They were such disparate personalities—it’s amazing that anyone could have believed they would come together as a result of random forces.
Crowell, Remember Our Names!
(The Road to Reflex Point)
“Protoculture activity on the dam!” the Regess’ voice came to her children. “Investigate!”
The gleaming purple Shock Troopers boosted away, forgetting Annie and Magruder for the moment. Lunk came dashing off the dam crest roadway, getting clear of Ground Zero.
Scott watched with satisfaction as the Troopers, joined by the others who had been combing the valley, plummeted down to the blinding-bright Protoculture flares set along the dam face. He pushed the button.
Concrete blew out in a storm of conventional and Protoculture shaped charges, as the dam fractured and broke. The Invid mecha were stunned by what was happening and then they were thrown backward and down by the falling concrete cliff and the freshwater sea behind it. In a moment, a squadron of Invid were wiped away, smashed and flattened by forces that not even Robotech armor could withstand.
“And so the river god legend comes true,” Scott mused, looking down on the devastation from the heights. Just lying on top of some Flowers of Life had given Rand weird visions; perhaps living in the midst of a preserve of them had given the tribe some kind of altered perception, or prescience
The water quickly pushed up dirt and trees, hunks of mecha and vegetation. It was less a tidal wave than a moving wall of mud and solid debris that would plow down anything before it. A lot of Flowers were doomed. Maybe the Invid would even lose interest in the valley.
Lunk, Rook, and Lancer had come up behind him. Lancer spoke softly. “Did the tribe’s Visions serve us, or …”
Annie pushed herself up, realizing that she had been lying on top of Magruder. Nearby, the Cyc rested on its side, smoking, but still intact. “Macky! My little Greystoke! Are you hurt?”
Magruder moved, then sat up, rubbing a bump on his head and knowing that by all rights he and Annie should have been torn limb from bough. Then he heard the din of the flood. They had barely made it high enough; a few yards away and several down, the broached reservoir had left its high-water mark.
Annie was offering him a handful of white silk, her gage for her jungle knight. “Need a hankie?”
His hands closed around hers. “Hey, we did it, Annie! Thank you, oh, thank you!” His face was alight; not even Silverhair could say no to him now!
Annie sat listening to the world-shaking noise of the flood recede. Sunlight came directly down on them through one of the holes in the Invid-built roof. It seemed a perfect moment, the kind she had always wanted to live, the kind she had always wanted to trap in amber.
“Believe me, Macky, it was my pleasure.”
Rand was beginning to get a grip on the knots that held him. “If they’ve damaged my Cyclone I’ll twist the skin off their heads and strangle ’em with it!”
He was blinded by salt sweat, but he was working mostly by feel. He had an enormous headache from the shot he had taken. “What is it with kids these days, anyway?”
It was a holy night in the treetop town, both because the Invid had been driven out by the river god’s righteous wrath, and because Magruder had at last proved himself a man of the tribe. (The team noticed that a number of people were breathing a sigh of relief about that, since they wouldn’t have put up with any more of Magruder’s pecadillos.)
Magruder and Annie, in the best raiment of the village, got to sit side by side in the high-backed chairs of honor in the tribe’s council hall. Annie looked a little punchy but very happy. In addition to greeting Magruder as a man and a brother, Silverhair offered him his choice of any woman as his wife.
“All hail, Magruder!”
The river receded quickly, and for some reason the tribe didn’t seem bothered by the loss of the dam, or the likelihood that the Invid would come again. Prophesies had been served, had been borne out, and thus other prophesies and Visions—which the tribemembers wouldn’t discuss—would be, too. Therefore, all was well.
With the tribe’s help, the building of a string of rafts went with surprising ease and speed. There were hidden warehouses, with empty oil drums, cordage, and tools. Several nights later, the team floated off downstream, on a string of rafts that supported them and their mecha.
Lunk had gotten a few powerful heat-turbine outboard engines going, and these were used for steering and minimal propulsion—enough to give the rafts headway. Even Marlene had to man a sweep, since the team was now one member short.
The shoreline still reeked of the stuff that had been washed up onto it during the flood. Watching the luminous fairy-grove of the tribe, each team member thought about what Annie had meant to him or her. All, that is, except for Rand, who stood by his outboard and looked downstream only, refusing to acknowledge that anything had happened.
The others silently manned steering engines or sweeps. At last he whirled on them. “Why the long faces? You all look like your gerbil just died. Try pulling yourselves together, okay? We’re better off! You didn’t have to look after her as much as I did, so trust me on this one. Now us big kids are free to get on with some down ’n’ dirty freedom fighting!”
Rook, sitting with her back to a crate, hiked herself up a little, studying him. “Y’know, you’re as transparent as glass.”
Rand made a blustering objection, then turned away, his cheeks hot. Then he said in a low voice, “Hey, I think we’ve arrived.”
It was just coming into view around a bend. The Invid Hive looked a little like a spider straddling the river. Its nodules were all alight now, like blister windows. Its curved underside glowed like a belly-furnace. As they watched, a flight of mecha left it, ungainly bats making their way out into the night.
“There are no Hives like that,” Scott breathed. “That’s the weirdest looking—” He drew breath. “All right, everybody; you know what to do.”
They had tarped the mecha and Lunk’s truck with camouflage covers, but that didn’t hold much promise for the time when the string of rafts came in under the bright undergut of the Hive. It was like being a bug under a lamp beam, Rand reflected, as he huddled under a tarp, staring up at the fiery glare of the thing.
But somehow they weren’t noticed. They couldn’t decide whether it was because the Invid were in a turmoil after suffering losses, or simply that the aliens were looking for Protoculture spoor and ignoring everything else.
The stilted Hive made a bizarre sight, set against the delicate pink-lighted inner surface of the tremendous roof shell. At some point, the team realized that the light had grown less harsh, that they had passed out of the fortress’s immediate area. They emerged from cover as the rafts drifted into darkness.
Something crossed the night sky. It was the patrol they had seen leave the fortress, exiting the valley through one of the giant holes. There were five Shock Troopers flying as the rear two echelons of a triangle, two followed by three. But what was at the apex made the team gasp.
“Hey, look at—” Rand began.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Trooper like that before,” Lancer said, the last of the Hive’s light catching his pale skin.
Scott was shaking his head slowly. He had memorized every mecha-identification profile there was, and he had never seen this one. It was twice the size of the others. “What could it be?”
But there were no answers.
Once again, Rand’s Notes on the Run offers an enlightening commentary on the subtler forces affecting the team:
“Another two days’ rafting brought us to a deserted city where, wonder of wonders, we found a pinch of Protoculture in an old Southern Cross underground shelter—just enough to keep us going. It should have made us rubber-kneed with relief, really; it was a lucky find. But we were all still a little depressed about Annie. I kept expecting her to start yapping and pestering me.
“Unloading the mecha from the rafts was a lot easier once they were under power, and the Beta lifted Lunk’s APC off like it was a toy. We decided to hole up in the downtown hub of that empty burg for a few days, to see what else there might be that we could use. The Forager in me didn’t trust the place—those windy streets, echoing concrete canyons—but I knew there would be few other places to resupply between there and the coast.
“Figuring a few rest stops, Scott told us he estimated another eleven days’ travel to the Pacific coast of Panama, where we would get ready for that hop to what all the old maps call Baja California. Most of Central America was an Invid bailiwick, and the Gulf of Mexico was their bathtub; we didn’t have much choice but to go around. Scott said we might manage to be in the region of Reflex Point in as little as a month or so.
“Yippee.…
“While Scott and Lancer went over the maps, and Marlene sort of huddled in Rook’s old jacket, watching Scott, Rook and Lunk and I rode off to see what else we could forage. Our headlights only made the city seem spookier and more ominous. Rook was grousing, something about the foolishness of scavenging in the dark.
“I told her, ‘We’d be sitting ducks during the day—not that I feel a whole lot safer now. I’m beginning to think the Invid see equally well, day or night.’
“It wasn’t much of a comment, I suppose. To tell the truth, I was still thinking about Marlene, and the looks she was giving Scott. If we had been living some oldtime musical, I would have said the two of them were about to burst into a somber duet. As for me, that intimate connectedness I had felt with Marlene seemed to be fading. And my feelings toward Rook changed from second to second.
“Anyway, there we were riding among leaning and teetering buildings, toppled wreckage, cracked streets with weeds growing up through them—and the Invid jumped us. A flight of Pincer Ships were following either that giant one we had seen back in the valley or its twin.
“They took a novel approach, blasting the top floors of buildings to pieces, raining cinderblocks and cement and pieces of girder and glass down on us. We did some stunt driving you won’t find in any books, with dust coating our goggles and sticking in our teeth. A granite splinter opened a groove in Lunk’s cheek.
“It seemed like we fled forever. Then we zazzed around this turn and Scott and Lancer were there, running neck and neck, Marlene riding pillion behind Lancer. We had gotten lax, maybe, because Scott was the only one in armor. Wearing that tin can never seemed to bother him; I had seen him sleep in it often.
“At any rate, he told us to find cover while he ran interference. It made sense; without our armor, the rest of us were just bikers in a bull’s-eye. Then we heard his fireworks, and we poured on everything we had because as good as Scott was—and he was the best among us—he couldn’t hold ’em for long.
“I was in the lead, and I spotted a major subway entrance. We went down, giving our kidneys a nice little massage on the steps. Scott was right behind Lunk’s truck, and the Invid rounds were already melting the entrance canopy. We ran to the end of the platform and then hit the rails.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it was dark down there! Our headlights scared up rats as big as small dogs, and other things that didn’t fit in any Audubon book I ever saw—mutations, of course.
“I figured we could put up a pretty good fight down there, because the Invid would have to bunch up and move slowly. But I made a note to slip on my helmet the second there was a chance; weapons make noise, and in the confinement of the tunnel a few shots would be plenty for a little short-term hearing loss.
“What I hadn’t foreseen, though, was that the Invid would just shoot at us from the street above. They had tracked us by Protoculture emissions, I concluded. I bet that big bozo we had seen was the one doing the shooting; Pincer Ships simply didn’t have that kind of raw power. Even Shock Troopers didn’t pack such a wallop.
“Sure enough, the first one made me partially deaf and gave me the beginnings of a week-long headache. At every junction we looked for a way to go deeper.
“The Invid shots blew straight down through ceiling and floor behind us. The ceiling suddenly collapsed and Lunk’s APC was nearly stuck, but somehow he churned free. I do believe that glorious old wreck listened when he talked to it.
“We shut down our Cycs so the Invid couldn’t sense our Protoculture, but they must have gotten a final fix on Lunk’s truck, because the last volley damn near nailed him. As it was, the whole tunnel began to break up.
“We all wriggled to shelter under some subway cars, except for Marlene, who had taken a spill, and Scott, who crouched over her, protecting her with his armor. I looked at the two of them and the way they looked at each other and I knew, in that bizarre instant flash you sometimes get, that they were what Vonnegut called a “Duprass”—a bonded pair. Something to do with fate, no doubt.
“It sounded like they were knocking whole buildings over up above; the tunnel was blocked by fallen debris and concrete back the way we had come. Lunk’s beloved old jalopy was crumpled, too.
“Then it got quiet. We guessed that they had decided they had destroyed us. But there was no going back; our only chance, the way I saw it, was to look for another route out of the place—find a junction further down. And we had to do it fast, Lancer pointed out, because there might be Invid looking for a way in.
“Scott was mechamorphosing back to cycle mode while he was reminding us how persistent the Invid were—as if we hadn’t seen that for ourselves. If Scott had one weakness as a leader, it was stating the obvious. But as he stripped out of his armor and went to look for an exit, his light showed that the tunnel had been sort of squooshed together like a toothpaste tube in that direction.
“We were sealed in.”