Title: Armageddon Now (1?)

Author: Cyclone

Feedback: Please be gentle.

Distribution: Gimme credit and a link.

Rating: Mechanized violence and harsh language.

Spoilers: Up to Chosen for BtVS. Anything goes for the other.

Disclaimer: Some of the characters depicted herein belong to Joss. The jury's still out on others. I'm just borrowing them for a while.

Summary: The Scooby Gang must endure an apocalypse they cannot stop.

Author's Note: This is what I get for borrowing a friend's Robotech comic collection. This will require at least some basic knowledge of Robotech, since I'm jumping ahead to avoid rehashing what amounts to a bunch of events happening around this 'fic's main characters.


Xander tried to ignore the occasional tremor beneath his destroid's feet as he maneuvered the foot-thick patch over the tear in the wall and began welding it in place.

He wasn't a soldier, after all. He was just a construction worker, and the stripped-down Spartan he was piloting wouldn't make much difference in the battle raging just on the other side of the relatively thin sheet of steel. The SDF-1's auto-repair systems could only handle so much, after all.

Suddenly, the patch he'd just made exploded toward him, and when his vision cleared, he saw the top half of a Valkyrie in battloid mode lying in front of him, its chestplate shattered. As he brought the destroid to its feet, his radio crackled to life.

/Worker-Seven, do you copy/

It was the fabled Lt. Cmdr. Hayes.

Joy.

"Worker-Seven here," he replied. That was his destroid's designation, abbreviated to WK-007 on all the paperwork, much to his own private annoyance.

/Worker-Seven, our internal sensors have been knocked out in your sector. What's going on over there/

He looked around, "I patched the hull breach, but it just got blown open again."

/We're reading incoming battlepods. We need you to intercept them./

"You want me to WHAT?" he sputtered. "This tin can's not even armed!"

/You only need to hold them off for a few minutes. Green Squadron's breaking off to assist. Control out./

Xander scowled. That was a woman who really knew how to aggravate someone. They could have at least given him something to shoot the Zentraedi with.

He looked around and found something promising. It was a gun pod, likely belonging to the luckless Valkyrie he'd found himself staring at only moments earlier.

Picking it up, he hunkered down behind the lower remains of the wall, glad that the civilians had been evacuated to the shelters. With a silent prayer, he lined up the 55mm tri-cannon and depressed the trigger.

He was rewarded with a brilliant fireball, and he quickly tracked to the next target. It sideslipped at the last second, however, and he barely clipped it, taking off a leg as it continued to rocket towards him.

Xander kept firing, but the nimble battlepod somehow managed to avoid the next burst, just as the spray of shells stopped.

Out of ammo. Crap.

He felt a kind of detachment as the battlepod barreled into him, sending him and his destroid flying back against what, until that second, was an office high rise.

Reflexively, he grabbed the battlepod and groped for the welder hooked to the destroid's hip. Xander brought it up to the battlepod's sensor eye and activated it, melting through delicate electronics and armor with equal ease.

When it stopped moving, he threw it back in relief.

And stared as the hatch popped open.

You have GOT to be kidding me! he thought. With growing horror, he watched as the badly burned Zentraedi warrior rose and leaped at him. Without the mass of the battlepod, however, the Zentraedi's weight was much more easily managed, and Xander's destroid stayed on its feet.

Xander ground his teeth as massive fists hammered his destroid, denting armor and shaking him in the cockpit like a set of maracas. He measured the distance and returned the favor. The Zentraedi folded over the punch to the gut and went flying back out of the ship.

The one-eyed carpenter struggled to catch his breath.

God, I hope Green Squad gets here soon.

As if in answer to his silent plea, he saw a Valkyrie flash by outside, apparently in pursuit of an enemy.


Xander hopped off the ladder, glad beyond words to be out of that cockpit. He was soaked with sweat, and he was still trembling. He doubted his nerves would recover for at least another hour. Fighting demons was one thing, but he'd never had to fight in a giant robot before.

Frankly, he had been more afraid of hitting the wrong button and self-destructing or ejecting than he was of the Zentraedi.

"What did you do to my destroid!" roared the burly mechanic.

Xander shot the mechanic a tired look, "Don't look at me. The brass, in its infinite wisdom, decided I should try to hold off the aliens in sector three. Without weapons."

The mechanic looked up at the battered destroid again, "What'd you do? Wrestle with them?"

"Basically, yeah," Xander nodded.

The man looked at him with newfound respect for a long moment, then finally growled, "Well, don't do it again. I don't have enough time as it is. I don't need to be wasting time patching up your machine too."

"Gotcha."


"Hey, Xander," Dawn waved as he returned to his apartment. Of all of them, she had adjusted to the new... circumstances... better than any of the others.

It took them about two weeks to convince Willow to NOT try to magically translocate everyone and the ship back to Earth.

Buffy and Giles were both torn, trying to deal with the idea that there was something out there that a Slayer couldn't fight. The sudden feeling of helplessness was ten times worse than when they faced Glory or the First.

"Hey, Dawn," he nodded. "What's up?"

"I signed up."

He blinked.

Signed up? What did she mean by "signed u-"...?

"You what!"

"I'm joining the defense forces," Dawn replied. "Training starts tomorrow. I've had enough of sitting around while everyone else fights."

Xander nodded, "Oh. Technician?" She did, after all, pick up an engineering degree...

"Veritech pilot."

He blinked, "Does Buffy know?"

"Not yet. I'm going to tell her tonight."

Xander nodded again, "Well, uh, I need to get changed, then I'm heading out to check the construction site."

"Plus, you don't wanna be here when I tell her, right?"

"Possibly."


"Keep going, keep going," Xander waved the truck onward. "Whoa, hold it! Yeah, we got it."

He turned and headed for the edge of the construction site. A large chunk of shrapnel had neatly embedded itself in the steel framework, and it took a combination of careful maneuvering and an array of pulley cables to get it out without doing further damage.

"Mister Harris?"

He looked up, "It's Xander, not 'Mister Harris,' Mi-" He blinked in surprise. "...uh, Commander? What are you doing here?"

What on Earth -- well, on the SDF-1, anyway -- would bring the workaholic Lt. Cmdr. Hayes to a construction site where she had no business being?

The bridge officer had a somber, regretful look on her face. She looked up, "I just... came to apologize, Mi-... Xander. I shouldn't have sent you into combat like that."

He shook his head, "Don't worry about it, Commander. You did what you had to do. Besides, I've been thinking about signing up for combat duty anyway."

True, I'd only been thinking about it since Dawn told me she did a half hour ago... but there's no need to tell her that, Xander added silently.

"But, I... your destroid wasn't armed, and I..."

"...had to get someone there," Xander interrupted. "Look, Commander, if you hadn't, I'd be dead. That destroid's not fast enough to get clear before they would've swarmed it, and you'd've had an even bigger problem on your hands."

She looked at him for a long moment, "Thank you."


"Xander, did you know about this!" Buffy demanded, searching his face for answers.

Xander blinked. Or winked. It was hard to tell sometimes.

"Ah, only maybe an hour before you did," he said.

She fumed.

After a moment, he asked, "Ah, we are talking about Dawn's new career choice, right?"

"Yes."

"I'm a grown woman now, Buffy," Dawn groused. "I can make my own decisions."

"She's quite right," Giles interjected.

"Giles?" she whirled in shock, betrayal written across her face.

"You can't protect her forever, Buffy. And certainly not from this. This... this is beyond anything any of us has ever faced before."

Don't be so sure about that, G-man, Xander thought silently. "Yeah, well, don't worry too much about it, Buff. I'll be out there."

"Xander," Dawn scowled. "You didn't. I don't need a babysitter."

"Hey!" Xander protested. "After nearly nearly getting my ass shot off today, I thought it might be a good idea to be in one that had guns for once! Lots of guns. I start training on the Tomahawk in a week."

"Why not veritechs?" Willow asked.

Xander rolled his eye and pointed at the socket, "You really think they'll let a one-eyed man fly a jet, Will?"

"Oh. Um. Right."


"Oookay, maybe this wasn't such a good idea," Xander muttered as he mentally ran over the destroid's controls. He hadn't thought the Tomahawk would be so... clumsy.

Good grief, this thing makes the Beta look graceful!

He looked out at the featureless darkness of space and resisted the urge to run his scanners. The Captain had planned some sort of ambush or something, and stealth was of paramount importance.

But Xander had this nagging feeling he was forgetting something, something important about this op...

And with Dawn out there, somewhere, flying with the Skulls...

"C'mon... c'mon..."


Author's Postscript:

Another part of another 'fic.