"The ride's starting, Rick. You better get the Alphas up." Grant's tone was one of excited disbelief.
Rick turned in time to see Veidt give him a knowing nod, signaling that he had "heard" Grant's message. When the Haydonite began to move off in the direction of Max's Alpha, elevating some as he hovered along the rim of the chute, Rick chinned Bela's frequency.
"A moment more," the Praxian told him. "Teal is with us."
"What's she doing down there?" Rick asked, surprised. "Everyone was supposed to be aboard by now."
"You will hear it from her own mouth," Bela told him shortly.
Rick understood that it had something to do with Baldan's death, and thought better than to press for details. "All right," he said. "Tell Kami and Learna they'll be riding with Max and Veidt. You and Teal will go up with me."
Bela acknowledged, and Rick hurried off to the Guardian-mode Alpha, which was sitting at the edge of the GMU's bubble mountain like some diminutive bird-of-prey. He threw himself up into the cockpit and brought the mecha's engines to life. Beside him the mountain was lifting off, while Praxis continued to rumble its ominous farewells.
In Fantomaspace, meanwhile, the pirated shuttle carrying Wolff and company from the SDF-3 was closing fast on the anchored dreadnought Lang had been instrumental in procuring.
"They're warning us to come about and return to the fortress," Janice told Wolff from the command seat. "Scanners show two gunships on our tail."
Wolff leaned forward to study a monitor, straining against the chair's harness. Elsewhere in the small command cabin, Sarna and Burak were similarly strapped in. Too large for any two of the shuttle's acceleration couches, Tesla was in the cargo hold, shackled but free-floating.
"Any word from the cruiser?" Wolff asked in a determined voice.
"Negative. They're not even responding to the SDF-3 bridge."
"Good. Now if we can just get there in time..."
A blaring sound began to wail from the control station's external speakers, and Janice swung to an adjacent console. "We're being targeted."
"Ignore it," Wolff snapped. "The first one will be a warning shot. With a little luck we'll be too close to the cruiser for them to risk a second."
"Steady..." Janice cautioned, and a split second later a bolt of angry light strobed into the cabinspace through the forward viewports. A second burst followed, singeing the shuttle's radome. Displays and monitors winked out, then revived.
Wolff showed the others a roguish grin. "Now we couldn't answer them if we wanted to."
"Cruiser's docking bay is opening. The bridge is patching into our guidance system. The SDF-3 thinks they're assisting in our capture."
"Let them take us in," Wolff ordered. He turned his head to take a final look at the SDF-3, suppressing a wish to see the fortress holed and derelict.
Janice straightened in her chair to obstruct his view. "The fortress is repeating the warning.
Admiral Forsythe-"
"To hell with them," Wolff barked.
Four crewmembers were on hand to meet the shuttle in the docking bay. "We were attached to Major Carpenter's command," one of the young officers explained as Wolff stepped out. "Welcome aboard, sir."
Sarna hovered alongside Wolff; Janice was last out, keeping a watchful eye on Burak and Tesla.
Wolff accepted the proffered hands. "Carpenter, huh? Good man. Sorry he can't be with us."
"Dr. Lang has other plans for him, sir," an ensign supplied.
"So I understand," Wolff said. Then, as if remembering: "Listen, we've got to do something about those gun-"
"All taken care of, sir. We put a few shots across their bow and they showed their bellies."
Wolff returned a weak smile. "You know what that means, Captain-you're committed."
"We were all along. Now we can act on it."
"All right," Wolff said, nodding, his smile broadening. "Let's get under way."
As they left the bay, the ensign added, "Course is set for Praxis."
"What's our ETA?" Janice wanted to know.
"Two days relative." The captain saw their surprise. "We've made some improvements since you left."
"I guess you have," Wolff enthused. And he began to think about those improvements as the captain hurried him to the bridge. Carpenter was one lucky soul, getting a shot at returning to Earth. Wolff never would have believed he could be envious of such an opportunity, but the events of the past thirty-six hours had punched a lot of holes in his former thinking. Things have changed, he seemed to hear both Lang and Minmei say; and indeed they had. He would be the next to return Earthside, he decided. One way or another. And for the first time in a year he thought about the family he had left behind, and the love he would try to reawaken.
The orbs had lifted the GMU to an altitude of almost twenty miles by the time Rick and Max brought their Alphas aboard. Below, hidden beneath a swirling, agitated pall of cloud cover, Praxis was fractured beyond recognition, the molten stuff of its core geysering to the surface and boiling away the planet's oceans and fragile atmosphere. Microclimates and cyclonic storms added to the fury, unleashing blinding bolts of lightning and torrents of black rain, while volcanoes answered the skies with thunderous volleys of their own making. Praxis bellowed and roared like some tortured animal, rattling the GMU with its clamorous cries.
In the base's pressurized ordnance bay, Rick and the others began to wonder whether they would make it after all. Veidt had told them that the orbs could only remain clustered for a short time once they reached the outer edge of the planet's envelope; but with Praxis seemingly entering its final phase, the base would need to be hundreds of thousands of miles out-at least as far as the planet's primary satellite. The way Cabell saw it, the Sentinels had one recourse: to use the most fully fueled VTs and Logans I to reach the far side of the moon. A preliminary count of the available mecha, however, had already pointed up the cruel truth half the Sentinels would have to face; and even so, what would the rest have accomplished outside of prolonging the inevitable? Were they to throw together a bivouac on the moon's frozen surface, or simply wander the wastes like some misguided flock until the mechas' power and life-support systems failed?
In another part of the bay, Gnea and Bela were asking Teal why she had gone back to the cave. Neither of the Praxians knew much about Spheris or the ways of its crystalline life-forms, but the women guessed that Teal would have been just as happy to have remained on Praxis with her dead comrade.
"But we've all endured losses and hardships," Bela was telling her, trying to be helpful. "Recall how Lron and Crysta suffered when the Farrago met its end, and how Gnea and I grieved for our Sisterhood. Now our very world..."
Lron, who was standing within earshot, made a kind of mournful growl. "Death is the way of the world," he muttered in the usual Karbarran fashion. "We do not mourn the loss of our friends; we are resigned to such things."
"I'm not mourning for Baldan," Teal said, looking up at him and Crysta. "I'm upset about the child."
"The dead child," Gnea started to say.
"It's not dead," Teal said harshly, standing up and walking away from them.
"It lives?" Bela said, catching up and spinning her around by the arm. "And you would knowingly abandon it?"
"Let her be, Bela," Lron cut in. "You know nothing of their ways."
"I know what it means to leave a being to die," she answered him. "Why, Teal?" she asked.
The Spherisian gazed at her coldly. "Because I will have to care for the infant. That is our way."
Teal snatched her arm away and Bela threw back her broad shoulders. "I will return for the child. I will raise it, if you won't."
Teal whirled on her, pointing a hand accusingly. "What do Praxians know of motherhood? I forbid you!"
Even Gnea had misgivings about the idea, and risked a step into Bela's path. "Think twice, Sister. Besides, it is too late-Halidarre rests and our Praxis is out of reach."
"I'll take you," a female voice rose up from the group of mecha pilots that had gathered round. Miriya Sterling eased her way her way through the group, until she was toe-to-toe with the amazon. "I'll take you," she repeated.
"A Praxian and a Zentraedi sharing the same small space?" Gnea scoffed. "Even such a mission of mercy-"
"No matter what you may think of me," the former Quadrono ace responded, "I know as much about the sanctity of life as any of you do. Give it a try, Bela-for the infant's sake." She thrust a helmet into Bela's hands.
Bela held on to the thing for a moment, then donned it, and raced with Miriya for one of the Skull's red VTs.
Rick didn't even consider trying to stop them-not that Bela or Miriya would have listened to him in any case. He had noticed a kind of latent xenophobia surfacing among the Sentinels-something stress had brought out-and reasoned that a rescue mission could provide just the rallying point everyone needed.
Bela and Miriya were suited up by the time Rick came over to wish them luck; and minutes later the bay had been cleared for the VT's launch. Miriya entered course headings as the mecha dropped down along the GMU's substantially reduced orb cluster and into the dark night of the planet's soul.
Once through the shroud, the two women witnessed for themselves the final, tormented moments of Praxis's tectonic death. Great, furious rivers of molten stuff coursed across the planet's surface now, burying forests and villages in liquid fire. Here and there, where
the rivers were abruptly dammed by ground swells, were crater-sized lakes of lava, flailing white-hot tendrils into an equally hellish sky. Praxis seemed to be expanding while they watched, bursting its geological seams.
Miraculously, the region around the caves was practically unchanged, except for an expanding flow of lava that had sealed the entrance to the central cavern. The artificial chute, however, remained open and accessible.
"We'll have to go in through the top," Miriya shouted, struggling to keep the VT stabilized in the face of intense updrafts from the liquified valley floor.
Miriya imaged the VT over to Guardian mode and dropped the mecha into a controlled fall through the wide chimney the Sentinels had blasted through fifty feet of porous rock. With external temperatures registering in the red, there was no leaving the Veritech for a personal rescue; but years of experience in handling the mecha allowed Miriya to accomplish something even more extraordinary: foot thrusters holding the mecha motionless only inches above a pool of lava that had seeped in through the mouth of the cave, she utilized the radome to rake the throbbing crystal away from the wall where Teal had dropped it. Then, when the Spherisian infant was within reach, she took it gingerly into the VT's metal-shod hand, brought up the thrusters, and took the Guardian up the chimney, in a kind of stork reversal.
All the while, Bela was offering words of encouragement, and free of the chute now, she reached forward to give Miriya an affectionate squeeze on the shoulder.
Praxis did all it could to ground the tiny craft, hurling plumes of fire at its tail and chasing it to the edge of space with savage stabs of lightning; but there was no stopping Miriya, no way she would permit the planet to reclaim the child they had rescued from its unharnessed evil.
Once more through the pall, the VT reached the deceptive safety of the planet's stratosphere. Locked on to the GMU's frequency now, Miriya and Bela began to relax some; but as they approached the ten-wheeled battlewagon and its support cluster, they saw something that delivered them to the edge of panic: both the vehicle's launch doors were wide open, and local space was littered with VTs and Logans, even half-a-dozen reconfigured Hovertanks. Miriya and Bela thought for a moment that things had reached the hopeless level, and someone had given the abandon-ship order, a reckless last gasp for the moon...
Then they spotted the dreadnought, Wolff's bright spot in the galaxy-the SDF-7 rescue vessel.
One day Rick and Lisa would compare the rescue of the Sentinels to the SDF-l's rescue of
Macross from the Solar System's outer circle of frozen hell; there was the same sense of urgency, the same logistical problems and sacrifices-and chief among these would be the GMU itself. With the orbs beating a fast path for the safety of interstellar space, the Sentinels had no way to maneuver the base aboard, and there was no docking bay in the SDF-7 large enough to contain it even if they could. But just now, to everyone but Vince Grant, the GMU was of secondary concern. Distance was the crucial matter at hand-how much could be put between the cruiser and Praxis, and just how quickly.
They were close to a million miles out when the planet came apart, when enough force to obliterate the moon-the place Rick had recently seen as their possible salvation. Bela and Gnea were on the bridge to witness the brief fireball that flared where a world had once turned.
"We are homeless," Bela cried.
But from what Rick and the others were beginning to understand, the Praxians weren't the only ones. Again a comparison with the SDF-1 would present itself, the memory of a council's edict that forbade the fortress to remain the Earthspace, an edict that effectively betrayed the Robotech Defense Force. And such betrayals, Rick reminded himself, had a cruel way of balancing out...
Superluminal Reflex drives kept the fortress well ahead of Praxian debris, and during that brief run to the outer limits of the planetary system, Wolff related to his dazed comrades the sobering tale of his short stay aboard the SDF-3. Wolff knew nothing of the simulagent's assassination, and Tesla certainly wasn't talking; but even without that subplot, there was more than enough to leave the Humans dumbfounded.
As they continued to rehash the details, a curious understanding of the council's decision began to undermine their initial outrage. But that Wolff should have to steal a ship, and that the Sentinels would as a consequence be viewed as outlaws...these things were not so easily embraced. For the XT Sentinels, the revelations only meant that they had gained a second enemy instead of a much-needed ally. Among the group, however, there was the beginning of a renewed cohesiveness.
Rick thought he detected something unsettling in Wolff, but he dismissed it, speculating that he would probably have returned in even worse shape.
"Do we return to Tirol, or continue on as planned?" Rick asked everyone. "If we opt for going back, it could mean prison for most of us, death for some," he added, glancing over at Wolff. "On the other hand, it might give us a chance to explain ourselves to the council and keep Edwards from gaining any further influence."
"What do we care about your General Edwards?" Lron shouted, looking for support from the other XTs. "The Invid are our enemy. And if your forces decide to side with them
against us, so be it."
Kami, Learna, Crysta, Bela, and Gnea voiced their support for Lron's position. Cabell, Rem, Janice, Sarna, and Veidt were curiously quiet.
Rick silenced them and directed the question to the RDF contingent. Lisa stood up to answer him.
"I understand the need for countering Edwards's influence," she said in a way that was aimed at Rick, "but we have to consider the broader picture. Our return could place the council in an awkward position with regard to further negotiations."
"We'll accomplish the same thing with continued acts of aggression directed against Invid-held planets," someone from the Wolff Pack pointed out. "What happens when Edwards comes gunning for us-do we fight our own forces?"
Vince Grant shot to his feet and turned on the pilot, even as Jean was trying to calm him down. "The council would never bow to the Regent's demands that we be hunted down! They'd break the truce before they'd do that-"
"Not if Edwards is running the council!"
"Waste 'em!" said a Skull pilot. "They were ready to let us die on Praxis! I say we're free agents!"
XTs and Humans cheered. Rick found himself thinking about pirates, and happened to notice Jack Baker slapping Lron on the back, while Karen raised her eyes in an imploring gesture.
"Put it to a vote," Max sugg
ested.
Rick scanned the crowd and received nods of agreement from Lisa, Wolff, Miriya, Vince, and Cabell. "Will it be Garuda, then, or back to Tirol?" he asked loud enough to be heard above the tumult.
"Garuda!" came the overwhelming response.
"Then it's settled," he said, aware once more of how he had taken charge without being asked. And from across the room, Lisa's eyes burned into his own.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I'm looking forward to Garuda in a way that has nothing to do with what I felt toward either
Death Dance Page 9