“I thought I might find you in here,” her friend said, slipping into the seat opposite her “Why so glum, chum?”
Lisa looked up, startled and in no mood for good cheer.
“Come on,” Claudia pressed. “Tell me what Rick has done now, Lisa.”
“Please, Claudia …”
“Not in the mood for talk, huh? Well, honey, sometimes it clears the air … just helps to get it in the open.”
Lisa loved Claudia dearly, but ever since Roy’s death she seemed to have become the absolute font of optimism. Whether this was simply her way of running from reality—her path of control—Lisa had no idea. Just now she didn’t feel like “clearing the air”; instead, she tossed her head back as if to shrug off her dark mood and asked Claudia what made her think she was upset.
Claudia almost smiled. “Uh, woman’s intuition. And even if I’m wrong, I want you to try my prescription for pain.” She produced a box of blended teas from her jacket pocket and slid it across the table. “Hot tea can do wonders for open wounds.”
Indefatigable optimism and a reliance on health potions and panaceas, thought Lisa. But after a moment she surrendered.
“Is it really all that noticeable?”
“Only if someone happens to be glancing in your general direction,” Claudia told her. “Or maybe to someone who’s been there …”
Lisa could only shake her head.
Claudia reached out for Lisa’s hand. “I know how it is … but you’ve got to loosen up. Stop trying to control how you feel—just tell him.”
Claudia stood up.
“What am I supposed to tell him?”
Now Claudia shook her head. “How you feel about him, silly.”
Lisa thought about it as Claudia walked off. She picked up the package of tea and began to fool with it absently. Rick Hunter, she said to herself. This is the way I feel about you: I-I love you. Suddenly she gave the box a sort of hopeless toss. Even her inner voice was stammering! This was not going to be easy.
* * *
Mirroring the emotional state of its pilot, Skull One came in fast and furious, rocking side to side as it screeched along the Prometheus’s flight deck.
Rick was like a raw nerve just waiting to be touched. Effectively he’d been in high gear since leaving the abandoned Zentraedi base over forty-eight hours earlier. For the past eight, the squadron had been scouring the countryside for signs of Khyron’s forces. Beginning with the site of the surprise attack (now a place of unspeakable carnage, littered with the remains of scores of Battlepods and RDF mecha), Skull Team had traced Khyron’s retreat north to yet another hastily abandoned base. Sensor readings indicated that a Zentraedi warship had been launched from the base shortly before Skull’s arrival, but there was no trace of its heading or any way to determine the strength of Khyron’s remaining army. Given the number of Zentraedi who had deserted the cities, the size of the ship (Zentraedi cruiser class), and the fact that Khyron was in possession of a workable sizing chamber, troop estimates ranged anywhere from one to three thousand.
Then there was Lisa to think about—the other front in this war without end. Bad enough that most of his waking life was spent following orders, but to have to take them from someone who expected to regiment his personal life as well was more than he could stand. Even the memory of Minmei’s sweet embrace wasn’t enough to wash away dawn’s sour start.
“We’ll put her away for you, Captain!” one of the ground crew said as Rick was raising the canopy.
It took Rick a second to realize that the man was talking about Skull One. He took a deep breath of fresh air and climbed from the cockpit, dead on his feet.
The ground crew chief called out to him as he was leaving. “Excuse me, sir, but Captain Hayes wants you to report to her as soon as possible.”
“Did she say why?” Rick asked him.
“No, sir.”
Rick turned and stormed off. It was time to have a showdown with Captain Hayes.
Lisa, meanwhile, was at her station in the SDF-2 control room. She had made up her mind to apologize to Rick, perhaps go a step further if her courage held up. Humming to herself now while she toyed with the tea package, she didn’t notice Rick’s vexed entry. Vanessa, at the adjacent duty station, tried to whisper a warning, but Lisa had turned and caught sight of him, somehow misreading his mood.
“Oh, hello, Rick,” she said cheerfully.
He answered her by practically throwing his written report at her. “With my compliments, Captain.”
Lisa’s eyes went wide; she hadn’t anticipated this.
“Will that be all?” he continued in the same sarcastic tone. “I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
“Rick, I—”
“I said, will that be all, Captain?”
“What’s the matter with you?” She raised her voice, but it came out confused-sounding.
“What’s the matter with me?! I come in after chasing Khyron halfway across the continent and the first thing I hear is that I’m supposed to report to you—you think I don’t understand military procedure by now, or what?!”
He was standing over her, red-faced and shaking.
“If you’ll just give me a chance to explain …”
“And another thing.” He made a fist. “My personal life is just that—personal! D’ ya understand, Captain?! I’ll speak to whoever I want, whenever and wherever I want!”
So that was it, Lisa thought. He believed that she had manipulated this morning’s situation for her own purposes. In other words, her motives had been transparent.
“I understand,” she told him meekly.
“Like Vanessa here, for example,” Rick added suddenly, walking over to her station. “Am I right or not?”
Vanessa adjusted her glasses, glanced briefly at Lisa, and slid down in her seat, wanting no part of this. “Uh, I don’t really think I’m …”
But Rick was bending over her, his hand on the back of her chair, full of false charm. “Hey, why don’t we grab a bite to eat?”
Vanessa blanched. “Please,” she told him, not wanting to have to state the obvious. “As you can see, I’m still on duty …”
“So what? You can still play hooky, can’t you?” Rick stole a look at Lisa; she was getting to her feet, her back to both of them.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Lisa said, “I think I’ve had enough of this.” She was hurt, but at the same time she felt sorry for Rick. That he would stoop to such transparent gestures to get even with her; that he would drag her friend into it; that he was a man …
When Lisa was out of earshot, Vanessa turned sharply to Rick and told him off. “That was the worst, Hunter. I mean it.”
He had an arrogant look on his face. “Oh yeah, why’s that?”
Vanessa shook her head in disbelief. “You’ve been relying on instruments too long, hot shot. Open your eyes: Did you stop to think about how Lisa feels about you?” This was none of her business, and she knew she had no right to be speaking for Lisa, but somebody had to get this guy to wise up.
“Feels about me?” Rick was saying as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You gotta be kidding—the only thing Lisa cares about is her job.”
Vanessa frowned, and Rick walked off. She gave herself a moment to calm down, then went over to Kim’s station to fill her in on this latest chapter in the Hayes-Hunter miniseries.
“What’s Lisa’s problem?” said Kim after she’d been briefed.
“She doesn’t have any problem,” Sammie defended her commander. “It was just a lovers’ quarrel. It’s none of our business.”
Vanessa disagreed. “You weren’t there. She loves him, but she doesn’t have the courage to tell him.”
“That’s absolutely ridiculous!” said Kim, suddenly angry. “Why doesn’t he just be a man about it and tell her how he feels?”
Vanessa gave her a quizzical look. “Has it ever occurred to you that he doesn’t share the same feelings? He asked me out,
you know.”
“Oh, come on,” Kim said, dismissing it. “He knows how she feels about him, and he does feel the same. He’s just being a stubborn idiot.”
Vanessa restated her doubt. Sammie, though, had a dreamy look on her face. “Well, if I felt that way about a man, I’d come right out and tell him.”
Kim turned to her and laughed. “Yeah, but you do that with almost every man you meet!” This cracked Vanessa up as well. But it didn’t last long.
Kim sighed. “The only reason we’re laughing is because it isn’t happening to us.”
Vanessa nodded. “The only other man Lisa ever loved was killed in action.”
“This makes me so sad …” Sammie said tearfully.
Yeah, Vanessa thought, putting her hand on Sammie’s shoulder. But what would we do for entertainment around here without Lisa and Rick? What was there in her own life—or in Kim’s or Sammie’s—that even approximated passion and the dream of a new start? Rico, Konda, and Bron? That was a dead end on several counts. She grew tearful herself, for all of them. For the emptiness at the center of this brave new world they had all been thrown into.
In spite of the threatening skies, Lisa had decided to walk home from the base. The clouds opened up before she had made it halfway to the New Macross burbs, drenching her instantly and chilling her to the bone. A long winter was on its way.
When the world is out of synch with your inner life, you come to think of it as a heartless, godless realm; and yet when it mirrors those thoughts and feelings, you dismiss it as pathetic fallacy.
She stood thinking this to herself in front of Rick’s quarters. There were lights on inside, and once she saw his silhouette pass briefly behind the picture window perma-glass. It wasn’t aimless wandering that had brought her here, but she couldn’t summon up the nerve to go up to the door. Rather, she had a peace offering in mind: She’d leave Claudia’s tea in Rick’s mailbox, go home and phone him, and—
“Planning to drink that tea in the rain?”
All at once there was an umbrella overhead and Claudia was beside her, smiling. “Why don’t you go up and knock?”
“He doesn’t want to see me,” Lisa told her, raising her voice above the sound of the rain.
“You’ve made up his mind for him, huh? Well, listen, if you’re not ready to talk to him right now, why don’t you come on over to my place? We’ll dry off and talk some—what do you say?”
Lisa hesitated, and Claudia put the umbrella in her hand.
“Well, while you’re thinking about it …”
“Claudia, I …” Lisa began, but her friend was already trotting off. Lisa gave another hopeless glance toward Rick’s window and followed after her.
“I’ve made some nice hot tea,” Claudia called out from the kitchen.
Lisa was on the living room sofa towel-drying her hair. Tea sounded all right, but the chill she was feeling ran clear through to her heart. “At the risk of sounding like a pushy guest,” she said when Claudia entered with the tea serving, “you wouldn’t happen to have anything stronger lying around, would you?”
Claudia’s eyebrows went up. “Like what?”
“You hiding any wine around the house?”
A big grin appeared on her friend’s handsome face.
“You got it.”
“Well, go get it!” Lisa said playfully. She had a low tolerance for alcohol and drugs of any sort, which was both a good and a bad thing: On the one hand, her body simply rebelled at overindulgence, a fact that kept her from turning to drugs for escape in times of stress; while on the other hand, she could count on a little going a long way—one or two drinks and inhibition was a thing of the past. A classic “cheap date,” she reminded herself.
“Burgundy all right?”
“Right now I’d settle for Zentraedi zinfandel.”
Claudia returned with two wine goblets and sat down facing Lisa on the matching recliner. A framed photo of Roy held center stage on the low table between them. She pulled the cork from the bottle and poured two full glasses. Lisa offered a silent toast and drained the entire glass, sensing an almost instantaneous warmth suffuse her body. She settled back against the couch and smiled at Claudia.
“So how long does it take for the hurting to stop?” she asked her.
“You sound like you’re giving up.”
“When he came in with his report this morning, I really wanted to apologize, but then, before I could, he started chewing me out.”
Claudia refilled Lisa’s glass. “What did he say?”
“Only that his personal life was his own business and that I should stay out of it.” Again Lisa drained the glass.
“What did you expect?” Claudia was saying. “He doesn’t know how you feel about him. You’ve both shared some ordeals and some close conversation, but as far as he knows, you’re just his fellow officer and sometime friend.”
“I know … I’ve tried to be honest about it … but I don’t think it would matter anyway.”
Claudia had never seen her friend quite so loosened up. Lisa was holding her glass out for yet another refill, but she already looked pretty low-lidded. Claudia didn’t want her to get sick or pass out, but she poured a little more burgundy, anyway.
“You don’t know that it wouldn’t matter to him. Stop trying to outguess him all the time. Just do it, Lisa.”
Lisa blinked and shook her head. “Okay, toss it up to the wine.”
“Fine. But you weren’t drinking out there in the rain twenty minutes ago when you decided he wouldn’t want to see you … The situation’s not as hopeless as you think—at least the man you love is still alive … Of course, I know that you’ve had that experience also,” Claudia was quick to add.
Both women turned to the photo of Roy.
Claudia continued. “When Roy passed away, this,” she said, holding up her wine, “became a very necessary crutch for me … Now, nothing seems to be important anymore.”
Lisa was stunned, almost brought back to the edge of sobriety. But what about all that optimism? she wanted to ask—all those teas? Instead, she said: “There’s a difference, anyway … You and Roy hit it off from the very start … Rick and I were … emenies, I mean, enemies.” Lisa stopped and took a breath: “Enemies.”
Claudia chuckled, then grew somber. “It wasn’t like that at all—Roy and I were at each other’s throats all the time. It nearly drove me crazy.”
A second revelation! thought Lisa.
Claudia reached for Roy’s photo. “Do you want to laugh? I’ll tell ya ’bout him!”
Lisa laughed up front. “Lemme tell ya something—right now I’ll take all the laughs I can get!”
Rick was too exhausted to sleep; it was as if he had somehow passed beyond the need for rest. And that cold prewinter rain beating down on the flat roof of his small modular barracks home seemed to be keeping time with his racing heart.
He had tried to focus his thoughts on Khyron’s whereabouts; the latest intel reports pointed to a southern route of retreat. But where, Rick had asked himself while pouring over the reports and reworked maps—somewhere in what used to be Mexico, or the decimated Panamanian land bridge, the Amazon jungles, such as they were? Where was he hiding, and what was his next move likely to be? Even Breetai hadn’t a clue.
He gave up on this after a while and collapsed on his back to the bed, still in his uniform, hands locked underneath his head.
Why did I have to go and shoot off my big mouth like that? he asked himself, getting at last to the center of his confusion. The least I could have done was to listen to what she had to say!
That tall, blond, smooth-talking, and guitar-strumming Ray Fokker had been a ladies’ man came as no surprise to Lisa; but to hear Claudia tell it, he had also been something of a scoundrel and womanizer. Lisa had always known Claudia and Roy as the happy couple—this went back to the early days on Macross Island when the SDF-1 was first being rebuilt. But the stories Claudia had regaled her with for the past two h
ours painted a much different portrait than the one Lisa had imagined.
Claudia met Roy in 1996, during the initial stage of what would come to be called the Global Civil War, when the two of them were stationed together at a top-secret base in Wyoming: Roy the eager young fighter jock, half in love with death and destruction, and Claudia the naive recruit, easily impressed and often taken advantage of. Claudia described an arrogant Roy to Lisa: a whacko flyboy who would be plying her with gifts one week, then showing up for a date with three adoring women in tow the next. A Roy who would down enemy fighters in her honor but who would rarely call in advance to cancel an appointment.
“Talk about a complex personality,” Claudia said. “At first I didn’t want anything to do with him, and I avoided him as much as possible. I even told him so, point-blank. But … it didn’t work—Roy Fokker was nothing if not persistent.
“But what I’m trying to tell you is that our first impressions can be all wrong. Roy and I never really talked to each other, or said how we actually felt, until it was too late … And then he was gone.”
Lisa was momentarily confused; then she realized that Claudia was referring not to Roy’s death but to his overseas transfer during the Global Civil War.
For over a year Claudia didn’t hear from Roy; but ultimately they both wound up on Macross Island soon after the “Visitor” crash landed. Still, it was rough going. Roy now had a new love: Robotechnology—specifically, the Veritech fighters that Dr. Lang’s teams of scientists were developing.
“He used to look at those experimental aircraft the way I wished he would look at me,” Claudia explained.
She had actually left unopened all the gifts Roy had given her in the old days and returned them to him years later, hoping he would come clean with her about how he felt. But Roy had simply chalked it up to fate, telling her with a shrug, that you couldn’t win them all! And it was Claudia who had ended up hurt. On another occasion she saw him dancing and carrying on with three women in a way that suggested that they knew him much more intimately than she did.
But finally—on a rainy night much like tonight, Claudia went on—Roy confessed his love for her. As obsessed as he was with flying and combat, he was equally obsessed with death; he was certain that he would die in a fighter, and it was only Claudia he could talk to about his hidden fears.
Doomsday: The Macross Saga Page 49