Genesis

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Rick was brought out of his musings by a scrape of metal-a screech, really-that set his teeth on edge and had him alert for danger.

He'd grown used to the endless dripping of water condensed on or leaking from pipes, not even registering it anymore, and could identify most of the ship's sounds-giant circulation systems and the vibrations of far-off machinery. But this one was something new.

It was Minmei. "Let's see: Yesterday was Thursday. Now Friday…" She held a triangular piece of scrap metal in her hand, one edge sharpened against the deck, finishing the line she was gouging in Mockingbird's upside-down fuselage, under the starboard nose canard.

There were two of them, irregular verticals cut deep into the racer's vulnerable skin. She'd picked a spot where there was room for quite a few marks, he saw.

"Hey! What're you doing?"

She turned to him with a smile, happy to be doing something that yielded tangible results, however slight. "I'm keeping a record of how many days we've been stranded here." She offered him the improvised cutter. "Would you like to help?"

It had obviously never occurred to her that his Heiko had a day/date function. Rick kept the fact to himself; her personal calendar seemed to lift her morale. "No thanks. You're doing fine. I'm gonna get back to work."

"See ya." Minmei grinned and watched him walk off, slinging his clipboard around his neck for another exploration-survey mission.

That was a brand-new paint job! He blew his breath out. It didn't matter anyway; Mockingbird would never fly again. Some help she is! Well, I don't suppose too much else can go wrong today.

Which was just when he clunked his forehead against a low-hanging pipe. Recoiling back in pain, he hit another with the back of his skull. Hissing in anger and pent-up frustration, he berated himself for not wearing the Veritech helmet as a hardhat.

But he refused to turn back. Marking off the different routes and possible escape paths available to them had seemed easy at first, until he'd come to realize what a tremendously complicated and far-reaching maze they were trapped in. He'd come to so many dead ends that he constantly saw them in his dreams.

Banging on pipes and bulkheads with the metal bar had produced no results, and even sending shorts and longs over a severed power cable was a failure. Depression was hard to fight off, and he couldn't bear the thought of what would happen if he didn't come up with a solution soon.

There was one long shot he hadn't mentioned to Minmei yet, not so much because it was a life-or-death risk for him but rather because, if he tried it and failed, she would be alone. Still, his alternatives were fewer and fewer with every passing hour.

When he finally dragged himself back to the plane after more fruitless searching, he was pleasantly surprised to see that he hadn't been the only one hard at work.

"Well, Rick, how do you like our new home?" Minmei asked him, eyes shining.

Rick broke into a smile for the first time he could recall. "It's great!" was all he could say.

Minmei had somehow figured out how to get the parachute out of the back of the pilot's seat-maybe after reading the ejection instruction plate, it occurred to him. It couldn't have been easy with Mockingbird hung upside down eight or nine feet off the deck.

More than that, she'd draped it over the ship to make a roomy red and white striped tent. And best of all, she'd located the survival gear, set up the tiny camp stove, and put together a meal whose smell had his mouth watering until his jaws hurt.

The compartment lights were going dim according to SDF-1's twenty-four-hour day/night schedule. The two moved in under the tent, Rick sitting tailor-fashion while Minmei knelt by the stove, stirring with a plastic spoon.

"By making stew we can make our supplies last longer," she explained. Rick repented of his earlier thought-that she couldn't pull her own weight.

"That's right; I forgot," he said, determined to make it up to her. "You're in the restaurant business."

She was sprinkling bits of what seemed to be seasoning into the stew, only he couldn't remember spices being listed on the rations contents listings. Whatever she'd done, she'd come up with something that smelled heavenly.

"No, the White Dragon was my Aunt Lena's restaurant," Minmei responded, shrugging. She thought a moment, then added, "Actually, I want to be an entertainer."

Rick cocked his head in surprise. "You're planning on being an actress?"

"Well, I studied acting, singing, and dancing." She'd been dishing up his portion. "Here."

"Thanks." He was silent for a while, taken by the image of Minmei dancing. Then, "That doesn't exactly prepare you for something like this, huh." Ruefully, he looked down at his clipboard and the growing map of dead ends.

Five days went by.

"Can you believe they're rebuilding the city inside the ship?" someone was saying as Lisa Hayes entered the officers' wardroom. "It's amazing."

She saw by his insignia that he was a Veritech pilot off the Daedalus, one of the few who'd been in the air during the spacefold jump and had thus been spared. He and his kind were like specters these days, watching whole new groups of pilots being crash-trained to fly the fighters that the carriers' dead could no longer man.

His comment about the refugees and their rebuilding was grudging. Open area of any kind in a naval or space vessel was always held dear, and now…

"You can leave the trays, steward," Claudia was saying at the table where she waited for Lisa. "Thank you very much. It smells wonderful."

"Yes, ma'am." The steward served awkwardly, a new recruit; everybody with military training had been tapped for higher-priority work these days, and it was most often serve yourself. But things were tough all over, and complaints were very few. This particular steward, Claudia had found out, was to be posted to a gunnery class next shift.

"So he expects me to volunteer and go out and get this castaway shelter module all alone, and I sez, 'Sir, I'm brave but I ain't crazy!" the VT pilot continued.

"So you didn't volunteer," his tablemate said. "But did you go?"

The first pilot shrugged unhappily and made a zipping motion with his hand, thumb and pinkie spread to indicate a Veritech's wings. They both laughed tiredly.

Some things never change, Lisa thought. Contrary to what most civilians thought, real combat veterans seldom bragged among themselves of their heroism; it was a mark of high prestige to go on about how scared you were, how fouled up things were, how hairy the situation had gotten, how dumb the brass were. Because among them, everyone knew; boasts were for outsiders.

"Oh, there you are," Lisa said, collapsing into a chair across from Claudia.

Claudia lowered her coffee cup. "What's the latest on the refugees?"

Lisa pursed her lips, weighing the answer. "We finally have them divided by city blocks and the construction's going on twenty-four hours a day."

Claudia's dark eyes were unfocused with fatigue and with the strangeness of what had happened and what was going on.

She could only manage an understatement. "Really? That's incredible."

Gloval had known at once what must be done. His relentless effort to get the Macross survivors and as much salvageable and recyclable material aboard as was possible had yielded amazing results. It was the only way the humans could make the long voyage home.

Miles-square purse-seine nets had been devised overnight by the engineers to collect what could be collected of the wreckage. There'd been too many acts of individual valor to count or keep track of. Not the least of them was the work of the disposal teams, whose grim job was to remove the dead from the supercarriers and other areas where they were encountered.

Hold after hold in SDF-1 that had been reserved for future missions and future purposes that would never come to be were now filled with wreckage, and there were material stores that could be used as well. Robotech fabrication machines aboard the SDF-1 were the most advanced devices of their kind ever developed-the equivalent of an industrial city packed into a few compartments, minifactories that could replicate a staggering assortment of manufactured goods and materials.

As for blueprints and plans, they would be child's play for the SDF-1's computers, since all records of the city's construction, from the first permanent building constructed ten years earlier to the last, were in the ship's data banks.

More importantly, Gloval understood before anyone else aboard just what the long trip to Earth would entail. The civilians couldn't be expected to simply sit in packed emergency billets and twiddle their thumbs; that invited complete social breakdown, and disaster for the SDF-1.

The secret was well kept in subsequent mission reports and in announcements to the refugees, but it was Gloval's liaison officers who planted the seed of the idea: Why not rebuild Macross City?

The gouges of Minmei's calendar had multiplied: four verticals with a crosshatch now, and two more besides.

Now Rick dreaded returning to the small light cast by the miniature camp stove, dreaded having Minmei pretend she wasn't disappointed by another day of bad news.

She'd begun explorations too, to double their chances, over his strenuous objection at first-but with his unspoken acceptance as things became more and more desperate.

Now he sank wearily onto his pallet, while she stirred the thin soup that was the very last stretching of their rations. He hadn't been able to find out how the mice were subsisting, but it wouldn't be very long before he and Minmei would be forced to start trying to catch them. He doubted that even she could make mouse stew taste very good.

He sat, trying to figure out how to phase his difficult decision.

"No luck, huh?" Minmei said. "Why don't you rest?"

"Minmei," he began, head lowered on his knees, "I don't know what else to do. This ship is like a big prison maze."

"Yeah," she said without looking up, "a big prison floating somewhere in space."

It was an opening he hadn't expected, a chance to make his plan look hopeful, to make her optimistic. "That's it, of course! We're in space!" He tried to sound as though he'd just realized the implications of that.

She looked startled. "What about it?"

"That's our way out of here! Out that air lock we found and into another, somewhere farther above!"

She didn't understand. "We can't do that; we don't have any spacesuits."

He was already on his feet, the Veritech helmet taken down from its resting place. "My flight helmet will protect me. I'll float out, get help, and come back down here for you. It's simple! It'll work!"

He flipped up his flightsuit collar and ran his fingers along the automatic closure to show her how it formed a pressure seal and a collar ring that could be fitted to the helmet's.

She looked terribly confused. "Yes, but-"

"Now, I'm going to need your help," Rick said as he led the way with the flashlight. "So I'll show you how to use the air lock controls, okay?"

She trailed behind unwillingly, hands clasped behind her, silently accepting his help as they began ascending the mountain of packing crates and boxes again.

They reached the Zentraedi-scaled utility shelf near the power panel; it was the width of a country lane. The control dials were the size of wagon wheels, the buttons as big as her bedroom window. "You sure you understand everything?" he checked again.

"Mm-hmm." Then she said in a rush, "Without oxygen tanks, though, Rick? How're you going to breathe?"

"There's air in the helmet and some in the suit. I won't need much time." But he hurried along before she could pinpoint the problem that he'd already spotted: They'd explored the ship in every direction and found no nearby air locks. From this one, it would strain his scant supply of air to the very limits to reach another, even if one lay just beyond their prison.

He turned and started off before she could say anything more. "Wait!" cried Minmei, running after him. "I'm having second thoughts about all this! Rick?"

She ran after him, back around the turn in the shelf. "Where're we going?"

"I want to show you: You can stand by this big viewport here so we can communicate if we have to." The viewport was bigger than a movie screen.

She gasped and threw both hands up to her mouth, feet going pigeon-toed, eyes enormous.

He prepared his most matter-of-fact voice. "Minmei, what is it now? You've gotta stop this constant worrying-huh?"

She wasn't looking at him. She was gaping over his shoulder at the viewport. He whirled. "Look… at… that!"

"I've never seen anything like it!" Minmei breathed. "What kind is it?"

At first he thought it was some kind of new prototype spacecraft, silvery and sleek, and he was already trying to figure a way to signal it. Then he was afraid it might be an alien ship, although it didn't look anything like a pod. But a second later he calmed down and saw what it really was, which was only slightly more fantastic than possibilities one and two.

"Offhand, I'd say it's a tuna," Rick ventured. "I didn't know they grew that big."

This one was as long as Mockingbird and appeared to be intact and whole. Why the forces of explosive decompression and vacuum hadn't turned it into something more like a radar-waved football, he couldn't imagine; he was unacquainted as yet with the very singular peculiarities of a Protoculture-generated force field.

It floated along like a schooner, as if it was keeping pace with them. "That sure is a big tuna fish," Minmei observed, licking her lips.

"Real big," Rick conceded. He turned to her, and they both yelled "Yay-yyy!" at the same instant, pressing their noses and palms up against the viewport. "I wonder if there's a way I could snag it out there," he said longingly.

They turned to each other, chorusing, "Tuna fish!"

Rick made sure the ring seal was as tight as he could make it. Seals at his wrists and ankles were reinforced with all the tape he'd been able to find and some turns of twine. The collar closure was wound tight with layer upon layer of cloth strips.

He realized he couldn't hear anything and opened the faceplate again. Minmei was yelling down to him, "Be careful out there! Wave when you're ready!"

He gave her the wave and closed the faceplate again, carrying his looped line back into the oversize air lock. Minmei said, "Here we go!" to herself and strained against a wagon wheel dial.

Rick did his best to keep calm as the inner hatch came down with a finality that made the deck jump and the air bled away. Next to him were a pair of heavy tanks of some kind; he clutched them close. He felt the ship's artificial gravity easing off him.

When the air was gone and the outer hatch was open, he took careful bearing and pushed himself off, trailing the long rope behind. His suit was already becoming a steambath.

The tuna was obliging in that it didn't move much, but his aim was off. He threw one of the tanks from him in one direction, Newton's third law driving him off in the other.

There'd be no time for fumbling; if he missed, he'd have to go back in and refill his suit with air, get more ballast, and try again. Exhausted and depleted, he didn't know if he had the strength for that and didn't want to find out. He tucked the second tank into the looser cloth windings.

He pinwheeled, unused to zero gravity, forcing down the appalling thought of how he'd die if he lost control of his stomach now and gave in to zero-g nausea.

Then he was drifting toward a lifeless eye the diameter of a dinner platter. He spread his arms and bulldogged the tuna. The big fish spun slowly as Rick clung to the left side of its head. He belayed a loop around a pectoral fin as insurance.

He tried heaving the second tank to get the tuna moving toward the lock, but without much luck; the thing was weightless, but its mass hadn't changed, and its mass seemed immovable.

The line he'd played out behind him reached its end, stretching just a bit, an expensive composite made for deep-space work, stronger than steel. Rick was jolted, realizing that if he hadn't looped the fin, he'd have been snapped loose from the fish like a paddleball.

The line's elasticity absorbed the fish's movement and contracted, starting the tuna moving back for the lock. Rick felt his air getting short and fought the urge to use the fish as a launching platform-to kick off for the air lock and hope he could recover it later. He and Minmei could survive for a while longer without food, but not forever, and the fish would probably be the difference between life and death for them both.

He held on, straining at the line to speed things up. The air lock seemed a long way away, and his air very, very thin, making him groggy, while the fish moved as slowly as a glacier.

He shook his head to clear it, concentrating. Everything was blurry. Wasn't there some book about an old fisherman who hung on somehow? Rick was pretty sure his father had made him read it, but he couldn't recall it.

The hatch was before him. Had he been napping? He didn't have time to get out of the way, and the tuna trapped him against the deck, plowing him along. He felt some tiny seam give, and the air pressure in his suit began dropping.

He shoved hysterically, fighting his way out against the impossible mass, kicking off and fetching up against the miles-high inner hatch. He slammed it with his fists, breath and consciousness slipping away-forever, he knew, if he didn't get air soon.

The hiss got louder, and he located the stressed spot just as it began to go, holding it together with his hand, hooking one foot on some kind of cross member, hammering and hammering with his free fist. He didn't notice the jarring of the outer hatch.

Nor did he notice the return of gravity until it flipped him off the inner hatch. He sagged against the armored door, now only able to thump it feebly, the world going red in his vision, then increasingly dark.