And so the stage was set by the eternal mandala, the yin and the yang—the good that is in evil, and the evil that is in good. Human betrayal, Zentraedi disobedience of several kinds, and yes, that fanatic courage of the aliens—these all played their part that day.
Jan Morris, Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians
CLAUDIA TURNED TO CALL TO GLOVAL. “A MIXED GROUP OF fighting vehicles is approaching our decks, sir. The Veritechs couldn’t hold them.”
“I want Vermilion ready for immediate launch,” Gloval snapped.
Lisa found herself seeing Rick’s face and shook her head to regain her concentration. “Yes, sir.”
* * *
As his ship and Max Sterling’s were raised to the flight deck, Rick thought, Well, here we go again. And how many will die this time? Damn all Zentraedi! You want death? Come on, then; we’ll give you death!
* * *
Claudia updated, “Enemy breakthrough heaviest now at blocks three, seven, niner, and sixteen.”
Gloval turned and called, “Get the tactical corps mecha out on deck. Double-check to make sure all civil defense mecha are in position and have them stand by for possible redeployment!”
Everybody knew what that meant: Gloval was practically admitting that the aliens might penetrate to the very interior of the ship itself—perhaps to Macross City.
Lisa shuddered, but she kept on at her work, seemingly calm and self-possessed. “Vermilion Team, stand by at block number three for protection and await further orders.” From that position a number of the dimensional fortress’s functioning gun turrets and missile tubes could provide some cover for them until Gloval decided where to commit them.
“Roger,” Rick acknowledged.
Almost all the other VT teams were either in the air or waiting to be lifted to the flight deck, but that didn’t seem to be daunting the enemy. More and more alien mecha were dropping, an unbelievable assault force. That cruiser must have been packed cheek by jowl with them! Lisa thought.
She saw Vermilion forming up on an outboard pickup. Enemy fire was sizzling down all around them, blue-white beams that vaporized the nonskid and scored the armor deeply.
Rick’s voice came on again. “Hey there, Commander Hayes! How many of these things do we have to shoot down before they stop coming at us? Ten thousand or twenty thousand? Or two million, or what? Just checking, you understand.”
A sudden volley hit right near his VT and almost got it; she could hear the shock and adrenaline in his voice as he cried out, “God damn you!” at the aliens.
Lisa looked stunned. “Hold position,” she said slowly, feeling her skin go cold and her heart pounding so hard she could feel it all through her. She watched her screen, hypnotized, waiting for the next salvo to claim him.
“Await… further orders…” she managed. She saw Rick’s face before her, in a cockpit, but then suddenly Karl Riber’s—or no, it was Lynn-Kyle’s, wasn’t it? What was happening to her?
* * *
There was such a thing as personal initiative, and junior officers—especially team leaders—were expected to recognize a time when it was their duty to exercise it.
“Well, I’m getting these fighters out of here before it’s too late!” Rick snapped, as much to himself as to Commander Hayes. “All right, Vermilion; follow me!”
There was no time for a catapult launch, even if the cat crews had been able to function in that firestorm. None could, and many of the brave crews were down for good.
The VTs rolled behind Rick, engines shrilling; only Robotechnology gave them power to reach sufficient airspeed in the short space available. Rick’s VT howled out into the air, followed by Max, Ben, and the rest.
Even so, they hadn’t gotten away fast enough. The fifth VT took a direct hit while lifting, crashed to the deck again, burning out of control because overworked damage and firefighting crews were fully occupied elsewhere. From the explosion, it was clear that the pilot had died instantly.
But the deck would have to be cleared for more launches and for eventual landings, assuming any Veritechs came back this day. A courageous cat crew officer named Moira Flynn climbed into a cargo mover. Braving the flames, the exploding VT ordnance, and the withering enemy fire, she began bulldozing the wreckage to the edge of the deck, to dump it into the sea.
Lisa could barely spare an instant in which to watch the launch of Vermilion; there were a thousand other things that demanded her attention. But she shut her eyes for an instant. Please let him be all right! But Rick’s face was superimposed in her mind with Karl’s, with Kyle’s…
* * *
Out on the flight deck, a bulky Gladiator attack mecha from the tactical corps—a smaller, cruder version of the Battloids—fired its chest cannon, missile racks, and straight-lasers. It suddenly found itself confronted by a quintet of Battlepods that dropped to the deck almost simultaneously, blowing the Gladiator away; both human crewmembers were dead practically before they knew what was happening.
More pods landed, firing the heavy guns mounted on their plastrons and, in some special cases, missile launchers, particle cannon, and other offensive armaments.
Two more Gladiators came forward to seal the hole in the defensive lines, braving the enemy rounds to throw out a wall of fire of their own. The crewmembers loved life as much as anybody, but they were unswerving in the defense of their ship and their planet. They opened up with gatlings and missiles and lasers. The Battlepods kept coming until the mecha were at point-blank range.
Another Gladiator went down. Amid the smoke and confusion, the third found itself out of ammunition and standing toe to toe with a pod.
The Gladiator crew reacted at once; as the pod sprang at it, their war machine swung an armored fist, caving in the lower half of the Zentraedi’s plastron. The Gladiator ducked, and the pod crashed to the deck a little beyond.
Unarmed, the RDF mecha turned to grapple with the next pod, but it leapt high in the air like an immense grasshopper, all guns firing. The Gladiator collapsed in on itself, becoming a fireball.
* * *
Rick lined up another bogey, one of the small, fiendishly fast Botoru pursuit ships. The enemy fired a poorly aimed stream of the annihilating energy discs that were one of its armaments, then flared like a meteor before the Vermilion Leader’s volley.
The battle was the biggest fighter ratrace yet, an the more frantic and hysterical because it swirled through the relatively small area around the battle fortress. Speeds were therefore much lower than usual, but distances were so short and maneuvering room so limited that everything happened in split seconds.
One dogfight got mixed up with another. Pilots from both sides collided, shot friend instead of foe, lost sight of their prey only to find a bandit on their tail.
Lisa’s voice sounded in Rick’s headphones. “Proceed to enemy penetration at block number seven.”
Only Max and Ben were left now. They managed to make it over to the designated defensive block, where they were witnesses to something out of an old-time Western movie.
Civil Defense mecha had been rushed up to serve as reinforcements for the tacticals. The thickset war machines, like walking dreadnoughts, stood straddle-legged on the deck, blasting away at the massed enemy.
Excalibur Mark VIs and Gladiators, drum-armed Spartans with their huge circular canisters of missile launchers, and multibarreled Raider Xs swinging their beam cannon this way and that—they all stood shoulder to shoulder against the main Zentraedi onslaught as enemy fire took them out of the line one by one.
The pods were closing in fast; the enormous losses they’d suffered seemed to have no effect on the size of the fleet. They had advanced to a point where none of the SDF-1’s primary batteries—and only a few of the remaining secondaries—had a line of fire on them; the batteries were primarily for air defense.
The RDF mecha were standing their ground, laying down fire with everything they had. They knew that if their line collapsed, there would be nothing to stop the aliens from getting into the ship—and winning the war.
It was truly the hour of the attack mecha, with even the VTs taking a back seat. They made their stand as the Zentraedi closed the distance by leaps and bounds. The killing in the skies had numbed him, yet Rick thought this was one of the most savage scenes ever seen during the war.
As Vermilion came in to see what they could do to help, two foremost Raider Xs went up like cans of firecrackers. The pods bounded past the wreckage to close in on the last of the defenders. Khyron was gleeful, nearly mad with the joy of war, as he led the final charge, addressing the cannon of his Officer’s Pod to a new target. In minutes, the ship would be his; and with it, the universe.
In the meantime, three of the accursed VTs made a close strafing run, destroying the leading line of pods. But other pods would soon be there to deal with them; even Veritechs couldn’t keep Zor’s ultimate creation away from Khyron now!
Khyron was distracted by two lumbering Excaliburs that were closing in on him, their power low, missile racks exhausted. He blew them both away in the same moment with the tremendous derringerlike cannon that were arms of the Officer’s Pod.
The VTs were making another pass, and the enemy mecha were being outrageously stubborn—but the final conclusion should only take another minute or so.
But just then Khyron heard an alarm signal on his instrument panel. He read his indicators, turned, and craned to look up into the distant sky. “What’s this? No! Impossible!”
* * *
Grimly, without looking up from her data displays, Claudia said, “Captain, a second enemy attack force is on the way down now, from another ship. They appear to be a new type of mecha.”
* * *
Leading her combat drop, Miriya looked approvingly at the bitter struggle raging all around the dimensional fortress. Behind her came a full battalion of her Quadrono Battalion’s powered armor mecha.
Azonia was still reiterating instructions over the com net, a rather offensive bit of interference, Miriya thought. “Miriya, the purpose of your operation is to thwart Khyron’s plan. Therefore, do not fire at the enemy or damage the dimensional fortress.”
Azonia had done some thinking in the interim and had consulted several of her personal informants. It seemed Khyron was playing a game truly his own; everything pointed to his intention to take the SDF-1 for himself.
And Azonia would win no approval from her superiors or the Robotech Masters if that were to happen; quite the opposite, in fact. Thus: Miriya and her Quadrono Battalion were launched to stop him.
So a Zentraedi warrior is expected not to fire at the enemy, eh? Miriya smiled to herself maliciously. “Well now, it’s too bad I never heard that order because my communications gear is malfunctioning, Azonia!”
Her own personal mecha-suit was the one that had so dazzled the RDF during her insertion of the three spies. It was super-charged, more maneuverable and powerful than any other in the Zentraedi fleet. Now she zoomed down like a lightning bolt, blowing an unsuspecting VT out of the air with a double stream of the annihilation discs, destroying another a split second later.
“I love it when a good plan works out well,” she said languidly. And the good plan in this case was her own—the one that had gotten her another crack at the enemy and, if she was lucky, a little scuffle with Khyron’s incompetents as well.
The Quadrono armor hit thrusters, rocketing for the deck.
* * *
Azonia ranted at the com pickup in her flagship bridge command center. “Khyron, come in immediately! Can you hear me? You are in violation of your orders! Therefore, stop this attack at once!”
Perhaps he would claim that his equipment wasn’t working properly. That was the damnable thing about the Zentraedi armada, and for that matter their whole instrumentality. With a few exceptions like that bitch Miriya’s, Zentraedi war machinery had a far from flawless operational record.
It was only right that warriors care only for war; maintenance and mechanics were work for slaves. But there never seemed to be nearly enough of those, at least ones of any use.
Azonia swore under her breath and waited to see what would happen.
* * *
But Khyron wasn’t opposed to answering her. He was merely completing his latest maneuver, having leapt his pod high to come down directly over two of the last enemy attack mecha, a pair of Raider Xs, blowing them to bits with the derringer cannon.
“Violation of my orders?” he mocked her. “But I haven’t done anything to these despicable Micronians, at least not yet!” He was firing to all sides. “But in the centuries to come, if any of them are left alive, they will speak the name of Khyron with terror!”
“Don’t play games with me!” Azonia shouted. “Turn back at once or I’ll have you shot!”
The last of the enemy mecha were down, and Khyron was about to lead his forces to the ultimate plunder, when the odds suddenly changed. Aircraft elevator platforms ground up into view to either side despite the fact that the last of the SDF-1 combat aircraft had long since taken off.
They were loaded, instead, with every MAC II Destroid cannon the desperate defenders had managed to get to the trouble spot, arriving in time only because of the attack mecha’s courageous last stand and Vermilion’s skillful flying. Six of the stumpy, waddling gun turrets were on either elevator, port and starboard.
Mounting six pulsed laser-array cannon and four supervelocity electromagnetic rail-guns apiece, the MACs had the pods in a perfect cross fire—and opened up. What had been imminent victory for the pods became instead a disastrous firestorm.
The rail-guns fired solid slugs at a velocity that delivered incredible kinetic energy on impact, velocities so high that making the slugs explosive would have been redundant. Zentraedi combat armor was no protection, and Battlepods collapsed in on themselves like crushed eggs or came apart in fragments, only to explode instants later.
The MAC’s pulsed lasers swept back and forth at the massed alien war mecha, quartering the sky with grazing fire that raked the flight deck, and caught them as they leapt or while still on their feet. Pods went up like exploding oil-well rigs or expanding spheres of shrapnel and flame.
Khyron had instantly leapt his pod away to comparative safety upon seeing the MACs appear. He would have gone truly berserk with frustration and wrath at that point, but his own life was now at stake.
There would be no quick taking of the objective, and SDF-1’s deck was being swept clear of his troops. More, Miriya’s hated Quadronos were hovering above, out of range but capable of intervening at any moment. But on whose side? In some ways she was as capable of duplicity as Khyron himself.
And then, of course, there was Azonia’s promise to have a shot.
He gave a low, bestial growl as he landed his Battlepod on a safer area of the deck, opening his command channel. “All right, men! Cease firing! We’re returning to the fleet!”
His mission exec, Gerao, came up over the net, sounding shocked. “Ex-excuse me, mighty Khyron; would you please repeat that? We’re going back now?”
Khyron could see from his instruments that Gerao was fairly well in the clear and could reach the cruiser quickly. The cruiser was exactly where he’d directed that it be: submerged in the ocean not far from SDF-1.
“Yes.” Khyron sneered. “I have just received a direct order from Commander Azonia. “But—don’t forget to get your souvenir, my friend.”
“My souvenir?” Gerao’s tone said he’d understood Khyron’s hidden meaning. “Why, no, sir. I certainly won’t forget that!”
Khyron began regrouping his forces for the shameful withdrawal. But part of him burned fusion-bright.
If Khyron couldn’t have his victory, he would at least have his revenge!