Rick swatted at the air, trying to swipe the sunshine from his face like it was an annoying insect. To his mild annoyance, the sunshine still shone in his face, forcing him to blink rapidly, try to clear his mind, and wake up. He looked over the face that lay in front of him and smiled. The sunshine cascaded off the highlights in her reddish-brown hair, and highlighted the features of her face. Yes, indeed, Lisa Hayes was the one true love of his life, and it only took a near-death experience to learn that and come to grips with it. Suddenly, a shadow crossed the sunlight, and Rick thought it was good, because it kept the sun out of his face.
Just as that thought crossed his mind, however, his mind began swimming with nausea and vertigo. The next thing he knew was darkness.
Rick came to on a bunk a prison cell, barely aware of his surroundings because of the pounding pain in his head. The walls of his chest felt like a welding torch was firing full blast at his lungs and ribcage, and was having difficulty breathing. He sat up and rolled to sit unsteadily against the edge of the thin cot that was bolted to the floor of the cell they threw him in. The walls were solid stone, with a wire mesh window about eye level against the far wall, which were reinforced by thick iron bars beyond it. The door seemed to be made of heavy-gauge solid metal of some type; he was guessing steel, but wasn't entirely certain. It was painted with an assortment of pits and dents and scorches that a door accumulates over its normal lifespan.
Well. It seemed that wherever he was, he had no choice but to enjoy the local hospitality.
The door started to budge from without, so he lay back on the cot and feigned sleep. A uniformed escort stepped through the door, stood at attention.
“Attention, Admiral on deck!”
Rick stood slowly on deck, shuffled to attention, and snapped a crisp salute.
Admiral Lisa Hayes entered the room, returning the salute. “At ease, Commander.”
“Permission to speak freely, Admiral?”
“Granted,” Lisa replied wearily.
“What in the holy hell is going on here, Lisa?”
“Our scanners picked up some anomalies in your bloodstream, Rick. While you were asleep, your skin started to turn black around your eyes, which then started to spread across your face. I gave you a sedative, and they medevacked you to our base.”
“Ah, I never knew what Walter Reed looked like on the inside,” Rick snarled back.
Lisa involuntarily took a step backwards. “I asked them to put you in the best facility, for close observation, but it appears that Gen. O'Grady countermanded them.”
“O'Grady? Gee, if they made him a general, I wonder if he found his rank insignia at the bottom of a Cracker Jacks box.”
“I'll see what I can do, Rick; I don't know why they've put you in this cell,” Lisa said, awash in confusion and disdain for her associate officers.
“I don't have time, Admiral, I need to be back out there at the front, leading men into combat!”
Lisa threw up her hands in frustration. “Dammit, Rick! How can you be so calm about this? How do I even know you're who you say you are? You were declared dead 5 months ago!”
Rick looked into his hands and grimaced in frustration. “Lisa, I can't make you believe what I say, or believe I am who I say I am. I don't know what's going on inside me, or what's going on anymore. Where's your father, for example? And how did you get promoted so fast?”
Lisa looked at him in a blinding mixture of rage, confusion, and pain. “You mean to tell me you don't know what happened? To my father? To Captain Gloval, to our friends on the SDF-1? To the very human race you're a part of?”
“I'm serious, Lisa, I don't know what happened.”
Lisa bit her lip in thought for a moment, to force the tears back, and started, “After you rammed your fighter into Dolza's ship, Max took the fighter fleet in a spearhead to follow your wake into the gap. The SDF-1 was taken out by a few battlepods that crashed through its screens, but it took out Dolza's ship with it when it blew. Between Khyron's attack and the sacrifice of Skull Squadron, we lost over 75% of our active military divisions on the Line. Then, my father…”
She choked on her tears and looked faraway for a moment or two, then continued. “Dad assembled about twenty fighters and took off towards the only remaining Zentraedi cruiser, the Kharfoux . In typical Zentraedi overkill fashion, they launched three hundred pods at the base. Our pilots had to distract the incoming battlepods from killing off the survivors left at Alaska Base. Dad led the fighters into the thick of the fray; the pilots he led turned the sky into a junkyard before they were taken down, fighting, one by one.
“It was only a matter of time till the law of averages caught up with him, and he made them fight for every inch of sky they took. But in the end, when they tried to overwhelm him, he hit the self-destruct button and exploded the mini nuke he had installed for just that occasion, which took out all the remaining pods in the airspace around us, enabling us to get to safety.”
Rick looked at her, the woman he loved, and could almost feel the immense physical pain her grief was causing her. But he had to refrain from embracing her; he knew it was a breach of etiquette, and also, there were probably surveillance cameras watching him, just begging to give O'Grady the excuse he needed to declare Rick a danger to others; if he embraced Lisa, O'Grady could then say he had attacked her instead, and edit the tape appropriately at his court-martial.
“So, how bad is the situation,” he asked, numbly.
“Pretty bad,” Lisa replied. “Quite aside from our status in tactical terms, you seem to have unidentified entities swimming in your bloodstream. We have no idea what these things are, but you look like the recruiting poster for the Zentraedi Zombie Brigades. O'Grady told me to give you all this information because I'm about the only face around here he thinks you'd trust right after your ordeal, but you'll be examined by a Doctor Landerman at 1600. So you have two hours to eat, shave, take a nap, and get ready for his examination.”
“Lisa, do you believe it's really me?”
She looked at the far wall and seemed lost in thought for several moments.
“You know, after my mother died, I never thought I'd get close to anyone ever again. I loved my father, Rick, I truly did, but his duties and his personality always drove us apart when he tried to get closer to me,” she said, trying to fight tears.
“I withdrew into myself, always convinced that every man I'd get involved with would die on me or be wrong in some way. I had locked myself off from everyone. Even Riber. I loved him, but I still held a part of me back from him, because, as much as I loved him, there was always a bit of distrust with him. Nothing against him personally, but always a lack of trust in people I let get close to me, and after my father's distancing himself from me, I felt no man could ever truly love me and accept me as anything more than a little girl from a broken home.
“I never knew anything except drill, precision, and parade; after a while, it ground my pain and discomfort into submission, and, in time, it became completely second-nature. I lived for work, and nothing else; that's how I became a senior officer at such a young age. But you changed me, Rick; gave me something to live for and hope for besides a high rank, pension, and full military honors at my graveside.”
She couldn't fight the tears any longer, so she let them streak down her face as she spoke. “I was filled with your love, and my love for you, to the point where it was like raw energy making me run. And when I saw your fighter explode over the Earth, my heart shattered into a million bits, and I went back to the woman I was before, full of drive and mindless devotion to duty. And now you're back, and I don't know what to think anymore. All I know is that I love you, and I'm breaking apart inside, because you've changed somehow, and I can't help you. You are the same man I love, but you're different, and it scares me to death that I can't find out what that difference is,” she said, before the hysterical crying overtook her.
“Lisa,” Rick stammered fast, but she cut him off, drying her tears and straightening herself up.
“Doctor Landerman will examine you in a few hours; get your sleep and I'll have them send some food for you to eat,” she said, coldly and professionally, as she left the cell, fighting to keep her voice calm and natural, and resisting the urge to run as if some demon was following her. The door closed with a clang, and the lock clicked. Then the lights went out.