Force of Arms

by Jack McKinney

  Lisa looked at him, pulling the windblown strands of long brown hair away from her face. "Thank you for getting me out of there, Rick." She could bear dying on the surface, in whatever form that death might take. But to endure her last moments among the charred and smoking remains of the base's dead-that would have been more than she could have borne. She extended her hand.

  Rick took it with a grin. "Oh, c'mon. It gave me a chance to disobey your orders again, after all." They shook hands, and she let herself laugh just a little.

  Lisa sat on the edge of the cockpit. "I'll always be grateful. I admire you a great deal, Rick."

  That wasn't what she really wanted to tell him, but it was a start. It was much further along than Rick had gotten in saying what he was feeling at the moment. It occurred to him that a world that was a mass grave, very likely smoldering ash from pole to pole, was a strange place to profess love for somebody.

  Or maybe not, he saw suddenly. Maybe it was the best epitaph anybody could ever hope to leave behind.

  He had already yielded to the hard lesson that life wasn't worth much without it.

  He almost said four or five different things, then shrugged, looking at

  his feet, and managed, "It was...it was a pleasure."

  A ray of light made them turn. The rising sun had found a slit between clouds, to send long, slanting rays on the two people and their grounded machine. There was no sign of the stupendous battle.

  "It looks like the fighting's stopped." She felt so peaceful, so tired of war, that she didn't even want to know the outcome.

  "Um, yeah."

  "I wonder if there's anyone else around?" "Huh?"

  She looked around to him. "What if we're the last? The only ones left?"

  He looked at her for long seconds. "That wouldn't be that bad, would it?" he said softly. "At least neither of us will ever be alone."

  "Rick..."

  He had his mouth open to say something more, but there was a blast of static from the commo equipment as the automatic search gear brought up the sound on a signal it had located. There was a familiar voice singing a lilting, haunting hymn to Earth.

  We shall live the day we dream of winning, And beginning a new life!

  "Minmei!" Lisa cried. She didn't know whether she could ever change her feelings toward the singer, but right now that voice was as welcome as-well, almost as welcome as the company Lisa was keeping.

  "Up there!" Rick shouted, pointing. Something was descending on blue thruster flames hundreds of yards long, trailing sparkling particles behind it, weird energy anomalies from the interaction of barrier shield and reflex furnace obliteration.

  Rick held Lisa to him. The dimensional fortress settled in toward the lake bed, the two flattops held level, elbows against its own midsection like Jimmy Cagney doing his patented move.

  All it needs to do is throw a hitch in its shoulders and sing "Yankee

  Doodle Dandy"! Rick thought.

  The enormous blasts of its engines kicked up dust, but the SDF-1 was landing with the rising sun directly at its back. They watched it sink down, silhouetted against the wavering fireball of the sun, until the land was waist high all around it.

  Sunrise was throwing brighter light across the flattened terrain. "What a sight for sore eyes." Rick smiled, flicking switches on his instrument panel.

  Lisa laughed outright, surprising herself. Was it right to be happy again so soon after so much carnage? But she couldn't help feeling joy, and she laughed again. "Oh, yes, yes!"

  "This thing's still got a few miles left in it," Rick decided, studying the instruments. "Let's go."

  "Okay!"

  She settled back into his lap, and when he put his hand over the throttle, she covered it gently with her own, averting her eyes but leaving her hand there. He moved the throttle forward. Lisa's heart soared, feeling his hand beneath hers.

  The Guardian jetted across the devastated landscape, into the sunrise, straight for the SDF-1 and the long shadow it threw. Lisa, her arms around Rick's neck, laid her head on his chest and watched a new future loom up before her.

  Part II:

  Reconstruction Blues

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  Why were the higher-ups so surprised that we rebuilt right away, and so quickly? Human feet can wear down a stone, human hands can grind down iron, human perseverance can overcome any adversity.

  Mayor Tommy Luan, The High Office

  Upon its initial arrival, Gloval had thought of the SDF-1 as a kind of malign miracle, since it had kept humanity from destroying itself utterly in the Global Civil War.

  There was another miraculous purpose it was to serve, to divert war away from Earth, fight off the Zentraedi, and ultimately break the invaders' power.

  But there was a third role in this sequence of events that even Gloval hadn't guessed; indeed, he had unwittingly worked in opposition to it.

  The SDF-1 was an ark, as well.

  Even after the bombardments, the scorched-Earth attack that had very nearly come to a no-Earth situation, the boiling away of much of the planet's water-temporarily at least-into the atmosphere, pockets of humanity had survived. But what chance would they have to resume an advanced culture and technological base?

  Very simply, none.

  Take mining as an example. Most of the useful minerals that could be mined by primitive means were long since exhausted. The huddled groups of war-shocked people who survived the Zentraedi holocaust were unable to mount even steam-age mining efforts, much less the sophisticated operations it would take to get to the less accessible deposits still remaining in the planet. An unbelievably complex and interdependent world had simply passed away, and there was no means to rebuild it.

  Terran technology had used up its one bolt, and there was no such thing as starting over from scratch, because the resources that had let Homo

  sapiens start from scratch had been consumed long before.

  The human race was on its way to becoming a permanent, dead-end race of hunter-gatherers with no hope of ever being more again. History was about to close the books on a vaguely interesting little upstart species; events and the simple facts of life had gone against it.

  Except there was the SDF-1, with Macross City inside.

  There had been few hard words or unyielding attitudes once the great starship set down in the dry lakebed. Who do you get mad at when the world lies dying?

  In their years of wandering and persevering, the residents of Macross City had put most delusions and wishful thinking behind them. They saw what had happened, and it came to them quickly that against any expectation, they had been the lucky ones. The castoffs and pariahs were actually the cargo of a new ark.

  So in the end that was the fate of Macross City. What was left of it was disembarked, person by person, piece by piece, around the lakebed, and the rebuilding began.

  The intellectuals and experts argued about the best ways to reestablish ecological balances and manage moisture reclamation; the people of Macross rebuilt their homes and businesses and lives as best they could, trusting that such things were more important than all the computer projections.

  The ship's engines provided power. Its mecha and military people enforced law and order in an ever-growing domain of security. The SDF-1's fabricators and other technical equipment quickly provided a new industrial base, and the population of Macross constituted an urban economic hub.

  In the time after that last Armageddon, the SDF-1's name might better have been that of one of its constituent flattops, Prometheus. It was humanity's main source of medical care, technical resources, and most importantly, the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the species Homo sapiens.

  The nuclear winter scenario was much less severe than the computers

  had guessed. That was partly because the predictions had been based on faulty models. It was also because the RDF and civilian corps worked around the clock to make it so.

  And they had allies. The explosion of Dolza's base had d
isabled or taken with it his entire Grand Fleet, but a considerable part of Breetai's armada had survived. Many Zentraedi had chosen to go to Earth and take up a life there either in Micronian size or in their own original bodies.

  Both races hoped for a new golden age or at least a lasting silver one.

  It was a world seared and barren, pockmarked with craters and. split with fissures made by war. Everywhere were the rusting mecha of the last great battle. Most of the disabled Zentraedi ships had, for unknown reasons, oriented on the nearest center of gravity-Earth-and driven toward it.

  The result was that the planet's surface was an eerie Robotech Boot Hill dotted with crumpled alien warships that had driven themselves partway into the ground like spikes. The reminders of that last day were everywhere, too many to ever dismantle or bury. Only time and the elements would remove the grave markers, and they would not do so in the life span of anyone then living.

  But those who were left alive went on a new crusade, the one to heal the planet and put things right again.

  Two years passed.

  Rick Hunter's VT, in Guardian mode, complained at the strain he put on it in the tight bank. He gritted his teeth but held to it. The old ship, battered as it was, had never failed him yet. With replacement parts and maintenance time in such woefully short supply, the Skull Leader's craft wasn't in the shape it had been in during the war, but he trusted it.

  The Guardian jetted in low over the rust-red, pitted countryside and foot-thrustered to a deft landing. It bowed, nose nearly touching the ground; he jumped from the cockpit eagerly, hardly able to credit what was happening to him.

  "I don't believe it! It's impossible!"

  He ran across the gritty, fallow soil, back toward what he had spotted. All around were gigantic, jagged shreds and peels of Zentraedi armorplate, twisted and mangled, slowly turning to rust and dust. Off to one side was an overturned Guardian wreck that looked like it had been put through a meat grinder. Its rusting legs stuck straight up into the air like a dead hawk's.

  Rick skidded to a halt, the wind moaning around him. He looked down and was astounded.

  At his feet, springing from a moist plot of earth somehow enriched enough to sustain it, was a field of dandelions. The irregularly shaped, few-square-yards patch of them was sheltered from the wind by the wreckage and yet, by chance, had good exposure to sunlight.

  For a moment he couldn't find words. "Absolutely incredible," he murmured, but that was insufficient. Here, near yet another Zentraedi wreck, the soil had been fortified with something that would support life. He suspected that he knew what that something had been, and it suddenly made him feel very mortal and humble.

  "Real flowers!" He knelt, handling them as gently as a lover, inhaling.

  Certainly there were flowers in the greenhouses and protected fields of the reclamation projects, but this! It was a thing as wonderful as flight-no, more wonderful! Life itself!

  He couldn't recall how many times, as a child, he'd raced across a field of these unglamorous flowers, eyes fixed on the blue sky, wishing only to fly. And now things had come full circle; he flew the most advanced aircraft ever known with his eyes trained on the ground, waiting and hoping for just such a sight as...dandelions.

  I hope this means the Earth is forgiving us, he meditated.

  It was a good and precious thing to know that at least one positive sign, however small, had shown itself. There were other omens that were not so good. Rick was privy to a lot of high-level information thanks to his experiences among the Zentraedi and his value as an intelligence source.

  There were things he tried not to think about, and three of them had disturbing names: Protoculture. Robotech Masters. Invid.

  Three VTs swooped in low over the desolate land, forming up again after completing their aerial recons of assigned sectors. They were newer ships than Rick's, but they looked somehow less sleek and finished. There were those who said the true high-water mark of Robotech workmanship had passed.

  "Commander Hunter, come in, please," said Rick's new second in command, Lieutenant Ransom. "This is Skull Four calling Skull Six."

  No answer, after five minutes' trying. Ransom thought for a moment. "Bobby?"

  Sergeant Bobby Bell, youngest of the remanned Skull Team, appeared on Ransom's display screen. "Yo?"

  "I can't raise the boss, kid."

  Bobby's round face looked pained. "What d' you think? Renegades?"

  That was one of the big reasons for the patrols. Of the many Zentraedi who had gone forth among the humans to try a more peaceful way of life and a chance to open up the more feeling and compassionate side of their nature, some had found that it simply wouldn't work.

  The renegades had begun slipping away into the wastelands more than a year before. There was an entire world of salvage for them out there: mecha, weapons, rations, and anything else they might need, provided they could find the right wreck. More importantly, there was the freedom to act as Zentraedi warriors once again, to follow their own brutal, merciless code. "I think his last transmission came from his search quadrant," Bobby

  said worriedly.

  "I know," Ransom said. "I got a DF fix on it. Let's go.

  The VTs formed up, and their engines made the ground tremble. They shot away to the northwest.

  The SDF-1 stood like a knight in a bath up to his waist. The two supercarriers floated at anchor, giving the corroding derelict added buoyancy.

  Refilling the lake had been a major priority, since not even the fortress's colossal strength could support itself and the two giant warships for long. At the same time that RDF fliers were seeding clouds and Dr. Lang's mysterious machines were working day and night to head off the nuclear winter, combat engineers and anybody else who could be found to lend a hand worked feverishly to make sure the drainage would be ready.

  And just over forty-eight hours after the ship's landing, the rains had begun. They gave back some of the moisture boiled away by the Zentraedi attack, but Lang's calculations, supported by subsequent data, showed that much of it was gone forever. Short of importing many cubic miles of water across space from some as yet unknown source, the Earth would never again be the three-quarters-ocean world she had been when she brought forth life.

  In time, the rains stopped, and the generations-long job of replanting and refoliating the planet began.

  Around the lake the new Macross rose, the stubborn refugees rebuilding their lives yet again. It was the only new population center on the planet so far, the only place where the concrete was uncracked and the buildings tall and straight. There was fresh paint, and there were trees transplanted from the starship. There were lawns and flower beds seeded from plants that had survived the billions of miles of the SDF-1's odyssey.

  It was a city where energy and resources were used with utmost efficiency, a town of solar heaters and photovoltaic panels, with a recycling system tied to every phase of life. The Macross residents and SDF-1 personnel had learned the tough lessons of ecological necessity during years in space, and nothing at all was wasted. That was the sort of world it was going to have to be from now on.

  In a neat, quiet suburb of the city served by an overhead rapid-transit system sat a modest little prefab cottage, its solar panels, guided by microprocessors, swinging slowly to follow the sun. As a senior flight officer, Rick Hunter rated off base housing even though he was single, and liked the

  idea of getting away from the military when he could, even if his home looked like modular luggage. As Skull Leader, he seldom got a chance to be there.

  So Lisa Hayes took it upon herself to tidy up the place when he was away. Her own rather more spacious quarters were nearby.

  Neither of them was quite sure what the bond between them meant or where their companionship was going, but she had a key to his place, and he to hers.

  Now she hummed happily to herself as she put away the last of the just-washed dishes. Maybe I ought to bill him for maid services, she thought wryly.


  But she knew better; she enjoyed being in his place, touching the things he touched, seeing reminders of him all around. She hoped that the extended patrol up north didn't last too much longer-that he would be home soon so that they could be together again.

  Lisa considered the sunlight streaming through the kitchen window. Polarizing glass was all well and good, but curtains were what that window needed.

  Will you listen to me? Curtains! Miss Suzy Homemaker! She smirked at the apron she was wearing. It was doubly funny because she was due back at the base soon for more meetings and briefings on the final construction details of the SDF-2, the new successor to the battle fortress.

  And she meant to have a berth on that ship, to be the First Officer if she could, and go to the stars. Ol' Suzy Homemaker herself.

  She snorted a laugh as she moved into the bedroom. Seeing it, she sighed. Why does this place always look like a bear's been wintering here?

  She raised all the blinds, opened all the windows, and moved around the room slowly, fondly. When she smoothed the sheets to make up the bed, her hands lingered upon them, and she touched the pillows tenderly, remembering his head on them, and her own.

  Her wrist chrono toned, reminding her she had to go soon. When she straightened, her eye fell on something she hadn't seen before.

  It lay on his desk, next to his spare flight helmet: a photo album bound in creamy imitation leather. Lisa moved toward it unwillingly, knowing she shouldn't do what she was about to do but unable to stop herself.

  The album was well worn, had obviously been leafed through many times. The first page made her heart sink, There was a snapshot of Minmei seated on a park swing back in the Macross within the SDF-1, Rick standing behind her. The other picture was a close-up taken of Minmei back at the start of her career, a wide-eyed gamine with flowing black locks framing her face.

  Lisa sighed again. What does he see in her? What's she got except great looks, the singing voice that won the war, and superstardom?