In recent years, Karl Riber hadn’t come so often to mind—not more than once or twice a day, sometimes.
Occasionally, I wonder why I stayed in the service, since it was war that took us apart, war that had made peace-loving Karl volunteer for duty on the Mars Sara Base, that got him killed in that raid.
I was only a teenager, and a rather young one, when he left. When he died, I thought someday the pain would go away, the years would wear it out. I know better now.
Lisa Hayes, Recollections
LISA AND HER WATCHMATES SHOWED UP AT THE WHITE DRAGON with Max Sterling bringing up the rear. Max knew that Rick claimed to dislike them, especially Commander Hayes; but Max didn’t share his feelings.
He even suspected that Rick protested too much, was too loud in his denunciation of Lisa; Max had seen them together and knew there was more there than met the eye, more than either of them was willing to admit. But far be it from the self-effacing Max Sterling to make any comment.
As for Kim, Sammie, and Vanessa—the ones Rick had dubbed the “bridge bunnies”—Max was delighted to have their company. He thought it good luck to have run into them and been invited along and figured any VT jock who wouldn’t jump at the chance to have four good-looking women for company ought to report immediately for a long talk with the flight surgeon.
“Looks kind of crowded, doesn’t it?” Kim was saying, just as they realized someone was signaling them. He had a big roundtop all to himself, the only unoccupied table in the place. The bridge bunnies thought it was a sign from providence, and Lisa made no objection to joining him.
“Talk about a case of perfect timing,” Rick said as Max ran around trying to hold all the women’s chairs at once. “Minmei’s long-lost cousin Kyle was in Yokohama. And she wouldn’t come back without him.”
Lisa’s face clouded with disapproval. She knew Rick’s orders, and bringing an outsider was tantamount to disobedience. Still, if that was the only way Miss Macross would rejoin the ship, Rick had probably done the right thing, she admitted, even though she couldn’t see why the staff people—especially the civilian affairs and morale officers—were so determined that the girl be catered to.
Besides, she knew from her visit to the Alaskan base that there would be no leak of information about the SDF-1’s return or Minmei’s visit, not even from Minmei’s parents. The damned Council gestapo would apply pressure to make sure of that.
“So it’s a big reunion,” Rick was grousing. “Everybody in the neighborhood came in to see him.”
“Gee! What a hunk!” Sammie gushed.
Her two cohorts were quick to agree, sounding as if they were about to swoon. Lisa looked over to where Kyle stood with Minmei and his mother, greeting people and exchanging pleasantries with that gentle reserve of his.
Lisa gasped. He—he reminds me so of Karl!
Gentle, peace-loving Karl, her one and only love, gone forever.
The Terrible Trio were into their act. “Kim, you shouldn’t stare; not so hard!” Sammie giggled.
Kim sniggered back, “Oh, sure! And I suppose you saw him first?” Sammie dissolved in laughter.
Max seated himself, tossing a forelock of long blue hair out of his eyes, and polished his glasses on his napkin. Vanessa asked Rick, “What did you say her cousin’s name was again?”
“I think I said Kyle,” Rick grunted.
The Terrible Trio had practiced enough to say it as one, so that everybody in the place could hear: “OH! WELL, HE’S SURE GOOD-LOOKING, ISN’T HE?”
Maybe “bridge bunnies” isn’t such a bad name for them, after all, Max mused, putting his glasses back on and taking another look at this Lynn-Kyle.
“Gee, Minmei looks so happy,” Kim sighed.
Rick had something sour to say on the subject, but at that moment Mayor Tommy Luan sauntered up to the table, his usual effervescent self.
“Well, well, well, Rick, m’boy! So these are some of your friends, eh? Why don’t you introduce me to the ladies, hmm?”
Rick wondered if there was ever a time when Tommy Luan wasn’t campaigning. But before he could comply, Minmei’s cousin was there, with Minmei trailing behind like a faithful pet.
“Hello, Mr. Mayor; glad to have you back on Earth. I’d like to introduce myself: My name is Lynn-Kyle. Welcome to my family’s restaurant.”
Minmei, clinging to his arm, added, “Hi!”
Rick heard a little sound escape Lisa and saw that something about Kyle made her very distraught. The Terrible Trio fell all over one another greeting Kyle, and Max mumbled some adequate response.
The mayor said heartily, “Well, Kyle, even if you don’t like the army, you’ll have to admit there are some lovely ladies in the military!”
Lisa gasped. He even had the same convictions as Karl!
“Oh, uh, did I say something perhaps I shouldn’t have?” Tommy Luan asked with elaborate innocence. “Well, young people should get to know one another.” He sauntered off. “’Scuse me.”
Max had the distinct impression that the mayor was wearing a satisfied smirk—as though he’d succeeded at something. But what?
“Was the mayor implying you have something against the service?” Sammie piped up.
Kyle shook his head, the long, straight midnight hair shimmering. “It’s not just the military. I don’t like fighting of any kind.”
Sammie rested her chin on her hands and batted her eyelashes at him. “Oh, really?” For a guy this dreamy, she’d have sat happily listening to him do Zentraedi halftime cheers. Minmei gave Sammie a suspicious scowl.
“Fighting produces nothing!” Kyle declared. “It only results in devastation and destruction!”
Max was studying Kyle with an unusual directness. “Are you saying that everyone in the service enjoys destroying things?”
Rick couldn’t help jumping in, even if it offended Minmei. Maybe even because it would. “Well, I didn’t join the Robotech Defense Forces because I like devastation and destruction.”
Divine as Lynn-Kyle might be, even the Terrible Trio had to nod and murmur their agreement with that. Minmei intervened, afraid that things were about to get out of control.
“Hey, relax, everybody! We’re celebrating Kyle’s return, after all. I’ve got it: They’re broadcasting that show I taped yesterday. What about turning on the television?”
That met with general acclaim; if Minmei was the darling and idol of the SDF-1, she was an empress among her friends and neighbors. In another moment the six-foot screen showed her in the center of the spotlights, microphone in hand—not that the sound crew couldn’t have used directionals, but she preferred it as a prop. She wore a stunning new Kirstin Hammersjald creation.
The crowd in the White Dragon was cheering and stomping and whistling, as was the crowd in the taping studio. Rick strained to catch a little of the song:
I spend the days alone,
Chasing a dream—
All at once the entertainment special disappeared in an avalanche of zigzag, to be replaced by Colton Van Fortespiel.
Everyone in the SDF-1 knew Van Fortespiel, the SDF Broadcasting System’s supervising announcer and the only TV anchorman on record to wear dark wraparound sunglasses on camera. His appearance sent a signal of fear through the room; unscheduled announcements of this sort usually spelled trouble for the dimensional fortress.
For this reason, and the sunglasses, Van Fortespiel was sometimes called the Boogieman. The Boogieman was wearing earphones today, too, and speaking into a jumble of mikes that took his voice over the various sound-only circuits, intership comlines, and alternative TV channels.
“We interrupt our regular programming for this very important news bulletin.”
The White Dragon resounded with angry resentment. The crowd had felt at home, safe, and had been eagerly watching Minmei; the people wanted no part of any more disaster reports. They were yelling for Minmei’s show to be resumed.
“At a news conference moments ago,” the Boogieman continued, “Captain Henry Gloval disclosed to the press that permission for any survivors to leave Macross has been denied.”
There was a moment of stunned silence as Van Fortespiel shifted his sheets of copy, until a grandmotherly woman howled, “What does he mean, ‘denied’? Does that mean we’re stuck here? For how long?”
Others were raising objections, too, but most were shushing them to hear what else the Boogieman had to say.
“Rumors circulating throughout the ship’s upper echelons today indicate that this prohibition may only be temporary.”
A man in a brown sport coat shook his fist at the screen and hollered, “We finally make it back to Earth and now they’re telling us we have to stay aboard this junk heap?”
A redhaired woman, holding a frightened little girl who wore an RDF insignia on her rompers, wailed, “How much more do they think we can endure? When will all this ever come to an end?”
There were plenty of angry voices to second that. “Yeah; we demand an explanation!” bellowed a guy in a black T-shirt.
But the Boogieman was already returning them to their normally scheduled programming. In another second, Minmei, smiling winsomely in the spotlights, was finishing.
—here by my side!
…and taking a bow. The crowd in the restaurant didn’t spare her a clap or a whistle.
Kim murmured, “They spent all that time and this was the best announcement they could come up with to break the news?”
Max and Rick traded puzzled, worried looks: What’s she talking about?
Sammie gulped. “Look, they’re not taking it very well. I sure hope this doesn’t turn into an all-out rebellion!”
The man in the brown coat said, “Hey, look; we’ve got those military officers right over there! I say let’s get some kind of explanation out of ’em!”
A number of the men there went along with the idea, and in a moment the five RDF members seated at the table found themselves surrounded.
The brown sport coat shook a fist in Rick’s face. “C’mon, Lieutenant! Tell us what’s goin’ on!”
Rick spluttered and stammered, as surprised as anyone. “Well, uh, I guess I don’t really know…”
“Stop this!” Lisa snapped. “Stop it right now! How dare you treat us this way? We risked our lives—and plenty of us died!—to get you back here safely!”
Some of the crowd paused at that, but the man in the brown sport coat and a number of others weren’t buying it.
“What d’ ya want, gratitude?” He sneered. “When we lost everything we had because of your SDF-1? And now you’re making us prisoners here?”
He slammed his fist on the table; the Terrible Trio jumped, startled and frightened. “Well? I want a straight answer!”
Lisa tried again, more calmly. “Please, it’s just a temporary measure. Just give us—”
He cut her off. “For what, more of the same old promises? We’re tired of lies! We’re tired of being held here like convicts! Now we take matters into our own hands!”
Whoever the brown sport coat was, he was a rabble-rouser of considerable talent. He had almost all the men and quite a few of the women with him, talking about justice and fighting for their rights. And for Lisa the agonizing thing was that she knew that there was a lot to justify their reaction and that her father had been one of those chiefly responsible for doing this to the Macross survivors.
Some loudmouth was yelling, “Why don’t we show ’em we mean business? Let’s take these punks and force ’em to get us off this ship!”
Lisa stood, gathering the others in by eye. “Let’s go.”
A broken-toothed man clapped a big paw on her shoulder. “Hold it!”
She tried to stare him down. “You’d better let me go.”
He shook her. “Siddown!”
But a hand closed on his shoulder. “Okay, that’s enough.”
It was Max Sterling. Rick, halfway out of his chair to help Lisa, did a bit of a double take. Max had been sitting beside him a moment before. What’d he do, teleport over there?
Max’s voice was still mild, but his face showed a certain intensity Rick had seen only during combat. Look out, tough guy! Rick thought to the broken-toothed man.
“Take your hand off her. Now.”
Max had barely gotten it out when the man threw a punch, screaming, “Shut up!”
Max ducked, but not far. Rick had seen him do this before; Max’s incredible reflex time and psychomotor responses let him deal with such things by split seconds and fractions of an inch.
Max avoided the clumsy haymaker and delivered a jolting left, snapping the other’s head around, stepping back neatly as he began to collapse.
Other members of what had now become a mob saw what had happened and began to converge on Max, snarling and getting ready to fight.
Max glared at them, unruffled. “You’d better get back.”
Somebody shrieked, “Let’s get ’em!” and Rick found that he couldn’t get to Max because the mob was closing in on him, too. A man in a green turtleneck threw a wild left. Rick bobbed under, came up, and planted a solid uppercut, sending him staggering back. Two more men closed in, swinging hastily and inaccurately. He avoided them, backpedaling.
Max was taking on a very muscular young man who had plenty of power but not much style. Max warded off a roundhouse with an inside block, getting a quick hold on that arm. Max’s fist went ballistic under the guy’s chin, lifting him right off his feet. It was the brawler’s good fortune that his tongue was well back in his mouth, or his teeth would have snipped it off.
The muscular one landed sprawling across a table; it crashed down, slamming him on the back of the head as he landed on his butt on the floor.
Lynn-Kyle had neither advanced to help his cousin’s friends nor withdrawn from the scene. Rick got one brief look at him: Kyle was standing as rigid and indifferent as a stone idol.
Rick stopped another vigilante with a short, hard shot to the sternum, then rocked him back with a left cross.
Things had gone very well for the two VT pilots up to now, but more and more men were getting ready to wade into the melee as soon as an opening occurred. On the outskirts of things, Lisa and the Terrible Trio were doing what they could. Quite a number of self-appointed public prosecutors never got to mix it up with the pilots because a chop across the neck or a kick to the kneecap put them out of the fight for good.
But the odds against them kept growing. With no chance for a breather and no escape route, Rick and Max knew things would probably swing the other way shortly. There was no helping that, and the brawl had gone too far to be stopped now; they fought on. Rick was accomplished in hand to hand, quick, well trained, and in good shape, but Max Sterling was simply unleashed lightning.
It was then that Max, blocking a punch so that he had his foe’s arm in a firm lock, threw the man through the air. Only this fellow, thrashing and kicking madly, was lofted straight at Lynn-Kyle, who had been watching the fight impassively. Behind Kyle, Minmei let out a kind of squeak and ducked for cover.
Kyle never even moved his feet; he simply bent aside and struck, sending the unfortunate man flying through the air again, away from his cousin and himself.
The vigilante crashed into the table the muscular fellow had overturned, shattering it on impact as a result of the amazing force Lynn-Kyle’s move had imparted to him and somehow contriving to land on his face.
Two of the brawler’s friends were at his side instantly. “You all right?” one of them asked idiotically when it was obvious the man was not all right.
The brawler looked up woozily. “Who is that guy? He’s an incredible fighter!”
“His name’s Kyle,” said the other buddy, “and that was nothin’ but luck!” He straightened. “But I’m gonna fix him.”