many things she'd never done and so little time to reflect on the things she had-the harshness of it hit her in an instant: the miracle that was life, the irreplaceability of each moment.
The Battlepod was almost upon her, armorshod hooves pounding the street. The very vibrations of it threw Minmei headlong, scraping her elbows and hands and knees, as explosions crashed all around. She was not quite sixteen years old, but she understood in that moment that war had no eligibility requirements.
Gigantic pod feet crashed behind her. Minmei cringed, hands over head, waiting for death to take her. An enormous hoof descended.
Just then an amplified voice said, 'Oh, no, you don't!'
She heard an explosion and a tearing of metal and felt waves of heat scorching her back. There was a rending of armor and a ground-shaking crash. Somehow, none of it hurt her.
Minmei gathered her nerve and opened her eyes. The pod had been knocked back through the air, one leg dangling loose, in flames. She'd been protected by great metal wings.
It was another example of those things people were calling Robotech, this time in the metal eagle form they seemed to take on at will. There was something familiar about this one's voice.
'Take it easy, honey; you're okay,' Roy said over external speakers. 'We'll protect you.'
Roy turned to Rick. 'Take care of the girl! I'll keep the pods off our backs!'
Minmei struggled to her feet while the skull-and-crossbones machine reared, mechamorphosing and growing taller and manlike in a way that put her in mind of some miraculous origami. The second, the red one she recognized from her aunt's restaurant, stayed in the man-bird mode, objecting, 'You can't handle them alone!' in another voice she remembered.
Roy brought his Gatling up, covering the area. 'Don't argue with me! I'll draw their fire while you get her out of here.'
Rick, using controls and mind-imagery, eased the Guardian over, extending its left hand, until fingers the diameter of telephone poles were ready to grasp her. He raised the cockpit canopy to call down, 'Don't move! I'm going to pick you up!'
For a damsel in distress, Minmei showed a certain skepticism. 'I thought you were an amateur.'
The anthropomorphic hand gently enfolded her; Rick sweated bullets, concentrating, and knew that he would never try anything like this with a mere physical-control system. Only Robotechnology allowed such fine discretion.
Minmei had a fleeting feeling that she ought to be wearing a white gown and wondered if she was to be carried to the top of a skyscraper or dragged into the middle of a fight with dinosaurs.
In a way, of course, that had already happened. 'Huh?
'Trust me; I can do it!' Rick called down to her.
'Do I have to? Ohhhh!'
But the grip, though firm and secure, didn't mangle her or crush her into jelly or even hurt-at least, not much. Which was just as well, since there were alien pods releasing flights of missiles high overhead.
'Get outta here, Rick! Fire your jets!' Roy hollered, bringing up his Gatling and sweeping it back and forth at the incoming missiles, hoping to cut into the odds a little.
The Guardian's foot thrusters blared; Minmei howled, and they were airborne, zooming away from the attack.
Roy got a number of the missiles, detonating them, which in turn knocked out quite a few others- 'fratricide,' as the ordnance people called it-as they either veered into one another or detonated from the force of the first explosions. But survivors got through, beating down on Rick, who didn't dare go faster with Minmei in hand for fear that the air blast and maneuver forces would injure or kill her.
He could only duck and dodge, engaging his jamming and countermeasures gear as Roy had taught him, and hope for the best. Missiles sizzled by all around to impact far down the street.
Minmei hid her head in her hands, then looked up to see that Rick was yelling something at her, too distracted to remember the external speakers. 'What're you saying? I can't hear you!'
Roy spotted a pod just as his radars and other instruments picked it up; it was making a stand on a ridgeline above the housing project which had been gouged into the side of a hill. The Zentraedi pod launched itself off the ridge at him; Roy brought his muzzle around and trap-shot it in midair. It rained down in fire and broken fragments.
His fields of fire were clear for the moment. He raised Rick on the tac net. 'How's it goin'? Everything okay?'
'I'm all right now, Roy-'
'I don't care how
'Huh? Um, okay. So far.' Rick began a steady, smooth ascent to get above the battle and out of the range of the pods in Macross City.
'She's a taxpayer. If anything happens to her, you answer to me.'
Rick grinned at Roy's screen image. 'Don't forget, Big Brother: I saw her first.'
'That's how it is, huh? We'll discuss this later!'
Roy got back to business at hand, leaving Rick to ponder Minmei, whose hair was being whiplashed in her face by the ship's airspeed. They'd already gained enough altitude for it to be pretty cold out there; she couldn't take much of it, in addition to the strain it would put on her simply to breathe.
'Boy, I've gotta figure a way to get her into the cockpit,' he whispered.
It was exactly then that his instruments beeped an urgent warning. 'Uh oh…'
In Macross City, an alien pod fitted for heavy weapons stood up from its concealment behind a demolished mall. It was mounted with two large racks of rockets, like firebreathing Siamese twins. Missiles came spiking at him, superheating the air with their trails.
He cut in all countermeasures, going into a booster climb, going ballistic. He rammed the stick up for a pushover, losing a few of the seekers, unable to tell if the maneuver forces had simply knocked Minmei out or killed her.
Wishing he had Roy's skill at this sort of thing, Rick dodged, white-faced with the thought that he would fail, would let Minmei down and lose both their lives.
Miraculously, he avoided them all-almost.
A hit at the elbow joint of the arm holding Minmei blew the joint in half. Minmei fell away, screaming, as if in slow motion. It seemed to Rick that he could hear the scream echoing away.
He banked, diving after her, though all the books and experts would have said that there wasn't a thing in the world he could do to save her. He concentrated on those fingers-thought and thought hard.
The telephone pole fingers of the Robotech hand slowly opened in answer to his thinking-cap command, and Minmei found herself floating in midair. The ground, the sky, the wind-nothing seemed to be moving but she and the giant hand.
She realized she was still screaming, and stopped, pushing herself free for whatever good it would do. Then there was something next to her, matching speeds and distances. She seemed to be floating-swimming outside the canopy, some dream mermaid, kicking and struggling toward him, her eyes so big and terrified and pleading that the sight of them almost paralyzed him.
Earlier that same day, Rick would have said that no aircraft in existence could do what the Veritech was doing now. It drew close to Minmei, canopy easing open (he would have said that an aircraft canopy would be torn away like a piece of tinfoil if subjected to aerodynamic stresses like those), in close obedience to his commands and images.
Her black hair stood back, stark, around her face; the white legs kicked like a swimmer's. She glided toward him, arms outstretched. In that moment he knew that if he didn't save her, life would cease to have any meaning.
Still there was the buffeting of the air and the slipstreams created by the fighter itself; they tore at him as Rick rose up, safety harness released, to draw her into the fighter. No ship, not even a Robotech ship, had ever been subjected to such exacting demands.
Gripping the windshield frame, he grabbed for her hand, missed, grabbed, and missed again, the whole time imaging the Veritech's precise positioning at speeds approaching the blackout point. One-armed, its
