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from where she stood.
But moments later, as suddenly as the drawing aside of a curtain, the
SDF-1 broke out into a vast, open place. Behind it was a tunnel with its mouth
edged by jagged, bent-out superalloy plate. The Zentraedi gaped as it drifted
across the vast space within the headquarters mountain.
Gloval knew the timing had to be split second and perfect, and he had no
leisure for preparation.
There were quite a few enemy vessels still inside the gargantuan base,
something Gloval had been hoping against. But they were all at rest, unable to
maneuver or open fire for seconds more at least, perhaps as much as a half
minute. In a battle like this, that was an eternity.
"Prepare to execute final barrage!" he snapped as his bridge crew bent
to their work. "Then full power to barrier shield!"
Missile ports opened to let loose the last volley the SDF-1 was capable
of firing, the do-or-die knockout punch Gloval had saved for this moment. The
fortress's heaviest projectiles-Deca missiles the size of old-fashioned ICBMs,
Piledrivers as big as sub-launched nukes-were readied for firing.
The bows of the flatdecks opened like sharks' mouths, revealing racks of
smaller Hammerhead and Bighorn missiles.
"Target acquisition on their main reflex furnace," Gloval ordered.
But Claudia was way ahead of him. "Target locked in, all missiles, sir,"
she said.
In his command post, the looming Dolza tried to believe what he saw
before him. "What are they doing? They'll destroy us all!"
If the reflex furnace went, the resulting explosion would certainly
destroy the base and everything in it, and quite possibly all ships in both
fleets and even the planet nearby. But that didn't seem to be daunting the
Micronians.
This isn't war! Dolza screamed within himself. It's madness!
So the tiny creatures were willing to die in order to avoid the disgrace
of defeat.
They are more like us than I thought! Dolza realized. They have some
source of strength we must learn. What allies they would snake in a war
against the Robotech Masters!
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"Wait!" he bellowed.
"Fire!" Gloval roared on SDF-1's bridge.
The missiles gushed from the battle fortress, the smaller, faster ones
getting a quick lead and leaving corkscrewing white trails. The heavier ones
took a bit longer to get up to speed, but they quickly overtook and passed
their little siblings. All angled in, on assorted vectors, for the base's
reflex furnaces.
But Gloval had dismissed them from his mind as soon as he had given the
order to let them fly. There was no time to spare.
"All power to barrier shields!" he snapped, but again his bridge crew
had anticipated.
The ship was standing stock still. Every erg of power in it was
channeled to the shields; producing first a cloud of scintillating lights
around the ship, then a green-white sphere like some exotic Christmas
ornament.
"Barrier shield coming to maximum," Kim said calmly. Then, a second
later, just as the first missiles began to detonate on target, "Barrier at
max, sir."
The enemy ships in the base were opening fire now, but their shots
glanced harmlessly off the barrier system. Gloval barely paid attention to
confirmation of that; he had little doubt the Robotech shield created by Dr.
Lang could hold out against an enemy bombardment for a few seconds. The real
test was coming up.
Dolza watched the awesome barrage hit home on the reflex furnace area of
the ship's interior and knew he was going to die.
Even with the protection of its shielding, even with the defenses of
desperate, brave Zentraedi captains who purposely threw their ships in the way
of the all-out salvo, enough missiles got through to ensure that the base
would be destroyed. Many times enough.
The reflex furnaces churned, then spewed forth utter destruction. Dolza,
watching from his command post, had time only for one thought.
Years and years before, he had watched Zor die. Zor had spoken of some
overriding Vision that made the megagenius send the SDF-1 here, to Earth.
Had Zor seen this moment, too? And things beyond it?
Then a terrible light seared him. Dolza howled a fierce Zentraedi war
cry as he was rent to particles.
The interior bulkhead of the base began to bulge with secondary
explosions, nodes of superhard armor being pushed out like putty by the force
of the blasts running through the place. The rift in the reflex furnaces that
had destroyed Dolza's command post was expanding, gushing forth blinding-white
obliteration.
Ships only beginning to maneuver for the run to safety were caught in
it, wiped out of existence like so many soap bubbles in a blast furnace.
The base swelled like an overfilled football, then split apart along
irregular seams that hadn't been there moments before. Ruinous light spilled
out of it, then it lit the sky over Earth like a star.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Francis Bacon said that "In peace the sons bury their fathers and in war the
fathers bury their sons." My father warned me when I joined up that this
didn't always apply to our family, because we were all military. He might have
had some premonition that I would outlive him, but what he didn't foresee was
that his daughter would hear taps played for an entire world.
Lisa Hayes, Recollections
The thick clouds had darkened the Alaskan night to pitch-blackness, but the
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fighter's night-sight capabilities gave Rick a clear view of what he was
doing. The lurching Guardian barely cleared the rim of the Grand Cannon's
shaft without snagging a wingtip.
It might be begging for a crash, but he kept going, nursing the fighter
along until he was beyond the blighted, red-hot area around what had been
Alaska Base.
He was barely clear of the blast radius when Alaska Base went up like a
pyromaniac's fantasy of Judgment Day.
He flew in Fighter mode for a long while, casting back and forth across
the charred Earth for safe landing, watching his radiation detectors and
terrain sensors.
He swooped in over what had been a major UEDC base, according to the
maps. But there was only a dry lake bed, its water vaporized by a direct hit,
and the remains of what had been a major city. The plane started bucking hard,
and he went back to Guardian. The place showed no signs of radioactivity or
fallout; he decided to set down.
It was a little before sunrise on a smoky, darkened world that, it
seemed, would never see the sun again.
Rick hit the foot thrusters and brought the VT to an erratic, slewing
landing. The canopy servos had gotten fried in one of those last blowups, so
he yanked the rescue handgrip and blew the canopy off.
Rick and Lisa stood up in the cockpit and looked out at the mutilated
landscape of Earth. It was as pockmarked as the moon, with deep cracks and
crevasses. Smoke was rolling into the sky from dozens of impact points and
from fires that stretched along the horizon. The air was hot, thick with soot
and dust. There seemed to be volcanic activity along a chain of mountains to
the west. A scorching wind was rising.
The most frightening thing was that there was no water to be seen
anywhere.
There was a patch of open sky, but as they watched, the clouds rolled
in, blotting out the stars. He wondered how the battle had turned out. From
the looks of Earth, it probably didn't matter very much.
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
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