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ГЛАВА ТРИ
Я действительно не могу сказать, кто сказал это первым -коммандор операции , Чёрный Лев, член экипажа крейсера, но кто-то сделал это, и, учитывая обстоятельства, каждый откликнулся на призыв, там и тогда случилось начало: Второй войны Роботек. Лейтенант Мари Кристалл, как процитировано в «Повелители,» История войн Роботек, Часть. CXII
Космическая станция Либерти медленно дрейфовала в пяти мерном Лагранжевом пространстве вблизи Луны. Она совмещала в себе функции крепости-форпоста, центрального узла связи, а также промежуточной станцией на маршрутах между Землей и колониями на Луне и других мирах. Ее комплекс космической аппаратуры связи, комплекс который не мог работать на Земле, был единственным способом для поддержания пусть даже периодических контактов с экспедицией SDF-3. Либери была во многом залогом защиты Земли.
Таким образом, она стала приоритетной целью.
«Свобода, это Лунная база, Лунная база! Прием!»
Оператор связи Лунной Базы отчаянно регулировал мощность своего передатчика отчаянно, бросив взгляд на развертку радара он сделал отметку на экране дисплея.
Пять целей, большие, приближаются с темной стороны луны. В секции G2 были уверены в том, что никто из человеческой расы не контактировал и даже не видел их прежде. Форма и сила полученного сигнала говорили о том, что они исходят от грозных кораблей, идущих курсом на станцию Либерти с ужасающей скоростью.
«Почему они не отвечают? Почему?!« Связь внезапно оборвалась, как будто какая-то помеха подавила её, как только, первая цель была обнаружена. Ничто на Лунной Базе не могло быть поднято в воздух, чтобы перехватить неопознанные летающие объекты.
Оператор почувствовал как холодный пот выступил у него на лбу. Это был страх за себя и за ничего не подозревающих людей на борту космической станции. Если станция связи Либерти будет уничтожена, то Лунная база и другие человеческие форпосты рассеянные по всей Солнечной системе окажутся отрезанными, что сделает их легкой мишенью в случае нападения.
Внезапно произошел всплеск показателей приборов: либо противник был вынужден перераспределить энергию с канала помех в каналы оружия, щитов, или куда-либо еще, или компьютерные системы радиоэлектронного противодействия нашли способ «пробить» канал передачи. Прерывистый, зашумленный помехами ответ Либерти пробился в эфир.
Лунная База ОП включил свою гарнитуру микрофон и начал передавать с неистовой поспешностью.
«Космическая станция Либерти, я Луная база. Экстренное-сообщение, повторяю, экстренное-сообщение! Пять целей сближаются с вами, курс восемь-один-три дробь четыре-четыре-девять! Вы не можете их засечь; они ставят помехи и маскируют сигнал. Мы не могли их засечь, пока они не вошли в зону оптического наблюдения. Возможно противник, повторяю, возможно противник. Они идут прямо к вам! »
В центре связи станции Либерти, другой оператор доложил дежурному офицеру, о получении Экстренного-сообщения высокой важности, как только принял и записал передачу Луной базы.
Когда это было сделано, он повернулся к пульту, чтобы предпринять исключительные меры введенные в действие с момента восстановления Земли после Холокоста Зентреди. Сейчас офицеру попросту не хватило бы времени, чтобы прибыть в центр связи, оценить сообщение , связаться с сотрудниками G3, и объявить Боевую тревогу. Каждая секунда была на счету; Человечество познало это на собственной шкуре.
Оператор никогда не делал такого раньше, но ведь никому ещё не доводилось оказаться в подобной ситуации. Решительно нажав подсвеченную красным кнопку, капрал центра связи запустил систему оповещения космической станции о Боевой тревоге, одновременно направив на Землю сообщение призывающее последовать их примеру.
Он попытался собрать воедино все, что сообщил ему Оператор Луной Базы так же, как делает это дежурный вахтенный офицер. Оператор прикрыл рукой микрофон связи и стал передавать по трансляции: «Боевая тревога, мэм! Прикажите разогревать оружейные батареи, походу у нас большие проблемы?! »
Вахтенный лейтенант кивнула. Она тут же повернулась к интеркому безопасности, связываясь с командным центром станции. Включить всеобщее оповещение о боевой тревоге.
«Занять боевые посты! Лазерным и плазменным расчетам, подготовиться открыть огонь! «
Тяжелые артиллеристы бросился к своим боевым постам. Либерти приходила в полную боевую готовность. Тяжело бронированные башни открылись обнажая уродливые, блестящие морды двух- и четырех-ствольных батарей, ориентирующихся стволами в направлении последнего известного вектора подхода цели.
Рядом с крепостью, начали курсирование патрульные корабли, в попытке обнаружить и пресечь подход противника. Это были большие, медленные, дельтаобразные крейсера, которые собирались заменить в ближайшем будущем. Они были первыми, кому довелось прочувствовать силу Мастеров Роботек.
Пять штурмовых кораблей Мастеров Роботек приближались, напоминая своей формой песчано-красные пузатые бутылки. Их флагман открыл энергетические пушки нацеливаясь на Земной корабль. Его раскаленный залп вскрыл борт крейсера, с той же легкостью с какой повар потрошит рыбу. Вакуум и последующие взрывы довершили разрушение корабля Землян. Все произошло так быстро, что у мужчин и женщин составлявших экипаж крейсера не времени даже вскрикнуть. The Masters' warcraft plunged in, eager for more kills.
«I can't raise any of the patrol cruisers, ma'am,» the Liberty Station commo op told TASC Lieutenant Marie Crystal. «And three of them have disappeared from the radar screens.»
Marie looked up at the commo link that had been patched through to her by the commander of the patrol flotilla with which her Tactical Armored Space Corps fighter squadron was serving. She nodded, her delicate jaw set.
She was a pale young woman in battle armor, with blue eyes that had an exotic obliqueness to them, and short, unruly hair like black straw. There was an intensity to her very much like that of an unhooded bird of prey.
«Roger that, Liberty Station. Black Lions will respond.» She ran a fast calculation; the flotilla had diverted from its usual near-Earth duties when the commo breakdown occurred, and was now very close to Liberty-close enough for binocular and telescope sighting on the explosions and energy-bolt signatures out where the sneak attack had taken place, beyond the satellite.
«Our ETA at your position in approximately ninety seconds from launch.» He acknowledged, white-faced and sweating, and Marie broke the patch-up. Then she signaled her TASC unit, the Black Lions, for a hot scramble.
«Attention all pilots. Condition red, condition red. This is not a drill, I say again, this is not a drill. Prepare for immediate launch, all catapults. Black Lions prepare to launch. »
The decks reverberated with the impact of running armored boots. Marie led the way to the hangar deck, her horned flight helmet in one hand. There was all the usual madness of a scramble, and more, because no one among the young Southern Cross soldiers had ever been in combat before.
Marie boarded her Veritech fighter with practiced ease, even though she was weighted down by her body armor. The scaled-up cockpit had room for her in the bulky superalloy suit, but even so, and even after years of practice she found it a bit more snug than she would have liked.
The Tactical Armored Space Corps' front-line fightercraft had been decreased in size quite a bit since the Robotech War because they no longer needed to go to a Battloid-mode size that would let them slug it out toe-to-toe with fifty-foot-tall Zentraedi warriors or their huge Battlepods.
Her maint crew got her seated properly and ready to taxi for launch. As Marie sat studying the gauges and instruments and indicators on her panel, she didn't realize how much like a slim, keen-eyed Joan of Arc she looked in her armor.
Strange, she brooded. It's not like I thought it would be. I'm anxious but not nervous.
Crewpeople with spacesuits color-coded to their jobs raced around, seeing to ordnance and moving craft, or racing to take their places in the catapult crews. They, too, tended to be young, a part of Robotechnology's new generation, shouldering responsibilities and facing hazards that made them adults while most of them were still in their teens. Even in peacetime, death was a part of virtually every cruise, and the smallest mishap could cost lives.
The Black Lions launched and formed up; the enemy ships turned toward them but altered course at the last moment, launching their own smaller craft.
«What are those things?» Second Lieutenant Snyder, whose callsign was Black Beauty, yelled when the enemy fighters came into visual range, already firing.
Gone were the simple numeral callsigns of a generation before; Earth was a feudal hegemony of city-states and regional power structures, bound by virtually medieval loyalties, under the iron fist of the UEG, and the planet's military reflected that. So did the armor of the Southern Cross's ultratech knights, including Marie's own helmet, with its stylized horns.
«Shut up and take 'em!» Marie snapped; she hated unnecessary chatter on a tac net. «And stick with your wingmen!»
But she didn't blame Black Beauty for being shocked. So, the Zentraedi are back, she thought. Or somebody a lot like them.
The bogies that were zooming in at the Black Lions were faceless armored figures nearly the size of the alien invaders who appeared in 1999 to savage Earth and initiate the Robotech War. These were different, though: They were Humanoid-looking, though insectlike; Zentraedi Battlepods were like headless alloy ostriches bristling with cannon.
Moreover, these things rode swift, maneuverable saucer-shaped Hovercraft, like outlandish walking battleships riding waterjet platforms.
But they were fast and deadly, whatever they were. The Hovercraft dipped and changed vector, prodigal with their power, performing maneuvers that seemed impossible outside of atmosphere. Up until today that had always been a Veritech specialty.
About twenty of the intruders dove in at a dozen Black Lions, and the dogfighting began. Fifteen years had gone by since the last time Human and alien had clashed, and the answered prayers that were peace were suddenly vacated.
And the dying hadn't changed.
The small volume of space, just an abstract set of coordinates, became the new killing ground. VT and Bioroid circled and pounced at one another, fired or dodged depending upon who had the advantage, maneuvered furiously, and came back for more.
The aliens fired extremely powerful energy weapons, most often from the bulky systems packages that sat before them on their control stems. That gave the Lions the eerie feeling that a horde of giant metallic water-skiers was trying to immolate them.
But the arrangement only looked funny; incandescent rays flashed from the control-stem projectors, and three TASC fliers died almost at once. The saucer-shaped Hoverplatforms turned to seek new prey. This time they demonstrated that they could fire from apertures in the bodies of their saucercraft as well as those in the controlstem housings.
«Black Beauty, Black Beauty, two bogies on your tail!» John Zalenga, who was known as White Knight, called out the warning. «Go to turbo-thrust!» Marie spared a quick glance to her commo display, and saw Zalenga's white-visaged helmet with its brow-vanes on one side of a split-screen, Snyder's ebony headgear, like some turbaned, veiled muslim champion's on the other.
But before Snyder could do anything about his dilemma, the two were on him, their fire crisscrossing on his VT's tail. Marie heard the fight rather than saw it, because at that moment she had the shot she wanted at a darting alien Hovercraft.
VT armament had changed in a generation: gone were the autocannon and their depleted transuranic shells. Amplified laser arrays sent pulses of destructive power through the vacuum. Armored saucer-platform and armored alien rider disappeared in a cloud of flame and shrapnel.
Marie's gaze was level and intent behind her tinted visor. «We lost Black Beauty; the rest of you start flying the way you were taught! Start flying like Black Lions!»
Outside of a few minor brushfire conflicts over borders, the VTs of Marie's generation had never flown combat before. Certainly, Aerial Combat School was nothing like this: real enemy fire and real friends being blown to rags of sizzling flesh and cinders, with the next volley coming at you.
But Marie's voice and their training put the Lions back in control. The survivors got back into tight pairs, covering one another as the Bioroids came back for another run.
«Going to Guardian mode,» Marie bit out, her breath rasping a little in her helmet facemask. They were all pulling lots of gees in the hysterical maneuvering of the dogfight; as trained, they locked their legs and tightened their midsections to keep the blood up in their heads, where it was needed. The grunting and snorting for breath made the Black Lions' tac net sound as if some desperate tug-of-war were in progress.
Marie pulled the triplet-levers as one; her VT began changing.
None of the intricacies of mechamorphosis mattered much to the young VT leader with a sky full of bogies coming at her. All Marie really cared about was that when she summoned up her craft's Guardian configuration, the order was obeyed.
She could feel the craft shifting and changing shape around her, modules sliding and structural parts reconforming themselves, like some fantastic mechanical origami. In moments, Veritech became Guardian, a giant figure like a cross between a warrior and a space-battlecruiser, a sleek eagle of Robotechnology.
«Got you covered, White Knight,» she told Zalenga. «Here they come.» The Masters' battle mecha surged in at them, the flashes of their fire lighting the expressionless insect eyes of the Bioroids' head-turrets. But the next joust of spaceborne paladins was very different from what had gone before. The Guardian had most of the speed of a Veritech, but the increased maneuverability and firepower that came from bringing it closer to anthropomorphic form. More or less the form of the Bioroids.
But more, Marie Crystal thought her craft through its change and its actions. The secret of Robotech mecha lay in the pilot's helmet-the «thinking cap,» as it had been dubbed. Receptors there picked up thought impulses and translated them into the mecha's actions. No other control system could have given a machine that kind of agility and battle-prowess, which seemed more like those of a living thing.
Marie dodged one Hovercraft's fire, neatly missing that of the thing's companion, darting like a superalloy dragonfly. She controlled her mecha with deft manipulations of the gross motor-controls-hand and foot controls there in the cockpit-but more important, she thought her Guardian through the firefight. Mental imaging was the key to Robotech warfare.
The lead Bioroid was firing at a place Marie's Guardian no longer occupied. She blasted it dead center with an almost frugally short burst of intense fire, a hyphen of novafire that was gone nearly before it had begun. The Bioroid erupted outward in fireball demise.
She ducked the backup Bioroid's cannonade, too, and wove through it to fix the alien mecha in her gunsight reticle and shoot. The second Bioroid was an articulated fortress-bulbous-forearmed, bulbous-legged-one moment, and a superheated gas cloud headed for entropy the next.
The other Black Lions weren't slow to pick up on the new tactics. Some went to Guardian mode, and one or two to Battloid-the Veritech equivalent of the Bioroids-while one or two remained in Fighter mode. The Bioroids simply could not adjust to the smorgasbord of Earthly war-mecha suddenly facing them. Tables turned, and it was the invader mecha that disappeared in spheres of white-hot explosion. Then it became apparent that they had had enough; like oily, scuttling beetles, the two or three survivors hunkered over their control stems and fled.
A controller from the Lions' cruiser got through to them just as they were preparing to mechamorphose and pursue the enemy until none were left.
«Black Lion Team, break contact! All Veritechs, break contact! Let 'em go for now, Lions, and return to the ship at once.»
The ballooning explosions began to die away; Marie gathered up her unit unhurriedly, enjoying mastery of the battlefield.
But she knew that the tactics that had won the Lions this day's fight might not be as effective next time. And she knew, too, that the force her team had faced was probably a negligible number in terms of the enemy's total strength.
She thrust the thought aside. Today was a victory; embattled humanity, cast into the eye of the storm of interstellar Robotech warfare again, had to relearn the skill of taking things one moment, one battle, one breath of life at a time.
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