fanfic_name = Strange Bedfellows

chapter = Chapter One

author = Nighthunter

Rating = AP15

traductor = Jerry Wicker

Type = Angst

fanfic =

A/N: You will have to bear with me, as I like the Japanese name for the Veritechs, which is Valkyries, and I will be interchanging between calling them and the RDF Destroids by both their American and Japanese designations. All of the main characters will be keeping their American names, however??.although I do like LaSalle and Hayase better than Grant and Hayes.

On with the story! :

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Captain Lisa Hayes sat in the backseat of the Cat's Eye Recon Valkyrie as it flew over the wasteland that was once part of the Alaskan forest. Although it had been almost a year since Lord Dolza's Grand Fleet had razed the Earth in his "Rain of Death," all but eradicating all life on the hapless planet, which included the site that she was currently flying over, Lisa could not help but still participate assisting with the ongoing search and rescue missions whenever she could. The last time that she had seen her father, Admiral Donald Hayes, alive was at the Grand Cannon command center, which was not far from where she was flying at the moment. Even though it looked like he had perished in an overloaded generator's dying fireball, Lisa still held out hope that her father might have survived through it all. After all, if that Major Thomas Riley Edwards was able to survive that holocaust, and she was able to come out of it alive, then who was to say that an angel may have blessed her father or some of the many others the same way.

"So desolate?.," She muttered aloud to herself.

"What was that ma'am?," her pilot, Third Lieutenant Gerard Mauthis asked Lisa, half-cocking his helmet concealing head in her direction. He was a recent transfer to the Wolf Squadron, and had been relegated to Recon veritech fighter duty while his old bird was getting retro-fitted back in Macross City.

Lisa blinked, startled back to the present and out of her personal reverie by the young man's voice. It was then that she had realized that she had spoken out loud.

"Nothing, Lieutenant. I was just thinking aloud. How much longer until we reach the old Grand Cannon site?"

"We should be there in about 25 minutes or so, if our positioning is correct."

"Thank you Lieutenant Mauthis," Lisa said thru the comm.-link in her own flight helmet as she looked out towards the rightmost fighter that was part of her escort. She would have much preferred if it was Rick that was flying escort for her, but she knew that the Skull Wing, including Vermillion Squadron were not going to be back from the Brasilia Sector chasing down one of Khyron's warlords for at least another few days of mop-up duty. Diamondback Squadron, one of the other surviving fighter groups from the SDF-1's original compliment, had instead been pulled to provide CAP duty. They were a good bunch of men and women, and a competent lot, but they were not Rick Hunter and the rest of Vermillion and Skull squadrons.

The veritech fighters that were providing escort for Hayes' Recon Plane consisted of a pair of VF-I J's and a pair of I A's, the rookie pilots holding the outward two slots of the flight formation. Everything was going fine as the formation entered the outer area of what was once the site for the UEG Grand Cannon, and what had become the tomb for Admiral Hayes and so many others in Lisa's mind. As she looked down at the blasted landscape that was slowly recovering, she could not help but think to another blasted landscape on Mars. It was there that Lisa had lost the first love of her life, Lieutenant Karl Riber, and it was also there that her feelings for Rick Hunter first began to bloom.

'How ironic,' Lisa thought wistfully even as she activated the Doppler radar to begin it's sweep of the ground below her. 'Why is the place that I always seems to lose one loved one, I seem to find another. First Mars Sara, and then here at Alaska Base. I'm sure Father would have loved Rick once he got to know him.'

Lisa brought her mind back to the present with a visible shake of her head and a hopefully less audible sigh as she re-focused on the console before her. She had been out on these reconnaissance patrols numerous times before, and most of them had been just as fruitless as command was thinking that this one would turn out. While some survivors from Alaska Base had been found, most of those were in the first few weeks after the Rain of Death, and that was over a year ago. The last survivors that had been found by reclamation crews were found over eight months ago, but that fact didn't seem to deter Lisa, which was why Admiral Gloval continued to approve of these missions. She knew that the radar scans were good, but were not infallible with trying to pick out human heat signatures thanks to the amount of rubble that buried most of the base during that fateful night.

The first few cursory sweeps of the area brought about the same results of the other searches, and Lisa was beginning to get disheartened by the prospect that this whole endeavor was nothing but a bust. The VT element leader had suggested that perhaps they do a more low altitude, gerwalk fly-by this time, and since she could see no reason against it, Lisa gave the idea her tacit approval. A few moments later, it appeared that the Lieutenant's suggestion had paid off, as there was some sort of positive ping that appeared on Lisa's scanners, faint, but there was definitely something, and it appeared to be human, just below the surface. Lisa blinked her eyes, and then double checked her readings as the fighter group completed their slow moving pass, a small gasp coming from her lips as the results were same as before. Her Emerald Green eyes grew large at the results as she frantically tired to get Lieutenant Mauthis' attention.

"Yes, Captain Hayes?," the young man asked with just a hint of that same Germanic accent that Doctor Emile Lang was so well known for after feeling her tap the shoulder of his flight suit.

"Turn us back around for another pass. I..I think we may have some survivors down there!"

"Sure thing Captain. Hang on."

The formation did a lazy pitch and roll that eventually put them back over the area that the Captain had gotten the first ping. At first, there was nothing, and then after Lisa spent some time re-calibrating and fine-tuning her instruments, she was able to detect it again. Smiling with renewed hope in her eyes and heart, she was about to order the pilot to go down for a closer look when everything went horribly wrong.

The veritech holding the outermost portside position suddenly wobbled, and then exploded in a cacophony of debris. The other three Diamondbacks broke formation and scattered momentarily, reconfiguring into fighter modes as they looked for their attackers. The Cat's Eye went for the TARMAC, as Mauthis knew that his options were a little more limited with the sensor dish attached to the back of his plane and with the Captain riding shotgun. Lisa felt hopeless and stupid for not scanning the area around them while she was conducting her searches, since they had all relied on her to be their long range eyes and ears, yet somehow their attackers had snuck up on them. Bringing her instrumentation back to omni-directional tracking mode as the VT pilot juked thru a pair of ravines in an attempt to buy them some breathing room, Lisa was finally able to get a reading on her attackers.

The trio of veritech pilots found their opponents and were more than willing to go to town with them after they had gather some maneuvering room and knew what was going down, at least at first. The dozen inbound Zentraedi tri-thrusters were fast, hard hitting targets, but were also easy to knock down if one knew how to do it. First Lieutenant Rashid Oloru smiled darkly as he unload a quartet of Hammerhead missiles at a pair of Zent fighters, and watched them disappear in a wash of hellfire. He noticed at that moment that his young wingman, Ensign Brandon Derringer had just knocked one that was trying to climb onto his six right out of the ballgame, and was trading way too accurate fire with another tri-thruster. The Arabian smirked slightly watching the rookie tear into the enemy warplanes, when his proximity alarms started blaring thru his helmet. The smirk disappeared completely as the veteran pilot realized what was causing the alarms to go off, just as his wingman of just over three years, Second Lieutenant Eris Gossling piloting Diamondback Eight warned him of the surface launched missiles in-bound. He tried a bank and roll even as he popped chaff and activated his ECMs, hoping that that would be enough. The evasive techniques, picked up and honed thru the century of human combat flying proved themselves once more as the first of the missiles became confused by the electronics wash-out, then smashed headlong into the chaff as they tried to re-lock onto their target, and then exploded in a glowing death blossom that had the added effect of committing fratricide to the remaining missiles in that wave.

Lieutenant Oloru breathed a quiet prayer to Allah as he pivoted his plane back around and caught the firer of the first flight of missiles just as it was getting lined up his other wingman and unloaded a second salvo. Gritting his teeth as he went into a full power dive, the flight leader unloaded with his GU-11 gun pod, slamming high velocity shells into the pair of light artillery battlepods and cracking them open like a pair of eggs. He converted to Battloid and continued to dish out a healthy does of death to the battlepods that had seemed to come out of the woodwork. Although most of the Zentraedi were on foot and equipped only with body armor and energy rifles, they were not showing up very distinctly on his radar and their numbers were beginning to actually overwhelm the Robotech defenders.

'There's just too many of them! And where are all of these devils coming from! This area was supposed to be clean of all Zent activity!'

Just as he was going to call his people to re-group and pull out with the Recon ship, Diamondback Eight came crashing down to earth, a broken and twisted scrap of metal that moments before had been his wingman for the last three years. Turning to gun down the mecha that had brought his best friend, he saw a sight that he had hoped never to encounter again. The Officer's pod that was evading his fire and was lining Oloru up was none other than the same Glaug Pod that had decimated scores of RDF Veritechs and Destroids over the years. Just as the Zentraedi pilot was lining up Oloru, Ensign Derringer dove in behind it and unloaded on him with his own Gun pod, sending 55 mm shells into the Officer Pod's flank and scoring a solid hit knocking out it's thrusters before it could dive away and return fire. Derringer moved in to finish the job when his Valkyrie went flying backwards and up into the air, twin gouts of fire coming from the chest area of the VF-1A as it collapsed to the ground and convulsed for a few moments before going still.

"Die you Alien scum!," Oloru screamed into his mike as he charged the Enemy ace, firing rounds into the enemy mecha but for some reason failing to score that fatal shot in his crimson rage. A half dozen other pods jumped forward to defend their leader as it reeled from the new attack, and were just as quickly blown away. At that point a second Officer's Pod popped up and opened up on the damaged VT, dropping it where it stood under a new barrage of hellfire from it's twin derringer mounted plasma cannons. As Lieutenant Rashid Oloru fell to the ground and felt his life bleed out of him, he saw the Cat's Eye go to supersonic, and for a brief moment, thought that his team's sacrifice had been worth it. Then all hope left him as he saw a beam of light come up and seem to flick the remaining VT out of the air.

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Lisa Hayes was still trying to punch thru the sudden wave of jamming when Mauthis relayed back that the entire escort flight had been destroyed. He was in the process of punching the after-burners and hopefully would be out of the combat zone before the aliens had a chance to re-group and give chase. At that same moment, the static lifted off of her comm arrays and Lisa breathed a quiet prayer of thanks, hoping that this might be the break that they needed.

"This is Cat's-Eye flight 713 requesting assistance from Zentraedi attack. I repeat this is?..," Lisa began, but was cut off when her head smashed into the console, cracking her faceplate, ruining the device, and knocking her unconscious in one fell swoop.

Up in the forward cockpit, Third Lieutenant Gerard Mauthis was having the fight of his life as he fought to keep a semblance of control as the Valkyrie came crashing down to Earth. Whoever the gunner that hit him was, he at least knew how to take out an airplane, Mauthis had to give that to him. The avionics were fried, the fusion reactor was overloading, and lateral motivators were gone completely. As the plane's spins got more erratic, Gerard gave up on trying to fly the plane and focused more on trying to recover from the turn and burn that the plane was slipping into. He had all but straightened the Valkyrie out when he ran out of time and the ground raced up to meet them, smashing the nose cone in and shearing off one wing on impact. The plane continued to skid for a good 100 yards or so before it finally came to a crumpled stop against a small hillock.

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The smoke from the downed aircraft brought a pleased smile to the face of the Zentraedi commander. Laying an ambush here was a sheer stroke of genius for a superior commander like himself. If only his .."contemporaries" could recognize his tactical acumen back when they were still the greatest fleet in the cosmos, back before this thrice-damned Micronians had somehow cheated the fates once more and were able to survive the Grand Fleet's "Rain of Death." His own unit, the Botoru Battalion almost didn't survive that grand gesture. He had to concede that to these little pests, some of them did indeed have the will to fight and die that could almost rival a true Zentraedi's?ALMOST. He brought himself back to the present as he popped the canopy to his Glaug, frowned at the damage that had been down to it, then dismissed it to whatever fickle entity was giving the cursed bipedal cockroaches their brief spats of luck before he snuffed them out. He watched as his men gathered themselves together and began to collect their dead, as well as prizes off of the fallen human mecha. In this day and age where everything had been made to last, an odd concept to the hard-lined Zentraedi mindset, but something that he had to learned to adapt and worked with during his ongoing crusade to eradicate these Micronians.

He smiled as he walked away from the others, and headed over to the retreating command ship that tried to escape his wrath. Too bad for them that he was the Greatest Warlord in the Zentraedi Fleet and that the Robotech Masters had ever produced. Grel and Gerao soon joined up with him, both of their faces enlivened with the recent victory over the humans.

"So Lord Khyron, it looks like you win this bet after all," Gerao said with a smirk. "You were able to kill more of the little Micronians than us."

"Yes, but that was only because I was I had a ? feeling that the last one would try to circle back once it thought it was out of the fire zone. What a curious little bunch these little opponents are. No matter how many times we encounter them, they never quite react the same way twice. Their only predictability seems to be their un-predictability."

"How very true, milord."

The trio crested the hillock and looked down upon the smoldering wreck of the very VT that the two giant officers were conversing over. Grel, still a bit more focused on scavenging some goods and possibly collecting yet another "souvenir" from the plane and it's little occupants was surprised when the rearmost occupant let out a slight groan when he peeled back the pexi-glassed canopy.

"Lord Khyron, looks like your shot may not have been quite as good as we originally thought. One of the Micronian pilots is still alive."

"Good grief, then why don't you finish him off," the Warlord grumbled as he stomped over to take a look himself at what had Grel pausing and peering into the robot's cockpit. The scowl on his face is replaced by a sly smile as he notices some of the insignia on the torn and bloodied uniform.

"Then again, perhaps this one could be of some use to us yet. Pull her out and bring her along. I have a feeling her friends will be here shortly, and we have some preparations to make. This prize will do quite nicely."

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Tbc..........

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State = Continuará/To Be Continue

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