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  Then she nearly yelled aloud. It’s him!

  It came partly as shock, partly as something she had expected, and, deep down, even looked forward to—for reasons she couldn’t analyze—to see the red Bioroid poised on an open deck high above. The Bioroid was open, and its tall, slim, deep-chested pilot waited in that characteristic pose of his, one foot on the open Robotech breastplate, his eyes closed as if he were listening intently.

  She found herself short of breath, and gave out a low moan. Mmmm …

  His eyes opened and his head came around until he was looking straight down at her. She heard that silent, internal voice of his again, Hmmm …

  A fundamental recognition—something on profound levels to which she had little waking access—passed between Dana and the red Bioroid pilot. This time he shielded some of his thought from her: This one is no ordinary primitive! She is Of the Protoculture! She has had open access to it; she has the power it gives!

  He watched her, unblinking, and made a sign of acknowledgment, a fey salute, hand going to brow, then cutting away. She heard the quavery mental voice in her head. Know then, Primitive, that I am Zor Prime, Warlord of the Robotech Masters!

  Dana stared at him for a moment, then lowered her visor again. She sat looking up at him, and he stood gazing down. Neither moved.

  Without warning a shot came from one side, a stray heavy-cannon blast from a Bioroid Hovercraft. It broke the spell; Dana maneuvered quickly, to make sure she wasn’t in anyone’s line of fire. When she glanced up again, the red Bioroid was diving down like a pouncing tiger, its hand weapon held out before it.

  “Try again sometime!” Dana was already springing aside, going to Gladiator mode, sending up a hail of fire. The red flipped in midair, landed nearby, and fired back. The two mecha catapulted here and there, firing and jockeying for position.

  The foe got three shots into the Gladiator’s side in a line, but Dana had a target of her own. She missed taking the red’s right arm off, but once again got the broader target, the big discus-shaped hand weapon, knocking it away through the air.

  Let’s see how you do without your big metal yo-yo!

  But the alien recovered like a demon, throwing a punch, rocking the Gladiator back on its thrusters and suspension.

  The red behemoth was about to throw itself on the Gladiator, when Dana pulled a move she had been saving for a special, desperate moment—this moment. Her Gladiator leapt high, to come down on the red’s shoulders and head with all its weight, a staggering blow that sent the crimson mecha spinning and crashing onto its back.

  Dana landed well, traversed her main battery, and fired, but the red was up, vaulting high once more, with astounding speed and agility. It landed close, launching a bombshell punch near her turret, sending the Gladiator to its knees.

  The alien’s metal fingers sank into the Gladiator’s armor as the red lifted the Gladiator in an awesome show of strength, about to tear it to pieces. Dana had no angle with the main battery, but peppered away at the lustrous visor with her rapid-fire, quad-barreled secondaries as a distraction.

  She wasn’t dismayed at the turn of events though; this invader still had a lot to learn about the ATACs.

  Now I’ve gotcha! She set the Gladiators thick, immensely powerful legs against the other mecha’s torso, pushing off and firing thrusters at the same time. She launched herself free, nearly toppling the red again. “I’m tired of fooling around with you!” She summoned up her mecha’s Battloid form.

  Her landing sent shudders through the Earth she had come to defend. “Okay, Big Red! Time to settle this!”

  The red was eager; it came through the air with a tackle so fast and strong that Dana couldn’t counter it. She was flipped over backward, crashing against the side of the alien ship.

  Inside, the sound of the impact and its vibrations made Bowie shake his head and open his eyes. It took him a few seconds to remember where he was and figure out what had happened. The charge from the mesh hadn’t killed him, and somehow he hadn’t fallen all the way to the deck. He lay on a monolithic crate a few yards below where he had been standing when the power surge hit him. He checked himself for broken bones, and found none. Then the ship shook again.

  “What the blazes is going on here? Hey, if you’re hauling anchor, I want off!”

  * * *

  Outside, the red swung a massive punch, but its timing was off. Dana ducked, and the unbelievable power of the Bioroid (plus some power, Dana was sure, that was the red’s pilot’s alone) let the great scarlet fist penetrate the alien ship’s hull.

  Dana reacted at once, bringing her Battloid’s leg up to shove the Bioroid away sprawling. As she jumped her mecha to its feet, her external pickups registered a human voice, “Well, hi, Lieutenant!”

  Somehow, she wasn’t surprised; although the odds of finding him, especially like this, were so remote as to be absurd. But it all fit in with the feelings that had been going through her, and the odd sensation—of hidden forces at work—that had been building in her.

  “Be with you in a minute, Bowie.” She turned to deal with her opponent again.

  “No sweat, Dana. Lay a few on him for me!”

  But the Bioroid had regained its feet as well, and now came hurtling at her like a cross between a falling asteroid and a runaway freight train. Dana rolled and scrambled, and just avoided being trampled, her Battloid flattened. She heaved it to its feet, and decided to end the fight and get Bowie out of the ship, whatever it took.

  Marquis of Queensberry rules seemed to be pretty well out the window anyway, so she didn’t feel any guilt as she drew the battle rifle that had been the Hovertank’s cannon moments before. The Bioroid didn’t seem to know what to do. She fired from the hip, and the first shot blew the visor open.

  The red flailed back and sank partway to the ground against the Masters’ forward command ship. The ball turret within it was exposed amid smoking, fused components and bent armor. The shadowy form of the pilot lay inert and its pose suggested unconsciousness, or death. The red’s knees trembled, then gave, and the crimson Goliath came down like a toppled building.

  Bowie was straining at the opening the red’s punch had made. “It’s just too narrow, Lieutenant!”

  Dana brought the cannon around. “Stand away!”

  With a volley of shots she widened the hole so that three troopers could have walked abreast through it. It made the air of the compartment almost too hot to endure, to breathe.

  He hurried to the opening, keeping clear of its glowing, molten edges. He gathered himself, leapt through. He landed on the back of the fallen Bioroid. When he reached the ground, Bowie smiled at Dana. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

  “That’s okay. It’s nice and restful in the stockade; I could use a rest.”

  “If they need character witnesses, they’ll probably make me appear for the prosecution, Dana.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  One might have thought the Masters, with their lesser military strength, would have perceived threats to which the mighty Zentraedi were blind.

  And the Masters thought they had: they addressed the “wraiths” within the mounds, and the mecha of the Human race. How the ghosts of Khyron, Azonia, and the rest must have laughed there, deep in Tellurian soil!

  Major Alice Harper Argus (ret.), Fulcrum:

  Commentaries on the Second Robotech War

  BACK AT THE COMMAND CENTER, COLONEL GREEN TURNED to Emerson. “We just got a sitrep from the advance elements of the attack force, sir. It says that Private Bowie Grant has already been rescued.”

  Emerson whirled from studying the tactical displays. “Explain.”

  “Well, it seems that Lieutenant Sterling mobilized her squad sometime last night and performed the rescue on her own this morning. But her troops are still engaged with the enemy, and our troops are moving in to reinforce. It seems we’ve seen only the first round; the enemy is regrouping for another.”

  Emerson glanced at the maps. “A
nd what’s their strength?” He wondered if Dana would be commended or shot this time—provided she lived through the morning at all.

  “Roughly equivalent to ours, from all reports, sir,” Rochelle supplied. “I’d say we’re pretty evenly matched.”

  Sean Phillips had his visor thrown back. “C’mon, Dana, get moving! What’s wrong?”

  “You feeling okay?” Angelo asked anxiously.

  But she was not. Moments before, triumph had seemed assured. The long, slanting rays of the morning sun reminded her that only a very short time had passed since her attack commenced. Then, before she could scoop up Bowie, her external pickups brought her the creaking of armor.

  “I don’t believe it!” She looked down in shock. “He’s coming back for more? It’s impossible!”

  But the red fist had risen again to grasp the end of her rifle-cannon’s barrel, bending it, dragging it down. The weapon was useless now; she released it, backing away, placing herself between the rising Bioroid and Bowie.

  “Take cover, Bowie; the rest of you watch for other Bioroids! This one’s mine.”

  Bowie dashed away as the red reached its feet once more. It trembled but moved purposefully and unstoppably. Dana backed up cautiously, her Battloid bringing its hand up for more close combat. She had made up her mind that she was going to deck this foe for good, rip that turret out of the enemy mecha and kill or capture its occupant, or die trying. The two armored titans maneuvered like wrestlers.

  Okay, whoever you are! If you can go the distance, so can I! What she couldn’t see was that within his turret, the pilot’s eyes were closed and he looked for all the world as if he were unconscious or dead.

  Just then a fusillade of shots ranged in nearby, blowing huge chunks of soil and rock high. More came in, bracketing the two duelists. Dana looked around. “What in—”

  A face appeared on one of her control console displays. Nova Satori! “Lieutenant, I have an urgent message from headquarters. The enemy’s regrouping for a massive counterattack. On the other hand, your reinforcements have arrived.” She allowed herself a thin smile.

  There were more cannonades from the bluffs and high ground all around the advance ship. Positions where blue Bioroids had entrenched themselves or established fire superiority were pounded and roasted, pieces of enemy mecha thrown high. Dana saw Gladiators, Hovertanks, conventional armor, and even some old-style Destroids and Raider X’s. There were MP-powered armor, too, much like Battloids themselves. She wondered which one Nova was in.

  “Looks like the cavalry arrived just in the nick of time, eh, Dana?” Nova added.

  “We’ll take care of the cleanup here, Lieutenant,” the Strikeforce commander’s voice came up over the net. “You and your squad can back off and sit this one out. We—Huh? What’s that?”

  He was looking up because the sun had been blotted out. Something huge had come down into the morning sky. It was a ship as big as a city, floating in with an appalling, slow sureness. And there were others, all having penetrated Earth’s sensor defenses, all come to punish the impudence of the primitives below. The six gargantuan mother ships of the Robotech Masters closed in from all sides. The red Bioroid stood looking up at them reverently.

  The Southern Cross soldiers gripped their weapons irresolutely, barrels realigned toward the sky, but seemed feeble and ridiculous against the immense power of the starcraft.

  Suddenly, the mother ships began disgorging assault craft; the bottle-shapes, several from each mother ship, flashed down at their targets. MP-powered armor, Battloid, and the rest all were caught in intense strafing, with no air cover and little ground cover. But these Earth defenders all fired back, all stood their ground and fought. Men and women hurled defiance and blazing energy salvos back into the skies—and died.

  The toll was terrible, even though the attack was short; a carpet of intense radiation blasts took out many of the mecha in the surrounding heights; only Dana and her troops, close to the advance ship, were relatively safe. Conventional APCs and tanks fared even worse, sitting ducks for the assault ships. Gladiators were putting up the strongest resistance; Dana saw two of them converge their fire to bring an assault ship out of the sky in a fiery crash.

  Again she heard the quavering, inhuman voice of the red. “Retreat to the forward command ship.” The blues followed it away in those kangaroolike, two-legged hops, up a ramp into the ship.

  They’re not getting out of here because they’re outgunned, that’s for sure! Dana realized. She was about to yell for everyone to run for it, when an area of cloud seemed to boil away before an intense ray of light, like a beam of supernova. It sprang down into the ground near one of the mounds, though not the one containing SDF-1.

  There it ignited, or exploded. A white-hot infernal wind flew out from it, riding a Shockwave, carrying before it mecha, powered armor, tracked vehicles, and armored infantry. It fragmented Earth’s proudest war machines, tossing them like leaves before it. In moments the formidable attack force was reduced to stunned survivors, wounded, and the many, many dead.

  But the Masters had calculated well. They knew a great deal about the mounds now, knew that the Matrix would be safe for the time being—until they could return and deal with the wraiths.

  Dana kept her head well down until the worst of the Shockwave and heat had died away. Then she lifted her head, wiping dust from her visor, to see the forward command ship lifting away above her, moving to rejoin its mother ship. Far off to one side, a glowing crater hundreds of yards across gave testimony of the Masters’ wrath.

  She drew off the winged helmet tiredly, lowering it. It was a singular mercy to see Bowie wave exhaustedly from where he had taken refuge in Angelo’s Trojan Horse.

  Dana was filled with sorrow; nevertheless, she felt no guilt. Whatever the aliens wanted here, she and the others had kept it away from them.

  But they’ll come again. And then it’ll be a fight to the death; we all know that now. A lot of good men and women died proving it today: this planet is ours! And now the Robotech Masters are going to pay!

  And now she knew the name of her strangely familiar enemy: Zor.

  In their great mother ships, the Robotech Masters pondered this latest development. The fleet of six huge ships withdrew to a geostationary orbit and remained there, silent and enigmatic.

  Endless conferences took place between the Masters at their Protoculture cap and the Scientists, the Politicians, and other triumvirates at their lesser caps, and with Zor, their battlelord. The matter of the resistance of the Protoculture wraiths in the mounds was the prime source of discussion, but there were others.

  For the time being there was no question of simply excavating the mound and taking the Matrix; the combined impediments of the wraiths and the Humans made that impossible. But the Masters insisted, and the Elders concurred with them, that the primitives must have some control over the incorporeal entities who guarded the mounds. Zor was tempted to disbelieve, but in the end agreed with their assessment when he recalled that the female he had battled was Of the Protoculture.

  And yet, for reasons he could not explain to himself, he did not reveal this fact—kept all but the most perfunctory mention of Dana from his mind when reporting.

  Several things became clear under the compassionless probing of the Masters: they could not take the Matrix by direct assault and dared not simply begin laying waste to the planet; their Protoculture was in short supply, and their time was running out quickly.

  Because their own Protoculture sources were shrinking, the Elders grew restive, demanding some resolution. Added to this was the fact that the Invid might become aware of the Matrix at any time, and intervene.

  Using the splendid military skills and cruel, fanatic loyalty they had programmed into the last and finest of the Zor clones, Zor Prime, the Masters considered their next course of action.

  A week went by.

  In the UEG headquarters the military and civilian leaders of Earth’s feudal government met in
emergency session. They were desperate and short on sleep, and the observers who had come in from the east still had the stench of carnage and smoking ruin in their nostrils and on their clothes.

  What constituted the core of the United Earth Government looked across the long table at its military hierarchy, some dozen men in a vaulted, gleaming hall. At a separate desk, facing the head of the table, sat Chairman Moran, who presided over the UEG. He was an elderly man of medium height and build, with silver-gray hair and mustache, dressed in civilian clothes adorned with the crest of the UEG. He had spent most of his life trying to reconcile the ideals of civilian freedom with the harsh necessities of military strength and preparedness.

  The headquarters was a domed building of classic architecture, a new Versailles or Reichchancellory; within were fine furnishings and marble columns and rows of towering MP-powered armor to guard, but none of the men who ruled Earth took any pride or reassurance from those things today. They were disturbed and apprehensive as only the powerful, confronting an unexpected, greater power than themselves, can be.

  Moran looked them over. “Gentlemen, many of you have already heard the news. This enemy military commander—Zor, or whatever his name is—has broken his self-imposed ceasefire. At oh-eight-hundred today, local time, he and his assault ships and Bioroids attacked and wiped out a training base in Sector Three. They leveled virtually every structure in that sector and killed nearly every living soul there.”

  The officers did know; they traded troubled glances, not knowing what to say. The attack had been so swift and merciless that there had been little time for counterattack.

  “We’ve managed to keep word of this from getting out to the general populace, but there have been rumors,” Moran went on. “And we cannot afford a panic! Now, I want to know how this could have happened. Commander Leonard, how on Earth could we be caught so completely off guard?”

  Supreme Commander Leonard, top-ranking officer in Earth’s military, a big bear of a man with his shaven, bullet-shaped skull and flaring brows, stood.