Interlude VI: One Last Ride to the Rescue
"All systems read green. Are you sure about going forward with this, sir? The YF-4 is fresh from its factory refit, and Rockwell-Bell's executives are not going to be happy," Commander Millard Johnson transmitted from the Olympian heights of the Factory Satellite's command center. Retro-fitted control stations dotted the surface of a towering edifice the size of a small skyscraper, and the tasks of hundreds of technicians and officers were left unattended as they all craned their necks and listened for the words that echoed in reply.
"Absolutely. You let me worry about Rockwell-Bell. They said they fixed the glitches, so we'll put it to the test. Call it a 'stress analysis under dynamic field conditions.'" The voice was young and eager, but steeled by experience and a willingness to sacrifice all on behalf of innocents and comrades-in-arms alike. "Any word from the Zentraedi?"
"Negative, Lightning One. The Sal-Dezir is still in geo-synchronous orbit over Manhattan."
"Acknowledged. Then Lightning One is ready for launch."
Johnson looked over his shoulder, up at the pulpit-like senior command station two stories above his own flight direction console, to see the green-eyed woman in the somber black uniform coat and tall white cap. She looked back at him with sharp, clear eyes, and gave him a shallow nod. He turned back to his coms.
"One last ride to the rescue," he said to himself, too quietly for anyone to hear, then keyed the transmitter. "You are go for launch, Lightning One! Give 'em hell!"
"Lightning One, launch!"
A fighter bay on one of the Factory Satellite's secure sub-modules, a boulder shaped mega-construct massing more than the Himalayas, opened and a single, sleek veritech launched, its engines lit with the blinding blue of full thrust. The Lightning prototype, glossy and pristine from its visit to Rockwell-Bell's zero-g facility, had been freshly re-painted white, with red and black trim. It proudly displayed the Jolly Roger on its razor-sharp tail fins. Under the sure guiding hand of its pilot, the Lightning arced toward the Earth at a speed untouchable by anything else in the Solar System.
When this mission was over, the Lightning's pilot would fully accept his senior role in the United Earth Forces. He would help Lisa guide the formation of the greatest armada Earth had ever built, and take humanity to the stars and beyond. But Admiral Rick Hunter needed this. The UN Spacy needed this. We failed, Rick thought. The Valkyrie forces failed to stop Khyron in time. Failed to protect the SDF-1 and Macross, as they had done so many times. Failed to save the lives of Admiral Gloval, the crew, and thousands of civilians who had always trusted, always believed in him and his pilots. Not this time. This time, I'm going to stop them.
In mere minutes, the Lightning was slicing into Earth's atmosphere. The veritech bucked and roared as the temperature gauges shot upward, but the upgraded shielding kept Rick cool and comfortable. The controls were no problem. He had spent hours in the simulators and poring over the technical manuals as overseer of the project, and the interfaces had been significantly streamlined and improved over the VF-1 Valkyrie's four dozen controls. The only minor annoyance was the new flight suit - heavier and more embellished than the one he had worn on thousands of flights. He ignored the distraction, let himself sink into an almost meditative state, and prepared himself for the struggle to come.
The Lightning slowed, passing through the worst turbulence, and its heat shields retracted. Rick's screens cleared, and he flipped through scanner modes and read IFF transmissions with all the speed and confidence of a seasoned commander. He frowned. The situation in Manhattan had deteriorated severely even in the short time he had been making atmospheric reentry.
Rick broke through the cloud cover, and where the pillars of smoke didn't conceal them, he could see York's infantry and conventional armored vehicles were bogged down fighting their way through a grueling guerilla-style defense by Manhattan's micronian scaled soldiers and civilian volunteers. But now, dozens of refitted battlepods, painted matte black with midnight blue identifiers, were blowing straight past the resistance. The towering mecha crossed entire city blocks with incredible, thruster assisted leaps. Elsewhere, a near equal number of Centaur hover tanks was winding its way through the north of the city, bypassing barricades and strong points. All seemed to be converging on the Municipal Building.
Rick couldn't raise Bron or anyone in the city leadership, nor could he get the attention of anyone in the MDU, as fragmented bands of defenders fought on, heedless of their own lives. Edwards and his five remaining Valkyries were at the left flank of York's battlepods, sniping with lasers and trying to peel some of their number away from the juggernaut advance. There was nothing for it. He nudged the Lightning into a nose-first power dive that brought back memories of his stomach churning plunge into Macross city during the first battle on Launch Day, all of those years ago.
"Is it wise to drop straight into that mess, sir?" Millard asked.
"There's no one left to stand in York's way. This is what I'm here for."
Rick's instrument panel tinted red, bold block letters warning him MISSILE LOCK.
"I have three groups totaling thirty-four F-16's. Distance is twenty-three kilometers," Millard told him over the screech of the cockpit's alert tone. "All vectoring on your flight path."
Rick smirked as he confirmed the data the orbital observers were streaming to him. "York's reserve squadrons." They were closing in like a swarm of vipers around a raptor, clearly smelling an easy kill and a chance to take revenge for the massacre carried out by Phantom Squadron. "Time for Rockwell-Bell to prove their work."
Without hesitation, he reached out with a gloved hand and pulled the white lever marked 'B' next to his left knee. While half of the UN Spacy watched with held breath, the Lightning's enormous outboard thruster pods split along their lengths, forming into legs and shoulders as the main fuselage folded and the green-visored head popped up between the extended arms. It all happened in a smooth sequence that lasted mere seconds, and Rick found himself piloting an armored sky-diver in freefall, thousands of feet above the island of Manhattan.
Rick didn't bother trying to dodge or shoot down the dozens of missiles sweeping toward him. The Lightning's next generation active countermeasures foiled the laughably outdated guidance systems of the AMRAAMs and he slipped past them as they suddenly veered off in all directions, blindly trying to find him. Instead, he concentrated on his multi-tracker, highlighting the aggressor aircraft and unleashing a hornet swarm of his own warheads from wing pylons and internal launch bays. His targets fared no better than Phantom Squadron's opponents had hours earlier.
"Very impressive, Lightning One," Millard commented as most of the F-16's disappeared in balls of flame, "but you've used up all of your missiles, and there are still eight bandits left."
Rick shook his head. The Lightning was a hot ride, everything he had been promised, but there was nothing especially glorious about destroying nearly helpless foes. He had racked up nearly as many kills the first time he flew a FAST pack equipped Valkyrie against unprepared battlepods.
"It doesn't matter. They've used up most of their ordnance already, and they're fleeing for their lives. I've got to keep focused on our objective."
He let his battloid drop like a stone, tucking in its arms and legs, then ignited his thrusters and put on even more speed, only tilting back and reversing his plummeting descent when he was just a few hundred feet above Kimlau Square. More than a dozen battlepods were massing in the open space, arriving from multiple streets and putting themselves only a few short leaps away from the Municipal Building. The Lightning screamed down from the war-blackened sky and Rick brought it into a delicately balanced hover on its thruster array, twenty feet above the asphalt.
The battlepods, like absurdly plump, headless birds, pivoted and tracked on Rick, but did not immediately fire, clearly dumbfounded by his unexpected arrival. He hesitated. He knew this place. A lifetime ago, though it was only eight years, old Pop Hunter took his teenaged son to eat at Kimlau Square to celebrate him winning his fourth national flying competition. The square was small, tucked to the side of several converging boulevards, but it was a lovely place, with raised stone flower beds and carefully manicured, blossoming trees. A lone statue of Lin Ze Xu looked down sternly from a stone plinth, a figure from what was now an almost mythical lost past.
Another battlepod cleared half a city block on its monstrous thrusters and landed just outside the square, then barreled through a dim sum restaurant and crushed its cheerful red awning in an avalanche of smashed brickwork and shattered glass. The black war machine leveled its weapons and unleashed a clumsy fusillade of particle beams and armor-piercing slugs at Rick.
Without the need for conscious thought, Rick drifted his battloid out of the path of the poorly aimed volley like a flitting hummingbird. The spell broken, he flexed the YF-4's burly arms and, with a snarl on his face, struck back. The Lightning needed no gun pod. The prototype carried more than enough firepower in the energy pulse cannons installed in both its shoulders. Vibrant green bursts of energy blurted from the focusing apertures. Rick's opening volley tore across the main hull of the Glaug unit and it was consumed in the titanic explosion typical of mecha powered by Protoculture.
Rick took advantage of the confusion he had caused and backed around a four story block of businesses, inadvertently landing in a tiny cemetery that dated to the 17th century. He waited, sweat beading his face as he watched his monitor and listened to the low register hum of his weapons' capacitors recharging.
"They're coming," Millard reported.
"I'm ready."
Sure enough, the crews of the battlepods couldn't resist leaping the block in pursuit of him. Six of them landed in a jostling cluster in front of a credit union that faced the next intersection, nearly bowling each other over. Even a green Zentraedi pilot, fresh from the cloning tube, would have had the programmed knowledge to avoid such an elementary mistake, but York's training of its pilots seemed to be rudimentary at best. Of course, York's racist warlords would never have dreamed of employing the skills of experienced Zentraedi pilots in preparing their mecha crews. Rick would make them pay for their lack of preparation.
No reckless spray of energy - Rick would not subject the city to the kind of indiscriminate mayhem York was perpetrating if he could help it. Who knew which buildings were evacuated and which were occupied? He reached out with precise streams of green pulses and blew apart one of the pods, sending the five other tightly packed pods crashing to the ground. He had no time for mercy, and quickly picked them off with followup strikes as they sluggishly tried to get their long, ungainly legs back under them.
"Four more coming around the corner now," his guiding voice from orbit warned him.
Rick slipped back deeper into the space between buildings as the next group came pelting into view, and he fired a sustained blast, setting the skeletal trees of the cemetery alight with the ferocity of his attack. The first two pods tumbled and burst in white flashes, but the next two swung around and returned fire. He went to one knee, avoiding the poorly aimed beams, and took them down with careful shots, but he had no time to catch his breath.
"Evade! Evade! Get out of there now!" Millard ordered.
The entire block of buildings came apart in a fiery maelstrom, savaged over and over by the heavy cannons of the last four battlepods. Rick was already gone, taking off at a run down Saint James Place.
"Go right at the next street. You're very close to the Municipal building. You'll see it when you pass NYPD Headquarters."
"What about the other battlepods?" Rick asked, his breathing coming in gasps.
"They're still blazing away, trying to figure out where you are. I think you terrified them. Besides, the remnants of Phantom Squadron is going to hit them from the rear in a few seconds. You've got to get to the north side of the Municipal building. A reinforced company of Centaurs is approaching."
Rick charged through the space between the NYPD headquarters and the Centre Street overpass just as the leading Centaur platoon arrived on the scene. The boxy hover tanks transformed into their rudimentary battloid mode and brought themselves to a sudden, jerking halt by launching braking grapnels into the surface of the street. They stopped in front of the limestone columns of the Tweed Courthouse, a few hundred yards away. Turrets rotated, and the thick, stubby barrels of their rocket cannons elevated while the grapnel cables retracted, serpent-like back into the hulls. A second and third platoon were nearing from the northeast at the same time.
"No!"
Rick couldn't make it in time. With a shriek, the Centaurs launched their heavy missiles from the tubes of their rocket cannons. He desperately fired on the relatively low velocity missiles, but the range was simply too short. Ten warheads smashed in rapid succession through the granite walls of the forty story building and exploded, causing tons of broken stone and choking clouds of dust to vomit out both sides of the structure. The twenty-five foot tall gilded copper statue, Civic Fame, toppled from the highest spire and crashed to the pavement in pieces, the body of the Greco-Roman goddess figure ruined beyond recognition.
Rick shouted his outrage and fired at a full run, sawing the legs off of the two nearest Centaurs and dropping them like dominos. He didn't know how many people might still be inside the Municipal Building, but this wanton destruction and murder in a world already broken and brought to near extinction lit a fury in him he had felt few times in his life. Leaping over the wrecked Centaurs, he dodged bright hyphens of laser and plasma beams aimed at him from the arm mounts on the other two and went hand-to-hand. Grabbing hold with unyielding alloy gauntlets, he lifted one bodily over his battloid's head and hurled it at its partner, which had reconfigured to tank mode and was trying to escape on a cushion of air. The pair spun away in a mangled mess, leaving furrows in the street behind them. Rick rounded on the larger group of Centaurs up the next avenue.
Unlike the battlepods, these tanks were not piloted by inexperienced crews, and they were in no mood to wrangle with a far superior mecha at knife-fighting distance. They volleyed their rocket cannons, sending him running through the grassy lawn of City Hall Park to scramble for cover around the corner of the courthouse. When the rain of masonry stopped clattering off the head and shoulders of the Lightning, he peeked back around, and saw dozens of small flashes from the upper works of the Centaurs. Compact black canisters arced up and tumbled down to the street, exploding in black puffs of smoke that expanded in seconds to create an obscuring wall that billowed towards him along Centre Street and quickly covered most of the lowest floors of the Municipal Building. Above the smoke, a great gash had been torn in the building's walls, the interior lit a hellish crimson by the fires that the invaders had ignited.
"They're trying to sucker you in," Millard warned. "They've dispersed inside the smoke barrage and are sending a detachment around the other side of the Municipal Building to outflank you."
"Then I'll outflank the flankers."
Rick took his battloid back along Centre Street and circled the building, going up the ramp that led toward the forlorn tatters of the Brooklyn Bridge. He ran along the overpass, unleashing a blistering spray of lasers at the flanking force of Centaurs, which were unprepared and advancing in tank mode. He caught one, then another. Their fan chambers ruptured, spewing their mechanical guts in every direction as they somersaulted and burned. The pilots of the other two cut their starboard fans and let the unsupported weight on that side cause them to pivot almost in place and allow them to reverse direction and beat a hasty retreat, covered by missiles fired from their turrets. Rick leaped the battloid off of the overpass to avoid them and landed in a crouch, palms flat. The Centaurs disappeared around the corner. The Lightning rose to its full height again, and Rick frowned at his sensors.
"Some kind of glitch here. I'm getting poor returns on my scans." So far, the Lightning had been responsive and flawless. There was a pause, then one of the members of the design team patched into the coms.
"Could be a problem with the cooling jacket for your lasers. They've not been tested with this amount of sustained fire since we integrated the improved sensor suite. Might need to up their shielding."
Rick rolled his eyes toward the heavens. "Perfect time to find that out."
"It is a prototype, sir," the engineer noted tartly.
Explosions thundered, and more dust and smoke gushed from the shattered windows of the Municipal Building.
"Blast it!" Millard growled. "They're attacking the building again!"
"Then I'm going into that smoke, sensors or no sensors," Rick said. It was possible the building had been evacuated before he arrived, but the entire city leadership might still be trapped inside, and he had no way to know. He would just have to keep defending it as best he could until York stopped attacking, or he couldn't go on. He throttled forward, keeping low, like a hunting cat.
"I'll help however I can with our eyes in orbit," Millard told him. "I can see muzzle flashes, about fifty meters from the northeast corner. But that doesn't mean there aren't more waiting for you."
"Here I go."
He plunged into the murk, and immediately lost visual. Magnetic resonance failed too, but infrared suddenly gave him two glaring white masses at point blank range. A line of plasma pulses raked across the Lightning's chest plate, and he rolled it to the side. Yellow warning icons lit up on the internal diagnostics, and when he stood, there was a hitch in the left hip that he had to compensate for. He returned fire at one of the infrared contacts, and his screen washed out entirely. His mecha shuddered under the close range explosion, fragments of flying metal clunked off of the fuselage. The whiteout was just starting to clear when the Lightning was struck again, and the battloid went to its knees. His helmeted head hit the side of the cockpit, spots exploding in his vision, and when he could see again, it was to a board covered in more damage alerts - mobility reduced by twenty-five percent, and the starboard cannon was out of commission. Gathering himself, he pushed the prototype into a half crawl half stagger out of the line of fire.
"Think I voided our warranty with Rockwell-Bell," he managed through gritted teeth.
"Hold on, sir!" Millard called out to him. "Help is on the way!"
"Edwards?" he wondered.
"No, it's-"
Millard's reply was drowned out by thundering war cries that reverberated through the cockpit. Hulking figures rushed through the thinning smoke from behind him and engaged the blurred shapes of the Centaurs. Great, burly limbs, clad in gray armor, grabbed the Lightning under its arms and lifted it to its metal-shod feet.
"It's ok, we have you," a voice loud enough to reach Rick through the battloid's heavy armor plating said. It was a giant Zentraedi. His face and fleet-issued armor were coated in soot and dust, but his blue eyes were bright behind the shattered green visor of his combat helmet. A ragged team of full sized Zentraedi warriors from the Manhattan Defense Unit swept past them, roaring battlecries in their native tongue and firing their auto-rifles from the hip. Through the trailing fingers of smoke, he could see a half dozen Centaurs reversing towards cover, the Zentraedi's fire glancing off the angled armor of their hulls with cacophonous clangs and bright sparks.
"I'm alright now. Thank you," Rick said through his loudspeakers, as the soldier released his grip. "What's your name, trooper?"
"Daric, sir."
"The name's Hunter. I appreciate the save."
Daric gave him a toothy grin wider than a great white shark's. "All of us recognize the leader of the Skulls. We are proud to face the foe alongside you."
Rick smiled back. "Then how about we rejoin your squad, and get back in the fight."
"Yes sir!" The man was clearly exhausted, but his voice was impassioned.
"Are you insane, sir?" Millard interrupted. "You're in no condition to go on! The Admiral is furious! I'm finding you a route of retreat."
"And let half-equipped, exhausted troops go back into battle against tanks and battlepods, unsupported? You know I can't do that."
"Sir-"
"Have I been recalled, Commander?"
There was a pause, and Rick could imagine Millard turning to meet the gaze of their commanding officer, the woman who had guided him through the storm of war these many years, who had just as great a role in forging him into the soldier he had become as his departed big brother had.
"No, sir."
"Then the operation will continue."
He followed Daric back into the firefight, driving back the surprised and disorganized Centaurs, until the vanguard of another company arrived to reinforce the enemy. The combat became as intense as anything he had seen since the height of the war.
Rick was badly battered, possibly concussed, and his veritech was seriously damaged. There were no clever stratagems now, instead he lost himself to a hazed battle state, his body commanding the Lightning on pure instinct. There was no sense of time, or the number of foes encountered and defeated. Centaurs fired, fled, burned. More battlepods straggled in, and he fought them too. He saw flesh and blood Zentraedi troopers take grievous wounds from weapons meant to blast and cut apart heavily armored vehicles. Life's blood streaked the buildings and streets in shocking red. The nature of mecha warfare, and his position as a pilot, had largely spared him from sights like these, but as the struggle dragged on, he was forced to witness his allies falling beside him, one by one, their great size magnifying the horror of their deaths. He couldn't follow the greater struggle for Manhattan. All that was left was the need to defeat the enemy, to defend the soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder with him. Voices called out to him, voices that were too far away for him to understand.
"Lightning One, respond! Sir! Rick!"
Millard was shouting at him, he realized. Tears blurred his vision, but not enough to obscure the face of Daric, who he cradled in his battloid's arms, or enough to blot out the his view of the hole burned through the man's chest plate and body.
"What is it, Millard?" he asked hoarsely.
"It's time to get out of there. They're gone."
"I'm not leaving them to-"
"They're gone. All of them. The sector around the Municipal Building has emptied. Friendlies, hostiles, civilians. The situation has-"
A squeal issued from Rick's headset that had him turning his head and grimacing in pain, and then the channel washed away to static that even the Lightning's improved com receivers couldn't filter. He gently lowered Daric's body to the cratered street and flipped through the standard frequencies.
"Battlefield-wide, broad-spectrum jamming," he muttered to himself, proper awareness starting to return. The jamming wasn't from friendlies, which meant it had to be the combined effort of a lot of enemy scout pods. Something major was afoot. Millard was right, with the area emptied, it was time to move on and get a handle on what was happening. The half dozen more battlepods moving through the area a few blocks away only added to the urgency. He was in no shape to tangle with them alone. He looked around, regretfully. The fighting had moved him a couple of intersections north, in front of a completely devastated row of government buildings and courthouses, interspersed with the smoldering, charred remains of small public green spaces. The bodies of his Zentraedi comrades were intermingled with the wrecked war machines of the invaders they had defeated, and there was no time to handle their remains with the dignity they deserved.
Deciding to go south, in the direction of Battery Park, where Rick remembered the defenders had set up a field post for the visiting Phantoms, he boosted off the ground on the Lightning's backpack and leg thrusters, and pulled the lever for guardian mode, needing speed and mobility the damaged battloid could no longer give him. A mistake. Rick heard a grinding metallic groan mixed with a squeal of misfiring servo-motors that no veritech should ever make. Black and yellow hazard stripes flashed into view on the borders of his heads up display, along with a dire warning.
TRANSFORM - CRITICAL ERROR -
sequence 34.5a-2 [FAIL]
Rick barely had time to read the words before the world turned upside down.
Rick woke up, at first only conscious of the pain in his head and neck, the ache in his ribs, and then of the rush of blood behind his eyes and temples. He was hanging, inverted, from his cockpit harness. His large, primary monitor, amazingly still functioning, was at an odd angle, stuck halfway to the stowed position it was kept in when the Lightning was in guardian or fighter mode. The canopy's armor shield was retracted, and past the bulk of the monitor, he could see cracked and dusty pavement, and a sliver of the ruined street. The veritech seemed to have flipped onto its back partway through the transformation sequence, and crashed tail-first into a storefront. He could make out the awkward sprawl of its dented, blistered limbs to either side, partially buried in a jumble of broken concrete blocks and glittering glass shards.
He tentatively tried to manipulate the Lightning's arms, and was unsurprised when he heard the servo-motors whine, but fail to move them even an inch. Trying to get the legs in motion was equally fruitless. He could just see the black, hoof-like thruster ports of the veritech's legs hanging in his field of view. The Lightning must look ridiculous, like a goose that had crashed trying to take flight and ended up on its back with its legs in the air. With the canopy upside down and pinned shut against the sidewalk, he was truly trapped. A squall of static in his ears told him that coms were still unusable.
Rick was still too woozy to even think about panicking at his predicament. A cloud of dust suddenly stirred up outside, and a metallic clang of a large mecha touching down shook him around in his harness. He saw black and blue, spindly legs, projecting cannon barrels like whiskers, and a baleful red scanner port. The battlepods he had seen moments ago had come to investigate.
Rick had been shot down so many times that it was alternately emberrasing or terrifying, depending on when he thought about it, and yet, he had expected his end to be something… more memorable. Did Bron and the others escape? Would Lisa be disappointed in him? Had he made enough of a difference to make up for what he had put her through?
Familiar laser beams cut molten trails of bubbling black tar through the street, and the battlepod jumped away in a hurry. Three shadows passed close by, about the right size and speed for pursuing guardians, and then a trailing Valkyrie landed by the wreck of his Lightning.
The battloid, mottled gray and fire scorched, knelt in an almost casual motion, one arm resting across its knee. Its head, carrying the quad lasers of an officer's variant like lethal antennae, peered closely into Rick's cockpit, and then it aimed a directional coms emitter at his veritech. An amused voice cut through the static.
"Well, well, this must be your lucky day, Hunter. You survived after all."
"Colonel… Edwards?" Rick croaked with difficulty.
"Right you are."
"Saved me…"
"Did I? You're not safe yet."
Confused, Rick shook his head at that comment, and regretted it when pain arced through his brain and neck.
"What-" He stopped and spat. A thick glob of blood marred the inside of the scratched cockpit glass. "What about the building? The… President? Bron?"
"Don't know." Edwards said dismissively. "I didn't see a motorcade pull out of there. The building's burning pretty good now."
"… Help me up?" He felt numb. His words were coming out slow and slurred.
"No, I don't think you're going anywhere in that contraption, Hunter. Just what were you trying to do here? I know you love your heroics, but I think you chose the wrong battlefield today."
"Had to… save…"
"And you're the only skilled pilot on the Factory Satellite?" Edwards sneered. "You need to learn to keep your eyes on the real prize, Admiral. You can be sure I am. But don't worry, I'll get the job done."
"Need… out."
"Nah, you're as safe there as anywhere else on Manhattan right now. I'd love to settle things today, but I have to go, Hunter. York's caught us by surprise again. Maybe I'll see you after the battle. Maybe not."
"Edwards…" Rick groaned, but the Valkyrie blasted off and left him behind. He fumbled to unlatch his harness and fell face first out of his seat before he could catch himself, landing hard on the inside of the canopy. Blinding pain exploded behind his eyes, and then, he lost consciousness.
Next time… underground, plague of locusts, and intervention…