Metal Fire

by Jack McKinney

  General Rolf Emerson and Colonels Anderson and Green would have given anything for a glimpse at what was going on in the fortress. But the recon team was already an hour overdue and hopes for their safe return were sliding fast. In an effort to do something, Emerson had ordered a stepped-up assault on the fortress, in the hope of hitting it hard enough to shake the team loose-lost ball bearings in an old fashioned pinball machine. But instead of tilting, the fortress had merely upped the ante, filling the skies with Bioroids on their hover platforms and sending out ground troops to combat the teams stationed at the perimeter of the crash site. It had been a calculated gamble, but one that had not paid off.

  The situation room was as busy as a hive, but the three massive screens opposite the command balcony told a woeful tale of defeat.

  Emerson sat back into his chair to listen to the latest sitreps from the field, none of which were encouraging. A rescue ship sent to ATAC area thirty-four had been destroyed. Air teams were sustaining heavy casualties from the fortress's cannon fire. Bravo Fourteen had been wiped out completely. Sector Five had been overrun. A rescue squad was being summoned to Bunker niner-three-zero, where nearly a hundred men were trapped inside. Medics were sorely needed everywhere.

  "Have you reestablished communications with Lieutenant Sterling yet?" Colonel Green asked one of the techs.

  "Negative," came the reply. "But we're still trying." Emerson caught Green's groaning sigh.

  "Let's not give up on Lieutenant Sterling yet, Colonel," he told him, more harshly than was necessary. "She won't give up until she's succeeded

  in her mission."

  Bowie, bareheaded and precariously perched behind and slightly above the pilot's seat of Dana's Hovertank, tried to fill the lieutenant in on his experiences since that elevator ride to Musica's harp chamber. He had never been too fond of Dana's reckless road tactics, and thought even less of them now that he had a chance to observe things from his friend's perspective. Dana was careening through the dark corridors at nearly top speed, not a care in the world as she twisted the Valkyrie through turns its gyrostabilizers were never meant to handle. The Diddy-Wa-Diddy had been left abandoned, set on self-destruct in the recycling hold. In an effort to take his mind off the very real possibility of a collision, Bowie continued his rundown of the events, even though there seemed to be a lot of discrepancies in his story.

  "And you say she ran away after being shot in the leg?" Dana said skeptically.

  "I know it sounds incredible, but I saw it with my own eyes!" Bowie replied defensively. "And she was one beautiful lady, too," he added wistfully.

  Dana threw a knowing smile over her shoulder, forcing Bowie into paroxysms of fear as she took her eyes from the corridor.

  "Maybe she was an android, Bowie." "No way."

  "Then my guess is she was a dream-after all, you claim that you felt yourself being taken up into the fortress and yet we found you on the same level we entered: We didn't take any elevator rides, Bowie, and we haven't seen a stairway yet."

  "But I'm telling you I went up, Dana! I do know up from down, you know!"

  Louie went on the external speaker: "Only when you're awake, Bowie, and I don't think you were. Think back to our briefing sessions and the notes from the Gloval Expedition into the SDF-1: when the captain's team

  exited the dimensional fortress they were certain that hours had gone by, and yet the guards who were stationed outside the fortress swore that only fifteen minutes had elapsed!

  "It could be that there is some sort of lingering effect to hyperspace travel," Louie continued unchecked, "something we're not yet aware of. Maybe time actually occurs differently inside the fortress than it does outside. It's something I'm going to investigate someday."

  The dark hallway was suddenly opening up and filling with light, and in a moment Dana and company found themselves on a polished floor as blue as the clearest of Earth's seas-an ice-lined canal of brilliant chroma, lined with a continuous wall of turreted and arcaded buildings. Reminiscent of ancient Rome, or Florence, before the destruction visited upon it during the Global Civil War, each structure was more than two-hundred yards high, with curved, scalloped facades, ornately columned arcades crowned by friezes, and round-topped portals. Elsewhere, gracefully arched bridges crossed the solid canal, overlit by circular lights set high in the hold.

  Stranger still, the hold was inhabited-by Humans. "At least they look Human," Dana commented.

  The aliens had all taken shelter under the arcades and were staring at the 15th's strange two-vehicled procession; but Dana didn't read actual fear anywhere, only an intense puzzlement, almost as though these people had no idea where they were, or what they were doing. Dress was uniformly practical, sensible, not so much fit for the Rome Dana had read about, but a Rome mock-up in the bowels of a spaceship. Shirt and trouser combinations of the same cut, the same fabric, individualized only by color or neckline, all with tight-fitting cuffs, blue, gray, gold.

  Suddenly, Bowie yelled: "Lieutenant, stop the Hovertank-I just saw that girl!"

  Dana and Louie cut their thrusters and the mecha settled to what seemed to be the street.

  Dana wondered whether this was a show being put on for their benefit. She scanned puzzled faces in the unmoving crowds, looking for a

  green-haired girl.

  "Are you certain it's her, Bowie?"

  "I'm positive-she's one of a kind! I'd know her any-what?! It can't be!

  I'm seeing double!"

  "Everybody here is either twins or triplets," Louie said, completing Bowie's thought. "They must be clones."

  Dana followed Bowie's gaze and spied an attractive girl in chiffon, shoulder-to-shoulder with her identical twin. Clones, Dana said to herself. They had to be clones, like the Zentraedi. She thought back to what she knew of her people: how they had been grown from cell samplings of the Robotech Masters. How she herself had a part of this in her. And it suddenly occurred to her that these clones might very well be her sisters and brothers! Dana found herself looking around for someone who looked like her.

  "Headquarters will be happy to find out that their advance intelligence reports were true," she heard Louie say.

  Just then three armored shock troopers broke through the murmuring crowds, leveling laser rifles as they took up positions around the Hovertanks.

  "Uh-oh-looks like we've got company!"

  "Don't make a move!" one of the Terminators shouted. "We've got you covered."

  "See-there's that bad movie dialogue I told you about," Bowie said. "Cowboys and Romans," Louie muttered. "What'll we do,

  Lieutenant-shoot it out with them?"

  "No," Dana said quickly. "If we fire into this crowd we'll end up injuring a lot of innocent people. We'll just have to try to make a break for it! Better tell your girlfriends good-bye!" she aimed at Bowie.

  The Terminators opened fire as the Hovertanks lifted off, mindless of the clones their stray shots cut down.

  Valkyrie and Livewire sped off. In the rumble seat, Bowie clung to Dana's waist, staring back at the two Musicans, heedless of the white bolts

  of fire snapping at the Hovertank's heels.

  "Boy, this mission's a washout," Cranston was saying to Sean. "I think those jokers abandoned ship when they saw us coming."

  "I'm beginning to believe you're right, Cranston," Sean admitted, absently twirling his helmet in his hand, as he slowly guided the Bad News away from the corridor rendezvous point. Nothing much had happened since they left the hothouse, and when neither Dana nor Dante had showed up at the designated hour, he had decided to take Cranston and Woodruff into the corridor Dana's contingent was to investigate. "I've seen more action on a Sunday School picnic," he started to say. But something was approaching them fast from up ahead, coming in from the direction of the point.

  Almost before Sean could bring his weapon into ready or issue instructions to his men, Dana and Louie came tearing by them without even stopping. Sean yelled, realizing if they hadn't seen them
, it wasn't likely that they would hear him. But he called out anyway, worried all of a sudden about what it was that was chasing them.

  And Dana's team pulled up short.

  "Wow!" Dana exclaimed. "I was beginning to think we'd never see you guys again!"

  Sean was puzzled by Dana's intensity. "Yeah, well I'm happy to see you, too, Lieutenant, but I wanna tell you, this is the dullest mission I've ever been on."

  "Dull?!" Dana and her team all said at once, fixing Sean with a look he couldn't quite grasp.

  "Yeah. We think the aliens abandoned ship or something."

  Suddenly Dana, Louie, and Bowie were all talking at him in a rush. Grant was saying something about his having been transported by an invisible elevator to the arms of a beautiful green-haired woman he had jammed with, or something. But there'd been a chase a-and that was of course why they didn't have his Hovertank with them because they didn't

  chance going back to pick it up-not that they could find their way there anyway. A-and then there was this population center they had just escaped from that looked like ancient Rome and was filled with nothing but identical clones and carapace-armored shock trooper androids...

  When it was over all Sean could do was exchange puzzled looks with his equally perplexed teammates.

  "Well, we got to see the famous forest of light-bulb trees," he told Dana. "Guess the shock troops were avoiding us for some reason."

  Just as Sean was saying this, Sergeant Dante's contingent-minus Road's Hovertank, and unfortunately, minus Road himself-hovered into view and joined them in the corridor. Dante told them of the firefight, how the aliens had crept up on them and pinned them down, only to back off unexpectedly at the last moment...

  He was in the middle of his explanation when the floor opened up underneath them. Nine Hovertanks and ten Humans plunged into the darkness.

  "Is everybody okay? Bowie?" Dana called out into the blackness.

  She knew she was wet and sticky, not from blood though, but from what she had landed in. Touching the stuff in the dark only led to more frightening images, so she groped in the opposite direction, wondering if she would stumble upon one of the Hovertanks. It would be a miracle if no one had been crushed under the falling mecha, and equally so if they all had as soft a landing as she had. There seemed to be some sort of weightlessness here-a dark and soggy lunar surface.

  But one by one the teammates answered her.

  "All present and accounted for. And apparently no injuries," Bowie yelled.

  "Speak for yourself," Dana heard Louie say. "I've got enough bruises for the bunch of you."

  "And I feel as light as a kitten in here."

  "Where the heck are we, anyway?" Angelo asked. "And what's that

  rotten smell?"

  "I've pulled enough K.P. in my time to recognize this smell anywhere," said Woodruff. "I got no idea what these aliens eat, but this is their garbage, I'll stake my wad on that."

  Sean, Marino, and Xavez all made sounds of disgust. But it was Kuri that voiced the first uh-oh...

  Machinery had been activated overhead, servos were coming into play and the sound was growing louder.

  "Hey...wait a minute," Angelo said. "This must be a freakin' compactor!

  And guess who's about to be compacted?!

  "I seen this movie, Sarge!" Xavez was suddenly moaning. "What're they tryin' to play with our heads, or what?"

  "Flatten our heads is more like it!" Kuri yelled from across the blackness.

  "Echo readings indicate that there is in fact a massive plate descending on us," Louie reported calmly. "I calculate forty-eight seconds until we become tomorrow morning's breakfast crepes."

  Dana heard two or three of her teammates pick up handfuls of the sludge and heave it in Louie's general direction. At about the same time Louie was hit and yelled, spitting words and whatever garbage had connected with him, Dana, who had been edging forward in the darkness, hands out front like a blind person, contacted one of the Hovertanks. From the feel of it, it had landed upright, and she quickly climbed aboard and hit the lights.

  It was her first mistake.

  Now everyone could see the sorry state they were in. They all looked around the room, and then up at the descending plate of the compactor. Yes, it was very much like a scene from a movie they had all seen.

  "Lieutenant, you gotta get us outta here!" screamed Xavez. "Stand back, everybody. I'm gonna blast us out of here."

  "You can't, Lieutenant," Louie warned her. "These are high-density ceramic walls. They're laser resistant. I don't think it would be a good idea.

  If you remember that movie-"

  "Then come up with a better idea, Louie. In the meantime, everybody hit the deck and hope for the best."

  Hitting the deck meant diving back into the muck, but suddenly even that seemed preferable to feeling the heat of a richocheting plasma bolt.

  "No-o-o!" yelled Louie once more before the end.

  The bolt did just what everyone feared it would: it impacted against the wall to no effect and headed straight back from whence it came, narrowly missing Dana who ducked down into the cockpit at the last second, then caroming around the room like a homicidal billiard ball of energy, giving everyone an equal chance to dodge or be fried. Ultimately the crazed thing hit the floor of the chamber and exploded, right at the foot of Dana's mecha.

  There didn't seem to be a hope that she had survived the shot. Where the Hovertank stood there was now only a huge garbage crater, smoking like a cookpot in hell. Blessedly the damn compactor had ceased its downward motion, and the hole was letting light into the room. They were all thinking that Dana had died for nothing, when suddenly they heard her voice rising from the hole. The garbage-spattered 15th grouped around the crater, peering in.

  Dana was still seated in the mecha, which was now on the floor of a corridor that ran underneath the compactor. Several other Hovertanks had fallen with her, along with Xavez and Marino who were covered with grime and shaking like palsy victims.

  "See-I knew it would work," Dana was saying unsteadily but knowingly. "The floor wasn't laser resistant."

  No one bothered to tell her that the compactor had stopped on its own. One by one they lowered themselves through the hole, wiping off what garbage they could.

  A corridor monitor blinked once and brought the reversed situation to the attention of the Masters. Things had not gone quite as planned, but the aged trio was willing to concede that no matter what happened, they were

  learning more about the Terrans and that was the purpose of the exercise-even though the female soldier had gotten a lucky break by finding her cannon round returned to the unprotected floor. And if anything, this only suggested that luck itself should be figured into the equation when dealing with this race.

  The Masters next plan was to separate this most fortunate one, the apparent commander, from her team, to see how the underlings would function without her. Just how much independent thought was available to them; how resourceful were they without adequate leadership?...

  They had managed to retrieve seven of the nine remaining Hovertanks; two were so hopelessly mired in the garbage sludge that even the mecha's thrusters couldn't break the things free-not without a good deal more time than they had to spare.

  The 15th was mounted in its mecha now, Bowie still riding behind Dana, Xavez behind Marino, Woodruff behind Cranston. The sergeant, Louie, Sean, and Kuri were back in their original units.

  "You sure beat the odds that time, Lieutenant," Louie commented.

  Dana adjusted her helmet and made a face as she picked sticky bits of refuse from the pauldrons of her uniform. "Let's not celebrate until we're out of here," she warned all of them.

  "But which way?" Louie threw to the team. "Without our helmet monitors, we can't tell one direction from another. We've gotta be down at least one level, maybe two, and unless we can find a way up I don't know how we're gonna get outta this thing."

  "Dead reckoning'll get us back to that ho
le; I'll bet I could find my way blindfolded," the sarge announced.

  "We'll just blow our way out," Dana said. "We got in: we can get out. But stay alert...I've got that funny feeling that we're being watched again..."

  No sooner had she said it than something leapt at her from the corridor ceiling. She heard Sean's warning and the rapid report of his rifle-adrenaline coursing through her like high octane-and caught the

  movement of the thing peripherally.

  Oddly, something said to her: snake. And when she raised her head to look back on the thing Sean's blast had downed, she realized that that image her mind's eye conjured wasn't far from wrong: it looked like an oldfashioned wire-coiled vacuum cleaner hose, only a lot wider, and capped with an evil-looking nipplelike device. In its final moments, before Sean's second round severed the thing's tubular body, the hose loosed a massive electrical charge that narrowly missed Dana's head and exploded against the far wall of the corridor. The hose spasmed around on its ruptured neck spewing a foul-smelling smoke, but no more fire.

  "Good shooting, Sean!" Bowie shouted.

  Louie watched the techno-assassin flail about for a moment, then glanced down at his console, noticing instantly that the radio had begun to function again. He told the team, and they realized that they must be close to the exterior wall of the fortress. There was a good chance Headquarters was monitoring them once again.

  "Good," Dana said, bringing the face shield down. "Let's move out." "Stay together this time," Sergeant Dante hastened to add.

  The Masters were no longer entertained by the shenanigans of their guests, and came about as close as they could to demonstrating real emotion. And emotion made it necessary for them to break their telepathic rapport and speak directly to the Terminator. It was imperative that the Terrans not be allowed to leave the ship alive.

  "See to it that all exits are sealed," said one of the Masters. "Move your sentries into corridor M-seventynine and use maximum force if necessary to prevent their escape.