The generals who let us die
so they can shake a fist—
They’d none of ’em be missed,
they’d none of ’em be missed!
Bowie Grant, “With Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan”
Bowie was tinkering with the keys again, trying not to think about the strikeforce expedition. “Doesn’t that get boring?” Sean asked, leaning on the piano.
“Not really.”
“I don’t mean you, Bowie; I mean those two.”
He pointed toward Dana and Louie, who were toiling over a simulator that looked as if it had been stripped, components lying everywhere. Why they had chosen the ready-room to work in instead of one of the repair bays or maintenance workrooms was still unclear, except perhaps the fact that Dana kept trying to entice people into volunteering to help.
Dana had commandeered the simulator from the canteen on authority from R&D, and neither she nor Louie had slept that night. On the other hand, as of yet no R&D support troops had shown up.
“I’m starting to wonder if that Cromwell really wants Louie’s gizmo for simulation training,” Sean murmured.
“I just—like machines,” Louie was expounding to Dana, as he reassembled things. “They expand Human potential and they never disappoint you, if you build ’em right. Somebody with the right know-how could create the ideal society. Unimpeded Intellect! Machine Logic!”
“I didn’t know you were such a romantic,” she said dryly. Ideal society? Boy, what a mechie!
Louie wanted to run the final test, but Dana pulled rank and he yielded amiably. She pulled on a visor, hopped into the simulator, and the computer-modeled slaughter began. It was a quantum leap from the old thinking cap; her score soared.
Elsewhere, the Tristar, Emerson’s flagship, was fighting a desperate diversionary action, luring the main body of the enemy’s forces one way so that the more badly damaged expedition ships could try to limp to ALUCE.
“We can’t take much more of this pounding!” Green growled, as the Tristar was jarred again by enemy fire.
“I know,” Emerson said calmly. “Get me a precise position fix and tell the power section we’ll need emergency max power in two minutes.”
“Sir,” Rochelle said and bent to the task. Green turned a silent, questioning look on the man he had served for so long.
“We’re going to generate an Orbital Warp Blast,” Emerson said. They all knew he meant use of the mysterious “special data” given him by R&D in a cryptic transfer that, rumor had it, could be traced to Zand himself.
The idea was to create a small black hole where the ship was, the ship itself being yo-yoed momentarily into another dimension. The singularity would then pull in and destroy everything in close proximity to it. The untested theory and some of the information came from Dr. Emil Lang’s research on the now-destroyed SDF-1.
“And then the enemy becomes a brief accretion disc, gets sucked into the singularity, and vanishes forever,” Green muttered. “Perhaps.”
“We try it or die anyway,” Emerson pointed out. To underscore that, another enemy salvo shook the Tristar.
Power readings seemed insane, violating all safety factors and load tolerances. Emerson had a microphone in his hand.
“Lieutenant Crystal, you and the other TASCs will lure all enemy forces as close to the Tristar as possible, and be ready to get clear on a moment’s notice, in approximately six minutes, do you copy?”
“You heard the man,” Marie told the Lions.
It was the weirdest mission she had ever been on: sting and run, get the enemy assault ships and battleships and ’roids chasing you. Juke and dodge to keep them from shooting your tail off; somehow keep them from engaging and diverting or delaying you. Protect your teammates but keep moving; do your best to ignore the heavy losses suffered by pilots who had been forbidden, in effect, to turn and give battle. And watch the time diminish down to zero.
As the timer wound down, the area around the Tristar was thick with dogfighting mecha, the biggest rat race of the Second Robotech War. The enemy forces were hitting Emerson’s flagship almost at will, and it couldn’t last much longer.
Then Marie heard Emerson’s order to get clear; the Ajaxes cut in all thrusters and headed away, leaving the field to the milling Bioroids and combat vessels.
Emerson watched the indicators and, when it was time, he threw the switch. Crackling energy wreathed the battlecruiser, seeming to crawl around it like superfast serpents. The tremendous discharge expanded to form a sphere just big enough to contain the ship. The Bioroids’ emotionless faceplates were lit up by the radiance of the blaze.
There were cosmic fireworks, then nothing to see as the lightshow was engulfed by the Schwarzchild radius. The Bioroids and vessels closest to the vanished flagship were destroyed by tidal forces. The invaders were sucked into nullset-space.
Those slightly farther away were helpless to escape becoming accretion material, whirling down to and over the event horizon after their fellows. The Masters’ mightiest assault force was gone except for a little quantum leakage.
Marie was waiting for the Tristar, praying that the last and most critical part of the operation wouldn’t be a disaster, when cannonfire rocked her A-JAC. “Damn!” she yelled, pushing her stick up into the corner for a pushover, imaging the aerocombat move through her horned helmet even though she was in airless space. There was one battleship left!
The other Ajaxes scattered as the enemy drove in at them, putting out a fearsome volume of fire with primary and secondary batteries. It was obviously damaged—and so had moved too slowly to be drawn within the deadly radius of the singularity effect.
Now it was practically on top of the Lions, still capable of doing fatal damage to the Tristar, should Emerson’s ship reappear and be taken by surprise. Marie gave quick orders, and the Black Lions went at the enemy dreadnought like wolves after a mammoth, biting, ripping, coming back for more even though they suffered heavy losses—and luring the battlewagon into position.
But the clones weren’t blind to what had happened to the rest of their battle group and fought to keep clear. The Masters’ battleship put its remaining power into a run for safety.
But it found another vessel blocking its way. Although the Salamis was shaking with secondary explosions and seemed more holes than hull, it closed in on the alien, firing with the few batteries still functioning.
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 Ajaxes 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 conveyorbeltlike 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 media’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 VFTS “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 thermo-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 thermo-rifle’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, because 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 thermo-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 thermo-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 thermo-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.