Invid Invasion: The New Generation Page 10

  “Sourpuss,” Rand said, standing up and moving over to Annie. “Any leech that gets a good taste of you is gonna swear off human beings forever.”

  Rook stood up, angry at first, then flashing an enigmatic, almost seductive smile. “We’ll see …” she said, walking off into the bushes to check for leeches off limits to Rand’s search.

  They stuck to the forest this time rather than risk showing themselves in the open ground that bordered the river. Two hours along they stopped to rest below the small falls of a tributary that fed the gorge. Rand stripped a sapling of twigs and fashioned a fishing rod for himself. He waded out to a rock midstream and cast in his line. Scott and the others sat under the trees along the bank.

  “Hey, Rand,” Annie taunted him. “Do you really think you can catch anything with that funny-looking stick of yours?”

  Rand frowned while everyone had a good laugh. “Just you wait,” he told them. “I’m an expert, and if there’s a trout anywhere in this river, it’s mine.”

  It was a pleasant spot, full of water sounds, animal life, and cool shade stirred by a gentle breeze. “Almost makes you forget where you are,” Scott mused.

  Rook nodded absently. “I know. I’m starting to feel like we’re at a Boy Scout picnic.”

  Rand meanwhile was addressing his would-be catch, when something small and mean hit him on the head. He looked around and found Lunk crouched on the limb of an overhanging tree. “Hey, what’s the idea?” Rand started to ask.

  “Invid …” Lunk said softly, cupping his hands to his mouth.

  Scott, Annie, and Rook took to the cover of the brush. Rand was looking around for a place to hide when he noticed the line stretched taut. He grabbed hold of the anchored pole, ignoring Scott’s orders to abandon the fish. It had to be a five-pounder at least, and he wasn’t about to let it go. Even so, he could sense the ground-shaking approach of the Trooper. He pulled hard and saw the rainbow break water; it was bigger than he had thought. The Invid’s cloven footfalls were increasing; Rand gave a mighty tug and brought the fish up. But just then the line snapped. At the same time the Trooper appeared through the trees.

  Deciding it might behoove him to be the one that got away, Rand dropped the pole and dived from the rock.

  Lunk was still in the tree, standing now, his back flattened against the trunk, when the Trooper passed. A second Trooper lumbered into view an instant later. Peering from the bushes, his H-90 raised, Scott saw that the two were headed toward the falls. Rand was nowhere to be seen.

  Unless one happened to be a fish.

  Running short on breath when the first Invid hit the water, Rand had propelled himself downstream, hugging the rocky bottom, only to run into another pair of armored legs. His lungs were on fire, threatening to implode, but surfacing wouldn’t necessarily improve the situation any. He swallowed hard, sensing a darkness creeping into the edges of his vision.…

  The two Troopers stopped in the middle of the river and swung their sensors through a 360-degree scan. Concerned for Rand’s safety, Scott ran from cover when the Invid had crossed the stream and moved off into the woods on the opposite bank.

  Lunk dived in, and found his companion unconscious on the river bottom, arms still locked around the boulder he had hugged to keep himself submerged. He brought him up and laid him facedown on the bank; then straddled him and carefully began to use his big hands to pump water from Rand’s lungs.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Annie asked.

  Scott nodded. “He just passed out.”

  Rand’s color started to return, and he coughed up a few mouthfuls of water. Softly, Rook called his name.

  Rand straightened up with an energy that surprised all of them, knocking an unsuspecting Lunk backward into the river. He looked around dazedly and dropped back to his knees exhausted.

  “Uh, the Invid are all gone,” Annie said.

  “Yeah, you can calm down, Superman,” Rook added.

  Rand smiled thinly.

  “All right,” Scott said, extending his hand to Lunk and helping him to the bank. “Now that they’re gone, we can get back to Lancer. We can’t be too far—”

  Rook saw Scott’s eyes go wide. She spun around and saw the reason for it: An enormous black bear, frightened and up on its hind legs, was breaking through the brush. Scott had his weapon raised but froze as a bizarre giant tiger-striped spider dropped from a tree onto the weapon’s barrel. Scott winced and uttered a startled cry, reflexively loosing a bolt from the thing that whizzed past the bear’s head. Rook lunged for Annie as the animal’s huge claw came down, narrowly missing her. Lunk almost caught the backlash and rolled for cover.

  Rand missed with two shots from his own weapon, and the bear’s right paw connected with the blaster, sending him and the weapon flying in opposite directions. Rand looked up into bared teeth and sharp claws, the face of furry black death. He made his peace with the Creator and glimpsed a brilliant flash of white light … But when the smoke cleared, he found himself still alive and the bear gone—vaporized.

  The only problem was that there was now an Invid ship overhead—and not one of the Troopers either, but one of the rust-brown Pincer units!

  “Well, I never thought I’d be happy to see you guys!” Rand said as he got to his feet, the smell of roasted meat in the air. He joined the rest of the team in a jog for the woods.

  The Invid rained fire down on them as they ran, steering them away from the safety of the trees and bringing one of the patrolling Troopers in on the action. The team soon found itself cornered, fenced in on open ground by high-energy beams and annihilation discs. But Scott heard a familiar sound cutting through the tumultuous roar of the Invid’s death-rays.

  It was Lancer, riding one of the abandoned Cyclones.

  Lavender hair trailing in the wind, he leapt the mecha over a surprised Invid Trooper and landed it not more than fifteen feet from where the team stood huddled together.

  “All I had to do was ride to the sound of the guns!” Lancer yelled when the Cyclone had skidded to a halt. “What’re you waiting for, Scott? Climb on!”

  Scott offered a silent prayer to the gods who governed silver linings and threw himself onto the rear seat. Lancer popped the mecha into a long wheelie that shot them through the legs of the bewildered Trooper. But the Pincer ship chased them, loosing continuous disc fire from its treetop course.

  Lancer kept the Cyclone in the woods for cover. Scott saw that they were nearing the river gorge now and raised himself on the rear pegs in an effort to spot the Alpha. Lancer took one hand from the controls and pointed. “At the foot of the cliff on the right!” he shouted over his shoulder.

  Scott realized that the land dropped away sharply up ahead, but he couldn’t discern just how high they were above the lower terrace. Lancer was cutting their forward speed as they approached the ledge. Scott leaned in to ask him how he planned to negotiate the jump. But all at once Lancer threw his arms straight up and was gone.

  Instinctively, Scott grabbed hold of the handlebar controls and saved the mecha from overturning. He looked over his shoulder and saw Lancer squatting on the overhanging branch he had swung himself to, smiling and waving Scott off. Scott was impressed: It had been one heck of a gymnastic feat. But neither of them was in the clear yet. An Invid Trooper broke through the woods and began to open up with disc fire. Lancer executed a Tarzan leap from the tree and disappeared into the undergrowth. Scott lowered his head to the rush of the wind and goosed the cycle. But the cliff face was close now, closer than he had realized, and an instant later he was sailing into blue skies above the treetops. He lost the Cyclone and plummeted on his own, no one to catch him or take note of his alarmed cry.…

  Elsewhere, Lancer had worked his way back toward the rest of the team. He literally ran into them not a mile from where he had put Scott in charge of the Cyclone. They had three Invid Troopers behind them, devastating the forests with sporadic sprays of fire. Lancer took the point and led them along the same p
ath he and Scott had Cycloned not an hour before. Twilight was giving way to darkness now, and Invid cannon sounds and annihilation discs lent a hellish atmosphere to the scene.

  Once again the Troopers succeeded in boxing them in, and once again Rook, Lunk, Annie, and Rand yelled good-byes to one another while explosions rained leaves and forest carpet all over the place. But Scott turned the tide: He had survived his plunge into the trees and made his way to the concealed Veritech. The Invid Pincer ship, as he explained later, was history.

  Now the Alpha came tearing into the woods and took out the Trooper whose cannons were ranging in on the team. Then Scott launched the VT straight up into the starry skies, reconfiguring to Battloid at the top of his booster climb and bringing out the media’s rifle/cannon to deal with his pursuers. Two more Troopers fell to the Alpha’s storm, but a third managed to work its way in close enough to inflict a pincer swipe that brought Scott tumbling back to the woods.

  The Trooper roared into a long sweeping turn and headed back in on the downed Battloid. Inside, Scott shook himself to clear his head and ran through a rapid assessment of his options as he brought the techno-knight to its feet. The media’s external pickups brought the team’s cries of warning into the cockpit, especially Annie’s high-pitched: “Behind you, Scott! Behind you!”

  Scott thought the Battloid through a quick about-face in time to see the approaching Trooper. He reached for the launch-tube cover levers. The Invid fired first, blazing discs spinning and twisting out of the cannon muzzles. But Scott’s aim was surer: Red-tipped heat-seeking missies ripped from the Battloid’s shoulder compartments and homed in on the Invid’s dark form, detonating against pincers and torso alike, and giving brief life to a blinding fireball, a brilliant orange midnight sun.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Most commentators overlook the fact that Lancer was a singer long before he was a freedom fighter, and a cross-dresser long before a Yellow Dancer. But he was first and foremost an actor—malleable, dramatic, and narcissistic. And while it’s true that he can be linked to certain literary traditions wherein heroes carried out their crusades under the guise of fops and other fabulous fools, Lancer was no Scarlet Pimpernel or comic Zorro: He was a fox of an entirely different order.

  Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point

  Prior to Zor’s arrival on Optera, it was the Flower of Life that held the central place in the Invid’s naturalistic pantheon. But that was no longer the case. They were aggressive species now every bit as warlike as the Tirolian Masters who defoliated Optera. And they worshipped Protoculture, the bio-energetic by-product Zor had coaxed from the Flowers themselves. They continued to subsist on the Flowers their captive Human population planted and harvested, but it was Protoculture that fueled the army of mecha which kept that enterprise running smoothly and without incident. Indeed, it could be said that the Invid themselves had become more dependent on Zor’s discovery than the Robotech Masters ever were.

  Enormous amounts of Protoculture were required to oversee and maintain Earth’s diverse population centers and to put down uprisings and revolts in the farms and factories. (Exedore would have been chagrinned to learn that the Invid had found their own way to manufacture Protoculture without having to resort to the matrix device that had figured so prominently in the First and Second Robotech Wars.) These reserves, fashioned by Human hands into individual energy canisters suitable for Invid and Terran mecha alike, were stored in scores of warehouses across the globe and guarded by Humans “sympathetic” to the Invid’s purpose. The privileges enjoyed by these sympathizers varied; sometimes hostages were taken to assure allegiance, while on other occasions outlaws and petty powerbrokers were given charge. Towns and cities bartered with the Invid overlords for simple freedoms: the right to enjoy a semblance of normal life in exchange for snooping out resistance groups or seeing to it that Protoculture cells did not fall into the wrong hands. Often the Invid allowed those in charge before the invasion to keep their lofty positions, except that there was a new authority to answer to—the Regess and her legions of territorial supervisors who dealt directly with their underlings.

  Lancer explained some of this to Scott while the team licked its wounds after their encounter with the Troopers. Even though the episode had consisted largely in their outrunning the Invid, it had nevertheless served to unite the members of the team and instill in each of them a confidence that hadn’t been there two days before. They were now beginning to understand and accept each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and they were learning to trust one another as well. Without any formal vote or voiced acknowledgment, Scott surfaced as the leader, which was only right given his training and resoluteness. Lunk was something of a sergeant to Scott’s lieutenant Annie, everything from den mother to mascot. Rook still held herself separate, but could always be counted on for her instinctive combat sense. And Rand was their backwoods provider, fishing and hunting when he wasn’t sitting under a tree scribbling notes to himself. That left only Lancer.

  Scott still had misgivings about the man, but as he listened to Lancer’s detailed account of the Invid infrastructure and occupation techniques, he began to see him in a new light. The female-singer ploy had yet to be explained, but it was obvious from Lancer’s report that the adopted persona of Yellow Dancer had opened many doors to him. He would discuss his former ties with the resistance only in a vague way, but Scott understood that his contacts were as numerous as his information was exhaustive.

  The team had retrieved the two other Cyclones from where they had left them in the grass and spent three days in the river gorge dining on pit roasted fish, recuperating, and planning the next move in their northward journey. They were careful about using the mecha now, convinced that Rand’s theory was correct. Most of the time the Invid Scouts and Troopers were operating in a kind of background net of Protoculture emanations and couldn’t home in on any one source. But when they were engaged in a particular search, their senses were more acute at screening out the random waves from the usually nearby active ones. In any case, it was a moot point at the moment; the Alpha was depleted of charge, and there was scarcely enough left in the Cyclones to power them, let alone reconfigure or fire them.

  That’s where Norristown entered the picture. Located somewhat east of their present route, it was one of the Southland’s largest cities, transplanted like so many others from the devastated north during the reign of Chairman Moran and the formation of the Army of the Southern Cross. The city had prospered throughout and boasted one of the continent’s few surviving sports arenas. But most important, it was the site of one of the Invid’s Protoculture storage facilities, a heavily fortified castle (constructed years ago in the Hollywood style) that overlooked the city.

  Lancer had a map of the place.

  And a rather ingenious plan.

  Less than a week later, Rook and Annie were on one of the roads leading into Norristown. They made an interesting picture—the blonde in her red and white bodysuit leaning almost casually against the parked Cyclone and Annie in her military greens and ever-present cap perched on the seat like some diminutive ornament. Not five miles away was the city itself, a tight cluster of buildings surrounded by forest, with Drumstick Butte and the hulks of two Zentraedi ships casting their giant shadows from behind. The Protoculture storage facility could be discerned at the foot of the oddly shaped, top-heavy butte, linked to the city below a well-maintained switchbacked roadway.

  Rook straightened up at the sound of an approaching vehicle and glanced over at Annie; the youngster nodded and hopped down from the Cyclone’s seat to stand alongside her traffic-stopping teammate. Up the road a truck came into view, and Rook threw the driver a playful wink and raised her thumb in a hitchhiker’s gesture. Innocently and with well-rehearsed bashfulness, Annie pressed her forefingers together and called for the driver to stop and lend a hand.

  The driver halted the truck and climbed down from the cab, taking in a long eyeful of the two maroon
ed girls and their red Cyclone. He bent down to inspect the mecha, complimenting them on the fine condition of the thing, but was sad to report that they were out of Protoculture fuel. This was so common an occurrence that the driver scarcely gave it a second thought; anyone might stumble upon some wonderful specimen of aged Robotechnology only to come to think of it as a worthless piece of junk when the all but irreplaceable Protoculture energy cells were depleted. True, there was a black market, but it was one that few people had access to. Between the needs of the Invid, the resistance, and your everyday ’Culture hounds, Protoculture had become a priceless commodity.

  “We were hoping you could fix it,” Annie said to the truck driver. “We’re on our way to the Yellow Dancer concert in Norristown.”

  The driver smiled up at her. “Not without Protoculture. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Hey, mister,” Rook said suddenly, as if noticing the driver’s Invid-occupation double-C hard-hat emblem for the first time. “You’re from the storage facility, aren’t you?”

  “So?” the man answered, wary now.

  “Couldn’t you spare us some?” Annie asked, leaning over the Cyclone’s seat.

  The man snorted. “What’re you, nuts, kid? If anyone found out I’d shared my rations, I’d be in deep trouble.” He turned his head at the sound of a mechanical click and buzz and found himself staring into the laser muzzle of a strange-looking disc-shaped weapon.

  Rook grinned and gestured with the blaster. “Know what? You’re already in big trouble, buddy.…”

  Five minutes later the driver had been dragged to the side of the road. His arms and legs were bound with rope, and his mouth was sealed by a piece of wide tape. He continued to struggle while Lunk secured the final knots.

  “Relax, buddy,” Rook told him. “We’re just going to borrow your truck for a while.” She hastened off to the spot in the woods where they had moved the vehicle. Her teammates had the back doors opened. “Well, the first stage went pretty well,” Scott was commenting as she walked up.