Metal Fire

by Jack McKinney

  "Status report!" the lieutenant demanded when they brought the tanks to a halt.

  The corridor, a good fifteen-meters wide, was filled with thick smoke and littered with mecha debris. The severed arm. of a Bioroid lay twitching on the floor, leaking a sickly green fluid and a worm's nest of wires. Dana wondered what sort of reception HQ was receiving and tried without

  success to raise them on the radio. Display sensors gave no indication that the video units were incapacitated, so she swiveled the camera through a

  360 for Emerson's benefit. Louie, meanwhile, launched a selfdeployed monitoring unit.

  It was Simon's mecha that had collided with the Bioroid. Fortunately, the private had bailed out at the last minute, his armor protecting him from the explosion and what would have been a full-body road rash. However, without the mecha, Dana informed him, he was going to be useless to the team.

  "But why?" he was saying to her now. "It's not my fault my craft was disabled."

  Sean, Road, and Woodruff had positioned themselves as a rear guard; Angelo, Bowie, and Louie were forward. Private Jordon and the rest of the team had dismounted and were grouped around Dana and Simon, the helmetless private looking small and defenseless in the vastness of the corridor. Jordon, who rarely knew when to keep his mouth shut, suddenly found it necessary to back up Dana's words to Simon.

  "You just have to understand, Simon, we can't afford to jeopardize the mission by dragging you along with us."

  Meanwhile, Dana had been trying to figure out just what she could do with Simon. They were a good half mile in, certainly not too far from the breach to have him leg it back, but what could he do when he got there? The skirmish was still in progress and he wouldn't stand a chance outside. He could ride second in one of the tanks, but Dana thought it was best to post Simon and one of the others here as backup. Jordon was as good a choice as any.

  Jordon didn't take the news any better than Simon had, but Dana put a quick end to his protests. He and Simon were to wait for the team to return; if no one returned by 0600 hours they were to try and raise HQ and make their own way out of the fortress. In the meantime, Dana would see to it that Louie maintained radio contact with them every thirty minutes. With that, she regrouped the rest of the 15th and signaled them forward.

  A substantial portion of their premission briefing had involved a thorough study of the archive notes left by the men who had reconned the first super dimensional fortress shortly after its fateful arrival on Earth. That group had been led by Henry Gloval and Dr. Emil Lang, and had also included the legendary Roy Fokker and the now notorious T. R. Edwards. But the 15th found little similarity between what they had read and what they were faced with now. For starters, the SDF-1 group had gone in on foot; but more important, this ship was known to be armed and dangerous. All Dana could do was keep proper procedure in mind and try to emulate Gloval's methodical approach.

  As a group they continued at moderate speed along the dimly lit corridor, the height and width of which never varied. It was hexagon-shaped, although somewhat elongated vertically, a constant fifteen-yards wide across the floor-uniform blue outsized tiles-by some twenty-five yards high. The walls (paneled on the downward slope and strangely variegated and cell-like above) appeared to be constructed of a laser-resistant ceramic. There was no ceiling as such, save for a continuum of enormous tie beams, proportionally spaced, beyond which lay an impenetrable thicket of pipes, conduits, and tubing-an unending knot of capillaries and arterial junctures. But by far the most interesting objects in the corridor were the adornments that lined the upper walls of the hexagon-oval shaped, ruby-red opaque lenses spaced five meters apart along the entire length of the hall. Every twelfth medallion was a more ornate version, backed by a segmented cross with pointed arms. Twice, the 15th entered a stretch of corridor where these lenses found their match in similar convexities that fined the lower walls, but along one side only.

  The team was moving parallel to the long axis of the fortress, one mile in when they reached the first fork, a symmetrical Y-shaped intersection at the end of a long sweeping curve, with identical corridors branching off left and right. The archway was lined with a kind of segmented trimwork that looked soft and inviting, but was in fact ceramic like the walls. Here, the servo-gallery above the openwork ceiling was bathed in infrared light.

  Dana once again ordered them to a halt and split the team: the sergeant would take the B team-Marino, Xavez, Kuri, and Road-into the left fork; Dana, Corporal Nichols and the rest of the 15th would explore the right.

  "We'll rendezvous back here in exactly two hours," she said to Angelo from the open cockpit. "Okay, move out."

  Dante's group swung their vehicles out of formation and followed the sergeant's slow lead into the corridor. Dana gave a wave and the A team fell in behind her tank. Behind the 15th, unseen, three curious, Human-size figures stealthily crossed the corridor. One of them depressed a ruby-red button that seemed part of a medallion's design. From pockets concealed in the archway slid five concentrically-etched panels of impervious metal, sealing off the corridor.

  Dana's group passed quickly through domed chambers, empty and discomforting, with riblike support trusses and walls like stretched skin. Beyond that was the selfsame hexagonal corridor and yet another Y intersection.

  "Which way now?" Bowie asked.

  Dana was against breaking the team up into yet smaller groups, but they had to make the most of their time. "Bowie, you and Louie come with me down the right corridor," she said after a moment. "Sean, you and the others take the left one-got it?"

  While Dana was issuing the orders, Bowie happened to glance over his shoulder in time to see what appeared to be the retreating shadow of a being of some sort. But the light here was so unsettling that he resisted alarming the others; his eyes had been playing tricks on him since they entered the fortress and he didn't want the team to think him paranoid. Nevertheless, Dana caught his sharp intake of breath and asked him what he had seen.

  "Just my imagination, Lieutenant," he told her as Sean's group split off and moved their Hovertanks into the left corridor.

  Dana also had the feeling that they were being watched-how could it not be so, given the technosystems of the ship? But that was all right: she

  wanted to be seen.

  The right corridor proved to be a new world: hexagonal still, but fully enclosed, with an overhead "bolstered" ridge and numerous riblike trusses. Gone were the medallions and ruby ovals; the walls, upper and lower, were an unbroken series of rectangular light panels. A new world, but a worrisome one.

  Without success, Dana tried to raise Sergeant Dante on the net.

  "I haven't been able to raise him, either," Louie said, a note of distress in his voice. "Do you think we should go look for him?"

  Dana was considering this when the silence that had thus far accompanied them was suddenly broken by a distant sound of servo-motors slamming and clanking into operation. The three teammates turned around and watched as a solid panel began its steady descent from overhead.

  The corridor was sealing itself off.

  Ahead of them, a second door was descending; and beyond that a third, and fourth. As far as they could see, massive curtains of armor-plate were dropping from pockets built into the ceiling trusses, echos of descent and closure filling the air.

  "Hit it!" Dana exploded. "Full power!"

  The Hovertanks shot forward at top speed, barely clearing the first gate. They tore beneath a dozen more in the same fashion, seemingly gaining on the progression-three urban joyriders beating the traffic lights downtown.

  Then all at once the progression shifted: up ahead of them was a fully closed gate. Dana, far out in front of Bowie and Louie, reached for her retro levers and pulled them home, favoring the port throttle so that the hind end of the tank gradually began to come around to starboard. There was no way in the world she wanted to hit that gate head-on...

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Initial analysis of the fruit
[found aboard the alien fortress] revealed little more than its basic structure-its similarities to certain tropical fruits seldom seen in northern markets these days. But subsequent tests proved intriguing: one taste of the fruit and a laboratory chimp soared into what Cochran described as "a one-way ticket to reverie." And yet it was not a true hallucinogen; in fact, molecular scans showed it to be closer to animal than vegetal in makeup!...Several years would go by before our questions would be answered.

  Mingtao, Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

  The huge wallscreen in the situation room was little more than static bars and snow. A flicker of image enlivened it momentarily, incomprehensibly, then there was nothing.

  "We've lost contact with the Fifteenth," a tech reported to General Emerson.

  "Increase enhancement," Rolf said sternly, bent on denying the update. "See if you can raise them."

  Haltingly a second tech turned to the task, well aware of what the results would be. "Negatory," he said to Emerson after a moment. "I'm afraid the interference is overwhelming."

  Colonel Anderson pivoted in his seat to face Rolf. "Should we consider sending in a rescue team?"

  Emerson shook his head but said nothing. The toss of one team would be enough...the loss of two loved ones, more than he could bear. He pressed his hands to his face, fearing the worst...

  The left corrider had led Sergeant Dante's contingent to an enormous hold filled with a bewildering array of Robotech machinery.

  "Where is Louie when you need him," Angelo was saying to his men.

  They had all dismounted from their Hovertanks and were grouped together marveling at the chamber's wonders. The hold was simply too spacious to fathom, its distant horizons lost in darkness. Here was a massive cone-shaped generator, three hundred yards in circumference if it was an inch; there, a second generator harnessing and shunting energy the likes of which Dante had never seen-a raw subatomic fire that seemed to have a life of its own. Liquids alive as fresh blood pulsed through transparent pipes, coursing from generator to generator, machine to machine, while unattended display screens strobed amber-lit schematics to robot readers, communicating to one another through a cacophonous language of shrill sounds and harsh rasps.

  There was no telling how high the hold went: indeterminate levels of conduits, tubes, and mains crisscrossed overhead, illuminated by flashes of infrared light projected by spherical anti-grav Cyclopean remotes-ruby-eyed monitors, ribbed and whiskered with segmented antennae.

  "Look at the size of this place!" Private Road exclaimed. (Angelo couldn't wait to promote the guy just to put an end to the running joke.)

  "Hold it down," said the sergeant. "Stay alert and keep your eyes peeled for anything that might be threatening."

  "Threatening?" Marino asked in disbelief, his assault rifle welded to his hands. "This whole place looks pretty threatening to me, Sarge."

  "Gimme hell anyday," Xavez seconded.

  Dante whirled on both of them, raising his voice. "I said can it, and I'm not gonna tell you again! The next guy that speaks is gonna be in a sorrier scene than this! Now, spread out! But keep in sight of each other! We've gotta job to do."

  High above them, one of the eyeball remotes blinked, fixing an aerial image of men and mecha in its fish-eye lens. That much accomplished, the device rotated slightly and emitted a patterned series of light.

  On a gallery still higher up in the hold, the code was received by a shadowy creature, which acknowledged the signal and moved off into the darkness.

  Private Road, meanwhile, had begun to edge away from the tight-knit group. There was no sense waiting around for the sarge to wrap up his lecture-they could recite it from memory by now, even the threats and imprecations. The private smiled in the privacy of his face shield and took a small step backwards. But suddenly something was taking him a step further: a vice had been clamped around his throat, shutting down his oxygen supply and crushing the nascent scream that was lodged in his throat. He could feel his eyeballs begin to swell and protrude as whatever had him increased the torque of its grip. He heard and felt the snap that broke his neck, the rush of death in his ears...

  "...and I want you to sound off the minute you see anything suspicious," Angelo finished up. He had armed his weapon and was lowering his face shield when Kuri made a puzzled sound over the tac net.

  "Hey Sarge, Road's gone."

  Dante leveled his weapon and swung toward where he had last seen the private. Xavez and Marino exchanged wary looks, then followed the sergeant's lead.

  "Road!" Dante called softly. He dropped his mask and called him again through the net. When there was no response, he gestured briefly to the team. "All right, don't just stand there: find him!" To Kuri he said: "See if you can raise the lieutenant."

  Dante double-checked his weapon, thinking: If this is Road's idea of a joke, they'll be calling him dead-end from now on!

  Suddenly, without warning, the room was sectioned by laser fire.

  "Stand clear!" Dana warned Bowie and Louie.

  The two of them returned to their Hovertanks as Dana primed the laser and aimed it at the armored gate.

  Dana's mecha had managed to stop just short of the thing, hind end almost fully around, two meters from collision. She had repositioned it in the center of the corridor now, thirty meters from the gate. The barrier was some sort of high-density metal, unlike the durceramic of the corridor walls,

  and Louie had every confidence that the laser would do the trick.

  "Any luck raising Sergeant Dante or Jordon?" Dana asked Louie once more before targeting.

  Louie shook his head and flashed her a thumbs-down. "Even my optic sensor is out," he told her over the net.

  That didn't surprise her, given the apparent thickness of the corridor walls and the fact that they were at least one-and-a-half miles into the fortress by now. Nor did the barriers come as any great shock; all along she had sensed that their progress was being monitored.

  "Do you think they caught the others?" Bowie said worriedly.

  "Your guess is as good as mine," she responded casually, and turned her attention to the laser. "All right then: here goes."

  She depressed the laser's trigger; there was enough residual smoke in the corridor to give her a glimpse of the light-ray itself, but by and large her eyes were glued to the barrier. Louie had cautioned her that it would prove to be a tedious operation-a slow burn they would probably need to help along with an armor-piercing round but Louie was not infallible: instead of that expected slow burn, the laser blew a massive hole in the gate on impact.

  "Well that wasn't so bad," Dana said when the shrapnel-storm passed.

  She reached for her rifle, dismounted the tank, and approached the gate cautiously. Beyond it was a short stretch of corridor that opened into what she guessed was the fortress's water-recycling and ventilation hold. What with the numerous shafts and ducts here, she reasoned she couldn't be far off the mark.

  "What do you see, Lieutenant?" Louie asked from behind her.

  Dana lifted her face shield. "Not much of anything, but at least we're out of that trap." As Bowie and Louie caught up with her, she cautioned them to stay together.

  There were enough dripping sounds, sibilant rushes, and roars to make them feel as though they had entered a giant's basement. But there was something else as well: almost a wind-chime's voice, soft and atonal, all but lost to their ears but registering nonetheless as if through some sixth sense.

  It seemed to fill the air, and yet have no single source, ambient as full-moon light. At times it reminded Dana of bells or gongs, but no sooner would she fix on that, than the sound would reconfigure and appear harplike or string percussive.

  "It's like music," Bowie said to a transfixed Dana.

  The sound was working on her, infiltrating her, playing her, as though she were the instrument: her music was memory's song, but dreamlike, preverbal and impossible to hold...

  "Are you all right, Lieutenant?" Louie was asking
her, breaking the spell.

  She encouraged the tone to leave her, and suggested they try to locate the source of the sound. Louie, his face shield raised, ever-present goggles in place, had his ear pressed to one of the hold's air ducts. He motioned Dana and Bowie over, and the three of them crouched around the duct, listening intently for a moment.

  "Maybe it's just faulty plumbing," Bowie suggested.

  Louie ignored the jest. "This is the first sign of life we've encountered.

  We have to figure out where it's coming from and how to get to it."

  Dana stood up, wondering just how they could accomplish that. Excited by the discovery Louie was firing questions at her faster than she could field them. She silenced him and returned her attention to the sound; when she looked up again, Louie was falling through the wall.

  Sean and company-Woodruff and Cranston-were in what appeared to be some sort of "hot house," scarcely 200 yards from the water-recycling chamber (though they had no way of knowing this), but in any case separated from the lieutenant's contingent by three high-density ceramic bulkheads. "Hot house" was Sean's conjecture, just as recycling chamber had been Dana's, but it had taken the private several minutes to come up with even this description.

  There was no soil, no hydroponic cultivation bins or artificial sunlight, no water vapor or elevated oxygen or carbon dioxide levels; only row after

  row of alien plants that seemed to be growing upside down. Central to each was an almost incandescent globe, some ten meters in circumference, tendriled and supported by, or perhaps suspended from, groupings of rigid, bristly lianalike vines. (Cranston was reminded of the macrame plant hangers popular in the last century, although he didn't mention this to the others.) The globes themselves were positioned anywhere from five to fifteen meters from the floor of the chamber, and below them, both still affixed to the stalks themselves or spread about the floor, were individual fruits, the size of apples but the red of strawberries.