Edwards had come up, his skullpiece throwing back Fantoma's glow and the glare of the Ambler searchlights. "Well, it's not going to trouble anybody much longer; not when my Ghost Riders are through with it."
"No!" Exedore barked. He turned to Lisa. "Admiral, mere Veritechs haven't the firepower to deal with a Pursuer. This is a weapon even the Zentraedi feared! Your GMU cannon, even the SDF-3's primary weapon-none of these have sufficient power to penetrate its shields! It is relentless, and once it finds its target…"
He gazed up at the Sentinel ship. "It will detonate with enough force to rupture Tirol's crust."
"Yes," Baldan the glittering Spherian said sadly. "Since its seeking mechanism is locked onto our ship, there is only one answer: we shall lead it away, into deepspace once more, and try to deal with it there."
"Is that any way for allies to talk?" Judge Huxley frowned, coming over to them from where the council had abruptly adjourned. She smiled at the surprise on their faces. "The Sentinels and the REF
are now officially involved. The vote was five to four."
"Madam," Exedore got out, unable to express himself, knowing hers had been the swing vote.
In a wave of emotion, he took her hand, pressing his lips to it, as he had seen Humans do. When he realized what he was doing, Exedore nearly swooned.
"If the SDF-3's main gun and the GMU's and the VT ordnance isn't enough to zap this Pursuer," Rick was saying, "what about throwing everything at it at once? We can lead it into the crossfire with the Sentinels' ship."
There was no time to try to come up with a better plan, the Pursuer was only minutes away.
Once again, Lisa found herself in overall control, she was on the SDF-3 patch-in right away, ordering the dimensional fortress to leave orbit and swing low for the ambush.
There was no time to process orbital ballistics and computer data; she calculated variables and unknowns and, with a guess and a prayer, set the moment when the trap would be sprung. It was not far off.
"Somebody'll have to go along with our new friends." Edwards said with a sharkish grin.
Plainly, he meant to be that one, to make early inroads with these creatures Privately, he saw it as a possible means toward his own ends
But Rick Hunter said, "Forget it, General. You look after the TIC and your Ghost Team." He turned to Lisa. "Admiral, I'm the logical one to go."
He had her there, Rick knew how the SDF-3's nerve centers operated, how the strikes would be coordinated and earned out, the proper command procedure for orchestrating the whole business from the Sentinels' end.
And he looks so happy at the chance to risk his life, Lisa thought She almost hated him at that moment, but she was a flag-rank officer with more important things to do.
"Carry on," she said, her jaw muscles jumping Rick saluted, turned, and dashed up the ramp along with the Sentinels.
CHAPTER FOUR
With the death of Zor, the grand Tiresian design to sow the Flower of Life among the stars came to a stop. In fact in most cases it was reversed The Flower couldn't be made to prosper where it didn't wish to, and couldn't be coerced. The shrinking, embattled Tiresian empire was forced to divert its resources to its fight for survival.
The Invid/Robotech Masters conflict that had promised to engulf the galaxy collapsed. The fighting on that side of the Milky Way shrank to the few remaining Haydon's Worlds, where a handful of Flower-viable spots still remained.
There was a pattern at work, but none of the combatants had eyes with which to see it.
Jan Morris, Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians
One of the prime selective criteria for REF personnel had been a capacity to function in crisis and under severe stress. As hasty preparations were made to bushwhack the Pursuer, the Ref showed its mettle.
Not only did arrangements have to be made to have the SDF-3 and the GMU in precisely the right place at precisely the right time, but a makeshift commo/data link to the Sentinels' ship had to be established. In addition, large numbers of Humans and Zentraedi had to be redeployed, Protoculture weapons fire missions had to be laid on, and VTs had to be hot-scrambled and correctly positioned.
Lisa, being shuttled to the GMU with the council because there was no time to rejoin her ship, was even too busy to think about how things might never be the same again between her and Rick.
Entering the Sentinels' ship, Rick was assailed by strange sights and even stranger smells.
He had little time to look around as he pounded along behind Lron and Burak and the rest, but from what he could see, the vessel was anything but sophisticated. The air was thick with a solvent smell.
Welds and power routing and systemry interfaces, even accounting for the fact that it was alien, all seemed so makeshift.
Lron had howled orders back at the ramp, and now the ship tremored as its engines came up.
Rick fought down a flood of doubt; maybe this wasn't as good as being in the cockpit of an Alpha, but it sure beat vegetating down in the SDF-3's Tactical Information Center!
Still, this alien scow was a strange piece of machinery; there were safety valves venting steam, bundles of cable looping overhead in different directions, mazes of ducting and conduit everywhere he looked, and even-He skidded to a stop as Lron and the rest made a sharp right turn at a junction of passageways. Rick found himself staring into what appeared to be a Karbarran version of perdition.
Or at least something close enough to pass. Rick saw dozens of Karbarrans shoveling tremendous scoops of some kind of fuel into furnaces that seemed to be burning in colors of the spectrum Rick had never seen before. Whatever the fuel was, it was piled high in bunkers nearby; the Karbarrans might have been stokers in a nineteeth-century ironclad, allowing for their thick goggles and long, gleaming teeth.
Rick stood transfixed, breathing the stench of singed fur.
Suddenly, Lron's enormous paw closed around his arm, and he was yanked off toward the bridge. The trip showed him more of the same mismatched machinery. He recalled Lron saying that the Sentinels' ship had been put together as a sort of aggregate trophy for the Regent, but this was carrying things rather far.
Then he was shoved into a cramped elevator thick with the odor of machine lubricants and metal filings. Whatever the occupancy limit was, the group exceeded it, and Rick found himself pressed up against Bela, the taller-six foot eight or so, he estimated-and brawnier of the two amazons from Praxis.
Her body showed the definition of a bodybuilder's; the pleasant scent of some kind of skin oil or balm emanated from her. While most of her definitely looked Human, Bela's eyes resembled those of an eagle.
He was acutely aware that her skimpy ceremonial fighting costume left a lot of skin exposed, and that a good deal of it, along with metallic bosses and leather-set gems, was pressed up against his uniform. To the primary mission of dealing with the Pursuer a most important secondary one was added: making sure Lisa never found out about the elevator ride.
Bela smiled at him, showing white, even teeth and deep-dish dimples. "Welcome aboard the-"
Here she used a word that his translator chip rendered as Farrago.
"Thanks for throwing in with us, Admiral," Bela added. "You're as brave as any woman I ever met."
"Um. Thanks…" was all Rick managed to say before the lift door spiraled open and the group charged out onto the bridge. The bridge was a blister of transparent material, a few hundred feet through its long axis, fifty across, set high up and forward on the bizarre megastructure of the Farrago.