TRANSFORMERS GENERATION 2
                                 and
                     ROBOTECH: THE NEW GENERATION

                               STRANDED

                      Part Three: Desert Battle

                      By Christopher E. Meadows

[Dedicated to Raksha, M. Sipher, and also Peter Walker, whose Robotech
 Glossaries are an invaluable fan resource, even if they shouldn't be
   considered "canon" by any means.  Keep up the good work, Peter!]


    The green and orange humanoid mecha roared through the skies over
the desert, its distorted shadow sending small animals scurrying for
shelter as it raced across the ground.  The mecha's body language
reflected the feelings of its pilot--a burning anger that seemed to
reach beyond the confines of his craft and sear the already blasted
desert further. 
    Prince Corg of the Invid was not happy at all.  Between his
repeated failures to destroy the human resistance group that had been
a constant thorn in the Regis's side since well before his quickening
to full Evolution and Princess Sera's recent odd behavior, he had
little to be happy about.  However, even if neither of those
situations existed, it was still doubtful that Corg would be happy.
Happiness, or even the capacity for happiness, did not seem to be a
part of Corg's nature. 
    Corg had been directed by the Regis to assume temporary command of
the Invid forces at a small Hive in what the humans had once called
Arizona, to investigate an apparent spacefold occurrence.  It would
never have occurred to Corg to doubt the Regis before his Evolution, but
it did now.  Did not the knowledge downloaded from the Hivemind suggest
that a fold was impossible this deep within a gravity field, save only
by the intervention of the Regis herself?  He was being sent on a fool's
errand, when his time could be better spent tracking down and
terminating that pesky resistance group.  Yet the Regis ordered, and so
Corg had to obey. 
    Corg projected his mental voice ahead, to the Hive.  "All Invid,
make ready!  Your Prince arrives!"  He was not quite able to prevent
his annoyance from leaking through, but so much the better.  Perhaps
it would help keep them in line. 
    Corg pressed forward on the glowing circles that were his
Battloid's controls, and the mecha accelerated toward the Hive.  Best
to get this over with and return to his search as soon as possible.

    Rapido threw himself into a roll as plasma discs blew craters in
the ground where he had just been standing.  "Guess they're not too
friendly!"
    "Looks that way, doesn't it?"  Skram brought up his blaster rifle
and returned fire, as Rapido came out of his roll with his own big
double-barrelled motor cannon ready.  The three blasts put holes
through the torso of one of the crab-like purple mecha, and it
exploded in a fiery display. 
    As the other crab-mecha began pouring plasma blasts their way,
Rapido yelled, "We've got to get them away from the spacebridge!"
    "Right!  Eat photon charges, creeps!"  Skram transformed,
converting his blaster cannon into the overcharged engine sticking up
through his hood, and roared right at one of the other mecha.  Most of
the shots he fired from behind his front grille went wild or were
deflected by the crabs' round pincer claws, but the the mecha were
startled enough that none of their own shots even came close to
hitting him.  Skram plowed into the mecha's legs and kept right on
going, knocking its footing out from under it and dropping it on its
face. 
    "Hmm...not the strategy I had in mind, but..."  Rapido transformed
and raced toward another of the aggressor-mecha, going airborne from a
small rock outcropping and slamming into its torso.  "...whatever
works!"  The crab went down, leaking green fluid from around its
sensor eye, and Rapido made a four-point landing a few yards later.
He skidded around in a bootlegger reverse and transformed again,
firing more blasts from his motor cannon. 
    "Yeah!" Skram whooped, adding his own firepower.  "These guys
aren't so tough--whoa!"  A blast kicked up dirt in front of him.
"Gotta watch that!"
    The one Skram had knocked over was getting shakily to its feet,
but the one Rapido had hit, he noticed with some satisfaction, stayed
down.  "I think we've got their attention now."
    "Time to cut and run?  You got it!"  Skram transformed again,
peeled out on the desert ground, and headed for the horizon.  Rapido
followed suit, his cannon becoming his own turbocharged engine, its
barrels his dual exhausts.  As one, the purple mecha launched
themselves into the air and zoomed after them, laying down a lethal
barrage of energy discs all around.  Fortunately, what they made up
for in firepower, they lacked in accuracy. 
    "Yahoo!!!" Skram whooped, as he and Rapido raced neck and neck,
swerving to avoid plasma blasts.  "Isn't this _fun_?!"
    "Fun isn't _quite_ the word I'd have used, Skram," Rapido replied
drily, holing a persistant crab-mecha through the torso with a lucky
shot from his dual exhaust cannon barrels.
    "Yeah, well, you just don't know how to have fu--UUUUUU!!!"  Their
pursuers had started leading them with their fire.  One of the blaster
disks slammed into the ground just in front of Skram's right front
tire, shredding it and causing the blue Corvette to vault into the
air. 
    Rapido gasped.  "Skram!"

    Nightracer's engine barely ticked over as she drove through the
ravine leading into the river valley where the secret Decepticon
sector HQ was located.  The pride of Deluge, a recently-promoted
scientific advisor, it had had even caught the eye of Megatron for
being completely energy-self-sufficient.  No more, Megatron had
decreed, would the Decepticons rely on what they could steal and
scavenge from others.  Using Deluge's new hydroelectric and geothermal
generators, they could even produce an Energon _surplus_.  It gave the
Decepticons that much more time to devote to plotting the Autobots'
downfall. 
    Nightracer was already mentally rehearsing what she would tell
Deluge when she returned.  She would make no excuses, but it would
not hurt to put what had happened in the best possible light.  She
ran over it one last time as she rounded the corner that would reveal
the valley and its Decepticon HQ to her in all their glory...
    ...and then stopped, words vanishing from her mind.  Even from
this distance, there could be no denying the simple fact that the
Decepticon base _was not there_.
    What _was_ there was a complex of buildings of an architectural
style quite unlike anything she had ever seen before.  Rising high
over all the others, sticking up from the center of the river, was
sort of a round structure, like a geodesic dome.  Lower down, in front
of it, were several small structures within a fenced enclosure.  Much
of the rest of the valley was occupied by tilled and irrigated fields,
growing vegetation of some kind.  The whole area was patrolled by
purple mecha like those she had seen pass overhead on her way in, as
well as smaller pink versions of the same general design. 
    Nightracer's sensors zoomed in, and panned across the terrain
taking in more details.  There were people in that fenced enclosure,
and others working in the fields.  They were under guard by what
Nightracer could only make out to be some kind of small robots or
beings wearing exosuits.  Humans?  No...not likely.  They did not have
the proper body language. 
    The humans, Nightracer observed, did not seem to be in the best
of health.  They seemed thin, emaciated, weak...as she watched, one
working in the fields keeled over.  One of the exosuits lashed out
with an energy whip, hitting the human squarely across its back.  It
did not move.  The suit kicked it, then gestured to two other humans
to carry it off.
    This engendered no particularly strong emotional response in
Nightracer one way or the other.  To her, all was as it should be; the
fittest to rule were obviously the ones in command.  Nightracer
wondered, though, were they indeed other humans, or perhaps some third
party?  As she watched, a green and orange humanoid mecha, similar to
one of the exosuits on the ground only much larger, landed, and a
human in a matching bodysuit leaped from a cockpit in the torso to the
ground.  Ah, Nightracer thought.  So I was right.  It was humans
after all.
    It was a source of amusement and irony to Nightracer, when she
infrequently thought about it, that human history was _full_ of
evidence that humans were capable of inflicting far more creative and
agonizing torture upon each other than anything the Decepticons had
ever come up with.  Perhaps it was because they had more emotional
involvement in the matter, took more of an interest in each other than
Decepticons did in them.  To the Decepticons, _all_ lower life forms
were unimportant save as a means to an end, or unless they happened to
be in the Decepticons' way. 
    The Autobots, on the other hand, seemed positively anal about
protecting them, as if they were their own personal cybermite colony
kept amid raw silicon fragments between two panes of transparasteel.
Save the humans, save the humans, it was all they ever _did_.
Nightracer doubted she would ever understand it.
    However, that line of thought _did_ bring Nightracer back to her
present situation.
    Whatever else she might have been, Nightracer certainly was not
stupid.  Far from it, in fact.  There was no possibility that the
Decepticon base could have been uprooted and replaced by all this in
so short a period of time since she had last been here.  It would have
taken far, _far_ too much time to build, not to mention that the
Decepticons would never have allowed it.
    The only explanation that was reasonable, that was anywhere _near_
reasonable, was that the malfunctioning spacebridge had transported
them after all, but not vertically, through space.  It had transported
them _horizontally_, across the boundaries of space and time and onto
some other planet Earth that was not their own.
    And this changed everything.
    With some irony, Nightracer reflected that Rapido's team of
Autobots, whom she had just been wishing dead, might now represent her
only chance for survival and returning home.  How little indeed past
alliances meant in a situation such as this.
    Nightracer backed away slowly, then turned and headed back up the
ravine, waiting until she was a safe distance away before accelerating
to maximum speed.  Best to get back to the Autobots and check on
them...and preferably keep _them_ from finding out about this place.
She knew with a cold certainty that they would not be willing to leave
a human prison camp in operation if they knew about it. 

    Skram tumbled through the air, headed for a collision with a
fairly large boulder--but was intercepted just in time.  "As the humans
would say, touchdown!" Windbreaker said, catching his friend before
he could come to harm.
    "Windbreaker!  Turbofire!" Skram cheered, as Windbreaker set him
down.  "You guys got here just in time!"
    "So I see," Turbofire said, bracing his blocky engine-gun on his
arm and firing at crab-mecha.  "What _are_ those things?"
    "Hostile!" Rapido replied, joining them in humanoid
configuration.  "Quick, behind those boulders!  Skram, can you
transform?"
    "I'm trying."  Skram slowly extended legs and arms, then stood
up.  "Yeah, I'm okay...just scragged my wheel, that's all.  Ow."
    "Take cover behind those boulders!" Rapido ordered, as plasma
discs blew splinters from rock nearby.  The Autobots scrambled for
cover, returning fire when they could.  The fire from both sides kept
up for several minutes--the cluster of boulders provided good cover,
and the only way an enemy could get a blast in would expose it
completely to the Autobots' return fire. 
    "Hey!" Windbreaker yelled, as a lucky shot slammed through one of
the mechas' sensor eyes.  "Aim for the red eye, there's a chink in
their armor there!"
    "You expect us to hit _that_?!" Turbofire yelled, as a disk
slammed into rock right beside him.  "Gah!"
    Just then, cannon blasts slammed into three of the four remaining
crabs' sensor eyes simultaneously, and a missile blew the fourth to
flinders.  "What the hell?" Skram said, looking up. 
    Nightracer stepped into view, smoke rising from the muzzles of the
massive over-under assault-rifle cannons in each of her hands.
"Howdy, boys," she smirked.  "Looks like I got here just in time."
    Turbofire blinked his optics.  "We were saved...by a Decepticon?"
    Rapido stepped into the open, not lowering his gun but not
pointing it directly at Nightracer either.  "Nightracer, I presume?"
    "You presume correctly, Rapido," she replied, not yet lowering
her own guns.
    "Looks like we owe you one," Rapido observed mildly.  "Not that
I'm complaining, but why?"
    "Oh, I think you can guess."  She waved noncomittally at one of
the lifeless crab-mecha, now slowly polluting the desert floor with
green ooze. 
    "Your point?" Rapido asked.
    Nightracer shrugged.  "Like I said, if you're as smart as you're
made out to be, you've guessed it already."
    Rapido nodded.  "I have an idea, yeah.  Am I to assume this means
you want to cooperate?"
    Nightracer made a show of stowing her guns.  "For now.  Until this
thing is over, then we split.  No fuss, no muss, no obligations.
Kapish?"
    Rapido nodded.  "Acceptible."
    "Right.  Let's not stand around gabbing all day like a bunch of
Autobots.  Oh, wait, you _are_ a bunch of Autobots, never mind."
    Rapido ignored the jibe, turning to the others.  "Skram, you
okay?"
    Skram nodded.  "Just let me slap on my spare and I'll be good to
go."  He ejected the tattered wheel from his shoulder, then fitted a
new one on in its place.
    "Then let's return to the spacebridge, so Skram can finish
checking it over.  Nightracer and I have a theory, and we might as
well see if the evidence supports it."

    Nightracer accompanied the Autobots back to the spacebridge, but
stood apart from them with her arms crossed as Skram devoted his full
attention to its inner workings.  Rapido and Turbofire stood close
by, looking over his shoulders, leaving Windbreaker to keep an eye on
her.  She did not bother looking at him; she had more interesting
things to scan.  The sky, the desert, the rocks...okay, maybe they
were not exactly _interesting_, but they were something to look at
besides the Autobot.
    "Well...I think you're right.  We hopped dimensions.  I think,"
Skram said, pulling himself back out of the access panel.  "At
least...it _could_ have happened, and there's no reason to say
flat-out that it _didn't_."
    "That doesn't sound too reassuring," Rapido noted.
    Skram shrugged.  "Hey, I'm not Perceptor.  I can't give you
infinitessimal probabilities and slag like that."
    "Can you get us _back_?  That's the sixty-four-thousand-Energon
cube question here, kid," Nightracer noted caustically.
    Skram's visage darkened at Nightracer's remark.  "I _think_ I
can," he said at last.  "It'll take parts from all of us to repair the
spacebridge...and I'll need a _lot_ of Energon to power it.  That's
the downside...even if everyone donated all they had and ran on bare
survival reserves, we'd still be way short.  This thing takes a lotta
power, y'know."
    "So what you're saying is that we're pretty much up shit creek,"
Nightracer said.   The Autobots exchanged glances.
    Skram spread his hands.  "Yeah, that's what I'm saying.  I'm
afraid it looks like we're stranded."

                           TO BE CONTINUED


Author's Notes:

Yes, this is a crossover story.  I've written quite a few of them
already...why not another one?  Besides, "Generation 2", "The New
Generation"...the names just sort of _called_ to each other, don't you
think? :)

Seriously, this story was inspired by the "Who would win" threads that
seem to come and go in phases on the Robotech listservs and newsgroups
and other such discussion arenas--even alt.toys.transformers isn't
immune.  Everyone seems to think that their favorite continuity would
be the victors, and yet nobody ever goes to the trouble of writing a
fanfic to support their version of it.  So, I thought _I_ would. 

Of course, the whole issue of "who would win" is, in one sense, kind
of a moot point.  Rather like the way the Japanese filmed two endings
for "King Kong vs. Godzilla" so each country could have its favorite
monster stomp the other, the true answer to the question lies in the
script.  Even the best technology in the world can't save you if
you've got script immunity. :)

Incidentally, for all you other ultimate Robotech die-hard
have-the-entire-series-on-tape fans out there, "Stranded" is set in
the TV series continuity between Episode 77, "The Midnight Sun", and
Episode 78, "Ghost Town". 

Please, if you're reading this story, just drop me a note to say what
you think.  Doesn't have to be a long note, but I _would_ like to
know that there _are_ people reading this story, and it's not
vanishing utterly into electronic oblivion.

Later!


"Stranded" is copyright 1997 by Christopher E. Meadows.  Permission
granted for free electronic distribution via Usenet and associated
archival, as long as no fee is charged and this notice remains intact.
For further permissions, such as inclusion in "Con-Quest" or on an
archival webpage, please contact the author, he would likely be more
than happy to oblige. :)

The Transformers are registered trademarks of Hasbro and Takara, and
Nightracer is a trademark of Raksha and Plumed Serpent Productions.
Their unauthorized use here is not for profit, and not meant to
infringe upon those trademarks.  This is _not_ an official
Hasbro-endorsed story, please don't think I'm trying to pass it off as
one.  (There, that should make the Hasbro lawyers happy. :)

Robotech, the Invid, Prince Corg, and other associated characters are
trademarks of Harmony Gold, Inc.  Their unauthorized use here is not
for profit, and not meant to infringe upon those trademarks.  This is
_not_ an official Harmony Gold-endorsed story, please don't think I'm
trying to pass it off as one.  (And that should make the Harmony Gold
lawyers happy too! :)