Genesis

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rick somehow succeeded in keeping them from being smashed into a large gun turret as the Mockingbird nosedived, spinning round and round.

"There's nothing to worry about, Minmei; I'm an expert pilot," Rick insisted in what he hoped was a composed voice, fighting his controls and expecting to be slammed back against the SDF-1's superstrong hull. Minmei meanwhile sat with her head buried against his chest, moaning and wishing life would slow down again, even for a moment, so she could catch her breath.

But somewhat to his own surprise, Rick did manage to pull the ship out of its spin, level off, and gain proper flight altitude. "There, okay?"

She got up the nerve to look, saw that things were under control, and couldn't help laughing for joy, hugging him.

Rick Hunter felt very, very pleased with himself and began to wish that the flight could go on forever.

Macross Island was clearly defined beneath the dimensional fortress, seeming to draw nearer as SDF-1 descended. "We will enter fold in ten seconds," Claudia intoned over the PA. "Nine…"

Gloval watched the dozens of displays and screens with no outward show of the misgivings he felt. The enigmatic sealed engines made the huge vessel tremble, and the high vibrations of the fold generators seemed to cut through everyone aboard.

The seconds seemed to stretch on endlessly, then he became aware of Claudia saying, "… two… one… zero!"

"Execute hyperspace fold jump!" Gloval ordered. The bridge gang bent to their duty stations to carry out the command.

It seemed to Gloval that he was seeing the view from the bridge in an altered way, that he was perhaps seeing higher into the ultraviolet or lower into infrared. In any case, the superstructure was outlined with strange hot reds, yellows, and oranges that hadn't been there moments before.

Am I seeing into the thermal part of the spectrum, perhaps?

But even that didn't explain the strange, almost ghostly images, not quite indentifiable, that suddenly loomed in the air or the way in which vision suddenly altered so that the world looked like a shifting double exposure.

The SDF-1 appeared to be in the center of a hot gas cloud. From it expanded a white-hot globe of light, the same sort that the Zentraedi armada had produced earlier that day. Sounds like nothing humans had ever heard before toned and swirled in the crew's ears, with no apparent source.

The fold jump globe expanded, defying Lang's theories and calculations, enveloping Macross and its harbor, making even the supercarriers Daedalus and Prometheus shift in focus and seem to blur into double exposure as the waters crashed as if storm-tossed.

A vibration like an earthquake, far greater than any the Zentraedi attack had produced, shook the shelters, and the refugees thought the worst had come-the worst as they could conceive of it: the end of their world.

In Macross City sudden eddy currents from the fold swept through the streets, destroying buildings and the remains of downed war machines of both armies. The violent side effects of the space jump maneuver caught the tiny Mockingbird too, whirling it like a leaf.

Incandescent motes appeared, growing brighter and brighter, circling like lazy insects or sentient miniature stars. On the bridge, it was impossible to focus on instruments or screens. Lisa sobbed, feeling sick and wrenched from herself, as if she were being torn from life itself.

A globe with the SDF-1 at its center now encompassed the island, the waters around it, and a considerable bubble of sky. The ocean crashed against the force field, without effect.

SDF-1 shifted through the double-exposure changes again, stabilizing at last, then began to fade. In one moment, the spherical force field was immovable in the midst of the furious sea-and in the next, it was gone.

Billions of gallons of water poured in to fill the gap, colliding to send up tidal waves that would race around the planet for days. Air rushed in to take the place of the sudden vacuum, creating a thunderclap like the detonation of a nuclear weapon, only sharper.

Over the rim of the world, where the main Zentraedi elements were forming up for a final attack, the event registered only picoseconds before the glow erupted. It lit the horizon like a "diamond necklace" eclipse. Breetai needed no instruments or tech reports to know what had happened.

"A fold! I don't believe it!"

"Impossible that close to planetary gravity!" Exedore burst out in a rare display of emotion. These primitives somehow rebuilt the SDF-1 and, with whatever modifications or improvising they did, somehow came up with a superior spacefold process! Or perhaps it's something of Zor's; it doesn't matter. If it still exists, we must have that ship!

Breetai was uttering his terrible animal growl, fists clenched so tightly that Exedore could hear the squeaking of bones and cartilage under the exertion of those corded muscles.

"I want to know their exact position immediately!"

Out in the farthest reaches of the solar domain it had been cold and dark since the birth pains of the solar system, almost twenty million years before. Here the great furnace of the sun was only a tiny, cold droplet in the night, and Pluto, the only planetary body, nearly forty times as far from the life-giving primary as Earth, maintained a temperature near absolute zero.

But in an incomparable moment, Pluto and its single loyal satellite, Charon, were joined in their lonely, eccentric orbit.

The fold force field appeared, a stupendous orb in space, holding the SDF-1 suspended over an island with a fishbowl-bottom of ocean underneath it, the smoke of battle still rising from Macross City.

The sphere winked out of existence. By all rights, the waters should have boiled away in the vacuum, all atmosphere not pent up in the battle fortress or the shelters dissipated; and the fragment of Earth that was Macross Island itself should have begun coming apart.

That none of these things happened was proof-reinforcing later evidence-that certain other forces were still at work. The Protoculture-powered globe couldn't be maintained for very long, not even by the dimensional fortress's mighty engines, but secondary effects could; Protoculture-powered phenomena were very different from the rawpower manipulations of the universe that humans had been used to until now.

The ocean waters froze, still adhering to the island fragment, expanding and cracking. Most of the atmosphere began to fall toward the island, frozen air snowing down on it, coating it in seconds with a thickening glacial coat-despite the fact that instruments indicated no gravity whatsoever beyond the negligible amount such a mass would generate. Be that as it might, the harbor became a solid mass and the aircraft carriers were rimed with permafrost in moments.

These anomalies have always constituted one of the great mysteries of the Robotech Wars, though subsequent events and discoveries gave the human race some tantalizing hints as to what may have happened that chilly afternoon some three and a half billion miles and more beyond Terra's orbit.

Already disoriented and dismayed, with Minmei clinging to him, and concealing the terror he wanted to show, Rick realized two new and frightening things: His propfan engine was no longer having any effect, and the entire canopy was frosting over-fast.

It wasn't as if he needed that; he'd already watched with horror as Macross turned to a polarscape. It was clear that there wasn't much gravity in the dark, empty neighborhood, whatever it was. He'd heard Mockingbird's seals close against low pressure-no pressure, he was certain-and that spelled very bad luck.

Rick watched the blanket of white cover the canopy and wondered what he could possibly do next, aside from dying.

"Let's have some light in here!" Gloval ordered; the fold jump had drained all systems. The emergencies cast a weird red glow over everything. Heating units shouldn't have been needed in the vacuum of space; Gloval wondered what was wrong.

"Switching to backups, Captain," Claudia said crisply, and brought lighting back to normal. The bridge gang blinked a bit but kept to their jobs. Powerful running lights showed a dust storm of wreckage blowing past the ship, pieces impacting constantly.

"Radar shows an extremely large object just-beneath us, sir," Vanessa said. At least, it was «beneath» relative to the battle fortress; but the readings looked very peculiar, even though the ship's artificial gravity had cut in automatically during the jump.

"Our jump target was the moon; that's what your large object is," Gloval said.

"No; it's too small to be the moon, sir," she countered. "I'll put it on one of the main screens for you."

Everybody there looked, and everybody drew breath in brief astonishment and fright.

"It's coming straight at us, sir!" Vanessa said.

Gloval took a quick look at the readouts and contradicted, "No! We're moving toward it!"

"It's Macross Island, Captain Gloval!" Vanessa yelled, but Gloval had already seen that and reached his own conclusions as to the magnitude of the disaster. But there were other things that had to be dealt with instantly; reflection must wait for a later time.

"Retro rockets, Claudia! Maximum thrust!"

Claudia worked, tight-lipped, at her station and spared only a moment to say, "It's no-go; I'm getting no response whatsoever from the computer!"

Damn energy drain! Lisa thought, even as she sounded «collision» over the PA. "Emergency! Emergency! Prepare for impact! Prepare for impact!"

Helpless, the SDF-1 floated kneel-on toward Macross Island. "It's covered with ice," Sammie reported, looking into her scope while everyone else could see that on the screen. Claudia yanked her away from the scope so she wouldn't get her nose broken.

SDF-1 hit the tilted surface and crunched through the buildings as if they were a bunch of potato chips dipped in liquid nitrogen, sliding side-on across the surface of the worldlet that had been a thriving, jubilant city only hours ago.

Down in the shelters, people already dealing with the difficulties of mass null-g sickness and panic had their problems complicated by an impact that sent many of them flying once again across the shelters-toward walls and ceilings and floors that weren't padded and wouldn't make kind landing places.

Jason wailed and grabbed for his mother's hand; Lena pulled him back from an impact with the wall, and together they spun helplessly in midair, wondering if this was the end.

The rime frost on the outside of Mockingbird's canopy was gone in that uncanny pulling-together force exerted in the wake of the fold-a force that wasn't gravity but had many of its attributes. A force that seemed to make conscious distinctions.

But the cold of the outer rime had transferred through the canopy to the atmosphere in the cockpit, forming a thick glaze. Now Rick wiped away a large patch to get a look at what was going on.

"Ooo! Look how beautiful it is!" Minmei gasped, her long dark hair floating weightless. Rick was struck again by her innocence, the purity of spirit that saw beauty everywhere and gave so little attention to danger and evil.

A starfield shone against the blackness of space. Chunks of rock and debris floated by. Rick tried his controls, without effect.

I'm getting no response at all from the propfan. As crazy as it seems, there's no other answer: We're out in deep space. And that means we're in deep trouble!

"Oh, my, isn't it romantic?" Minmei sighed.

Rick forced himself to smile. "Yes, it is."

There was an abrupt metal-to-metal collision that jarred the little plane brutally, sending it spinning away. Rick had a split-second glimpse of some kind of large machine casing veering off from its impact with Mockingbird.

The two cried out in shock as the plane was spun through the vacuum, to collide with another piece of flotsam. The second hit jolted Rick's nose into the back of Minmei's head, but it also absorbed much of the spinning and brought the ship virtually to rest relative to the junk floating around it.

Rick sneezed mightily from the bump on the nose. Minmei looked startled, then laughed, and Rick joined her.

But she stopped in alarm a moment later. "What's that hissing sound?"

Rick was quick to cover his panic. "Oh, it's perfectly all right. Don't get upset about it."

But the hissing was coming from a hairline crack just under the windshield frame. "You hear all kinds of weird noises in these things." He forced himself to laugh lightly.

I don't dare tell her our air's leaking out into space! The flow wafted the ends of stray strands of Minmei's hair toward the crack.

Rick wadded a handkerchief and tried to push it into the crack. Maybe this'll hold it temporarily. It didn't seem to do much good.

Minmei's eyes were enormous with fright. "Let's get out of here, okay?"

"Hey, relax; what's your hurry?" Rick could think of only one slim hope of survival. He put the helmet back on her head, and she snuggled into his lap again as he thought, If the boosters don't work, we're sunk! "Comfy?"

"Uh huh," Minmei answered. Rick hit his boosters very gently, bringing them up.

He had a certain amount of independent control over each, but that still made steering a very ticklish problem. Attitude thrusters would have been a tremendous help, but there just hadn't been much need for deep-space maneuvering capability in the air circus.

A tiny burn-a mere cough-got the Mockingbird under way, infinitesimal spurts from selected boosters were the only way he had to steer. And there wasn't very much fuel in the little rockets.

He was beginning to see where there were some advantages to those nutty Veritechs after all.

"I guess we'll go find the SDF-1," he said. "Something funny's been goin' on around here." The air leak hissed on. At least the frost was melting off the canopy; he gave up wondering how much time they had and concentrated on piloting and spotting the battle fortress.

"There it is!" Minmei said very shortly. SDF-1 was hard to miss: still lodged in the remains of Macross Island, with explosions, tracers, and energy blasts flashing all around it.

The war had resumed,