Invid Invasion: The New Generation Page 6

  “I had to admit that I was thinking along those very same lines, but Annie’s timing left a lot to be desired. And since I didn’t relish the thought of finding that pink backpack of hers dangling from a bloody pincer, I threw the Cyclone into gear and went after her. I reached out, and she swatted my hand away, telling me to get lost. Angry now, I decided I would just scoop her up in my left arm and put an end to the foolishness, but I misjudged both my course and her weight. No sooner did my arm go around her waist than I was pulled from the mecha. Worse still, we were right alongside an open freight elevator; and down we went, eight feet or more, would-be opponents wrapped in each other’s arms.

  “I blacked out for a moment; perhaps we both did. But Annie came around first and laid into me as though I had just tried to maul her. I came to with her shouting: ‘Get off of me, you monster! You dirty Forager sleaze! You’re all alike!’ She heaved me off her and scrambled up out of the shaft with a nimbleness and speed that surprised me. By the time I poked my head out, she was nowhere in sight. But I heard her rummaging around in a nearby pile of mecha scrap, still cursing men in general, me in particular. When I saw her come up with an old-fashioned automatic rifle, I started having second thoughts about showing myself. Fortunately, she was only interested in emptying the thing’s clip against the already devastated facade of a building across the street. Then she tossed the depleted thing aside and dove back down into the scrap heap. Meanwhile, I was wondering what had become of Scott and whether the Invid would home in on Annie’s gunfire. When I looked over at her again, she was wrestling an antitank weapon up onto her shoulder.

  “ ‘Watch where you point that thing!’ I started to warn her. ‘It might be—’

  “And it was.

  “The small missile nearly put a center part in my hair, then changed trajectory and detonated against the side of the building.

  “A little to the right and she would have connected with the Invid who was just stepping around that same corner.

  “I ran for the overturned Cyclone, hopped on, and darted over to pick up Annie, who now had control of the weapon. She located another missile and launched it against the approaching Shock Trooper. I backed her up with pulse blasts from the front-end laser mount of the Cyclone, but neither of us managed to connect with a soft spot in the thing’s shell, and it kept up its menacing advance. Annie screamed and made a run for it, not a second before the creature’s right claw came down at her; the tip of its bladelike pincer swept the pack from her back and ripped open the jumpsuit neck to waist but left her otherwise untouched. But the nearness of the blow paralyzed her; I saw her reach back, finger the tear, and collapse to her knees.

  “Meanwhile, I had problems of my own: The Invid had turned its attention to me and fired off several discs, one of which blew the Cyclone out from under me and threw me a good fifteen feet from the blast. My back was to its advance now, but one look at Annie’s shocked face told me everything I needed to know.

  “ ‘Heeelp!’ she was screaming. ‘Anyone!’

  “But there was something else in my line of sight as well: a glint across the lake, sunshine on gleaming metal. And even as my head was going down to the street in a gesture of surrender and ultimate indifference—some part of my warped mind wondering what that giant cloven foot or pincer was going to feel like—I knew Annie’s call had been heard.

  “A figure in red Cyclone battle armor launched itself across the lake and came down at the end of the street, hopping in for a rescue, dodging one, two, then three explosive blasts from the Invid Shock Trooper. I saw the soldier return fire from the rifle/cannon portion of the armor’s right arm and heard the Invid take a direct hit and come apart.

  “The soldier put down behind me as I rolled over, Annie oohing and ahhing nearby, just in time to see Scott appear at the other end of the street with three Invid on his tail. He dropped one for the crowd and took off out of sight, the other two closing on him. I got up, hand shielding my eyes, and tried to follow the fight. Overhead now, Scott blasted a second Invid, then swooped in low and ass-backward to finish off the last. I saw him sight in on the Trooper, then loose the shot. It tore into one of the Invid’s hemispheric cranial protrusions, loosing fire and smoke from the hole.

  “Scott was thrown backward by the missile’s kick and landed on his butt not ten feet in front of us—Annie, me, and the mysterious red Cycloner. The Invid came in on residuals, mimicking Scott’s undignified approach with one of its own, and immediately fell face forward to the street, a sickly green fluid spewing from its wound, its outstretched pincer trapping and nearly mincing poor Annie. Scott had explained that the fluid was a kind of nutrient derived from the Flowers of Life, but I had yet to see exactly what it was that the stuff was keeping alive! Scott, his faceshield raised, turned to thank the red who had come to our aid. But it was obvious he had seen something I hadn’t, because he stopped in midsentence, as though questioning what he was seeing.

  “And Red bounded off without a word.

  “At the same time, Annie was crying for help, and Scott went over to her, lifting the pincer enough to allow the pale and shaken kid to crawl free. What a picture she made, kneeling there in the dirt, tears cascading down her face, her torn jumpsuit hanging off her shoulders.

  “ ‘I’m so sorry,’ she wailed. ‘This is all my fault.’

  “Scott didn’t say anything; he simply walked over to the fallen Invid and regarded it—analytically, I thought, as though he had seen those things bleed before.

  “I was sitting on the engine cover of my overturned Cyclone feeling twenty years older and wondering what had happened to solo riding.

  “ ‘We did what we could,’ I told Scott. ‘But it just wasn’t enough.’

  “Annie said, ‘Now what are we going to do, Rand?’

  “And Scott and I exchanged looks, remembering Ken and the other island …”

  “We found Annie’s knapsack, and I did what I could to sew up the tear in her jumpsuit. The causeway had been reextended to complete the span between the islands; Scott figured that Ken and the others had heard the explosions and realized they were going to have to deal with us one way or another. This was pretty much the case. Ken said, ‘I’m glad you made it,’ when he saw us cycle in. But Annie wasn’t buying it; she leaped off the rear seat, even before I had brought the Cyclone to a halt, and whacked Ken across the face forcefully enough to spin him around. He gave us a brief over-the-shoulder look and decided he had better take it or he would have us coming down on him as well.

  “He asked Annie to forgive him, and frankly, I was surprised by the sincerity he managed to dredge up. ‘I only did it to save the others,’ he explained. ‘If we stood up to the Invid, all the people in Laako would suffer for it. The way things are, we get by all right.’

  “Fire in his eyes, Scott dismounted, took off his helmet, and walked over to Ken. ‘So you feed potential troublemakers to the Invid to save your own skins,’ he growled.

  “I’m not sure what would have happened next if a crowd of Laako’s citizenry hadn’t appeared.

  ‘“You got that right, soldier!’ their leader told Scott.

  “They were only a dozen strong, men, women, and children, and they were unarmed; but there was an attitude of defiance about them that rattled us. The rest of the audience was glaring down at us from their cells in those shells of buildings.

  “ ‘You’ve got to leave here!’ the man continued. ‘I’m sorry, but we don’t want any soldiers in this town. So get out—now!’

  “I had to hand it to the guy: He wasn’t especially large or well built, and his glasses and workman’s blues gave him a kind of paternal look; but here he was standing up to an offworlder in Cyclone battle armor. I thought Scott would take the poor man apart; instead, I heard him laugh.

  “ ‘Well, was it something we said?’ Scott asked.

  “ ‘There is nothing funny about the situation, young man,’ the man responded angrily. ‘I am in deadly earnest. Nobody here ev
en wanted your Robotech Expeditionary Mission to begin with, and if it wasn’t for you soldiers, this planet would still be living in peace! Now, get out! Save your rescues for somewhere else!’

  “I winced at hearing this, knowing the man had gone too far. Scott stepped into the guy’s face, shouting back: ‘Why you.… Don’t you realize that without any kind of resistance, you’ve got no hope?!’

  “ ‘We know,’ Ken chimed in from behind Scott. ‘But we still want you to leave.’

  “ ‘Terrific,’ Scott snarled. ‘You’re going to sit back and relax and let the Invid rule over you and the entire planet—’

  “ ‘Fighting the Invid will aggravate the whole situation!’ the crowd leader interrupted. ‘All we want is a peaceful life. What difference does it make who’s at the top—some corrupt Council or the Invid? There’s no such thing as freedom!’

  “The man must have caught a whiff of his own words, because all of a sudden he was soft-spoken and rational. ‘Look, anybody who hasn’t seen it our way has already left. So will you please go?’

  “I had heard the same speech so often that I hardly paid any attention to it, but you just didn’t go throwing the reality of the situation into the face of a guy who had come halfway across the galaxy to fight your battles for you. Before I could open my mouth, Scott had grabbed the guy by the shirtfront and was ready to split his head open.

  “I told Scott to leave him alone. After all, in their own way they were right: They had peaceful lives, even without the so-called freedoms that were so important forty years ago. Besides, nothing Scott or I could say or do was going to change the way they felt.

  “ ‘Look around you,’ I told Scott.

  “He did, and the truth of it seemed to sink in some. He shoved the man aside and spat in the street. ‘I don’t believe what I’m witnessing here,’ he rebuked the crowd. ‘You people make me sick! You think I’m the only one fighting the Invid? Well, there are plenty of others. People who aren’t ready to roll over and play dead, understand?’

  “The crowd looked at him pityingly. He donned his helmet, mounted the Cyclone, and took off without a word to any of us.

  “I felt that I had to back Scott up and made some kind of silly speech about selling out strangers, but it all fell on deaf ears. Except Annie’s.

  “ ‘That goes for me, too,’ she told the crowd. ‘I wouldn’t want to live in this rotten town anyway.’ With that, she threw herself onto the cycle’s rear seat and told me to ‘let ’er rip.’

  “Annie hugged herself to me for all it was worth, and I could almost feel her tears through my shirt. But when I asked if she was okay, she said she would make it all right. I was certain she had known worse moments in her life.…

  “When we caught up with Scott, I asked about his plans.

  “ ‘Somehow or other I’ve got to find Reflex Point,’ he yelled without bothering to look over at me.

  “He had mentioned this when we first met and once or twice since but had never explained its meaning. ‘You keep talking about this place as if it’s the most important thing in the world.’

  ‘“It is,’ Scott threw back sternly, and accelerated out front.

  “There was something about his attitude that put me off, or maybe I was just hoping for an argument that would split us up and return me to my solo riding. I said, ‘You know what your problem is? You don’t know how to communicate with people! Now that you’ve had a taste of the old homeworld, don’t you think you’d be a lot happier back in space with your girlfriend?’

  “His silence told me I’d gotten to him.

  “ ‘Lay off,’ he snapped back, accelerating again. ‘Marlene’s dead.’

  “It literally stopped me cold in my tracks.

  “ ‘He never told you?’ Annie said as we watched Scott disappear over a rise up ahead.

  “ ‘Not one word about it,’ I mumbled. It explained a lot about Scott’s behavior, his obsession with waging this one-man war of his.…

  “ ‘I know how he feels,’ Annie was saying. ‘Being the woman so many men dream of, and yet so unlucky in love, has made me very sensitive to this sort of thing.’

  “I didn’t know whether she was trying to make me laugh or what, but her comment succeeded in lightening my spirits. Then she slammed me on the back: ‘Hey, come on! We’re gonna lose Scott if we don’t get a move on!’

  “I asked her if she was sure about leaving Ken behind, and she made a face.

  “ ‘Uh-huh. I have a feeling my next lover’s going to be my last. Now, let’s get moving, Rand!’

  “She pounded her tiny fists against my back again, and we were gone.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Mom was, as they used to say at the turn of the century, one tough broad. She was the most respected member of the Blue Angels, and even after her falling out with Romy and her flight from Cavern City, her name was adopted by only those riders who shot for the narrows, and scrawled on many a wall.

  Maria Bartley-Rand, Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

  It wasn’t much of a town—strictly main-street frontier, run-down and dirty—and it wasn’t much of a bar, but at least the place offered cold beer (even if it was locally brewed and bitter-tasting), shade, and a singer backed by a decent pickup band.

  After all of the battles are over

  After all of the fighting is done

  Will you be the one

  To find yourself alone with your heart

  Looking for the answer?

  Rook Bartley lifted her glass and toasted the singer. The song was soft and downbeat, just what she needed to ease herself into the blues, trip through memories she couldn’t do anything about.

  Rook took a look around the place over the rim of her mug. It was dimly lit and poorly ventilated but surprisingly clean and tidy for a joint in the wastes. There was the usual assortment of types, Foragers mostly, keeping to themselves in the corners, nursing drinks and private thoughts. A couple or two wrapped around each other on the cleared space that passed for a dance floor. And several bad boys on the upper tier, boots up on the table, midnight shades. Rook judged they were locals from the way they were scanning the room for action, your basic rough trade feeling safe on the barren piece of turf they had secured for themselves. Rook returned to her drink, unimpressed.

  She was a petite and shapely eighteen-year-old with a mane of strawberry-blond hair and a face that more than one man had fallen in love with. She was wearing a red and white short-sleeved bodysuit that hugged her in all the right places. It was set off by forearm sheaths, a blue utility belt, and boots, an outfit styled to match the mecha she rode, a red Cyclone she had liberated from an armory just after her split from the Blue Angels, the assault by the Snakes.…

  When it feels like tomorrow will never come

  When it seems like the night will not end

  Can you pretend

  That you’re really not alone?

  You’re out here on your own

  (Lonely soldier boy)

  You’re out here on your own

  (Lonely soldier boy)

  Rook settled back in her chair to study the group’s lead singer, a rocker well known in the wastes who called herself Yellow Dancer. The song had taken an unanticipated leap to four-four, guitar and keyboards wailing, and Yellow was off to one side of the low stage, clapping in time and allowing the band their moment in the spots. She was tall and rather broad-shouldered, Rook thought, but attractive in a way that appealed to men and women both. Her hair was long but shagged, tinted slightly lavender and held by a green leather band that chevroned in the center of her forehead. Yellow’s stage clothes were not at all elaborate—pumps, tight-fitting slacks, and a strapless top trimmed in purple—but were well suited to her tall frame and flattering to her figure.

  Yellow stepped back to the mike to acknowledge the applause. She was modest and smiling until one of the bad boys decided to change the tempo somewhat.

  “Hey, baby face!”
he called out, getting up from the table and approaching the stage. “Me and my friends don’t like your music. It stinks, y’ hear?”

  Rook had expected as much. It was the one with the pointed chin and wraparound sunglasses, the apparent gang leader. He was wearing tight jeans tucked into suede shin boots and a short-sleeve shirt left unbuttoned.

  “It’s garbage, it ain’t music,” he insulted the singer.

  Rook wondered how Yellow would handle it; the pickup band were locals, as was most of the room. No one was exactly rising to her defense, but neither was she showing signs of concern.

  “Well, why don’t you just give these people a sample of what you consider music?” she taunted back.

  Some of the crowd found the comeback amusing, which only managed to put Yellow’s critic on the spot. Rather than risk making a fool of himself, he decided to teach her a quick lesson and stepped forward swinging a lightning right.

  “I’ll give ’em a sample,” he said at the same time.

  But Yellow was even faster; still maintaining her place, she ducked to the left, leaving vacuum in her wake. The rogue’s arm sailed clean through nothingness, wrapping itself around the mike stand, and threw him completely off balance. The crowd howled, and Yellow smiled. But in that instant, her assailant recollected himself, turned, and caught her across the face with an open-hand left.

  Yellow’s head snapped back, but not for long. She countered with a right, open-hand also but hooked a bit to bring her nails into play. The man took the blow full force to his temple and cheek; his glasses were knocked askew, and blood had been drawn.

  “Now we’re even,” she said to the leader, whose back was still turned to her. But she now had the rest of the gang to answer to as well; they had left their tables and were approaching her threateningly. “How about calling it quits, fellahs?” she told them. “Tag-team wrestling isn’t scheduled until Saturday night, and we wouldn’t want to mess up the program, would we?”