Mom, who thrived on adversity, had met her perfect foil in Rand. Fortunately for me, they eventually worked it through.
Maria Bartley-Rand, Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture
A team had been formed: Scott, Rand, Rook, Annie, Lunk, and Lancer (although Scott wondered if the singer shouldn’t be counted twice). None of them promised to accompany Scott all the way to Reflex Point—if such a place actually existed; it was simply a loose agreement among six people headed in the same general direction, each with a separate purpose in mind. Scott wanted to see the Invid defeated; at the very least he hoped to link up with other downed fighters from the Mars Division and establish an organized resistance. Lunk was searching for a redemption of sorts; Annie, for a family. But the aims of the others were less clear-cut; their pasts remained unrevealed, their motives somewhat suspect. Nevertheless, Scott had himself a team.
All he needed now was an adequate plan.
The present one wasn’t working well at all. Rather than risk calling attention to their latest acquisition—the Alpha Fighter Lunk had so reverently maintained after his rather hasty departure from the Army of the Southern Cross—Scott and Lancer had flown the mecha north under the cover of night and secluded it along the river that marked the border of the neighboring territory. Lancer was to remain with the Veritech while Scott rode back to town on his Cyclone to collect the others. In the meantime, Lunk and Annie would be in charge of gathering up what they could in the way of supplies and foodstuffs. Rand and Rook would secure a safe route out for the loaded APC.
Things went smoothly enough at first; Lunk had seen to his assignment, and Scott rendezvoused with the APC/Cyclone convoy on schedule. They had begun their trek north and entered the highlands when the Invid appeared. It hadn’t paid to leave enemies the likes of Ringo behind.…
Scott held the lead up the rugged mountain road; Rand and Annie were a few lengths behind, then came Lunk in the APC and Rook on her red Cyclone. There were at least five Troopers in pursuit, with annihilation discs striking the cliff faces above and below the roadway.
Scott waved for the others to pour it on and accelerated along the arid slope.
Rook pulled alongside him and shouted above the deafening explosions. “They’re gaining on us!” To maintain their low profile, they had opted against suiting up in helmets or battle armor.
“We haven’t got a prayer unless we can reach the Alpha.” Scott turned to Rand, who had come up on the inside, and told him to take the lead. He and Rook would stay behind to armor up and reconfigure for combat.
Rand signaled his assent, cautioned Annie to hold tight, and moved out front. But no sooner had they reached the crest than two Invid rose into view. Rand engaged the brakes, pivoting the mecha through a clean 180, and headed back down the hill.
Scott hadn’t even dismounted yet. “Why are you turning around?” he shouted.
“They’ve got us surrounded,” Rand reported. “We’d better go cross-country.” He indicated the steep grade above the roadway and lowered his goggles.
“No. No detours,” Scott argued. “The Alpha’s only a few miles down the road—we’ve got to break through!”
Rand snorted and shook his head. “You break through, Captain. I’m heading for the hills.” He stomped the Cyclone into gear and took off, scrambling up the rutted incline, heedless of Scott’s shouts to stop. But not a moment later, Invid Troopers were ascending into view at both ends of the road, and Scott saw the logic of Rand’s choice. He gestured to Rook and Lunk and screeched off up the hill.
There was a barren stretch of plateau at the top of the slope, separated from twin fingers of pine forest by steep crevices too wide to jump. The Invid Troopers realized their advantage and began to loose disc storms of energy from their cannons. As always, there seemed to be an effort made to incapacitate rather than kill the humans, but it could just as easily have been poor marksmanship on their part. In any case, the plateau—great swirls of weathered rock and shale—was being torn up and superheated by the Troopers’ fusillades. Lunk’s APC, slower and far less maneuverable than the Cyclones, provided the best target, and the Invid were soon concentrating their bursts against it. Inside the cab, the big man was bouncing around like a featherweight, barely in control of the thing anymore. When a blinding disc streaked by inches from the carrier, he lost it completely; the APC crashed into a boulder and overturned, hurling Lunk twenty feet to a hard landing facedown on the shale. At the last instant, however, he had grabbed two sacks of supplies and had managed to hold on to them during his brief airborne journey. The sacks cushioned his fall somewhat, but he blacked out momentarily nevertheless. Coming to, he heard Rook’s voice behind him, warning him to keep his head down. He did as instructed and felt rather than saw the red Cyclone streak over him.
Scott and Rand had witnessed the collision and stopped their Cyclones to return fire against the Troopers, bringing rear weapons into play. Behind them, Lunk was attempting to gather together and rebag items spilled from the sacks.
“Lunk! Forget that stuff and come on!” Scott shouted.
“But we need these Protoculture energy cells for the mecha!” Lunk countered, ducking as a series of annihilation discs Frisbeed overhead. The Invid were close at hand now, upright and laying out salvo after salvo of white-hot fire. Explosions began to erupt all around him, orange blossoms in the shale, and he was forced to abandon the supplies. He made a beeline for Scott’s idling Cyclone, straddling the rear seat not a moment too soon.
“My toothbrush!” Lunk moaned, looking back at the wrecked APC as Scott gunned the mecha into a wheelie.
“So your teeth will fall out,” Scott said into the wind. “It’s better than having your head blown off.”
They were headed downhill a moment later, across a smooth flow of solid rock with an inviting forest of tall firs and eucalyptis at its base. As they neared the trees, Scott spied an unpaved road and made for it, signaling the others to follow his lead.
Two of the Invid attempted to track them but eventually gave up; it was widely believed (but certainly unproven) that the Invid had a kind of fearsome respect for forests in general. The Troopers circled overhead for a long while, then began to fan out trying to cover all possible points of egress. Meanwhile, Scott directed his band north in an effort to strike the river. By his reckoning, they were now somewhat west of Lancer and the Veritech, but reaching the river would put them in good position for a direct eastward swing.
The forest thinned as they worked their way north, giving way to a series of tall grass terraces that dropped in measured steps to the river gorge itself. The grass was deep enough to offer places of concealment for themselves as well as the Cyclones, so they continued their cautious advance. There was no sign of the enemy.
“Do you think we lost ’em?” Lunk asked, poking his head above the grass. He could see tall buttes and stone tors in the distance.
Rand answered him from nearby. “We must have—there’s no way those things can follow a trail through the woods. Believe me, I know.”
“How ’bout some food, then?”
Rook showed herself. “You really take the cake, Lunk.”
“I wish I could—”
“First you nearly get us all killed, and now all you can think about is that selfish stomach of yours!”
“Drop it!” Scott said more harshly than was necessary. He switched on his Cyclone briefly to read the system indicator displays. “You were right about those Protoculture cells, Lunk,” he admitted. “It’s imperative that I get back to the Alpha. Someone’s going to have to draw the Invid off in case I’m spotted. We can’t let them find the ship.”
Rand suddenly shushed him. “They’re coming,” he whispered.
The team dropped themselves into the grass, raising weapons as they did so. Minutes later, three Troopers could be seen patrolling the gorge, their scanners alert for movement on the cliffs above the river.
“Everybody hold your fire,” said Scott.
“How did they find us?” Rand said to no one in particular.
Annie put her hands to her breast. “I betcha they heard the sound of my heart pounding.”
Rand stared down at the Mars Gallant Scott had given him earlier; it was a long-barreled version of the sidearm blaster the offworlder wore, shaped a bit like an elongated closed-topped Y. Time to go on-line with this thing, he said to himself. But no sooner did he flip the switch than the Troopers stopped their bipedal patrol and turned on them.
“Open fire!” Scott yelled as globes of fulgent energy formed at the muzzles of the Troopers’ cannons.
Lunk, Rook, and Rand stood up, bringing their H-90’s to bear against the invaders. Phased-laser fire seared into the Troopers’ armored bodies, while annihilation discs ripped into the cliff’s grassy terrace, touching off violent fires and clouds of dense smoke. Two more Invid appeared above the cliffs behind the team, adding their own volleys to the arena.
“We’ve gotta get back to the trees!” Rand shouted above the angry buzz of disc fire and concussive detonations.
“Lead them away from the Alpha!” said Scott.
“You worry about the Alpha. I’m gone!”
Abandoning their Cyclones, the team broke ranks and began to belly-crawl their way through the grass back toward the tree line. They scaled slope after slope, beating a circuitous retreat across each terrace. The closest call came when Rook miscalculated and nearly slipped into a narrow ravine; but Rand was there for her, hauling her up and supporting her while they ran. In the forest once more, they took to the trees and hid themselves high up in the branches. Invid Troopers were walking sweeping patrols along the perimeter; two were actually braving the cool and dark mystery to probe deep into the woods. Rand flicked his Gallant on-line again as one of the latter group was passing beneath him. Curiously, the Invid stopped short, its would-be head rotating upward.
Rand took a sudden, sharp intake of breath—not out of fear but from realization. Of course! he told himself. At the river they stopped when I activated the power cell on my blaster. And just now …
It made sense, but it was time to try an experiment to validate his findings: He disarmed the power cell, and sure enough, the Invid lost interest and stomped off. “Yeah, that’s gotta be it,” Rand said softly. He was exhaling pent-up fear when something orange and menacing suddenly dropped on him from the branch above. His throat refused to utter the scream his guts demanded, but he gave a start nonetheless, raising the weapon like a club, only to realize that it was Annie, upside down and dangling from her knees, carrot-colored hair like an unfurled flag.
“Were you talking to yourself?” she demanded. “Were you? Huh?”
“Don’t ever sneak up on me!” Rand seethed.
Scott, Rook, and Lunk were on the ground now, telling Rand that the coast was clear. Excitedly, Rand scrambled down out of the tree.
“I think I know why we’ve been having so much trouble getting these blasted walking lobsters off our trail,” he announced. He gestured to the weapon’s on-line switch. “We’ve been giving ourselves away every time we switch on our Cyclones or our blasters.”
“How so?” said Lunk.
“They can detect the bio-energy given off by our Robotech mecha.”
Lunk helped Annie down from the tree. “You could be right,” he said to Rand. “Back at the river Scott left the panel gauges of his Cyclone on. They could’ve homed in on that.”
“Right!” Rand agreed.
“It makes sense,” said Scott. It had never been an issue on Tirol, but then, there were a lot of things about Earth that separated it from Tirol.…
“Of course it makes sense,” Rand was continuing. “They thrive on Protoculture, right? Well, it’s like they can smell the stuff, the same way a shark is able to smell blood in the water.”
“Charming thought,” Rook said distastefully.
Annie laughed. “Mr. Wizard! You really thought that out by yourself, huh?”
Rand smiled with elaborate modesty.
“Sure doesn’t happen very often, does it?” Rook scoffed.
Rand whirled on her. “Yeah? Besides your looks, what have you contributed lately?”
Rook’s nostrils flared. “All right, that does it! Let’s step aside and settle this once and for all!”
“You sure you don’t just want to get me alone in the bushes?” Rand said, smiling and stroking his chin. “Admit it—”
“Stop it!” Scott broke in, silencing the two of them. “Arguing among ourselves isn’t going to help matters any. We’re supposed to be friends, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Oh, is that so?” Rook said, arms akimbo. “Well, I don’t remember him ever becoming a friend of mine,” she threw to Rand.
“Then what the hell are you doing here?” Rand barked. “I didn’t ask you along! We don’t need this kind of nonsense.”
Rook and Rand faced off defensively.
“Cool off,” Lunk told everyone. “There’ll be plenty of time to scream at each other later. But right now we gotta get back to the Alpha.”
“Kiss and make up,” Annie said to Rand as Lunk walked off. “Or at least shake hands.”
“Fine with me.” Rand shrugged and glared at Rook. “But maybe you should ask the lady with the chip on her shoulder!”
Gradually, in single file, they began to work their way back to the river. Rook and Rand opened a second front in their war when Rook insisted that something was following them and Rand called her paranoid. Scott came down on them again and ordered Lunk to walk between them as a buffer. And it was in this way that the three men managed to avoid the leeches …
Scott and Rand heard Annie’s scream and turned around in time to see the descent of the mutant worm rain. They dropped from the forest canopy, instantly attaching themselves to the two girls.
Lunk made a sound of disgust and backed away. “There’s millions of them!”
Annie was crying and stamping her feet. Rook’s face was contorted, her body shaking all over. “Do something!” she screamed to Rand, but he only smiled. “You creep! Get these things off me!” She stood paralyzed, as if not knowing where to begin—on her arms, her neck, her face … Just then another leech dropped from the trees and landed on her forehead; Rook screamed and collapsed to the ground, wailing and kicking her feet in frustration.
“Hold still,” Scott said, kneeling alongside her and pulling the leeches off Rook’s arm. But Rand stopped him before he had detached more than two or three. He took Lunk’s lit cigarette and touched the lighted end to one of the creatures.
“Make things hot for them and they’ll pop out on their own,” he explained as the leech dropped off, sizzling. “Pull them off and you end up leaving the sucker intact.” Methodically, he moved the cigarette from leech to leech.
“I tell you, I get a real kick seeing city girls in the country,” Rand told Scott while he labored. “They look so darn cute when they start screaming.” He smiled at Rook. “You should’ve seen yourself …”
She made a face, averting her gaze from Rand’s handiwork. “Can you blame me? It’s disgusting.” She shuddered. “I hate to break this to you, Daniel Boone, but there’s something called civilization out there. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
Rand snorted. “That’s where you have crime and filth, right?”
“Better than slimy little blood-sucking tree leeches.”
“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 path 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.