"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.