As veteran Zentraedi warriors, you will, of course, even in your micronized state, find it necessary to hide your natural superiority. Be sure to conceal your immunity to the degenerate behavioral impulses of the humans.
Breetai, from his instructions to the spies Rico, Bron, and Konda
MINMEI HAD GONE ON TO RICK, TAKING ANOTHER BOUQUET AND presenting it to him. “And congratulations on your safe return, you handsome devil!”
She handed him the flowers with a wink and a laugh. He stood for a second looking as though he’d just touched a live wire. Then he blurted out, “Well! Um, thank you!”
Minmei put one slender hand to his right cheek and held him steady while she kissed his left. Fire and ice coursed through him; he remembered the moment, months before, when, trapped together in a distant compartment of the SDF-1, they’d shared a deeper, more lasting kiss.
The crowd had suddenly gone ugly. Minmei was everybody’s favorite, and there was a strange current of jealousy at seeing her single out a nobody lieutenant, hero that he might be, for special treatment. She was the dream girl, the idol, the fantasy figure; an undertone of hostility ran through the crowd.
She turned to the audience without losing her merry persona. “Now, now!” she chided, shaking a finger at them in mock chastisement. Amazingly, the sounds of resentment died away as quickly as that, and people were applauding her again. To make her point, Minmei kissed Max’s cheek, and Ben’s, as she gave them their roses. “Congratulations… congratulations…”
The crowd loved it; the crowd loved her.
Down among the people near the stage were the three spies. At first they’d merely drifted along with the people assembling in the amphitheater, to make sure they’d eluded any Micronian pursuit. Then it had become apparent that a major gathering was taking place, and they’d set out to infiltrate it. That had proved amazingly easy.
Bron had gotten rid of his pleated skirt and knee socks and white silk blouse and even the tasteful string of pearls. He was wearing a blue turtleneck and dark slacks, although it had taken a little doing to get new clothes.
On a quiet side street, they had stumbled across a metal bin stenciled CONTRIBUTIONS FOR THE NEEDY. With some effort, the portly warrior had hauled himself into it and found Micronian male garments that fit.
The three spies concluded that keeping contributions for the needy in the difficult-to-enter metal housing served as a kind of minimum qualification test in the savage Micronian culture; any needy individual who wasn’t fairly spry would be out of luck. It was a stern way to run things, the trio agreed, but no doubt very efficient.
Now, though, they looked around themselves worriedly. These Micronians were obsessed with the creature Minmei. At first the spies had thought that they’d stumbled onto a simple propaganda rally and that they’d get insights on the humans’ attitudes toward the Zentraedi, but the Zentraedi had hardly been mentioned.
Instead, there was a lot of strange business with passing plants around—flowers, to be precise—and a very confusing level of noise and emotion, virtually all of the outpouring directed at Minmei.
Konda in particular felt that they were close to uncovering some important military secret. There was no question but that the enemy was highly motivated; perhaps some new sort of mind control technique would be revealed.
They recognized Minmei from transmissions of her that they’d intercepted on their original signal-intelligence mission, of course. She’d abandoned the bizarre armor the Micronians called a bathing suit, and wore a slightly less revealing but even flimsier cover. The trio had as yet seen no demonstration of Protoculture powers from the humans’ garments, but they were still very edgy.
The crowd was still carrying on over Minmei. “Hey, what’s going on? A riot?” Bron yelled over the uproar.
They were packed in together tightly by the massed crowd, but Konda got his hands onto Bron’s shoulders. “Don’t panic! I don’t think it’s a riot; it seems to be something else…”
Rico was nearly at the end of his rope, sweating and shuddering a bit; a good old fashioned anti-enemy hate rally was something anybody could understand, but this was utter chaos! He covered his ears with his hands, squeezing his eyes shut. “Oh, my head!”
He began to slump in a near faint. His companions managed to catch him somehow in the press of the crowd. Just then, Minmei came to the edge of the stage in a convergence of spotlights and the gathered residents of Macross began applauding and cheering all over again.
“Now what’s the matter?” Bron asked, referring to Rico as well as the Minmei situation.
Chairs had appeared from somewhere, and Rick, Lisa, Max, and Ben were sitting uncomfortably. Minmei, angelic in the spotlights, indicated them with a sweeping gesture. “To celebrate their return, my first song this evening is dedicated to these four heroes and all the others who guard and defend us!”
She threw kisses to the crowd as the band came up, uptempo. Streamers and confetti rained down, and light effects blazed. As she threw her arms wide, she seemed to be a creature of pure light, of spirit, of magic. The streamers and confetti rained down on the crowd, too, and many joined in, joyously, knowing the words, arms around each others’ shoulders.
“Stage lights flashing,
The feeling’s smashing,
My heart and soul belong to you
And I’m here now, singing,
All bells are ringing,
My dream has finally come true!”
In a time when the most adored performers were unapproachable and inaccessible, she was somehow the exact opposite of the media sirens who reigned elsewhere. She was, after all, one of the citizenry, another Macross Island refugee like virtually everybody else aboard. Her success and stardom could as easily have been theirs—was theirs in a way.
She was one of them, and she gave herself to them totally, letting them share the moment. Her silver-bright voice soared, taking the high notes with complete confidence. Her slim, straight figure reflected the light back into their eyes, the joy back into their hearts.
They were a battered, war-weary community, and in a way nobody quite understood, she made them feel hope and experience a soaring elation. It had been said—and not discounted by Minmei herself—that she was a reflection of them, the military and civilian occupants of SDF-1.
Certainly there were precedents in history. Times of greatest danger and tribulation inevitably bring forth symbols.
In human societies…
The three spies couldn’t quite understand it but couldn’t resist it either. It had to be admitted, the gathering of humans might as easily be an assembly of Zentraedi in some ways—except that this spirit of undisguised joy was utterly weird. People swayed and laughed and forgot their problems, thinking about home, and there wasn’t a single pro-war propaganda message to be seen anywhere.
Somebody threw an arm around Rico’s shoulder from one side, somebody else hanging one around Bron’s from the other, and they were caught up in the swaying of the throng. It so happened that the groups on either side were keeping separate time, one going one way while the other went counter.
“This must be some kind of tribal ceremony,” Konda speculated, but he found himself enjoying it.
Still, somehow, as easily as if they’d been doing it all their lives, the Zentraedi sorted out the conflicts and in a moment were swaying along with the thousands upon thousands of others. It began to dawn on them what they were seeing.
As had happened before, a symbol had arisen, and Minmei was it, uniquely suited to the role. One tiny Micronian female, hoping to get home, possessed of a kind of deathless optimism; and all that was set off by remarkable singing skills and a personality that won over whomever she encountered. And none of it was calculated; people sensed that. She was wonderful and straightforward, and Macross City threw itself at her feet.
She’s incredibly dangerous to the Zentraedi cause, Rico mused. Why do I like her so much?
“I feel incredibly primitive,” Bron reported dubiously.
“But it has a pleasing effect on the senses,” Rico was honest enough to admit.
“It’s—mass hypnosis!” Bron burst out, even though he’d been trained to recognize mass hypnosis and knew this wasn’t it.
“Yeah, but I kinda like it,” Konda confessed. They swayed along with the music and laughed at the people who swayed and laughed with them…
“Stage fright, go ’way—
This is my big day,
This is my time to be a star!
And the thrill that I feel
Is really unreal:
I can’t believe I’ve come this far…”
In the midst of the performance, people had forgotten about the four forlorn figures sitting on their chairs, very much in the background now but unable to make an escape. Only Max Sterling seemed unbothered and happy.
Rick shifted the bouquet on his lap despondently. He saw it all now: Minmei had been elevated to a different level of existence. What they had gone through together and felt for each other didn’t matter anymore. He had lost her.
Lisa leaned toward him to ask, “What’s the matter, Rick?”
He shook himself, drawing a deep breath. “Nothing. The light bothers my eyes, is all.”
Lisa saw it wasn’t true. She hadn’t gotten to be a commander and the SDF-1’s First Officer by being unobservant or slow to understand what was going on. But that didn’t help her figure out what she was feeling as she looked at Rick and the now-unreachable Minmei: some complicated mixture of relief and foreboding.
Minmei’s hands were high, and she had moved the crowd into a veritable transport of joy. White light blazed all around her, and it seemed that every hope and aspiration was embodied in her.
“I can’t believe I’ve come this far,
This is my time to be a star!”
The hatch to the battle fortress’s bridge slid aside; all heads turned. Gasps and yells sounded from all sides.
Lisa felt better already, there in the place that was most important to her. “Hi,” she said shyly, not recognizing many of the faces and wishing only to get back to her station, get back to her work. She would have died before admitting that she wanted to drive all other thoughts out of her mind—to forget.
Claudia placed one hand to her chest in a “mercy me” sort of pose. “The prodigal returns!” The dark face creased in lines of real welcome, and Lisa began to feel better.
Gloval was absent from the bridge. The relief-watch tech at Lisa’s usual station stepped away from it, glad to see Lisa but a little intimidated before the omnipotent superwoman. “Nice to see you again,” the enlisted rating squeaked.
Lisa, nervous as a cat, managed to meet her eye for a moment. “Thank you very much,” Lisa got out, essaying a smile and then hiding behind her thick curtain of brown hair again. “It’s nice to be back.”
She ran her fingertips across the console’s controls, lost in thought. There had been so many times when she’d never expected to stand there again.
The women on the bridge were paying her a kind of attention that didn’t really conform to any conventional military courtesy—happy for her and taking liberties with standard procedure.
“Congratulations on your promotion!”
“And you’re a real hero!”
“We’re all so proud of you, Lisa!” The tech who’d been watching over Lisa’s station had her hands clasped, smiling beatifically.
These were all women who had served their time under fire, who had come to know what it was Lisa Hayes did so well and how much of a difference her actions had made in the fate of SDF-1. Their few words meant so much more to her than the spotlights and crowds—she felt her tension ease; she was home again.
Now that she was back in familiar surroundings, everything that had happened came back to her. A small part of her was preoccupied, shifting through her emotions, but Lisa just savored the contentment of being back where she belonged.
The things that had brought conflict to her—the kiss in the enemy stronghold, the sight of Rick and Minmei—were, perhaps, aberrations. Maybe it was just her destiny to be what those in her family had always been—members of a military dynasty, her destiny tied to that of the SDF-1.
Certainly, all things seemed clear there on the battle fortress’s bridge. Doubts, misgivings—they fell away like dead flower petals.
Then Claudia was leaning an elbow on the console, too good a friend not to understand exactly how Lisa felt, too good a friend not to kid her out of it. “Well, how does it feel to be a heroine?” she purred.
Lisa’s pale cheeks colored. “Oh, you!”
“Come on! Tell Aunt Claudia!” The dark eyes narrowed mischievously. “Or did this promotion give you a sudden sense of modesty?”
Lisa lowered her gaze to the deck, avoiding eye contact as she often did when she wasn’t on duty. But she grinned at Claudia’s jibe, the first time she’d grinned in a while. She gave her friend a bemused smile.
“That’s it! My secret’s compromised!” Lisa crossed her arms on her chest and made a severe face, imitating Captain Gloval at his sternest. She rolled her r’s, so there’d be no mistake. “So let’s have a little respect here!”
Somebody Lisa didn’t recognize returned from a coffee run, and they all had some. “It’s good to be here,” Lisa said meditatively, letting the cup warm her palms. Then she made a puckish expression. “And lemme tell ya, the Zentraedi make lousy coffee.”
Claudia realized something and set her cup down. “Hold on! Lisa, I thought you were supposed to be on special furlough.”
Lisa lowered her cup, not wanting to think too hard about the ceremonies and the tangled feelings that had driven her back to the bridge. She bit her lower lip for a moment and said, “I wanted to come home.”
Claudia was about to say something to that; Lisa was both shielding something and waiting for someone to draw her out of it. It seemed to Claudia Grant a good time to order the enlisted crew off the bridge for chow or whatever and get down to business.
But just then the hatch slid back again, and the Terrible Trio stood there. Sammie, Kim, and Vanessa spied Lisa and charged in, the dignity of rank forgotten. Lisa forgot it, too, swapping hugs with them and loving the calm and strength and serenity of the SDF-1’s armored bridge.
Claudia filed the subject of Lisa’s furlough and her strange new introspection away for discussion in the near future. She’d been protective of Lisa ever since they’d met and tried not to let that spill over into nosiness, but—
This girl needs a talking to, Claudia decided. And I’m not even sure about what!