The so-called Daedalus Maneuver was the first demonstration of what I have termed “mecha-consciousness”—levels beyond the somewhat primitive, almost instinctual modular transformation. The officers of the bridge, along with the engineering section, did little more than offer a prompt to the SDF-1: The dynamics of the maneuver were carried out by the fortress herself, despite claims to the contrary. I, alone, recognized this for what it was—an attempt on the part of the ship to interface with the living units she carried within her… Later I would overhear someone in the corridor say that “the Daedalus Maneuver (would) go down in the annals of space warfare as a lucky break for an incompetent crew.” In point of fact, however, the SDF-1 was able to repeat this “accident” on four separate occasions.
Dr. Emil Lang, Technical Recordings and Notes
“IT IS AS YOU PREDICTED, COMMANDER,” EXEDORE SAID AS he entered the flagship’s command center.
Without a word, Breetai rose from his seat; a wave of his hand and the projecbeam field began to assemble itself. Here was Zor’s ship, still in that bizarre configuration, a speck of gleaming metals caught in starlight and silhouetted against the milky white bands and icy rings of the system’s sixth planet. Breetai called for full magnification.
“The Micronians have activated electronic counter-measures and are about to enter the rings,” Exedore continued. “They are endangering the ship.”
“We cannot permit that.”
“I have taken the liberty of contacting Commander Zeril.”
A second wave brought Zeril to the screen. He offered a salute.
“My Lord Breetai, we await your instructions.”
“The Micronians are laying a trap for us, Commander Zeril. It would suit me to humor them a bit, but I’m concerned about the security of the dimensional fortress. As your scanners will indicate, the enemy has deployed several squadrons of mecha in the hope of luring you to your doom. Send out enough Battlepods to deal with them.
“The Micronian commander will bring his ship from the rings when you are within range of the main gun. I expect you to cripple the fortress before the gun is armed.”
“Sir!” said Zeril.
“You understand that the ship is to be disabled, not destroyed. As we speak, relevant data concerning the ship’s vulnerable points is being transmitted to your inboard targeting computers. Success, Commander.”
“May you win all your battles, sir!”
Zeril’s face faded from the field, replaced now by a wide-angle view of the SDF-1 at the perimeter of the ring system. Breetai and his adviser turned their attention to a second monitor where radar scanners depicted the exiting mecha as flashing color-enhanced motes.
“Attacking with such a weak force is completely illogical,” Exedore commented. “They seem to have little knowledge of space warfare.”
“They have been a planetbound race for too long, Exedore. Caught up in their own petty squabbles with one another.”
“Absolutely and totally illogical.”
Breetai moved in close to the scanner screen, as if there were some secret message that could be discerned in those flashing lights.
“I don’t believe they realize that we are holding back nearly all our forces… But this is an excellent opportunity for us to demonstrate just what they’re up against.”
* * *
No sooner had Rick Hunter executed a full roll to avoid colliding with a chunk of ring ice than Commander Lisa Hayes opened the net, her angry face on the comma screen lighting up the Veritech cockpit.
“Skull twenty-three! What in blazes are you doing? Just where were you at the briefing—asleep? I’m getting sick and tired of repeating myself: That kind of stunt flying will give away your position to the enemy! This isn’t the time or place for aerobatics, do you copy?!”
“It was just a roll,” Rick said in defense of his actions. “I’m not the only one—”
“That’ll be enough, Corporal. Follow Skull Leader’s instructions, do you copy?”
“All right,” he answered sullenly. “I gotcha.”
But Hayes wasn’t finished, not by a long shot.
“Is that the way you address superiors, Hunter? Look around you, bright boy. Everyone else here flies by the rules.”
“Roger, roger, Commander, I copy.”
“And get your RAS back where it belongs—why are you dropping behind?”
“Hey, you’re not flying around up here—” He caught himself and made a new start. “Uh, Skull twenty-three increasing relative airspeed, Commander.”
Hayes signed off, and Rick breathed a sigh of relief. This was going to be even more difficult than he had imagined. His first mission, and already he was being razzed by some know-it-all bridge bunny. Just his luck! What did she think, it was easy out here? Oh, to be back in the Mockingbird, Rick thought.
They were flying blind in Saturn’s shadow, far from the surface of the rapidly spinning planet and deep in the ice fields of its outermost rings. Rick’s eyes were glued to the cockpit screen and displays, and yet even with all this sophisticated instrumentation he had already had several close calls with debris too insignificant to register on the short-range scanners but large enough to inflict damage. He knew that the rest of Skull Team was out there somewhere, but visual contact would have been reassuring right about now—a glimpse of thruster fire, a glint of sunlight on a wingtip, anything at all. Soon enough there would be an added element of danger—the arrival of the enemy Battlepods.
Just then, Roy Fokker appeared on the port commo screen.
“Get ready, fellas, here they come.”
There’s no more flying for fun.
Claudia Grant, the black Flight Officer on the SDF-1’s bridge, was monitoring Lisa Hayes’s conversation with the young VT pilot when radar informed her of the enemy’s counterattack.
Claudia and Lisa had adjacent stations along the curved forward hull of the bridge, beneath the main wraparound bays which now afforded views of the rocks and ice chunks that made up Saturn’s rings. Each woman had two overhead monitors and a console screen at her disposal. Elevated behind Lisa’s post was the command chair, and behind the captain along the rear bulkheads on either side of the hatch sat Sammie and Kim, each duty station equipped with nine individual screens that formed a grand square. Vanessa was off to starboard, positioned in front of the ten-foot-high threat board.
Claudia’s station was linked to those of the three junior officers by radio, but such was her proximity to Lisa’s that scarcely a word the commander uttered escaped her hearing. Not that there would have been anything left unshared between them in any case. They had forged a close friendship; Claudia, four years Lisa’s senior, often playing the role of older sister, especially in matters of the heart. But for all of her desirable traits, her natural attractiveness and keen intelligence, Lisa was emotionally inexperienced. She projected an image of cool and capable efficiency, rationalizing her detached stance in the name of “commitment to duty.” But buried in her past was an emotional wound that had not yet healed. Claudia knew this much, and she hoped to help Lisa exorcise that demon some day. This new VT pilot, Hunter, had touched something deep inside Lisa by calling her just as he had seen her—“that old sourpuss”—and Claudia wanted to press her friend for details. But this was hardly the time or the place.
“Enemy Battlepods now engaging our Veritechs in the Cassini Quadrant, Captain,” Claudia relayed.
“Enemy destroyer approaching the target zone,” Vanessa added. Gloval rubbed his hands together and rose from his chair. “Excellent. If we can get a visual on the destroyer, I want it on the forward screen. Let’s see what these ships look like.”
Sammie punched it up, and soon the entire bridge crew was staring at the enemy vessel. It was surely as large as if not larger than the SDF-1, perhaps two and a half kilometers in length, but in no other way similar to it. Broad and somewhat flat, the warship had a vaguely organic look, enhanced by the dark green color of its dorsal armored shells and the light gray of its seemingly more vulnerable underbelly. Oddly enough, it also appeared to be quilled; but there was good reason to suspect that many of those spines were weapons.
“Not a pretty sight, is she?” said Gloval.
“Sir,” said Vanessa, “the destroyer is within range.”
“All right. Bring the ship around to the predesignated coordinates. Make certain there are no fluctuations in the barrier system readings and prepare to fire the main gun on my command.”
Claudia tapped in the coordinates. She could feel the huge reflex-powered thrusters kick in to propel the ship away from Saturn’s gravitational grasp. The pinpoint barrier system checked out, and the main gun was charging.
Free of the rings now, the SDF-1 was repositioning itself. The twin main gun towers were leveling out from the shoulders of the ship, taking aim at a target hundreds of kilometers away.
Main gun locked on target, sir.”
Gloval’s fist slammed into his open hand. “Fire!”
Claudia pushed down a series of crossbar switches, threw open a red safety cover, and pressed home the firing device.
Illumination on the bridge failed momentarily. The gun did not fire.
Again Claudia tapped in a series of commands; there was no response.
“Quickly!” Gloval shouted. “Get me Lang.”
“On the line,” Kim said.
Lang’s thickly accented voice resounded through the bridge comlink speakers.
“Captain, the pin-point barrier is apparently interfering with the main gun energy transformers. We’re doing a vibrational analysis now, but I don’t think we’ll have use of the gun unless we scrap the shield power.”
“Bozhe moy!” said Gloval in his best Russian.
Sammie swiveled from her console to face the captain, “Sir—particle-beam trackers are locked on our ship. The enemy is preparing to fire!”
* * *
Eight weeks of special training had failed to prepare him for the silent insanity of space warfare. Disintegration and silent death, the pinpoints of distant light that were laser beams locked on to his ship, the stormy marriage of antiparticles, the grotesque beauty of short-lived spherical explosions—bolts of launched lightning, blue and white, igniting the proper combination of gases…
Rick Hunter fired the VT’s thrusters as two Battlepods closed in on him from above—the relative “above” at any rate, for there was no actual up or down out here, no real way to gauge acceleration except by the constant force that kept him pinned to the back of his seat, or pushed him forward when the retros were kicked in, no way to judge velocity except in relation to other Veritech fighters or the SDF-1 herself. Just that unvarying starfield, those cool and remote fires that were the backdrop of war.
It was said that the best VT pilots were those who simply allowed themselves to forget: about yesterday, today, or tomorrow. “Nothing extraneous, in mind or body.” Warfare in deep space was a silent Zen video game where victory was not the immediate goal; success to any degree depended on a clear mind, free of expectations, and a body conditioned for thoughtless reaction. Stop to think about where to place your shot, how to move or mode your mecha, and you were space debris. Fight the fear and you’d soon be sucking vacuum. Rather, you had to embrace the terror, pull it down into your guts and let it free your spirit. It was like forcing yourself through the climax of a nightmare, confronting there all the worst things that could happen, then piercing through the envelope into undreamed-of worlds. And the dreamstate was the key, because you had to believe you had complete control of each detail, every element. The silence of space was the perfect medium for this manipulated madness. Out here, content was more important than form; wings were superfluous, banking and breaks unnecessary, thoughts dangerous.
Rick knew when he was trying too hard: He would feel the alpha vibe abandon him and the mecha follow suit. You are the mecha, the mecha is you. Left empty, the fear would rush in to fill him up, like air rushing into a vacuum, and the fear would trigger a further retreat from the vibe. It was a vicious circle. But he was beginning to recognize the early stages of it, the waverings and oscillations, and that in itself represented an all-important first step.
He stayed at Fokker’s wing, learning from him. The pods were not as maneuverable as the Veritechs and nowhere near as complex. They also had far more vulnerable points. It was just that there were so damned many of them. One Battlepod, one enemy pilot. How strong was their number? How long could they keep this up?
Rick came to Roy’s aid whenever he could, using heat-seekers and gatling, saving the undercarriage lasers for close-in fighting.
The assault group had fought its way out of the rings and shadow zone, but not without devastating losses to the Red and Green teams. And the SDF-1 had still not fired the main gun. It was difficult to tell just what was going on back at the fortress. Rick could see that it was taking heavy fire from the enemy destroyer, a bizarre-looking ship if ever he’d seen one: a cross between a manta ray and a mutant cucumber. But for some reason the enemy was using rather conventional ordnance, easily thwarted by the fortress’s movable shields. It would only be a matter of time before the destroyer upped the ante.
Rick guessed Command’s new orders for Skull Team long before Roy appeared on the screen with them: The VTs were to attack the destroyer.
Fokker led them in, searching for soft spots in the forest-green hull. Battlepods continued to exit the ship through semicircular topside portals, so the Skull Leader directed the attack along the underside of the destroyer, using everything his fighter was prepared to deliver.
Rick had completed one pass, discharging half his remaining Stilettos. He was preparing for a second run now, coming in across the nose of the destroyer this time, zeroing in on two massive cannons set close to the central ridge. Suddenly a Battlepod streaked in front of him with a VT in close pursuit; the mecha let loose a flock of heat-seekers which caught up with the pod directly over Rick’s fighter. He dropped the VT into a nose dive, expecting concussion where there was none, then executed two rollovers but still couldn’t manage to pull the mecha out of its collision course with the destroyer. Desperately, he reached out for the mode levers and reconfigured to Guardian. This would at least enable him to extend the “legs” of the mecha and utilize the foot thrusters to brake his speed. But the angle of his approach was too critical. With the nose beginning to dip and the energized foot thrusters threatening to throw him into a roll, Rick again switched modes, this time to Battloid configuration. Regardless, he was committed to completing the front flip, and the Battloid came down with a silent crash, face first on the armored hull.
As on the SDF-1’s shell, there was artificial gravity here, but Rick had no time to be impressed: two Battlepods were on him, coming in fast now for strafing runs. He thought the mecha to a kneeling position and brought the gatling cannon out front. Blue bolts from the pods were striking the hull around him, fusing metals and blowing slag into the void. It didn’t seem to bother the enemy pilots any that they were firing on their own ship; they were intent on finishing him off, homing in now, bipedal legs dangling and plastron cannons firing like spheroid kamikazes.
Rick was backing away from blue lightning, returning continuous fire. The big gun was dangerously close to overheating in the Battloid’s hands.
Then, suddenly, the hull seemed to give way under him. Instantly Rick realized that he had stumbled the Battloid through one of the topside semicircular ports.
The mecha landed on its butt, twenty-five meters below the action on the floor of a loading bay. Rick worked the foot pedals frantically, raising the Battloid to its feet in time to see the overhead hatch close—a shot from one of the pods had probably activated the external control circuitry. There was a second hatch in the bay which undoubtedly led to the innards of the destroyer.
Rick began to approach this second hatch cautiously, studying the air lock entry controls and feeling strangely secure in the sealed chamber. Just then the air lock door slid open. On the other side of the threshold stood an enemy soldier who had apparently heard Rick’s fall to the floor. He was easily as tall as the Battloid and massively built; but although he was armored, his head was bare and he was weaponless.
The alien goliath and the small human in the cockpit of the mecha had taken each other by surprise. As dissimilar as these potential combatants were, their frightened reactions were the same. The defenseless soldier’s eyes darted left and right, desperately seeking an escape route as Rick’s did the same. The alien warrior then stepped back, body language betraying his thoughts.
It was all that was needed to break the stalemate: Rick raised the muzzle of the Battloid’s gatling, metal-shod fingers poised on the trigger.
* * *
The enemy destroyer was bearing down on the SDF-1, peppering her with hundreds of missiles. Radar scanners located throughout the body of the fortress relayed course headings of the incoming projectiles to inboard computers, which in turn translated the data into colored graphics. These displays were flashed to monitors in the barrier control room, where three young female techs worked feverishly to bring photon disc cover to projected impact points, the spherical gyros of the pin-point barrier system spinning wildly under the palms of their hands.
On the bridge Captain Gloval feared the worst. The main gun was still inoperable, and despite the effectiveness of the shields, the ship was sustaining damage on all sides. Skull Team was counterattacking the destroyer, but it was unlikely they’d be able to inflict enough damage to incapacitate it. Was there ever in Earth’s history a commander who had more than 50,000 civilian lives at stake in one battle? For all these long months Gloval had never once contemplated surrender. Now, however, he found that possibility edging into his thoughts, draining him of strength and will.
As if reading Gloval’s thoughts, Lisa suddenly came up with an inspired plan. But first she needed to know if it was possible to concentrate and direct the pin-point barrier energy to the front of the Daedalu—the super-carrier that formed the right arm of the SDF-1.
Gloval immediately contacted Dr. Lang, and the reply came swiftly: Yes, it could be done.
Gloval ordered him to begin the energy transfer at once and quickly set in motion phase two of the plan. This required that all available Destroids, Spartans, and Gladiators—the “ground” support weapons mecha—be gathered together at the bow of the Daedalus. The final phase would be handled by the Captain himself; he reassumed the command chair, his strength and confidence renewed.
“Ramming speed,” he ordered. “We’re going to push the Daedalus right down their throat!”
Members of the Skull Team who took part in Operation Blitzkrieg would later report on the spectacle they witnessed that day in Saturn space. How the SDF-1, gleaming blue, red, and white, engulfed in explosions and locked on a collision course with the enemy, had executed a backward body twist, followed by a full-forward thrust of its right arm that brought the bow of the Daedalus like a battering ram squarely into the forward section of the destroyer.
One can not imagine the scene from Commander Zeril’s point of view: the impact; the sight of the front of his ship being splintered apart, cables and conduits rupturing as the destroyer impaled itself on the arm of the fortress; stressed metal groaning and giving way, cross-ties and girders ripped from their lodgings; the mad rush of precious air being sucked from the ship.
Perhaps Zeril and his second were alive long enough to see the forward ramp of the Daedalus drop open, revealing row after row of deadly Destroids, thick with guns, missile tubes, and cannons. Perhaps the two Zentraedi even saw the initial launch of the five thousand projectiles fired into the heart of the destroyer, the first series of explosions against the hull and bulkheads of the bridge.
* * *
Rick couldn’t bring himself to waste the enemy soldier. His mind and trigger finger were paralyzed, not out of fear but forgiveness. This was no Battlepod he was face to face with in the air lock but a living, breathing creature, caught up just as Rick in the madness of war. Remember what they did to us at Macross Island, Roy had drilled into him. Remember! Remember! …humankind’s war cry for how many millennia now? And when would it end—with this war? the next? the one after that?
Suddenly the soldier turned his head sharply to the right, as though he had heard something unreported by the Battloid’s sensors. Rick saw the soldier’s face drain of color, his eyes go wide with even greater fear.
In the next instant a conflagration swept through the corridor. The soldier was vaporized before Rick’s eyes, and the Battloid was thrown back into the loading bay by the explosive force of the firestorm. The air lock was sealed, but the chamber walls were already beginning to melt.
Rick brought the Battloid’s top-mounted lasers into action to melt through the overhead latch controls, and soon enough the semicircular hatch slid open. Foot thrusters blazing, the mecha rose from the floor and clambered out onto the destroyer’s outer skin.
The ship was convulsing beneath Rick, disgorging a death rattle roar from its holds. Forward, he could see the SDF-1 propelling itself away from the crippled enemy, its pectoral boosters blow-torching and its Daedalus right arm flayed of metal and superstructure.
Rick returned the mecha to Guardian for his takeoff, then well into the launch he reconfigured to Fighter mode, kicking in the afterburners to carry him away from the destroyer.
A series of enormous blisters was forming along the outer shell of the ship as explosive fire launched by the Destroids was funneled front to stern. But the hull could contain it for only so long; the pustules began to burst, loosing coronas and prominences of radiant energy into the void. A violent interior explosion then blasted the destroyer’s skin from its framework. At last there was nothing left but a self-consuming glowing cloud, a war of gases bent on mutual annihilation. The energy flourished wildly and dispersed, leaving in the end no trace of itself nor its brief struggle.