Mospeada Fan Fiction / Macross Fan Fiction ❯ Love looms in times of war ❯ Caught ( Chapter 11 )

Disclaimer: I do not own Robotech or its characters. This fan fiction was written for entertainment purposes only. No infringement is intended.

 

Love looms in times of war

 

Chapter 11

Caught

 

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“How much longer, chief?” asked Lorna Cooper while she moved around the security perimeter. The chief followed her diligently, deterring her from crossing the danger barricades on the hangar's floor. Unlike the scientific group lead by Dr. Reed, which waited patiently for the chief's clearance, the captain couldn't keep still. She followed the slow progress of robotic-saw wielding workers who tried to untangle a battloid from an alien craft.

 

“A bit longer, ma'am.” The chief held the captain's disapproving stare. ”The bastard's solid, and my men have to proceed with extreme care... the boogie could be booby-trapped.”

 

“Hn,” she managed to let out just before a commotion started near the bulky metallic scrap.

 

“Lift!” was heard from a distance. The chief excused himself and hurried toward his crew. After the booby-trap comment, observation from afar didn't seem so bad to the captain. Cooper witnessed the battloid's remains being secured and hauled away.

 

“The impact made a hole, sir!” a worker informed the chief.

 

“All the way to the core of it!” the older man sanctioned, taking in the gash's depth. He observed the composition of the craft's outer shell like strata on a mountain's cliff. It had a thick layer, spongy and porous. Angel cake, he thought, following the indentation. “A light over here!” he commanded and positioned it so that it bathed the craft's hidden innards. Blasted thing's hollow, he discovered and ran an impromptu density analysis. Well, that's safe enough, he decided.

 

“Let the scientists in,” he ordered.

 

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Cool air collected in her lungs.Whenever she was ordered into the synchronizing chamber, Ariel had a lot of trouble keeping her eyelids from drooping. Maybe it was the low buzzing sound the machine made, maybe the slight cold it surrounded her with; she wasn't sure. It was her second time in it and the feeling hadn't lost its strangeness.

 

As on cue, a reassuring hand set itself on her shoulder gently. Uld. She turned and sawKoreen standing behind him in the queue. “Consider this an order to take a short nap...” he told her.

 

30 minutes, Ariel thought, faced forward and recalled Doctor Iskandar's voice. “For your and the implant's health,” she had joked, her eyes danced behind heavy frames.The woman explained benefits that far outweighed the burdens of a half-an-hour procedure. “It is absolutely necessary,” she had declared, mock-sentencing the Invid to synchronization periods every few days.

 

Ariel backed into the tight contraption, feeling like a cat in water's proximity. She scooped her hair to the side and let her weight go. The implant on her upper back came in contact with a dark glossy patch. Her body sunk into the machine's cushioned interior as it spun from vertical to horizontal.

 

“I'm off to sleep on the job,” she fared her comrades good bye, eliciting their grins.

 

As the chamber was activated, Ariel felt a pulse on her back. A memory popped into her mind: a long forgotten human burial she witnessed. The lined coffin, she realized, hadn't seemed much less comfortable. She shuddered.

 

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“You wanted the drug, didn't you?”

 

“Yes, I did.” Duh! he felt like adding. “But you didn't have to tell Dr. Grant about me!”

 

“She wouldn't have given it to you otherwise!” she bit back. Ungrateful brat...

 

Too pairs of blue eyes faced off in the middle of a hallway, interrupting the flow of passers-by.

 

Dana had finally caught up with her brother after he had been freed from his Alpha's remains and debriefed. He found him edgy beyond his usual self -not that she knew him that much after their little time re-discovering each other. It has to be the SDF, she guessed from his attitude. The fortress' precious crew had been so close! It must have been hard for Scott to let go... Maybe she was going about this the wrong way. Dana's eyes softened and she relented; she told herself that she was the older, wiser sister and finally let out a sigh.

 

The younger Sterling saw the change on his sister's face and couldn't keep his anger up; then she sighed, further vanishing his annoyance at what she had done. It was obvious she didn't want to antagonize, less so in such a public area. When she had called his name, he was headed to the pilot's room to stand by and perhaps catch a glance of Ariel... No! he told himself, he was headed there to await new orders.

 

“Look,” she said, “I only wanted to help you. I know Jean, she wouldn't have budged if she didn't understand how important it was for you.”

 

“I'm sorry,” he said after a pause. “I know your intentions were good... And maybe you are right and telling Dr. Grant was the only way.” His shoulders sagged in defeat.

 

“She won't tell anyone,” Dana reassured, noticing his demeanor. “Jean's like a tomb when it comes to secrets,” she added bringing her hand to his shoulder. Scott covered it with his.

 

“Thanks.”

 

“Hey, what are big sisters for?” She hugged him on an impulse and he surprised himself by hugging her back. For a moment he was unconcerned about the world around them. It was good to have his sister close. For far too long he had been away from his family; for far too long he had deserted them. His vision caught people starring. He saw their faces, but his brain refused to process the visual stimuli; their features became a nameless combination of color. In spite of what his sister had said, Scott wasn't sure he could trust neither Jean nor... Grace. One way or another, the nature of his relationship with Dana was bound to be revealed sooner rather than later. His mind was occupied pondering just that when he heard a gasp. Suddenly, his brain saw the face of one of those busybodies spying on them...

 

“Ariel!” The word left his mouth in a whisper.

 

“Ariel?” Dana let go of him and, after following his transfixed gaze, focused on a pretty red-head whose jaw just hung open. She saw her brown eyes watering and then her bolting. Wait a second... was that an Invid uniform?

 

Shock.

 

Dana nearly missed the Invid's companion, who immediately chased after his fleeing comrade. Her eyes blinked between the spot where the Invid had stood and his brother's livid visage.

 

Disbelief.

 

She saw his embarrassment, his fear and something akin to guilt. It wasn't hard to put two and two together. He cares for the girl... An Invid... Mom's IS going to have a fit.

 

Realization.

 

The major collected herself, remembering to close her own jaw in the process. “I suggest you follow,” she told her frozen sibling.

 

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“I am a such fool!” the Invid cried. She moved fast through long corridors and was leaving behind transited passages. “He's on Mars... maybe married for all I know," she remembered a conversation she had with Rook before embarking in her current ill-fated adventure. “I doubt that. He has it for you...” her friend had answered at that time. He may not be married... but he definitely has "it" for someone else... An image of Scott embracing that woman came to her and with it, a bout of sobbing.

 

So much had changed in her life. She had gone from a being who drifted along to someone who pursued her own wants. From being afraid of holding a weapon, she had become part of one. The direness of the situation had firmed her resolve. Ending the war and rescuing the SDF-3 was worth many sacrifices, including having a foreign device in her body and going through the bothersome synchronization process it entailed. Ariel remembered thinking that it wasn't permanent; she would be rid of it.

 

Lorna Cooper's words of encouragement resurfaced from her memory. The captain knew how to inspire. "This is our chance to seal definite peace between our races, this is an opportunity to prove human and Invid can work together.” Ariel and her comrades wanted to earn their place among humans, they wanted full acceptance. Her naivety kept from her consciousness any hidden human agendas regarding her kind. She was blinded by her desire for a particular human to accept her, by her hopes that he could love her one day, when she proved to him that the weren't that different.

 

But that letter he sent me... She had found solace in those words. “I wish things had been different,” he had written, “that for once, I had followed my heart and gone after you...” Warm streams flowed anew as she felt those sentences which previously had held her heart together now ripping it open.

 

In the end, she had been the one who followed her heart and went after him. Rejection was what she found. “One day, if I make it back somehow...” Of course, he had written that to console her, not encourage her. He never planned to see her again. Scott would never return her feelings because he already had someone to receive his... someone human like him.

 

It was then, that Uld found her. He held her, like he had done after her first meeting with Scott. Again, he soothed her, caught tears another had caused. He reached into her mind and felt all she felt, above everything, the pain of love, unrequited. And he decided Ariel's love was what he wanted, to cherish and return. He held her troubled face in his hands and wiped the salty drops away. Before she knew it, he had leaned in and kissed her.

 

Yet, Uld wasn't the only one who found Ariel. Scott did, too.

 

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“We have it, General,” Lorna Cooper announced interrupting Vince Grant's meeting with Captain Sinclair. A middle aged scientist stood seemingly out of breath at her side. The superior officer gave the pair his attention while the sidestepped captain offered them a glare which, given his fearsome physique, could only cause alarm.

 

“Analysis of the craft was completed,” she explained unaffected by Sinclair's reaction unlike her companion, “they are drones, remote controlled, hollow.”

 

“Remote controlled? How?”

 

“Tamron waves,” Cooper said. Vince's blank face prompted her to introduce Dr. Reed who could explain scientific discoveries better than she could.

 

“They are extremely low frequency waves, General Grant, difficult to receive and even more difficult to transmit. Our experts had completely ignored them as potential means of remote-controlled warfare, until now.”

 

“How is the enemy able to use them?”

 

“We don't know how they are transmitting them with certainty. How they are receiving them, however, we have just managed to reverse-engineer. The captured drone is made almost in its entirety of a foam which amplifies Tamron waves and transmits them to a membrane at its core. This membrane is simple computer that controls the ship's movements.”

 

“I suppose your scientific team has a way of taking advantage of this knowledge, Dr. Reed?”

 

“Because we were able to reverse-engineer the process, we can build a detector and relay the data to our pilots.”

 

“So we wont be blind to the enemy anymore,” put in Sinclair, breaking the stoic silence that he had assumed since being interrupted.

 

“Indeed, sir,”

 

Vince pondered the information he just learned. “But what about the transmission mechanism?” His focus shifted to Reed. “Is it possible to disrupt it?”

 

“Without their guiding waves we can make quick work of the drones and attack the mothership directly,” observed Cooper.

 

“That would be ideal, yes. But blocking these kind of waves would require deflectors the size of a planet or a small moon, at least. That's nearly impossible to achieve.”

 

“Nearly, doctor?” Vince's eyes made the scientist uncomfortable.

 

“Uh... well, it is just a theory, no one has ever tried...”

 

“Get me a way of disrupting those signals, Dr. Reed.”

 

“I... I'll do all I can, sir.”

 

With that, Vince dismissed the scientist and ordered his captains to prepare for the third wave of the attack. The path to the besieged SDF-3 remained blocked and, within it, good officers, comrades and friends grew closer to being lost.

 

I am going to reach that ship, no matter how!

 

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