Genesis

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,

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Well, you're never gonna believe this!

From the diary of Lynn-Minmei

'It looks like they're fighting down there!' Minmei said.

It doesn't matter; we've got nowhere else to go. 'Don't worry.' He cut in the boosters, nursing them along exactingly to line up his vector, praying no debris got in his way because there was no hope of dodging anything.

In the fury of the battle back on Earth, human defenders had overlooked the fact that one of the first Zentraedi landing ships, loaded with Battlepods, had been heavily damaged and forced to set down on Macross once again, unable to fly. And so it, too, had been transported into deep space by the fold maneuver.

While the landing ship was no longer operable, the pods were. They'd immediately resumed their attack on the ship, no doubt in response to their assigned mission but moved, too, by the awareness that they were somewhere far from their fleet and that if they couldn't take the fortress, they wouldn't survive for long out by Pluto's orbit.