Force of Arms Page 16

People in the control booth and even members of the band had sent the inquiry up the line: Shouldn't Minmei go to another song?

  In the midst of the most important battle of his career, Gloval had taken time to give the order personally: no! This song, this song was the one!

  Now, with Minmei's voice ringing through it everywhere that battle damage hadn't silenced the PA system, the SDF-1 waded deeper and deeper into the massed Grand Fleet. Out on the decks and outerworks, enemy fire was taking a vicious toll of the exposed attack mecha, but the crews of the war machines still kept up intense fire.

  Breetai's armada had suffered badly, too, but hadn't slowed.

  "Keep all power levels at maximum!" he bellowed as systemry and power conduits blew all about him.

  His flagship and its escort, the SDF-1 side by side with them, pressed on, their volume of fire enormous, the rest of the armada striking after in a wedge, probing their way through the disorganized foe.

  Many of the smaller fightercraft and mecha on both sides had been snuffed out of existence by the overwhelming volleys being traded; most of the rest had quit the battle's fairway.

  "Hell or glory!" cried Azonia, holding her fist aloft, coming in to shore up the alliance's badly crumpling left flank. Her forces threw themselves into the engagement with fanatic zeal.

  Dolza's faithful leapt at them with an equal thirst for death and triumph.

  Inside the SDF-1, a direct hit pierced the hold in which Macross City

  lay. Atmosphere roared out at once like a great river, and more missiles penetrated the hold to score direct hits on the streets of the city. Armored curtains and sealing sections swung into place at once, but still there was grievous damage to the city. Rebuilt a half dozen times, it was fast becoming rubble again. Loss of life was relatively low because most of the inhabitants were on emergency duty elsewhere and practically all the rest were in shelters.

  Just before the last curtain rolled into place to seal the compartment and allow it to be repressurized, a last heavy enemy missile somehow sizzled through the gap. By chance, it found a shelter in a direct hit, and the carnage was nothing that belonged in a sane universe.

  Repair and rescue crews and medical teams wanted the ship to drop back to give them time to do their work. Gloval bit his lower lip but refused; perhaps all that was left of humanity was aboard the SDF-1, and if Dolza wasn't smashed now, in this moment, none of them would survive.

  The request was denied. The battle raged on. It was not the first agonizing time Gloval had felt himself something of a villain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Aside from Gloval, very few of our senior military people seem to be able to grasp the simple truth: The Zentraedi do not truly understand Robotechnology. They use it without comprehending how it works, as many humans use television, laser devices, or aircraft without the slightest idea what makes those technologies function. The Zentraedi were given their weapons and equipment by the enigmatic Robotech Masters. Their control over the Zentraedi is due, in part, to the giants' own ignorance.

  This means that the Zentraedi are vulnerable in ways of which they are unaware.

  Dr. Emil Lang, Technical Recordings and Notes

  More disturbances shook the underground corridors of Alaska Base as a terrier might shake a rat in its teeth. The titanic supports complained, and the ceilings showered rock dust.

  Through it flew the Skull Guardian, maneuvering in very confining space to avoid exploding power ducts and ruptured energy mains. Rick brought the ship to an abrupt halt, hitting the foot thrusters hard so as not to collide with a thick shield door that dead-ended the cyclopean corridor.

  But he was in no mood to be stopped. He lowered a phased-array laser turret and aimed with his gunsight reticle. The fearsome power of the quad-mount sent armor flowing in rivulets, but not as quickly as he hoped. He cut back his ambitions and tried for a man-size opening instead of a VT-size one.

  In a few moments a circular plug of armor two feet thick fell back from the shield door, leaving a makeshift hatch. Rick gave commands with his controls and with mental images; the Guardian bowed, its nose touching the corridor floor so that he could disembark.

  He was barely at the smoking, red-hot opening when he heard her. "Rick!" Lisa was waiting for him patiently at the far end of the short, small

  connecting passageway.

  He felt like sinking to his knees with relief and-something else. But there was no time for it, and so he tossed his thick, unruly black hair out of his eyes and flickered his eyebrows at her.

  "You the lady who called for the cab? I'm your man."

  She laughed fondly, nodding. "It's about time." She ran to him, laughing, and he caught her up in his arms, whirling her.

  In another few seconds they were in the Guardian's cockpit, Lisa seated across his lap, Rick trying to concentrate on his flying. Strange energy phenomena coruscated and spat all around, a poltergeist zoo of deadly short-term exotica. Purple lightning grasped for them, and green rays ricocheted from surface to surface. Walls blew out into the corridor, sending pieces of shredded armor plate whirling like leaf fragments.

  "The reactor's overloading!" she yelled over the din.

  Rick somehow ran the dimly lit obstacle course, Lisa's head buried against his chest in case the canopy shattered. After several centuries' time juking and sideslipping through the maze of Alaska Base, the Guardian was back into the vertical shaft of what had been Earth's greatest weapon less than an hour before.

  The last layer of defensive ships was riven apart by the irresistible wedge of the allied force. Before them hung Dolza's headquarters like some lumpy, dangling overripe fruit.

  But Dolza didn't run; that wasn't the way of the true Zentraedi warrior, and Dolza embodied the Zentraedi warrior code. It was as Breetai had known it would be. Instead, the moonlet-size headquarters came straight at its enemies, surrounded by such escort vessels as it could gather around it.

  "Objective now approaching," Vanessa reported. "All units in position," Kim sang out.

  "Target within range. Stand by, all batteries," Sammie said into her mike.

  "All escort fighters, break contact and attack objective immediately,"

  Claudia ordered. She paused for a quick glance at the headquarters. Its shape and lines and apparent texture reminded her so much of a mountain in space, falling straight at the SDF-1. Ready to crush them and the Zentraedi who had become humanity's friends; ready to crush everything in its path, as had always been the Zentraedi way.

  Claudia's face hardened along grim, angry lines. Not this time. She thought of her slain lover, Roy Fokker, and of all the others who had died in the pointless war. But not this time!

  Exedore, still at Gloval's shoulder, said softly, "Now, Captain."

  It was as if someone had run a high current through Gloval. "Open fire!" he barked.

  The SDF-1 fired again, in every direction, her carefully hoarded power being used at a fearsome rate now, at a moment that was late in the battle even though only minutes had elapsed.

  The armada ships of Breetai fell away to all sides to engage the enemy or lend support as they could. The final mission was the dimensional fortress's alone, and no other vessel in existence could perform it or accompany the ship.

  The giant warrior shape's thrusters blared, adjusting attitude, and now the SDF-1 came at Dolza's stronghold headfirst.

  "Brace for ramming!" Gloval bellowed, and the orders went forth. The engines shook the great ship and drove it in a death dive.

  The two great booms that reared above the ship's head like wings were now aligned directly at the space mountain that was Dolza's headquarters, the nerve center of the Grand Fleet. The booms were separate parts of the main gun, reinforced structures that were, with the exception of the mammoth engines, the strongest parts of the ship. And around their tips glowed the green-white fields of a limited barrier defense, making them all but indestructible.

  The SDF-1 plunged at its objective; Dolza's technica
l operations people, prepared for an exchange of close broadsides, realized only in a last, horrified moment what the dimensional fortress's intention was. By then, it

  was too late.

  The idea of being rammed hadn't occurred to them; no other vessel could have done it. Even Breetai's flagship could have caused Dolza's base little more damage that way than a child could inflict by crashing a kiddie car into Gibraltar.

  But this was Zor's final creation, a machine that incorporated most of what he had learned about Protoculture and the secrets of Robotechnology. The booms went through the thick armor of the headquarters moonlet as if it were soft cheese. The SDF-1 was like some enormous stake being driven into the heart of the Grand Fleet.

  Once the dimensional fortress was inside the outermost layers of the headquarters' armor plating, Dolza's stupendous ship was even more vulnerable. Bulkheads were smashed out of the way like aluminum foil; structural members snapped like toothpicks. The directed barrier shields glowed brighter but held.

  An ocean of air began leaking from the headquarters, and the dying started at once. Power junctions and energy routing, severed or crushed, sent serpents of writhing electrical and Protoculture lightning into the thinning air and serpentining along the bulkheads and decks.

  The SDF-1 brought its mighty forearms, the supercarriers Daedalus and Prometheus, into play. Their bows, too, had been reinforced and mantled with directed barrier shields. Like a giant punching his way through an enemy castle, the ship drove on, destroying all that was in its path, its thrusters making it an irresistible force.

  Zentraedi were whirled through the air like dust motes in the tremendous atmospheric currents being sucked toward the opening the SDF-1 had made. They died in explosions and were torn apart, ground up, squashed to jelly, or impaled by the flying, whirling wreckage.

  Through it all, Minmei sang. She knew the song was no longer a part of any surprise attack, but she felt-now that if she stopped, it might bring about some disastrous halt in the desperate attack. It was as if her song was what was making it all happen; it was a form of magic that she couldn't stop

  in midspell.

  Then the dimensional fortress was opening up with conventional weapons. X-ray lasers and missile tubes, cannon and pulsed beams hammered away at everything before and around them. The ship's path was often obscured by the demon's brew of flame and explosion all around.

  Minmei watched, transfixed, at the huge sweep of viewport and sang, wondering if the universe was about to end. Because that was how it looked from where she stood.

  But moments later, as suddenly as the drawing aside of a curtain, the SDF-1 broke out into a vast, open place. Behind it was a tunnel with its mouth edged by jagged, bent-out superalloy plate. The Zentraedi gaped as it drifted across the vast space within the headquarters mountain.

  Gloval knew the timing had to be split second and perfect, and he had no leisure for preparation.

  There were quite a few enemy vessels still inside the gargantuan base, something Gloval had been hoping against. But they were all at rest, unable to maneuver or open fire for seconds more at least, perhaps as much as a half minute. In a battle like this, that was an eternity.

  "Prepare to execute final barrage!" he snapped as his bridge crew bent to their work. "Then full power to barrier shield!"

  Missile ports opened to let loose the last volley the SDF-1 was capable of firing, the do-or-die knockout punch Gloval had saved for this moment. The fortress's heaviest projectiles-Deca missiles the size of old-fashioned ICBMs, Piledrivers as big as sub-launched nukes-were readied for firing.

  The bows of the flatdecks opened like sharks' mouths, revealing racks of smaller Hammerhead and Bighorn missiles.

  "Target acquisition on their main reflex furnace," Gloval ordered.

  But Claudia was way ahead of him. "Target locked in, all missiles, sir," she said.

  In his command post, the looming Dolza tried to believe what he saw

  before him. "What are they doing? They'll destroy us all!"

  If the reflex furnace went, the resulting explosion would certainly destroy the base and everything in it, and quite possibly all ships in both fleets and even the planet nearby. But that didn't seem to be daunting the Micronians.

  This isn't war! Dolza screamed within himself. It's madness!

  So the tiny creatures were willing to die in order to avoid the disgrace of defeat.

  They are more like us than I thought! Dolza realized. They have some source of strength we must learn. What allies they would snake in a war against the Robotech Masters!

  "Wait!" he bellowed.

  "Fire!" Gloval roared on SDF-1's bridge.

  The missiles gushed from the battle fortress, the smaller, faster ones getting a quick lead and leaving corkscrewing white trails. The heavier ones took a bit longer to get up to speed, but they quickly overtook and passed their little siblings. All angled in, on assorted vectors, for the base's reflex furnaces.

  But Gloval had dismissed them from his mind as soon as he had given the order to let them fly. There was no time to spare.

  "All power to barrier shields!" he snapped, but again his bridge crew had anticipated.

  The ship was standing stock still. Every erg of power in it was channeled to the shields; producing first a cloud of scintillating lights around the ship, then a green-white sphere like some exotic Christmas ornament.

  "Barrier shield coming to maximum," Kim said calmly. Then, a second later, just as the first missiles began to detonate on target, "Barrier at max, sir."

  The enemy ships in the base were opening fire now, but their shots glanced harmlessly off the barrier system. Gloval barely paid attention to

  confirmation of that; he had little doubt the Robotech shield created by Dr. Lang could hold out against an enemy bombardment for a few seconds. The real test was coming up.

  Dolza watched the awesome barrage hit home on the reflex furnace area of the ship's interior and knew he was going to die.

  Even with the protection of its shielding, even with the defenses of desperate, brave Zentraedi captains who purposely threw their ships in the way of the all-out salvo, enough missiles got through to ensure that the base would be destroyed. Many times enough.

  The reflex furnaces churned, then spewed forth utter destruction.

  Dolza, watching from his command post, had time only for one thought.

  Years and years before, he had watched Zor die. Zor had spoken of some overriding Vision that made the megagenius send the SDF-1 here, to Earth.

  Had Zor seen this moment, too? And things beyond it?

  Then a terrible light seared him. Dolza howled a fierce Zentraedi war cry as he was rent to particles.

  The interior bulkhead of the base began to bulge with secondary explosions, nodes of superhard armor being pushed out like putty by the force of the blasts running through the place. The rift in the reflex furnaces that had destroyed Dolza's command post was expanding, gushing forth blinding-white obliteration.

  Ships only beginning to maneuver for the run to safety were caught in it, wiped out of existence like so many soap bubbles in a blast furnace.

  The base swelled like an overfilled football, then split apart along irregular seams that hadn't been there moments before. Ruinous light spilled out of it, then it lit the sky over Earth like a star.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Francis Bacon said that "In peace the sons bury their fathers and in war the fathers bury their sons." My father warned me when I joined up that this didn't always apply to our family, because we were all military. He might have had some premonition that I would outlive him, but what he didn't foresee was that his daughter would hear taps played for an entire world.

  Lisa Hayes, Recollections

  The thick clouds had darkened the Alaskan night to pitch-blackness, but the fighter's night-sight capabilities gave Rick a clear view of what he was doing. The lurching Guardian barely cleared the rim of the Grand Cannon's shaft without s
nagging a wingtip.

  It might be begging for a crash, but he kept going, nursing the fighter along until he was beyond the blighted, red-hot area around what had been Alaska Base.

  He was barely clear of the blast radius when Alaska Base went up like a pyromaniac's fantasy of Judgment Day.

  He flew in Fighter mode for a long while, casting back and forth across the charred Earth for safe landing, watching his radiation detectors and terrain sensors.

  He swooped in over what had been a major UEDC base, according to the maps. But there was only a dry lake bed, its water vaporized by a direct hit, and the remains of what had been a major city. The plane started bucking hard, and he went back to Guardian. The place showed no signs of radioactivity or fallout; he decided to set down.

  It was a little before sunrise on a smoky, darkened world that, it seemed, would never see the sun again.

  Rick hit the foot thrusters and brought the VT to an erratic, slewing landing. The canopy servos had gotten fried in one of those last blowups, so he yanked the rescue handgrip and blew the canopy off.

  Rick and Lisa stood up in the cockpit and looked out at the mutilated landscape of Earth. It was as pockmarked as the moon, with deep cracks and crevasses. Smoke was rolling into the sky from dozens of impact points and from fires that stretched along the horizon. The air was hot, thick with soot and dust. There seemed to be volcanic activity along a chain of mountains to the west. A scorching wind was rising.

  The most frightening thing was that there was no water to be seen anywhere.

  There was a patch of open sky, but as they watched, the clouds rolled in, blotting out the stars. He wondered how the battle had turned out. From the looks of Earth, it probably didn't matter very much.