Roy covered the mike with his gloved palm and stage-whispered to one of the techs. "Hey, Ed! Switch this circuit over to radio only, will you?" It was going to be awfully hard to chew out his men about com-procedure discipline after today.

It took only a second or two for Ed to make the change.

"What're you trying to do, Rick, make a perfect fool of me?"

Roy could hear the laughter in his old friend's voice. "Aw, nobody's perfect, Commander!"

Roy was just about grinning in spite of himself. People who didn't watch their step every moment were liable to become Rick Hunter's straight men. Roy decided to give him back a bit of his own. "You haven't changed a bit, have you, kid? Well, this isn't an amateur flying circus; my men are real pilots!"

"Amateur, huh?" Rick drawled. He looked off in the distance and saw the Veritech fighters in a diamond formation for a power climb, preparing to do a «bomb-burst» maneuver. "I'm gonna have to make you eat those words, Commander. Comin' in."

"Stop clowning around, Rick-look out!"

Mockingbird swooped down in a hair-raising dive, barely missing the speaker's platform, so low that Roy had to duck to avoid getting his head taken off. A lot of people in the crowd hit the dirt too, and most of them cried out in shock. Roy caught another glimpse of the pretty young thing in the front row; she seemed thrilled and happy, not in the least frightened.

Roy spun as the Mockingbird zoomed off, building on the acceleration it had picked up in its dive. Suddenly, as the little aircraft was safely away from the crowd, covers blew free from six booster jet pods mounted around the turbofan cowling at the rear of the ship, and powerful gusts of flame lifted it into a vertical climb. The crowd went "Oh!"

Leaving streamers of rocket exhaust, the Mockingbird went ballistic, quickly overtaking the slower-moving formation of Veritechs.

"Get out of there!" Roy yelled up at him, not even bothering with the mike, knowing it was pointless. «Headstrong» was a word they'd invented with Rick Hunter in mind.

Rick cut in full power, came up into formation perfectly, becoming part of the display, as the Veritech fighters completed their climb and arced away in different directions, like a huge version of the afternoon's skyrockets.

The crowd was applauding wildly, cheering. Roy shook his fist again, furious-but a part of him was proud of his friend.

Out in space, vast forces were coalescing-nothing Earth's detectors could perceive yet, though that would happen soon. Soon, but too late for Earth.

Contact had been made; an inconceivable gap was about to be bridged, a marvel of science put to hellish use.

As Mockingbird floated in for a perfect landing, Roy leaped from the speaker's platform, so eager to get at Rick that he forgot to let go of the mike, yanking the stand over and nearly tripping on the microphone cord. The cord snaked along behind him as he ran.

Rick raised the clear bubble of the cockpit canopy as he taxied to a stop, his forelock of dark hair fluttering in the breeze. He pushed his tinted flying goggles high on his forehead. "Whew! Hi, Roy."

Roy was in no mood for hi's. "Who d' you think you are? What were you trying to do, get yourself killed?"

Rick was nonchalant, pulling off his headset and goggles and tossing them back into the cockpit as he hiked himself up. "Hey, calm down!"

Not a chance. Roy still had the mike in one hand, a few yards of cable attached to it. He flung it down angrily on the hardtop runway surface. "And while we're at it, where'd you learn to do that, anyway?"

Rick had his hands up to hold the much bigger Roy at bay. He gave a quick smile. "It was just a simple booster climb. You taught it to me when I was just a kid!"

"Ahhh!" Roy reached out, grabbed Rick by the upper arm, and began dragging him off across the hardtop.

"Hey!" Rick objected, but he could see that he'd taken a lot of the voltage out of Roy's wrath with that reminder of old times.

"I have to admit, those guys up there were pretty good," Rick went on, jerking his arm free, straightening his dapper white silk scarf. "Not as good as me, of course."

Roy made a sour expression. "You don't have to brag to me, Rick. I know all about your winning the amateur flying competition last year."

"Not amateur; civilian!" Rick bristled. Then he went on with great self-pleasure. "And actually, I've won it eight years in a row. What've you been doing?"

"I was busy fighting a war! Combat flying and dogfighting kept me kind of occupied. Hundred 'n' eight enemy kills, so they tell me."

"You're proud of being a killer?"

They'd touched on an old, sore subject. Rick's late father had rejected military service in the Global Civil War, though he would have been the very best. Jack «Pop» Hunter had seen combat before and wanted no more part of that. He had instilled a strong sense of this conviction in his son.

Roy stopped, fists cocked, though Rick continued walking. "What?" With anyone else, a serious fistfight would have resulted from this exchange. But this was Rick, who'd been like family. More than family.

Roy swallowed his fury, hurrying after. "There was a war on, and I was a soldier! I just did my duty!"

They made a strange pair, crossing the hardtop side by side: Roy in his black and mauve Veritech uniform and Rick, a head shorter, in the white and blazing orange of his circus uniform.

They stopped by a vending machine unlike any Rick had seen before, which offered something called Petite Cola. Rick fed it some coins while the machine made strange internal noises. He took a can of ice-cold soda for himself, giving Roy the other.

"You promised my dad that as soon as the war was over you'd come back to the air circus. Why'd you go back on that, Roy?"

Roy was suddenly distant. "I really felt guilty about letting your father down, only… this Robotech thing is so important, I just couldn't give it up."

He pulled the tab on his soda, torn by the need to explain to Rick and the knowledge that some parts of the original mission to Macross Island, and of Robotechnology, were still classified and might be for decades more. He felt a debt, too, to the late Pop Hunter.

Roy shrugged. "It gets into your blood or something; I don't know."

Rick scowled, leaning back against the Petite Cola machine. "What is Robotech, anyway? Just more modern war machinery!" Somewhere, he could hear a kid raising a ruckus. "And the aliens-huh?"

He couldn't figure out how he'd lost his balance, sliding along the vending machine. Then he realized it was moving out from behind him.

The Petite Cola machine was rolling eagerly toward the child, a boy of seven or so who was throwing a terrible tantrum.

"Cola! I wanna cola! You promised me you'd buy me a cola, Minmei, and I want one right now!" He was dressed in a junior version of a Veritech pilot's uniform, Rick saw disgustedly. Teach 'em while they're young!

Roy looked around to see the commotion. He was suddenly very attentive when he saw the person trying to reason with the kid-"Minmei"-was the young lady who'd been standing at the edge of the speaker's platform.

She was charming in a short red dress, pulling on the boy's arm, trying to keep him from the vending machine that was closing in for the sale. "Cousin Jason, behave yourself! I already bought you one cola; you can't have any more!"

Jason wasn't buying it, stamping his feet and screaming. "Why? I wanna cola-aaahh!"

To Rick's amazement, the scene turned into a combination wrestling match and game of keepaway: Minmei was trying to prevent Jason from reaching the machine and was crying, "Cancel the order, please, machine!" while Jason struggled to get past her. In the meantime, the machine, circling and darting, made every effort to reach him short of rolling over Minmei. With its persistence and agility, the vending machine somehow gave the impression that it was alive.