Chapter 22

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"WHAT!?" I jumped at Izabelle's body, dodging Thallin's grip as he tried to stop me. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her violently. "Sabotage the engines? Why'd you do something like that?" 

"The SDF-1 must not return to Earth." 

I realised that she probably couldn't feel anything I did to her body, so I let her go and stepped back. "And why not?" I turned and walked to the other side of the room. "What can be so goddamn important to stop us from going back home?" I turned around and looked at her. 

"There are fifty thousand humans aboard the SDF-1. It is hard to compete with them. Earth has three billion humans on it. It would be impossible for me to compete on that level. Therefore the SDF-1 must remain in space to allow for greater chance of success." The computer's droning voice was beginning to grate on me and I couldn't help but wonder what she was competing for. 

Thallin beat me to the question, "Compete? Compete for what?" 

"For your attention." 

That was too funny. I laughed, "The crazy thing's in love with you." <That would be her reason, wouldn't it?>Thallin growled at me before speaking again, "Izabelle? What did you mean by -" He was interrupted by a series of short, sharp vibrations that shook the floor. They were quickly followed by the muffled sounds of several explosions. "What the hell was that?" 

"The explosives hidden in the engines have been detonated. The main engines will now be useless without a major overhaul," the computer droned, without any feeling or any care. I couldn't expect it to feel any concern for the rest of us. It was only a machine, no matter how smart it thought it was or how much flesh it was walking around in. 

Izabelle didn't know it, but this was going to make our lives more than a little uncomfortable quite quickly. 

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I struggled for words, trying to verbalise my anger and my frustration and how much I wanted to disbelieve Izabelle's words. I was trying to say something along the lines of: 'You've got to be kidding me' or 'How could you?' or maybe even 'That was going entirely too far,' but none of them quite sounded like they would fit the circumstances. Besides, Thallin beat me to it. 

"Oh boy," he said. 

I turned and stared at him, "'Oh boy?' Izabelle atomises the engines, and all you can say is 'oh boy'?" 

Thallin looked back at me, looking only slightly annoyed, and tartly replied "Would you prefer 'Gee Willikers?' I am just as unhappy about the situation as you are. More." Then he turned back to Izabelle, who was still slumped over in the chair. He went on, talking more to himself than I, "Lang's going to hit the roof when he finds out about this." Then he walked to the door, opened it, and spoke a few words to someone in the hallway before closing it again. Then he leaned against the doorway and wiped the sweat from his brow. He looked at me and asked, "Any ideas?" 

"About what?" 

"About how we're going to get her out and somewhere safe." 

"Getting her out isn't the problem. Getting her out unnoticed is something else entirely." Then I remembered my first meeting with the Lieutenant. "Although..." I stopped in the middle of my words, as I suddenly knew what to do. 

Right then, the door opened again and Dr. Raven stepped inside, closing it after him carefully. "They said you wanted to see me. Your adrenalin levels giving you problems again?" 

Thallin replied, "Yes, but not the way you think. I need to get her out of the hospital." He pointed to Izabelle's still form and then to me as he continued, "Preferably at the same time as her. I also need something to calm me down." 

The doctor dug into his pockets, saying, "That last one's not a problem. I came prepared." He produced a large, tough-looking syringe and held it up, checking for air bubbles. 

Curious, I asked, "More of your mineral supplements?" 

Dr. Raven answered as he swabbed Thallin's shoulder with some damp gauze, "Not quite. This is Dopylar twenty-six." 

"A tranquiliser?" I remembered hearing about the stuff a couple of years ago, it was powerful stuff. Looking at the syringe again, I noticed how much it was holding. "There's enough in there to put an entire platoon to sleep for a week!" 

Dr. Raven grinned at me as he injected the entire contents of the syringe into Thallin. "Quite so, quite so. There should be just enough for our purpose. Thallin here is not your average RDF personnel, are you Thallin? 'Be all you can be' and all that?" He turned towards Izabelle, mumbling as he put away the syringe and looked her over, "Well you are all you can be, and got much more than you bargained in the process, didn't you?" 

Thallin spoke up, "It was not my idea in the first place. It was an accident, remember?" 

"Accident?" I thought back through my conversations with Thallin and all that he had told me. Then I remembered. "You mean the same thing that screwed up your metabolism does this to you? Jeez!" I grinned, "Tell me, Thallin: How much aspirin do you have to take when you get a headache?" 

Thallin replied, completely deadpan, "I do not have headaches. I seem to give them to other people." 

The doctor stood up from his examination of Izi's body and bellowed, "And you're giving me one right now! Who the hell is she? And why is her pulse practically non-existent?" 

I answered, "Her name is Izabelle Fate, Thallin's girlfriend." My reply was supposed to sound sarcastic, but it turned out more acidic. 

Thallin gave me a sidelong glance before he spoke, "She's a friend in trouble. I need to find a way to get her past hospital security." 

"Well, as I was about to say before the good doctor stepped in, you could always get her out on a gurney as a corpse," I said. 

Thallin spun about and glared at me for a moment. I returned his gaze, reading his mind. <No, Thallin. This is completely serious.>He asked, "A gurney?" 

"Yeah. You know, like the one you were pushing when I first met you." 

Dr. Raven spoke in my favour, "The lady's got a point. No one'd suspect an orderly with one more body on a gurney. God knows the aliens provide this hospital with enough dead pilots." 

Thallin nodded in agreement. I smiled proudly at the both of them. 

Twenty minutes later, we had signed Thallin out of the hospital and had gurneyed Izi's body to the alley next to the emergency ward's entrance. I helped Thallin get Izi to her feet and stash the gurney out of sight. Dr. Raven would retrieve it later. 

Thallin grumbled under his breath the entire time, "Alleys. Why does everything always have to happen in a dark alley? Why can't it happen in a nice sunny park in the middle of a warm sunny day, I ask you?" 

"Because, otherwise people like you wouldn't be able to complain about how cliched the situation is." I paused to pull Izi's arm over my shoulder and readjust my grip around her waist. "Shall we?" 

Thallin nodded and we walked out of the alleyway with Izi hanging between us, looking like a limp, unconscious, drunk pilot. I tried to add a bit of a stagger to my own step to add to the image. As soon as we reached the curb, I whistled and waved down a taxi. Once it had pulled to a stop, Thallin and I carefully pulled Izi in after us. I hardly tried to remember the twenty or so movies I'd seen this scene in. 

The cabbie looked at us through his rear view mirror, "Where you wanna go?" 

I shrugged at Thallin and he answered, "176 Redwood Boulevard." 

I whispered to him, "So what are you going to do?" 

"I don't know. Lang wants him dismantled, but it'd be like killing her. If I could get my hands on spare parts, I'd put them in a bag and present them to Lang, but if I tried to get parts for this, he'd know about it before I'd even step into his office. Let's face it, some of those parts are pretty specialised - they've only got a couple of practical uses." 

"Couldn't you get the parts from the black market?" 

"Not these. Like I said, they're rare. And there's bound to be only a limited supply on the Macross." He studied Izabelle's face and softly said, "Maybe I can just wipe her memories of all this mess." 

<That won't be enough Thallin. In fact, it might just make things worse.> "Be careful about playing God, Thallin. Mistakes are too easy to make," I warned. Thallin didn't respond, or even say another word for the rest of the trip. That suited me just fine, though. I had some thinking to do. 

I pondered over Thallin, his accident a few years back, the unusual side effects he was suffering from because of it, his odd behaviour, and one arm-sized hole in the hospital's concrete wall. 

Forward to Chapter 23.
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