"08 - Metal Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

Robotech: Metal Fire
Book Eight of the Robotech Series
Copyright 1987 by Jack McKinney


CHAPTER ONE
EXEDORE: So, Admiral, there is little doubt: [Zentraedi and Human] genetic makeup points directly at a common point of origin.
ADMIRAL GLOVAL: Incredible.
EXEDORE: Isn't it. Furthermore, while examining the data we noticed many common traits, including a penchant on the part of both races to indulge in warfare...Yes, both races seem to enjoy making war.
From Exedore's intel reports to the SDF-2 High Command

Once before, an alien fortress had crashed on Earth...
Its arrival had put an end to almost ten years of global civil war; and its resurrection had ushered in armageddon. That fortress's blackened, irradiated remains lay buried under a mountain of earth, heaped upon it by the very men and women who had rebuilt the ship on what would have been its island grave. But unbeknownst to those who mourned its loss, the soul of that great ship had survived the body and inhabited it still-an entity living in the shadows of the technology it animated, waiting to be freed by its natural keepers, and until then haunting the world chosen for its sorry exile...
This new fortress, this most recent gift from heaven's more sinister side, had announced its arrival, not with tidal and tectonic upheavals, but with open warfare and devastation-death's bloodstained calling cards. Nor was this fortress derelict and uncontrolled in its fateful fall but driven, brought down to Earth by the unwilling minor players in its dark drama...

"ATAC Fifteen to air group!" Dana Sterling yelled into her mike over the din of battle. "Hit 'em again with everything you have! Try to keep their heads down! They're throwing everything but old shoes at us down here!"
Less than twenty-four hours ago her team, the 15th squad, Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, had felled this giant, not with sling and shot, but with a coordinated strike launched at the fortress's Achilles' heel-the core reactor governing the ship's bio-gravitic network. It had dropped parabolically from geosynchronous orbit, crashlanding in the rugged hills several kilometers distant from Monument City.
Hardly a coincidental impact point, Dana said to herself as she bracketed the fortress in the sights of the Hovertank's rifle/cannon.
The 15th, in Battloid mode, was moving across a battle zone that was like some geyser field of orange explosions and high-flung dirt and rock-a little like a cross between a moonscape and the inside of Vesuvius on a busy day.
Up above, the TASC fighters, the Black Lions among them, roared in for another pass. The glassy green teardrop-cannon of the fortress didn't seem as effective in atmosphere, and so far there had been no sign of the snowflake-shields. But the enemy's hull, rearing above the assaulting Battloids, still seemed able to soak up all the punishment they could deal it and stand unaltered.
An elongated hexagon, angular and relatively flat, the alien fortress measured over five miles in length, half that in width. Its thickly plated hull was the same lackluster gray of the Zentraedi ships used in the First Robotech War; but in contrast to those organic leviathan dreadnaughts, the fortress boasted a topography to rival that of a cityscape. Along the long axis of its dorsal surface was a mile-long raised portion of superstructure that resembled the peaked roofs of many twentieth-century houses. Forward was a concentrically coiled conelike projection Louie Nichols had christened "a Robotech teat'"; aft were massive Reflex thruster ports; and elsewhere, weapons stations, deep crevices, huge louvered panels, ziggurats, onions domes, towers like two-tined forks, stairways and bridges, armored docking bays, and the articulated muzzles of the ship's countless segmented "insect leg" cannons.
Below the sawtooth ridge the pilots of the fortress had chosen as their crash site was Monument City, and several miles distant across two slightly higher ridges, the remains of New Macross and the three Human-made mounds that marked the final resting place of the super dimensional fortresses.
Dana wondered if the SDF-1 had something to do with this latest warfare. If these invaders were indeed the Robotech Masters (and not some other band of XT galactic marauders), had they come to avenge the Zentraedi in some way? Or worse still-as many were asking-was Earth fighting a new war with micronized Zentraedi?
Child of a Human father and a Zentraedi mother-the only known child of such a marriage-Dana had good reason to disprove this latter hypothesis.
That some of the invaders were humanoid was a fact only recently accepted by the High Command. Scarcely a month ago Dana had been face-to-face with a pilot of one of the invaders' bipedal mecha-the so-called Bioroids. Bowie Grant had been even closer, but Dana was the one who had yet to get over the encounter. All at once the war had personalized itself; it was no longer machine against machine, Hovertank against Bioroid.
Not that that mattered in the least to the hardened leaders of the UEG. Since the end of the First Robotech War, Human civilization had been on a downhill slide; and if it hadn't come to Humans facing aliens, it probably would have been Humans against Humans.
Dana heard a sonic roar through the Hovertank's external pickups and looked up into a sky full of new generation Alpha fighters, snub-nosed descendants of the Veritechs.
The place was dense with smoke and flying fragments from missile bursts, and the missile's retwisting tracks. As Dana watched, one pair of VTs finished a pass only to have two alien assault ships lift into the air and go up after them. Dana yelled a warning over the Forward Air Control net, then switched from the FAC frequency to her own tactical net because the real showdown had begun; two blue Bioroids had popped up from behind boulders near the fortress.
The blues opened fire and the ATACs returned it with interest; the range was medium-long, but energy bolts and annihilation discs skewed and splashed furiously, searching for targets. At Dana's request, a Tactical Air Force fighter-bomber flight came in to drop a few dozen tons of conventional ordnance while the TASCs got set up for their next run.
Abruptly, a green-blue light shone from the fortress, and a half second later it lay under a hemisphere of spindriftlike stuff, a dome of radiant cobweb, and all incoming beams and solids were splashing harmlessly from it.
But the enemy could fire through their own shield, and did, knocking down two of the retreating bombers and two approaching VTs with cannonfire. Whatever the damage to the bio-gravitic system was, it plainly hadn't robbed the fortress of all its stupendous power.
Dana's hand went out for the mode selector lever. She attuned her thoughts to the mecha and threw the lever to G, reconfiguring from Battloid to Gladiator. The Hovertank was now a squat, two-legged SPG (self-propelled gun), with a single cannon stretching out in front of it.
Nearby, in the scant cover provided by hillside granite outcroppings and dislodged boulders, the rest of the 15th-Louie Nichols, Bowie Grant, Sean Phillips, and Sergeant Angelo Dante among others-similarly reconfigured, was unleashing salvos against the stationary fortress.
"Man, these guys are tough as nails!" Dana heard Sean say over the net. "They aren't budging an inch!"
And they aren't likely to, Dana knew. We're fighting for our home; they're fighting for their ship and their only hope of survival.
"At this rate the fighting could go on forever," Angelo said. "Somebody better think of something quick." And everyone knew he wasn't talking about sergeants, lieutenants, or anybody else who might be accused of working for a living; the brass better realize it was making a mistake, or come evening they would need at least one new Hovertank squad.
Then Angelo picked up on a blue that had charged from behind a rock and was headed straight for Bowie's Diddy-Wa-Diddy. The attitude and posture of Bowie's mecha suggested that it was distracted, unfocused.
Damn kid, woolgathering! "Look out, Bowie!"
But then Sean appeared in Battloid mode, firing with the rifle/cannon, the blue stumbling as it broke up in the blazing beams, then going down.
"Wake up and stay on your toes, Bowie," Angelo growled. "That's the third time today ya fouled up."
"Sorry," Bowie returned. "Thanks, Sarge."
Dana was helping Louie Nichols and another trooper try to drive back blues who were crawling forward from cover to cover on their bellies, the first time the Bioroids had ever been seen to do such a thing.
"These guys just won't take no for an answer," Dana grated, raking her fire back and forth at them.

Remote cameras positioned along the battle perimeter brought the action home to headquarters. An intermittent beeping sound (like nonsense Morse) and horizontal noise bars disrupted the video transmission. Still, the picture was clear: the Tactical Armored units were taking a beating.
Colonel Rochelle vented his frustration in a slow exhale of smoke, and stubbed out his cigarette in the already crowded ashtray. There were three other staff officers with him at the long table, at the head of which sat Major General Rolf Emerson.
"The enemy is showing no sign of surrender," Rochelle said after a moment. "And the Fifteenth is tiring fast."
"Hit them harder," Colonel Rudolph suggested. "We've got the air wing commander standing by. A surgical strike-nuclear, if we have to."
Rochelle wondered how the man had ever reached his current rank. "I won't even address that suggestion. We have no clear-cut understanding of that ship's energy shield. And what if the cards don't fall our way? Earth would be finished."
Rudolph blinked nervously behind his thick glasses. "I don't see that the threat would be any greater than the attacks already launched against Monument."