No one, gunner or VT jock or attack mecha crewmember, could recall a more intense fight. Certainly they all earned their pay that day, and a lot more than money besides. Many paid the final price of freedom.
It is interesting to note, however, that although everyone on the VT teams had seen intense combat, it was the men and women of the air-sea rescue teams [whose units had also suffered heavy casualties] who, upon entering the various pilots’ hangouts, found that they would not be allowed to pay for their own drinks, period.
Zachary Foxx, Jr., VT: The Men and the Mecha
GIANT SAUCER SHAPES THAT WERE ZENTRAEDI AMPHIBIOUS-assault ships dropped from Miriya’s cruiser to retrieve Khyron’s surviving Battlepods.
At Khyron’s order, the first of his retreating units kangaroo-hopped from the SDF-1’s deck into the sea to get well clear of the fortress’s guns and fighters before making their rendezvous. He’d lost enough of his vaunted strike force without having them and their pickup ships shot out of the sky.
Now it was Zentraedi mecha that fought the holding action as RDF attack machines and VTs pressed them ever harder and turned the kill ratios around. Battlepods bobbed and churned through the waves as the great saucers descended for the rendezvous point.
Overhead, the fighters were still going at it with the Botoru tri-thruster pursuit ships while the SDF-1’s gun batteries took more and more enemy ships out of the fight as the tactical and civil defense attack mecha took over mop-up operations on deck.
Elsewhere, Gerao reached Khyron’s cruiser as it rose from its submerged position. He gave quick orders as his pod was being brought aboard, preparing to take command and wreak Khyron’s vengeance on the Micronians.
Vanessa called out, “Captain, that first enemy cruiser has reappeared! It’s on a collision course with us!”
Gloval thumbed the bowl of his empty pipe absentmindedly. “It looks like a suicide maneuver. Lisa, Claudia! Prepare the Daedalus for its Attack mode, immediately!”
* * *
Up on deck, Vermilion Team had its Veritechs in Battloid mode.
Rick concentrated on control, letting his helmet’s receptors pick up his thought-commands and translate them into the Battloid’s instant, fluid movements. The Battloid traversed its autocannon from one target to the next, firing depleted transuranic slugs that had awesome, armor-piercing capabilities. The powered gatling consumed ammunition at an amazing rate, and the Battloid had to transfer fresh boxed belts of rounds to it frequently from integral reserve modules built into various parts of its body.
The reloading took only moments, but in the middle of a firefight that could be a long time. Rick found himself on empty as a pod dashed at him. He hit the thrusters built into the Battloid’s feet and launched himself at it, just as its cannonade blew up the deck where he’d been standing.
He had no choice but to attack it hand to hand before it could get a bead on him. All around him, Battloids were locked in similar close-quarters fighting against the pods, up and down the SDF-1’s decks.
But the alien Battlepod crewman was shrewd and quick. The pod lashed out with one foot and sent Rick’s Battloid flying back ward with a tooth-rattling jolt. The Battloid crashed to the deck, its pilot dazed.
He shook his head clear just in time to send the Battloid rolling to the side. He avoided the pod’s next fusillade, rolled again, and brought the Battloid to its feet dexterously. And now, the chain gun was reloaded.
Rick fired a long burst, taking the pod dead center; he watched it dissolve and fly into pieces, an expanding, blazing sphere. But out of the ballooning explosion zoomed a new enemy, one of those strange alien mecha that had been mostly staying out of the fight up until now.
Whoever was flying it was either a masterful pilot or crazy or both. The battle-armored figure came through the fireball in one piece, though, and nearly bowled Rick over. Its weapons came close to downing Max on one side and Ben on the other as the two Vermilion wingmen dove for cover.
The lightning-fast attacker was gone before they could fire at it, since the SDF-1’s surviving batteries were hopelessly slow in tracking it. The three Vermilion fliers got their Battloids to their feet, shaken but unharmed.
“Let’s finish this thing!” Rick said in clipped tones. At his command, Vermilion went into Veritech mode, skimming the deck, turning pods into expanding balls of incandescent gas with intense autocannon fire.
The last few pods leapt high, thrusters cutting in, trying for a slim-chance vertical escape while the remaining Botoru pursuit ships dove to try to cover them. The lower battle and the upper became one as the mecha swirled and fought. Rick peeled off to go after two escaping pods.
* * *
“So they think they have won, eh?” Khyron mused, his pod standing in the shelter of a superstructural feature of the dimensional fortress’s flight deck, hidden and waiting.
* * *
Rick bagged the pods, and Ben and Max went back down to take care of an insistent pursuit ship that was still strafing the SDF-1. They returned to Battloid mode, blasting it into ten thousand pieces.
Meanwhile, Rick had picked up two more tri-thrusters on his tail. He led them down to deck level, and Max and Ben bagged them from behind with streams of high-density slugs.
“Nice shooting!” Rick said, relieved. Then he saw what was coming up fast behind him. “No!”
It was the strange alien attack mecha, the one that had nearly nailed him moments before. He braced himself to be hit, perhaps killed, then and there. But it zoomed past, gaining altitude rapidly, pulling away as if the VT were standing still.
Rick realized that it matched the description of that souped-up Zentraedi who had done so much damage to Roy Fokker’s Skull Team just before the Skulls recovered the stolen pod in which Lisa, Rick, Ben, and Max had made their escape from the aliens.
Rick cut in auxiliary power, going ballistic, determined to end the warped cat-and-mouse game.
In her special suit of Quadrono powered armor, Miriya laughed scornfully.
* * *
Khyron’s cruiser was close enough to the SDF-1 that the ship’s turret guns were making serious hits on it now. The remaining Battloids on the deck were also keeping up a steady volume of fire at the suicide ship. But that was of no matter; in moments, the battle would be over.
In his massively reinforced command center, Gerao braced for collision.
* * *
“Veritechs, be ready to get clear on my command,” Claudia said, having taken over some direction of fighter ops while Lisa readied the Daedalus Maneuver.
Miriya swept by, only a few feet off the deck. Rick was right on her tail, chasing her high and low, around and around.
She went into another climb, but the irritating Micronian stayed with her in the six o’clock position, chopping away at her with autocannon fire.
Not that it concerned her very much; Miriya was sure she could turn on him and kill him whenever she chose. But she monitored the coming impact of the enormous ships closely. “Khyron, do not fail!”
* * *
“Daedalus attack in five seconds,” Claudia marked. “Four…”
The Terrible Trio braced for collision; the enemy cruiser blocked the sky, growing larger every instant.
In one horrifying moment, Claudia realized that Lisa was paralyzed.
Lisa saw Rick’s face, saw poor dead Karl’s, saw Kyle’s. Over and over, so obsessively that she failed to see the cruiser’s bow filling the bridge’s forward viewbowl.
“LISA!”
Claudia’s shout brought her back at the very last moment. Her hands were reacting even before she could order her thoughts, flying across the controls. She heard herself responding calmly, “Executing Daedalus attack now.” It was as if someone else were speaking.
They felt the SDF-1 shift, its buoyancy radically altered, as the supercarrier Daedalus was lifted clear of the water—a battering ram the size of a hundred-fifty story building. There was the rumble of the dimensional fortress’s foot thrusters firing to keep balance. The sea boiled all around them.
The astoundingly powerful Robotech servos lifted the huge flatdeck clear of the sea, thrusting it at the incoming enemy like a titanic warrior throwing a slow-motion punch.
Gerao saw the carrier’s prow coming; it was far too late to do anything about it. He triggered his personal ejection mechanism, to flee the ship while he still could, leaving the rest of his crew to perish.
The Daedalus’s hurricane bow and can-opener prow had been reinforced by Lang and his technicians to the point where they were all but invulnerable, even against Zentraedi armor. Daedalus punched through the cruiser’s hull, keelside and forward, as if skewering it. The carrier burst through armor, structural members, bulkheads, and systemry, smashing everything that was in its path as if it were passing through rotted wood and plasterboard.
The cruiser’s velocity carried it into the blow, and the SDF-1’s incomparable power lifted Daedalus and the enemy vessel high. The supercarrier’s prow emerged from the cruiser’s upper side, protruding more than fifty yards beyond.
Lisa, still monitoring the attack and shaken by her near failure, hadn’t noticed that protrusion. She was alarmed that the cruiser’s residual momentum was grinding it forward toward the SDF-1 like a wild boar coming up a hunter’s spear to deal death before it died.
“Emergency missiles: Fire!” she said, hitting the switch.
High above, the carrier’s bow swung open and a thousand missiles screamed out of their launchers. But instead of seeking targets within the enemy vessel, as they were programmed to do and as they had done in the Battle at Saturn’s Rings, they boiled out into the open sky.
Here and there they found a damaged, limping Battlepod or a disabled Botoru tri-thruster, obliterating them; but the majority climbed, searching for targets and rose up at—a Veritech.
He juked and hit his countermeasures and jamming gear, giving his ship everything he had while simultaneously screaming over the command net.
“Lisa, this is Rick! I’m in direct line of our missiles! Abort firing! Destruct! Destroy them!”
She’d barely begun when he was yelling, “Mayday! Mayday, I’m hit!”
The jolt to his wing and another to the rear stabilizers, as well as the sudden, uncontrollable spin, let him know that there was no hope of keeping his VT in the air. He was preparing to eject when another missile hit the fuselage forward of the wing—just below the cockpit.
Above the VT that pursued her and slightly farther away from the missile barrage, Azonia gave her powered armor suit maximum emergency power, dodging and diving. The explosions of the missiles that had hit Rick’s ship had set off fratricide explosions in other missiles, causing them to destroy one another and upsetting the guidance systems of many more.
She turned, dove, shook off the last of the missiles chasing her, and came back past the SDF-1 in a low pass that clipped the tops off the ocean swells heated by the dimensional fortress’s thrusters. Her jamming equipment, the surface clutter, and her own speed and maneuverability had somehow saved her. Unscathed, she flashed into the sky once more as the missile barrage died away.
* * *
Khyron’s cruiser was beginning to glow and tremble from massive interior damage and ruptured power systems. Claudia and the others moved fast to pull the Daedalus free and back away. They were barely clear when the cruiser’s engines overloaded and it became a globe of blinding light, rocking the SDF-1 in the water.
“The follow-up missile attack on the enemy was a complete success!” Claudia crowed. “Captain, the enemy ship has been totally destroyed!”
* * *
Looking down from his hovering Battlepod, far out of the radius of battle, missile attack, and explosion, Khyron pounded his metalshod fist against the arm of his seat over and over.
“No! My plans can’t have failed! Not again! I won’t have it!”
Azonia’s image appeared on one of his screens. “Well, Khyron, it looks as though your perfect plan was slightly less than perfect. In fact, if it had been any less perfect, you’d be dead too!” Her jeering laugh let him know that such an event wouldn’t have been so imperfect to her.
* * *
The remaining enemy forces withdrew in their big saucer-like amphibious ships. Gloval vetoed any idea of pursuit. “Let’s not push our luck or theirs, eh? The battle is over.” He rose to go. “Just maintain present position.”
“Yes, Captain,” Claudia responded, when Lisa didn’t.
He paused to look back at Lisa. “Oh, and Commander Hayes: I want to commend you on the excellent job you did this afternoon.”
They all saw her shoulders shaking as she bent over her console, heard the sobs in her voice as she replied, “Thank you, sir.”
Later, as she sat in her cabin, her head whirled with bits and pieces of the things that were tearing at her: Rick. Karl. Kyle. Her father. Gloval. And the fate of all the innocent people on the SDF-1… The cruel faces of the UEDC councilors.
And, more than anything, what she should do about it all, because Lisa Hayes wasn’t anybody’s crybaby.
But she spent most of the time thinking about Rick’s frightened voice as the missiles closed in. There’s been no word yet of any sightings by the air-sea rescue teams.
In the end it was Rick’s voice she heard over and over, Rick’s face she saw. Then for a while she did cry, wondering if she would go insane.
“I didn’t know! I just didn’t know,” she wept. Didn’t know she would be putting him in danger with the missiles, didn’t know how deeply it would affect her and how much she felt for him.
Didn’t know if she could go on, if he were dead.
She gazed up to where the bulkhead met the overhead. “Please, please don’t let him die!”
* * *
The Barracuda helo swept in low. The pilot radioed back to the search plane, “Uh, roger, two-niner-niner. I have the dye marker in sight and now have the chute in sight. But I have no movement, I say again, no movement.”
The helo descended, churning up the water with the backwash of the rotors. The buoyant VT parachute was below it, lying like a dead sea nettle amid the yellow stain of the dye marker that had automatically been released by the wearer’s safety harness on impact with the water.
There was a figure in a flight suit, buoyed by automatic floatation pockets that had expanded when he’d hit, his helmet having sealed itself to keep him from drowning. But all the automatic gear was worthless if he’d been shot while in his ship or coming down.
Big, sinuous shapes were circling; large dorsal fins cut the water. The rescue teams got ready for a pickup while the door gunners did a bit of shark hunting.
* * *
Back at the hospital in Macross City, Rick was taken into the ER, priority. The medical personnel continued fighting their own battle long after the killing had stopped.