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

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



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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,