Macross Fan Fiction ❯ Underground Down Under ❯ Good Day...ACIF! ( Chapter 3 )

Robotech: Underground Down Under

Chapter III: Good Day...ACIF!

It is a basic fact that an aircraft cannot maintain lift equilibrium for level flight when it is missing a wing. Hence why Gordon Sabol's Alpha was careening in an uncontrolled spin at close to the speed of sound towards surface of the Gulf of Carpentaria following its unfortunate encounter with a particularly psychopathic Invid Scout. One that probably went to flight school in 1940s Japan. But for once, Gordon Sabol's mind was not interested in conducting a discussion on the topic. Rather admirably, in between screams for oxygen, his brain reminded him of two important things. Firstly, at transonic speeds, hitting a body of water would result in a fairly realistic simulation of crashing into solid concrete. Secondly, one had better not try to fight a spin. Naturally, the latter issue presumed that one actually had both of one's aircraft's wings. Fortunately, the latter issue did not preclude one's possessing a Veritech.

Sabol pulled his Alpha's configuration lever from Fighter to Guardian. The Alpha folded its wings (the right one anyway), and its four engines miraculously metamorphosis into appendages: two arms and two legs. Sabol positioned the craft's legs somewhat like a scissors and applied full thrust. The Veritech's left leg provided a push in the same clockwise direction as the spin even as the right worked as a brake against the atmosphere. As the controls began to respond again, Sabol pulled the lever again down to complete the Alpha's transformation to Battloid. Sabol spread-eagled the Veritech to increase air resistance as much as possible and rolled the Battloid onto its back. The dozen or so remaining Invid had followed the Veritech's plummet with interest, but at a fraction of the rate. In a moment of sheer aggressive glee, Sabol armed all 30 remaining short-range missiles and fired.

Eighteen Armored Scouts was something of a more worthy bag to boast about than six.

Sabol allowed himself a wicked grin as he transformed back to Guardian. The ground was still coming up fast. But it was not the ocean that was coming up to meet him anymore but the white sands of Cape Arnhem. Sabol hit the beach harder than he would have liked.

Tom Barker, leader of the ACIF, knew how to make an entrance. Sabol would later suspect that the grizzled, bearded resistance leader had towered above him for half an hour or so before Sabol came to, lying up against the Alpha's half-buried radome.

"Well now, Mr. Sabol," the man said with that characteristic Outback twang (mixed with strains of cosmopolitan SDF-1ian, of course) as soon as Sabol opened his eyes. "How was your nap?"

His military-style slouch hat was well engrained with dust and sweat, its left side pinned up with a sunburst badge stamped in the middle with an outline of Australia- as if there were any doubt of where Sabol had landed.

"I'm Tom Barker. Sorry we couldn't get to you faster to help out," Barker continued without waiting for a reply. "But from what I hear, you put on a fireworks display that nobody was going to miss from Darwin to Limmen Bight!"

Sabol stared at him dazedly.

"What's wrong?" Barker asked innocently. Sabol's brain volunteered to catalog a list for him. By its count, there was a crashed Veritech, an endangered mission, a doubly wrecked set of CVR armor, an on-board Cyclone that in all probability was shredded by metallic shards, and an extremely obnoxious man in front of him (critical to his mission) who Sabol probably would have tried to shoot regardless if his left arm were working and he hadn't already given his Wolverine assault rifle to the very nice people from New Zealand.

But what Sabol actually said was: "Um. It's just that I was kind of expecting your first words to be 'Good day, mate'."

Naturally, he was never going to hear the end of this.

The underground base station located in a Arnhem Land crater the ACIF fighters carried Sabol to was blessedly cool and dim. They'd also brought his Cyclone and a few canisters of Protoculture salvaged from the Alpha's cargo bay.

As they lowered Sabol into a rickety old chair, Barker handed him a canteen of water, saying: "Sorry I can't offer you a Fosters." Several men nearby snickered.

Barker leaned deliberately against the shelter's concrete wall with his arms folded and inquired: "So what can we do for you, Mr. Sabol?"

"I need your help," Sabol replied rather unimpressively.

"So it would appear," Barker said dryly.

Sabol glanced around at the ACIF men and women who studied him so intently. They were a fierce looking bunch, nearly all of them sporting pistol belts and rifle slings for a hodgepodge of various small arms, and soiled jackets and jumpsuits. Quite a few wore the same "Outback" hats as Barker, their tarnished old hat badges labeled "Australia" or "Australian Military Forces". There was something of an esprit-de-corps evident among these individuals that even Wolff's men lacked. Then again, the Robotech Defense Forces were never big on hats.

"As I stated in my distress call, I'm from Valhalla, in the Southlands. Colonel Wolff is banding together all the resistance forces he can locate for an assault in concert with the Moon Base forces on the Invid's main stronghold on the Earth, the Northlands hive known as Reflex Point."

"That was a very long and detailed sentence," Barker said with a blink. "But there's no way in hell that we can slip by the Invid to reach North America and help your Colonel out. Just look what happened to you. Mate."

"I didn't fly here to ask you about that," Sabol replied with irritation. "What the Colonel needs is reliable reconnaissance information. Australia possesses the only remaining uplink centers to a reserve UEG satellite network. All we need to do is get to the Great Victoria Desert transmission center, make sure it's in working order, then access the New Perth control bunker to get the network back online-"

"Is that all?" Barker asked as his men burst into laughter.

Sabol decided it was past time to completely blow his stack. "Listen, dumbass. I flew more than 10,000 miles through Invid-held territory to ask for your help on this mission. Now if you had a real resistance group instead of a pack of laughing hyenas, you would have already cleared out one or two of those blasted Invid hives so I wouldn't have had to engage in a running dogfight for 500 miles over open water outnumbered 20 to 1!

"And instead of being gracious, you take a guy who's been rammed at 800 miles per hour by a suicidal Invid Scout, then crashed into the ground, and before you even check to see if he's been turned to Swiss cheese by shrapnel, you plunder his Veritech and capitalize on one stupid semi-comatose statement to ridicule a mission whose outcome could mean life or death for all of humanity!"

For the long moment of stunned silence, Sabol was concerned that he'd overplayed his hand. Barker finally threw a hand over the smile that was creeping onto his face and turned to one of his men. "Chauvel, why don't you see if you can tend to Mr. Sabol's wounds?" Turning back to Sabol, he said: "I'll investigate the feasibility of your mission, Mr. Sabol. In the meantime, ah, welcome to the ACIF."

"Just one thing, Mr. Barker," Sabol replied tiredly. "What. The hell. Does A-C-I-F. Stand for?"

"Why, Australian Counter Imperial Forces," Barker answered with a chuckle. "As you're going to find out, we like to stay in touch with our military roots. With a bit of irreverence, that is…"