform to the ground, and was joined by a blue, to attack on foot.
“One on your right, Lieutenant!”
“I see him, Bowie!” Looking after each other was a habit they would never break, she guessed. That suited her.
The red popped up from behind a mound of fallen concrete to stitch the side of her Gladiator with a row of shots. Any other mecha in the Earth arsenal would have been severely damaged or blown to smithereens, but Valkyrie was scarcely touched. Dana traversed her gun barrel and whammed away again. The shot went wide, and the red and the blue came charging at the 15th’s position.
The red seemed as big as Mount Everest. It and Dana fired at the same moment, near misses that rocked each other. “Bowie, cover me!”
“You got it!” Bowie drove the red back, firing with everything his tank, the Diddy-Wa-Diddy, had, even though the twin barrels of the secondary batteries scarcely scratched the Bioroid’s hide. The rest of the 15th was busy maintaining the shield of AA fire; Dana went to Battloid mode, springing through the air to confront the red.
The two mecha catapulted through the air at each other. Dana protected herself from the enemy’s handweapon shots with the thick curve of armor mounted along one arm like an ancient duelist’s targone.
In the meantime she drew a bead with her own titanic battle rifle, the reconfigured tank-mode cannon. The shot pierced the red’s left shoulder in a spatter of molten metal and oily black smoke, a mecha-wound that spewed sparks and shrapnel and tongues of flame. The red went reeling and flailing back through the air, hit the ground with a crash, and lay sprawled. Dana rushed at it, intending to rip loose the power couplings and tubes connected to the head area, to disable it completely.
But as Dana charged in, it resumed firing. Only the reflexes of a young professional in superb condition let her leap her Battloid out of the line of fire. The red jumped to cover and so did Dana; in another moment they were playing duck-and-shoot once more.
“Angie, lay cover for me, can you?”
“It’s on the way!” The cannonade from the Trojan Horse sent the red bounding in retreat; Dana’s Battloid launched itself after.
“Gotcha now!” She fired on the fly, scoring another hit on the left shoulder as the red twisted and flipped to avoid. The alien landed awkwardly, nearly toppling. When it spun for another blast at her, she was ready.
Dana’s rifle-cannon bolt blew the discus-shaped hand weapon right out of the red’s fist; it stood unmoving, as if stunned.
Dana centered it in her sights. The war’s over for you, hosehead! At last, Earth had a POW.
Just then the Bioroid was in motion again. Straight for her. “Huh?”
It strode directly at her weapon’s muzzle. “What the—”
She fired again, a high-resolution beam that seared a hole right through it at the waistline. The red stumbled, regained balance, and charged her like an enormous defensive tackle.
Again the visions and strangely compelling images filled her. Was it because this was how she was to die? she wondered. The wash of emotion and disorientation paralyzed her where she would otherwise certainly have cut the foe in two with as many shots as it took.
Before she could shake off the trance, though, the red drop-kicked her Battloid. She shook off her stupefaction and her Battloid reached to grapple, but the red had already jumped high, its flying disc platform skimming in under it to bear it away into the air.
The alien fired at her with the weapons emplaced in the steering stem’s pod; she barely rolled out of the way in time to avoid being hit. The red zipped past.
“That tears it!” The Valkyrie hurled itself into the air, mechamorphosing. It landed solidly on both feet, in Gladiator mode, main battery traversing, Dana’s sight reticle searching. Let’s see how they like it when I clean house on their assault craft!
She fired off a max-power round, recalling how Bowie’s accidental shot of the day before had momentarily stopped the invaders. She aimed for it and hit the glassy blue dome on the upper side of its nose, presuming that to be the bridge; the shot shattered the dome and elicited a splash of secondary explosion, smoke, and flame.
The red tottered again, shaken by the bolt as much as the assault craft, and its emotionless tinted visor-face swung back for a look at Dana. She and the rest of the 15th opened up on the raiders with everything they had, primaries and secondaries hammering. Three more of the blues fell in the blaststorm, but the red and the rest wove through the fire to return to their smoking, listing ship.
The raiders dove aboard. The rust-red attack ship realigned, then dove upward out of sight at great speed, before the ATACs could bring weapons to bear on it.