Robotech

by Jack McKinney

  They had only gotten a few steps when Dana and Louie saw a small surface-effect runabout headed their way.

  Everybody else caught the signals and warnings except Sean, who had been traipsing along more or less on the heels of three attractive females who walked in a bunch. By the time he realized what was happening, the others had taken cover. He was in no position to bolt and decided, in typical fashion, to strike up a casual chat with the gals.

  “Um, ’scuze me, Miss—” He tugged her elbow; all three turned as one and went “Hmm?” in those eerie, indrawn-breath voices. The runabout of guards was cruising closer.

  Sean made idiotic stammerings about having met them before someplace, and maybe they should all do lunch. He laughed unconvincingly, slipped them a couple of winks, sweated.

  They were actually quite fetching, triplets with hair dyed orange, blue, and pink to differentiate themselves. They looked at him and listened for a few moments. Sean tried to maintain eye contact and yet watch the guards’ slow cruising progress.

  Orange Hair turned to her sisters. “This clone’s condition is remarkably degenerative, don’t you agree?”

  “Note the spasmodic facial expressions: neurological breakdown,” Blue Hair agreed gravely.

  “Let us try to determine the nature of his malfunction before he destabilizes completely,” Pinkie put in.

  Before Sean could get over his astonishment, they were gathered around him, prying open his mouth, spreading his eye wide to study it, thumping his chest—-feeling him up.

  He had left his torso harness back with his armor, and the three Clonehealers somehow had his tunic open and down around his waist, pinning his arms, and were tripping his feet out from under him in matter-of-fact fashion. He had been walking point, and so he wasn’t even carrying a gun.

  Their deliberate proddings and pokings sent him into a ticklish laughing fit. Please, whatever gods there be: Don’t let Marie find out about this!

  Dana rushed to the rescue, pushing the women aside. “All tarts pile off!”

  “These clones are obviously all infected,” said Orange Hair. She raised her voice. “Guards! Seize these clones immediately!”

  The runabout came end for end and the guards came roaring back.

  “Split up!” Dana cried. “They can’t follow us all!” She vaulted a railing with Bowie and Louie bringing up the rear. “Meet back at the tanks!” She ran off down glossy black steps that were mirror-bright and five yards wide.

  Angelo dragged Sean to his feet, but realized he had left their tanker carbines leaning against the wall. And there was no time to go for them; shots were ranging around them. They dashed off along the upper thoroughfare; the runabout was following them.

  “Y’can’t palm yourself off as an alien, ya ragweed!” Angelo panted.

  “Aw, write it home to your mother, Sergeant!” Sean snarled back. They ducked into the first alley they came to. The guard craft stopped and a cop triumvirate piled out to continue the chase on foot.

  The cop/guards split up to search a loading dock at the far end of the alley. Sean and Angelo popped out to jump the middle one, the sergeant punching the lone clone hard, making sure he wouldn’t get up again. Sean grabbed the guard’s short, two-handed weapon to cut down another guard. He pivoted, he and the third guard drawing a bead on each other at the same moment.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  I think the real change in Dana began the first time she had to write one of those letters that starts, “As commanding officer of the 15th squad, ATAC, it is my sad duty to inform you …”

  Louie Nichols, Tripping the Light Fantastic

  MUSICA CARESSED THE RAINBOW-BEAM STRINGS OF HER Cosmic Harp, evoking from it sad tonalities. She had no heart for the tunes the Masters would have her play. The acoustics of her darkened hall made it sound like a cathedral.

  Her sisters Allegra and Octavia approached, and she resigned herself to yet another disagreement over her new-found defiance. But Allegra said, “A band of alien soldiers has invaded the core district. We thought you would want to know.”

  Musica caught her breath. “Have they been injured? Captured?”

  Allegra spread her hands in a gesture to show that she didn’t know. “Karno and his men have started an all-out search for them. They will be found.”

  Musica sprang to her feet and walked away. “Don’t go!” Octavia called after. “It’s too dangerous!”

  “I must be alone for a while,” Musica said over her shoulder. She thought, No harm must come to him! Oh, Bowie!

  “You mean your units have permitted the enemy primitives to get away?” Mega, androgynous female of the Politician triumvirate, demanded.

  The guard group leader conceded, “Only temporarily, Excellency. But they cannot evade us for long, or escape the ship.”

  She gave him a frigid glare. “Your incompetence will be punished.”

  Louie, Bowie, and Dana were not the best mix of talents and traits.

  They found what looked like a dormitory, then had to dive under the bedlike furnishings when they heard voices. Peeking out from under the beds, they watched as the Clonehealers (who had been accosted by Sean and had accosted him in return) entered, discussing the matter of the alien invaders.

  “I cannot wait to sanitize myself,” Spreella said, pulling off her robes, “from the pollution of contact with them.” All three undressed, to the ATACs’ vast interest, and lay down on beds. Projectors of some kind automatically swung into place. Lights beamed down on the clones and put them instantly to sleep. Little ring-auras danced over them.

  A few seconds later, the troopers were wearing the togas, hoods pulled up. They ventured out again, and moved across a rotunda in what looked to Dana like Romeo and Juliet’s old neighborhood, except that there were no trellises, no flowers or plants of any kind.

  More guard runabouts appeared. The three ducked into the first door they came to and found themselves in a place that made them think of a cocktail lounge. It had softly lit art-shapes of glassy blue panes, and gently turning, unearthly mobiles. There was soft music from something that reminded Bowie a little of a flute. They sat nervously at a table and a female clone placed a strange drinking cup before each of them.

  “Drink this, then step through that door to the bioscan chamber,” she said, and moved on. Everyone else was downing the same purplish stuff; it smelled fragrant.

  They were all thirsty, and hadn’t been able to find anything like a public fountain or even a tap. They downed the stuff; it was delicious, a real pickup. Not beer, but not bad, and it cut their thirst.

  Dana decided to have a look through that door. “Bioscan chamber” sounded like something the brass hats would want to know about. They went through the door, pistols ready in their belts.

  A female nurse-technician clone was there, and the three were directed to put their feet on lighted markers inside capsulelike structures. The nurse manipulated a control component that resembled a small, halved Protoculture cap set on a pedestal, its flat face covered with alien instrumentation that looked like the detailing of a mecha.

  Rays played over them, and the nurse informed them that although their dysfunction was far along, there was hope for them. Their mental readouts gave the clone particular alarm.

  Bowie and Louie looked like they wanted to bolt, but Dana had the feeling that they were close to something vitally important about the Masters’ self-contained world. She followed as the nurse led them into the next and far larger chamber.

  The place seemed to be filled with a strange blue mist, a large compartment with scores of glassy, coffinlike containers in rows. Long, transparent cylinders descended from apertures in the ceiling to cast pale light. There were more of the control modules set here and there among the scores of shimmering coffins. The ATACs could see still forms in the glassy caskets.

  “Looks like we’ve found the morgue,” Dana murmured.

  “These conversion stabilizer units will remedy your malfunc
tions,” the nurse explained. She was used to clones being disoriented when they came to her, but she wondered if these particular three were beyond help. “Observe how this unit is now in complete harmony with his environment.”

  She referred to a male clone who was revealed as his sarcophagus lid rose. He sat up, blinking, on his elbows.

  “His structure was stabilized by this treatment and a simple bio-energy supplement,” the nurse went on. “You will now drink these.”

  She was talking about a sluggish looking stuff in three more drinking vessels that had come down on a floating table. Something in Dana was drawn to the idea of taking an alien elixir, of finding out what the strange sleep brought. It triggered some deep memory. She yearned to comply, even while the Southern Cross lieutenant in her knew it would be madness.

  The nurse was doing something at a wall unit. Louie suddenly yelled, “Look out, Lieutenant!”

  Dana turned. The just-awakened clone was lurching toward her, arms outstretched. He didn’t look very stabilized to Dana; he looked like something out of a horror movie, pale and hollow-eyed, the living dead.

  Their systems aren’t functioning up to par, I guess, Louie thought.

  Dana, filled with revulsion, screamed for the thing to stay back and hurled her drinking vessel at it; the glass missed and smashed into a control module. Liquid splashed, the module began sparking and sputtering, and the lights started dimming and brightening.

  “More trouble,” Louie observed; the see-through caskets’ indicators and controls were going haywire. The lids were rising; the clones rose from their resting places.

  “Oh, great! The whole graveyard’s coming to life!” Bowie yelled.

  Dana showed her teeth to Louie with a hunting cat’s ferocious mien. “Here’s your ideal society, Louie! Here’s your machine dream, your Empire of Unimpeded Intellect!” She seemed about to pounce on him. “Well? How d’you like it?”

  The nurse was shrilling something about third stage alerts and out-of-control clones. The three ATACs didn’t realize that she meant them, not the late risers.

  She must have put in a call already, though, because the troopers heard running footsteps coming toward them. Three guards with the submachine gun-looking weapons appeared in a doorway.

  “Use the zombies for cover and head for that other doorway!” Dana shouted. Bowie and Louie followed her, weaving among the sluggish, confused clones. Dana was hoping the guards would be busy rounding up the blitzed-out sleepwalkers, but the cop/clones gave chase instead.

  The three ATACs ended up out on what appeared to be a public transport platform, like a subway station. Dana, in the lead, took a turn and kept sprinting. They wound through sideways and almost tripped over a parked, unattended runabout.

  Dana jumped in, determined to get it working; she hit controls at random and it tore away into the air, leaving Bowie and Louie behind.

  Everything she did seemed to make it worse, and in moments she had another guard runabout pursuing her. Dana rode over the rotundas and through the passageways, coming close to crashing every two or three seconds, somehow managing not to kill astonished clones, trying to get back to her squadmates.

  She heard the pursuing runabout careen out of control and crash into a wall. As she zoomed out of an alley, Dana’s own vehicle tried for a wingover, and she went flying. Resigned to death, she had her fall broken by some kind of awning, and slid through as it ripped. She fell on her rear end on some kind of big disposal chute. It disposed of her, down into a steeply pitched shaft, just as she heard her stolen runabout explode against a distant ceiling.

  Her funhouse ticket was good for another ride; she went screaming down into darkness. She came sliding down across an arrival stage, losing speed and uniform fabric and skin, and went shooting off, to bounce off something soft and land in a heap.

  “Where did you come from?” a calm male clone voice asked.

  Dana, rubbing her butt and groaning, turned and said, “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  She found herself looking at a slender, graceful clone with long, straight, steel-gray hair and a very young face. “I am Latell, of the Stonecutters,” he said, rising from the peculiar-looking pallet on which he had been sitting and coming to kneel by her. “Are you badly hurt? Is there anything I can do?”

  She looked around her. The room suggested a Roman bath converted to use as a clone hospital, but here the beds had no lids. Around the room, the Masters’ slaves were lying down or sitting, looking very torpid. “Well, you could tell me what this place is.”

  “Why, this is the district interim center for purging and replacement.”

  So, she was at yet another clone spa. “Purging of what?”

  He tilted his head, studying her. “The personal consciousness of those who must be rehabilitated, naturally.”

  A male clone nurse appeared, a twin of the one who had tried to serve Dana the mickey. “You two! Your rest period is now terminated. Resume training.”

  Latell snapped to attention, then drew the truculent Dana to her feet, afraid that she was so destabilized as to risk punishment. Dana saw it wasn’t time to start a dust-up, and let Latell lead her away.

  He took her to a chamber where dozens of people—that was how she thought of them—were standing two or three apiece at glowing projection tanks. The clones studied abstract shapes and symbols and hypnotic patterns, which changed and shifted, the clones staring down at them with intense concentration.

  “Why are you here, Latell?”

  “I was found guilty of individual thought,” he confessed to her. “And you?”

  “Uh, the same.”

  He looked infinitely sad. “But they’ve allowed you to keep your permanent body,” he observed, too polite to point out what a nonstandard body it was—so rounded and with such an odd voice. “Not the normal procedure at all.”

  “It’s, ah, part of an experiment, Latell.”

  They were at one of the pool tables. Latell was gazing down at the shapes there, brow furrowed. The shapes began changing, multiplying, going do-si-do. “I’m afraid I must confess: my reprogramming efforts haven’t been entirely successful—oh!”

  He was staring disappointedly at the lightshapes. “The trainer is having no effect. I still have individual thought patterns.”

  She looked him up and down. “What’s so bad about that?”

  “You know as well as I. Unstable minds cannot be tolerated—”

  He was interrupted as a nearby female slumped against her pool table-trainer and fell to the floor. Dana rushed to her, trying to revive her without success.

  She looked around. “Somebody give me a hand, here!”

  A female who was twin to the one Dana cradled said frostily, “That is forbidden. Her body will have to be replaced.”

  So, when one member of the triumvirate got out of whack by the Masters’ standards, he or she was either fixed, or replaced. And the triumvirate went on.

  Dana showed her teeth in a snarl. “What are you, Human beings or cattle?”

  Human? She could hear the word ripple through them with a shiver of disgust. The clones left their trainers and began to converge on her. Latell dragged Dana to her feet, though she fought him.

  “You’ve gone too far,” he said. “You must leave.”

  “Idiots!” she was screaming. “Can’t you see what they’re doing to you?” Was this how Zor would end his days? But he had been a freethinking Human! To come to this …

  The nurse had reappeared, with a twin. “This one requires a body replacement. Yes. You, come with us.”

  The clone grabbed her and Dana let out her rage in the form of a quick footsweep and a shoulder block. The nurses went flying in either direction.

  She seized Latell’s wrist. “C’mon. I’m getting you outta here.” He didn’t resist. He was doomed, whatever he did, and in addition found her fascinating.

  Angelo and Sean had guard uniforms to wear over their Southern Cross outfits (though Angelo’s was
strained to its limits, to say the least), and guns and a runabout, but with the action over, they were at a loss as to what to do next. Parked in a deserted upper-tier plaza, they worried and debated.

  A plate on the runabout’s dash came alight and a voice said, “Unit thirteen, return to Main Control. Prepare for Override Guidance to return you to Main Control.”

  Sean checked over his stolen weapon. “Get ready, Angie. We just got our ticket to the target.”

  Stolen vehicles were the order of the day, only natural for a stranded Hovertank unit. Bowie and Louie had heisted themselves a vanlike craft, and techmaster Louie had quickly figured out how to drive it.

  They cruised slowly, hoping to spot one of the others and to get their bearings on either the control center or the tanks. Bowie, riding shotgun, abruptly yelped, “Louie, pull over! Stop!”

  “Hah? Whatsamatter? Whatsamatter?” But he did as the other asked. Bowie leapt out and went running after Musica, who had been wandering along as if in a daze.

  Louie shrugged. “Why not? We got nothin’ better to do.”

  At Musica’s direction, the three drove to the weirdest place they had yet seen in the mother ship. It was like some underground grotto or an ant’s orchard.

  Glowing spheres, some of them fifty feet across, were growing there—at least that was what it looked like. The spheres were held by a network of vinelike growths, alien lianas four and five feet thick, which sprouted dense crops of translucent hairs the width of hawsers.

  The vines traveled up to the roof and down to the floor in clusters, where they were rooted in the soil. There, smaller spheres sprouted on single vines, with spores of the mature forms growing in the middle.

  Bowie sat and Musica knelt, each looking off in the opposite direction at the tree-broad base of one of the rootvines. Louie waited in the van, some distance off.

  “Everyone is looking for you,” she was saying. “I was so afraid you’d been hurt or captured.”

  “It almost happened. It still could, but now I don’t care.”

  She turned to him. “Why do you say that?”