Force of Arms

by Jack McKinney

  The human-Zentraedi alliance swooped down at it.

  "What's that on our monitors?" growled one of Dolza's communications officers, his voice harsh and guttural.

  His subordinate could barely tear his attention away from the song to

  answer. Such distraction when a superior was asking questions would have drawn quick, terrible punishment at any other time, but they were both hypnotized by Minmei.

  If we must fight or face defeat,

  We must stand tall and not retreat.

  The subordinate shook himself a little and answered. "I don't know, sir, but we're receiving it on all frequencies."

  Then they both watched in fascination, ignoring the flashing of indicators and the beeps of comtones.

  "We're within firing range," Vanessa said tightly. "No counterattack detected."

  "It's working!" Exedore cried, watching the battle at Gloval's side. "This is it," Gloval said calmly. "All ships, open fire."

  In that first gargantuan volley, the attacking force's main problem was not to hit its own fightercraft or have its cannon salvos destroy its own missiles in flight. But the Zentraedi were used to that sort of problem, and fire control had been carefully integrated with the SDF-1's systems.

  It was an impact almost as damaging as the Grand Cannon's; millions of Zentraedi, gaping at Minmei's performance, died in moments.

  Alarms were going off. The few Grand Fleet officers who could force their attention away from the screens could get no response from their troops short of physically attacking them.

  As many of the Grand Fleet crews were beginning to notice the alarms, though, Minmei paused in her song; the band vamped in the background. A tall, dark figure stepped out into the spotlight with her.

  Lynn-Kyle wore a look of burning intensity, his long, straight black hair swirling around him, taking her hand. "Minmei-"

  "Yes, Kyle; I know," she recited her line. "You've come to say

  good-bye."

  "Yes."

  Minmei wasn't exactly sure where the lines had come from; everything was so hurried, so improvised. Weren't they from one of the movies the two had done together? But Kyle was putting more into them than he had ever managed on screen. He had seen her run off after Rick. What was going through his mind?

  No matter. He took her into his arms. She turned her face up to his. The camera cut from a two-shot of their bodies pressed against each other to a close-up of along, passionate kiss, Kyle no longer acting.

  In the Grand Fleet, alien warriors groaned and made nauseated sounds.

  "How can they do that?" "Most disgusting thing I ever-"

  And yet there was something about it that kept them from looking away, an appalled captivation. It should be added that among the female units like the Quadronos, there was more absorption and less repulsion than among the males.

  But all through the orbiting fleet, moans and growls and other reactions to the kiss turned into shrieks of dismay and pain as the alliance's volley cut through the enemy ships, holing them, blowing them to nothingness.

  Rick watched the kiss on a display screen and thought, not unkindly, Farewell Minmei.

  Then, "Let's get 'em!" he snarled over the tac net.

  Someone must have managed to cut off the Minmei transmission from at least some of the Grand Fleet's mecha. There were plenty of effective ships, more than plenty.

  The Skull Team's armored VTs bore in at the enemy, releasing barrages of missiles, fighting their way through Grand Fleet pod and tri-thruster defensive screens. Quadrono powered armor came at the VTs, too, less

  effective now that Miriya no longer led them. Miriya avoided engaging those.

  VTs shifted configuration according to the needs of the moment; Battloid and Guardian and Veritech modes were intermingled. Pods and tri-thrusters mixed it up with them and opened fire. Space was one big killing ground.

  The armored VTs were faster and more maneuverable than anything else in the battle as well as being more heavily armed. They pierced the enemy formations, ripping a hole for the rest of the attack force to exploit.

  Skull Team seemed to be everywhere, unhittable and unavoidable. Many, many Zentraedi saw their Jolly Roger insignia-the skull and crossbones-and died instants later. The heavy autocannon buzz-sawed; the missiles streamed, leaving boiling trails. But for every enemy downed, three more dove in to try to seal the gap.

  It's love's battle we must win. We will win.

  We can win!

  The range was close now. Around the bowl in which Minmei performed, the ship's mecha opened up. The Destroid cannon in particular put out staggering volumes of fire. Every battery the ship mounted-except for the monster main gun, whose energy demands might have damaged the SDF-1-was working overtime.

  The Grand Fleet's losses in the first moments of the battle were awful, but its numbers still gave it a vast edge, and some of the enemy ships were returning fire. The SDF-1 and the armada dreadnoughts forged on, blazing away in all directions. Enemy mecha were starting to get through to the alliance capital vessels now, despite the best efforts of the VTs and the armada's pods, tri-thrusters, and powered armor.

  But slowly, seemingly by inches, the allied force drew closer to Dolza's headquarters.

  Max and Miriya were like avenging angels, beyond any mortal power to resist or stop. Faced with the redtrimmed armored VT or the blue, all any enemy pilot could do was resign himself to death.

  Rick had part of his commo and guidance equipment tuned for signals of life on Earth, especially from Alaska Base. If there was any sign of life...

  A light cruiser was trying to break past the VTs for a go at the SDF-1. He went in at it, letting go a torrent of mixed ordnance, aiming for the vital spots the defectors had told the RDF about.

  The cruiser fired back, and Rick decided this was one head-on he wasn't going to survive. But all at once the cruiser expanded, armor flying off it like rind off a bursting melon, and then the vessel and its crew were scattered atoms and little more.

  So violent was the explosion that Rick was distracted, avoiding being damaged by it. When he looked around again, he saw that a trio of Battlepods had loosed multiple spreads of missiles at him, and there was absolutely no hope of dodging them all.

  He eluded some, jammed some of the others' guidance systems, shot a few right out of existence-and the special VT's armor protected him from several hits.

  But that left still more to go for his vitals. In Battloid mode, he crouched, trying to shield himself. He nevertheless took several, right in the breadbasket. VT armor was good but not that good.

  The damaged Battloid, leaving a wake of flame behind it, spun and tumbled for Earth, flopping lifelessly.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When you're in the upper-right-hand corner, pushing that envelope, and the "CANCEL" stamp comes your way, you do a lot of thinking.

  The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

  The crescent moon filing low on the horizon; the landscape of Earth made the two bodies like twins now.

  Compared to the barrage that had laid waste to the Earth, the stray beams and rounds from the colossal battle above were barely distant sniper shots. But they were enough to rattle an Alaska Base that was already mortally wounded.

  The shattered mouth of what had once been the Grand Cannon was already ringed with bizarre energy phenomena. Crackling discharges, wandering spheres of ball lightning, and fireflylike radiation nexuses had sprung from the tremendous forces loosed by the Grand Cannon and their interaction with both local fields and the fury of the enemy's rain of death.

  "Earth Defense Sector four-alpha, come in please," Lisa called into her headset mike as the room tossed. "This is Alaska Base!"

  The base heaved again, shaking down dust and debris from the ceiling. The tremors were caused by stray shots from the battle and by the rebellion of the very planet against the obscene things that had been done to it. But they came as well from the interior of the base itself. The installation
was dying; but from what Lisa could read from her instruments, it would not be a slow, quiet death.

  She had found no one else alive in the base. She had been ordered to see about a glitch in a shielded commo relay substation, had been there just as the cosmic fireworks went off. Being the last survivor in an underground charnel house might be somebody else's idea of a stroke of fortune, but it wasn't Lisa's.

  She fought to keep her voice and her nerve from breaking as she tried

  another call. She kept herself narrowly fixed on the job at hand to shut out the ghastly things she had seen and smelled and been forced to come in contact with in making her way back to her post.

  The place was nearly dark, lit only by dim red emergency lights. The weak flow from the fallback power system was barely enough to keep her console functioning. There was plenty of power in the base, power gathering itself for a split-second rampage, but she couldn't tap any of it.

  "It's no use. They're all gone," she said numbly. She wondered how long she would last, the only living thing in the city of the dead, perhaps the only human being alive.

  Not long, she hoped.

  Abruptly, multicolored lines of static zagged across her screen, and her father's face appeared, broken by interference, only to reappear.

  "Is that you, Lisa? I'm reading you, but the transmission is very weak." She let out a long breath. "Thank God you're alive!"

  She could see that he was still in the command station. A few figures moved in the gloom behind him, lit by occasional flashes of static or electrical shorts. So others had been spared by the concussion, the explosions and air contamination, the fires and smoke and radiation.

  "The Grand Cannon was severely damaged," he admitted. "I don't think it will fire again, but we have to try."

  "Oh, Father."

  He smiled weakly. "It seems you were right all the time. The Zentraedi forces are much too powerful for our weapons to handle. I should have listened to you."

  Another shock wave shook the base. Admiral Hayes said, "Lisa, you have to get out of here now!"

  Get out? What was he talking about? The surface was a radioactive execution chamber carpeted with molten glass for miles all around. She was about to tell him so, to make her way to him, to die with him because it was a better place than the one she was in now, and she knew she would die this day.

  Before she could speak, there was some sort of eruption from the Grand Cannon base equipment behind him, and the screen broke up into rainbow distortion, then went dark.

  "No!" She threw herself at the console, then sank to the floor, wracked by sobs, as the wailing of the base's power plant built and built for a final, terrible outpouring.

  "Father...Father..."

  As the battle draws on, we feel stronger, How much longer must we go now?

  Rick recognized the voice at once, even in the daze he was in from the missiles' pounding. He blinked and saw the Earth whirling before him. His flying sense told him his ship was spinning and sprawling toward the ground, its thrusters only marginally effective in slowing it. He was inside a big, loose-limbed fireball meteor.

  Where am I? What happened? Then it came back to him in a rush. As he gained a little control over himself, his VT, taking its impulses from the receptors in his helmet, did the same.

  Gotta go to F mode! The bucking and spinning of the dive made it difficult reaching for the one close control. He knew that if the ship hadn't made minimal attempts to control the crash, he would likely never have woken up.

  It was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life, but he got his hand to the F lever and yanked it. Damage control systems in his Robotech ship made decisions and blew off the armor and pods with which it had been retrofitted. Somehow, the burning components were jettisoned too.

  The Battloid folded, elongated here, shortened there-mechamorphosed. And in a moment, a sleek, conventional VT rode the thickening air down toward Earth.

  Seems to be handling all right, he thought. Maybe I wasn't hit as bad as I thought.

  The ship had automatically assumed a belly-flop attitude for atmospheric reentry. The speed of its descent reddened its ablative shielding a bit, torching the air around it.

  Oops! Better activate heat shields! In another moment a protective blister of heat-reflective armor, bearing the Skulls' Jolly Roger insignia, slid into place over the canopy. Other vulnerable components were similarly protected.

  The heat in the cockpit began dropping at once, and Rick tried to assess his situation. I'm still alive. That covered just about all the important stuff as far as most pilots were concerned.

  Minmei was still singing. He recalled those last words he had exchanged with her in his quarters as the sirens shrilled for a VT hot scramble.

  You can do it, Minmei. Just remember: Today you sing for everyone. But -I want you to understand, Rick. I'm really singing for you.

  And then she had given him a kiss that he had felt to his toes, a kiss that made him feel he didn't need a VT in order to fly.

  I love you, he told her; l love you, she said.

  But it was really good-bye, and they had both known it.

  He shook off the recollection; that was the sort of stroll down memory lane that got pilots killed. He was deep in the atmosphere now, his VT trimmed, seeming to respond well. He slowed, bringing the wings out to minimal sweep, rolling back the heat shields, for a look around. Night lay over the wasteland, and clouds closed in above.

  He tried to figure out why the VT was descending in the first place, why it seemed to be homing in on something. Then he noticed that the commo system had picked up a signal and remembered that he had given it a certain task.

  He swept in lower over the ravaged surface, trying to get a stronger signal. The utter horror of what had been done to his planet made him lock his mind to the job at hand and that alone. His commo equipment had picked up emanations of some kind on the designated frequency.

  He turned and banked, climbed through the smoky night. A minute of maneuvering went by, then two, and as if by magic he was rewarded with a signal that came in five by five-perfectly.

  "I say again: This is Commander Hayes, Alaska Base. Anyone receiving this transmission, please respond."

  There was a note of fear in her voice that he had never heard before. Something in it brought home to him forcefully how important she had become to him.

  Farewell, Minmei.

  He was so eager to reply, to tell her he was there, that he fumbled in opening his transmitter and ignored all proper procedure.

  "Lisa! Lisa, it's me!"

  "Rick?" She said it low, like a prayer. Then, wildly, "Rick, is it really you?"

  "Yes! Are you all right?"

  She suddenly sounded downcast. "Yes, but I think I'm the only one." "Lisa, give me your coordinates. Send me a homing signal."

  She waited a beat before answering. "No, Rick; it's far too dangerous here. But thanks."

  "Damn your eyes! I've got a fix on your signal, and I'm coming! Now, will you help me or not?" She didn't say no, but she didn't say yes.

  "Besides," he said jauntily, "what's a little danger to us? I'll get you out of there in no time." He wished he had his long white flying scarf so he could fling it back over his shoulder rakishly.

  Suddenly, there was a homing signal. "Rick, I'm so glad it's you," she said in a voice as intimate as a quiet serenade. "Be careful, all right?"

  Soon after, the VT dove straight down the shaft of the onetime Grand Cannon. It went from Fighter to Guardian mode, battered by rising heat waves and running a gauntlet of radiation that would have broiled an unprotected human being instantly.

  We shall live the day we dream of winning

  And beginning a new life We will win!

  We must win!

  She had sung it through, taking longer because of the scene played with Lynn-Kyle, and yet it hadn't been very many minutes since Minmei had begun her song. Nevertheless, Khyron the Backstabber knew, the universe and war in particular
turned upon such minutes.

  He stood in his flagship, well out of the battle but within striking distance, watching the fight. Lack of sufficient Protoculture to make his escape from the solar system had forced him to come up with a new plan, and the plan seemed more promising every moment.

  Grel, his second in command, watched Khyron worriedly. Khyron had shown no aversion to the singing, the kissing. His handsome face shone, his eyes alight with the gleam Grel had seen there when Khyron used the forbidden leaves of the Flower of Life.

  "What is your plan now, my lord?" Grel ventured.

  Khyron was still watching Minmei. "Mm. Pretty little thing." Grel couldn't help bursting out, "What?"

  Khyron looked at him coldly. "Get me the position of Breetai's flagship." Then he was smiling up dreamily at Minmei's projecbeam image once more.

  Grel didn't know what to say and, moreover, knew that saying the wrong thing to the Backstabber had cut short quite a number of otherwise promising careers. He couldn't help blurting, though, "But my lord! Breetai is one of us! You cannot do th-"

  Khyron whirled on him in a murderous rage. "How dare you? You will follow my orders or else!"

  Grel turned very pale and hurried to obey. Khyron turned back to his enjoyment of the song.

  But his enjoyment was sinister. He felt a physical, languorous pleasure as he concluded that he was at last coming to a clear understanding of a

  pure true definition of conquest; something more pleasure-giving, if he was right, than all the victories, booty, and worlds the Zentraedi had ever taken.

  In seconds, Khyron's flagship was underway, followed by the tiny flotilla of those still loyal to him.