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hatchway. His gatling cannon had been left in the hold, his lasers were burned
out, and he had scarcely half a dozen rockets left. Max was operating on
willpower, driven by the hope of rescuing his friends.
The interior of the flagship was a labyrinth of corridors and
serviceways, some well lighted and maintained, others dark, damp, and in
varying states of disrepair. But luckily, all of them had been deserted.
Until now.
Max was at the intersection of two corridors-curved ceilings, large
overhead light banks-peering around the corner when he saw the alien enter. A
private, Max guessed: standard-issue drab highrise-collared uniform, a round
cap with an insignia. He moved the Battloid back a step and scanned the area.
A short distance down the corridor behind him was what appeared to be a
utility closet with a curved-top hatch. He made his way to this as quickly and
quietly as he could manage, threw the bolt, and secreted the mecha inside.
Shut off from the corridor, Max had no way of knowing which route the
Zentraedi had taken, so the look of surprise on the alien's face upon
discovering a Battloid in the utility closet was no greater than the startled
look on Max's own.
For what seemed like an eternity they both stood there marveling at each
other, until Max's training brought a decisive end to it. He executed a
sidekick with the Battloid's right foot that caught the Zentraedi's
midsection, instantly doubling him over. Gathering up the unconscious private
in the Battloid's right arm, Max stretched out the left, grabbed the door
bolt, and slammed the hatch shut.
He was puzzling over what to do with the guy, when all at once the
cockpit indicators began crying out for attention. He checked the readouts but
still couldn't make sense of anything: All systems were functioning, and there
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didn't seem to be any immediate threats to the mecha, environmentally or
otherwise. So what was going on?
Then Max glanced at the astrogation displays. The temporal sensors were
spinning wildly-the flagship was folding!
Max watched as hours and days began to accrue on the gauge. He slumped
into his seat and waited...
The emergency spacefold which had catapulted the SDF-1 and Macross City
clear across the solar system had been Lisa's first; and, as such, there
hadn't been time to...well, look around. It had also been a relatively short
jump through space and therefore a brief one through time. But for this, her
second trip through the continuum, the temporal indicator built into her suit
registered the equivalent of fourteen Earth-days. Wherever the Zentraedi were
going, it was a long way from home.
Lisa had plenty of time to look around.
It was nothing like she had expected, nothing, in fact, like she had
been trained to expect. The stars did not so much disappear as come and go.
She couldn't be certain, however, that it was the same stars that were
rematerializing each time. The heavens seemed altered with each fade, as
though someone had snipped frames from a strip of film, editing out the
transitions from event to event. The energy umbrella that kept her and the
others confined to the grid prevented her from observing flux details in the
laboratory, but when she looked at Rick or Ben, she noticed a slight
shimmering effect that blurred the boundaries of objects; occasionally, this
effect intensified so that there was a sense of double focus to everything:
the form of the past, the form of the future, distinct, discrete, unable to
unite.
In real time, one Earth-day elapsed; and as the flagship began to
decelerate from hyperspace, the past twenty-four hours took on a dreamlike
quality. Had she slept through most of it, dreamed a good part of it? Or was
this some new condition of consciousness yet to be named?
Lisa, Rick, and Ben stood at the edge of their small world, watching the
stars assume lasting form once again. These were alien configurations to their
eyes: brilliant constellations of suns, dwarfs and giants, three planets or
moons of some unknown system, all against the backdrop of a gauzy multihued
nebulosity. And something else-something their unadjusted vision labeled an [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]