"Congratulations, Lieutenant," Karen echoed Rick.
"Same to you, Lieutenant," Jack told her emphatically.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I felt that my place lay with the Sentinels-with observing and recording a unique event in Human history.
But I was a little schizo about it, because I could feel that there were things shaping up at REF-Tirol that the Folks Back Home would need to know about, too. Heroes to be sung and villains to be fingered.
But one of the first things you learn when they hand you an aud/vid recording rig is that you can't be every place at the same time.
Or even two places.
Sue Graham, narration from a documentary Protoculture's Privateers. SDF-3, Farrago, Ark Angel Sentinels, and the REF
Jeanne Grant paused as she was about to secure the med-center diagnostic robot for transferal to the Sentinels' ship. As she had done intermittently through the morning, she glanced through the viewport at Tirol, and looming Fantoma.
"It sure isn't home," she muttered again, "but at least we know the dangers here."
She felt her husband's massive arm go round her shoulders. He brushed his lips against her cheek. She reflected again on the oddness of it-how a man so big and incredibly strong could be so gentle.
"But we're not needed here," he pointed out. "Lang will be years repairing the SDF-3, and in the meantime there are people suffering and dying."
And so the Ground Mobile Unit was being attached, figuratively and literally, as a new module of the Farrago, secured to the starship's underside. And Skull Team, now augmented to near-squadron size with Beta and Logan VTs, was now the main component of its assigned air group.
She clutched his hand. At least there was comfort in the fact that, with the GMU suddenly reallocated to the Sentinels' mission, Vince would be near her; she didn't know if she could have endured being parted from him as she had been before.
Jeanne took a determined breath to keep back tears, having made up her mind that there was no point to doing any more crying. Vince patted her shoulder. "I know, darling, I know. I miss Bowie, too. But I'm glad he's safe on Earth, he and Dana both. Rolf will take good care of them."
She sighed, leaning her head against his broad chest, wondering what their son was doing at that moment, on the other side of the galaxy.
On Fantoma, the first dropships began disgorging the mining equipment that the Zentraedi would use to wrest monopole ore from the heavy-g world.
Breetai stepped out onto the surface in his pressurized armor, stretching his arms and feeling his muscles work. Nearby, heavily shielded and powered mining vehicles were being off-loaded. They looked like high-tech dinosaurs, octopi, centipedes.
Breetai looked around him at the bleak planetscape, a scoured and blasted vista of grays and browns and black, with a typically high-g scarcity of prominent features; planets like Fantoma quickly pulled down mountains and hills.
It looked like a haunted world. And it was haunted, in fact: haunted by memories the Zentraedi had accumulated over generations as miners, only to have those memories wiped away by the Robotech Masters and replaced with false ones, implanted glories of the warrior race the Masters needed for their plan to conquer the universe.
Battlepods came off the dropships, too, to stand guard and serve as security for the operation.
Breetai let his subordinates take care of the details, and paced here and there, looking around him.
Lang and the other Earth savants had expressed surprise that the Zentraedi had been conceived as colossal laborers for the Fantoman mining operation. "If anything, it would seem to me, very small organisms would be more appropriate," one Human had ventured.
But that was because they still didn't understand the exact nature of the sizing chamber, and how it altered Zentraedi physiology to meet the challenges of a gravity more than three times that of Terra.
Breetai stretched again, feeling energized and exultant, rather than tired, by Fantoma's pull.
It was the oddest thing, but-memories seemed to be coming back to Breetai. The first dropship landing had been centered on an open-pit area, and it seemed to Breetai that he recognized the landscape around him. Something drew him up a slope-twenty degrees, he estimated; a steep climb-until he reached the summit.
There was a bench there, a mere trestle of stone slabs, but how had he known he would find it at just that spot? Conversations from his past, or perhaps hallucinations, drifted in and out of his thoughts.
He suddenly felt an impotent fury at having been deprived of his own past-at being unable to trust his own memory.
In that moment, an image of himself and Exedore came to him, sitting on the bench side by side, and Exedore saying something that Breetai was having trouble following.
I remember! The words were a thunderous rumbling in his chest.
"No; of course we won't remember this life, my friend," Exedore was saying, "but the Robotech Masters plan momentous things for us. We will become much like a force of nature-something that will sweep the galaxy-the universe-in glory and triumph!"
Breetai saw himself stop and ponder that; he was only a miner-though he was, aside from Dolza, the biggest and strongest Zentraedi ever created, the most durable and formidable of them all-and had difficulty understanding the interstellar jihad that Exedore was painting in words.
Now he recalled the peculiar stirrings in him when he had heard Exedore's exhortation. The thought of a life of battle and triumph had made him feel exalted. And he had had a preternaturally long lifetime of it, just as Exedore foresaw.
But where could these recollections be coming from? Surely the Masters had expunged all true memories. Breetai shook his head within the huge helmet, mystified and troubled.
"Lord Breetai?" He turned in surprise, both at the fact that someone was standing there, and at the realization that it was a Zentraedi female. "The construction gang is about to begin work on permanent housing," she said, "but they'd like you to make final approval of the site."
She was wearing Quadrono powered armor that had been retrofitted for labor and mining duty, he could see. One of Miriya Parino's spitfires, no doubt; Breetai had heard that the Quadronos had never quite forgiven their leader for undergoing Micronization, marrying Max Sterling, and having his child. Many of them had deserted to follow the mad Khyron and his, his lover, Azonia, but some had remained loyal to Breetai, and a few of those had survived the final battle against Dolza and the Malcontent Uprisings and the battle with the Inorganics.
Breetai looked at her uneasily. The Zentraedi had always been rigidly segregated by sex, and most of them found the thought of fraternization disquieting to the point where it had been known to make them physically ill. But the unusual circumstances here in the primitive Fantoman start-up effort had made it impossible to preserve the old ways altogether.
Breetai forced himself to look her over. Not easy to tell much about her in the bulky powered armor except that she was tall for a female, well over fifty feet. Through her tinted facebowl, he could see that she had prominent cheekbones and slightly oblique eyes, looking rather like what Lang or Hunter would call Slavic, and her purple hair was cropped masculinely short. But there was something else about her face…
He realized, stunned, that she was wearing cosmetics. The thought passed through him. Great suns! Where did she get them? Surely a female of our race uses as much in one application as an Earth woman uses in a month!