The recon team-Rick, Lisa, Jack, Karen, Rem, and Kami as scout-left the village shortly before dawn, sticking close to the northern fringe of Garuda's preternaturally quiet forest. They had traveled seventy-five miles by the time Rhestad rose-a massive oblate field of crimson that did little to warm the land. The two villages they passed en route had already been informed of the mission. Worried about attracting any undue attention to themselves, Rick had requested that the Garudans simply go about their business; but there was obviously too much excitement in the air for that. For sometimes miles at a stretch, Rick would see them crouched along the paths the Hovercycles cut through the woods, silent and feral, vulpine eyes aglow in the eerie morning light.
At mile eighty-five the team encountered its first Inorganic patrol-a pack of Hellcats a dozen strong, roaming the forest like some fiendish pride of saber-tooths. Kami had spotted them and passed the word; the Hovercycles were shut down and concealed. It was understood by now that the Inorganics were more than marauders or Robopolice units; they functioned as the remote eyes and ears for the Invid living computers, which in turn directed the scientists or command troops. Engagement, therefore, even if it ended in victory, would have only served to alert the hive to the team's position; so they lay as still as they could, pressed close to the chilled ground until the pack had moved through.
Rick and Lisa were on their stomachs, side-by-side, environmental suits adjusted to mimic the colors and textures of the area's fernlike ground cover. Rick had his arm flung protectively across his wife's back, and was gazing at her through the helmet's bubble-shield. Her eyes returned the wrinkled look his own were trying to convey. It was the first time he and Lisa had been out together in a long while, and if this wasn't exactly anyone's idea of an ideal date or the "closeness" Lisa had in mind during their most recent heart-to-heart, at least they were together. And somehow-though Rick would have been at a loss to explain it-he felt more assured with Lisa beside him. At the same time her presence had a kind of calming effect, because no matter what they might have to face, he was freed from having to worry about where she was or what dangers she might have otherwise been facing alone. Here, he had some measure of control over her situation-their situation.
Moving more cautiously after Kami gave the all-clear sign, the team took another hour to cover the last fifteen miles. They had portions of the enormous hive in sight for five of those miles, but didn't get an unobstructed view of the thing until they were almost on top of it. It sat in the center of an ancient impact crater, in a veritable forest of Optera trees, a dome-shaped structure with a base almost ten miles around, composed entirely of what appeared to be organic facets or geodesies; in fact, the hive had the look of something grown rather than erected. Four mile-high cattaillike antenna towers were positioned at cardinal points around the hive's oddly "bubbled" base.
Through field glasses, Rick could discern Garudan slaves gathering mutated fruits from
the trees. Huge containers of these were being conveyed to the hive itself by Invid soldiers in specially outfitted suits, often piloting Hovercarts of various design. Tracking the carts' movements ultimately enabled Rick to discover one of the hive's tunnellike transport corridors.
"What happens later on?" Rick whispered to Kami, who had stooped down to ask for the binoculars. "Are the workers taken into the hive?"
"No," he said, bringing his muzzle close to the helmet's audio pickups. "The labor camp lies about two miles from here." Kami pointed out the direction.
"Are you certain there are no Garudans inside the hive?"
Kami shook his head. "Not certain." The hives were the only places on the planet impervious to Garudan Sendings and out-of-body flights; but the Invids' continued presence on world in general had confused things. The clouds and wind were full of sinister whisperings.
"Then we've gotta find out," Rick said, turning around to motion the others forward.
Jack remained behind as rear guard, while the rest of the team began to work their way over the low ridge that was the crater's rim and down into the basin itself. It was warmer here, Rick realized without having to check the suit's sensor displays; redolent, too, he imagined, as the Optera tree forests on Praxis had been. They were closing on the edge of the cultivation area now, and it was time for Kami to go it alone.
"Don't take any chances," Rick cautioned him. He checked his chronometer. "One hour. If you're not back by then, we're moving out."
"I'll get word back to you from the camp if anything happens."
The underground, Rick reminded himself.
"Just see that it doesn't," Rem said.
Karen and Lisa wished Kami luck, and he started to move off.
Then all at once a small mountain was growing under their feet. Rick thought for a moment that this might be how the bulb-canopied Optera trees pushed themselves from the ground. Lisa and the others had been knocked off their feet, but he was still riding the rise up, arms outstretched like a high-wire walker. Elsewhere he could see two more humps beginning to form. Kami yelled something incomprehensible, just before Rick leaped and caught hold of a network of vinelike tendrils encasing the canopy-bulb of the nearest tree. He was dangling ten feet above the ground now, looking down on his
teammates and wondering why they had their weapons drawn, when a triple-clawed Scout pincer suddenly slammed into the tree not a foot from his head. The bulb split open like an overripe melon, showering him with viscous green gop and what he took to be seeds.
Lisa and Karen, meanwhile, were firing charges at the crab-ship, trying to position themselves for a shot at the mecha's scanner, a pouting red mouth low down on the ventral surface of its armored head. But the Scouts who had joined the first were advancing, and the two women were forced to hurl themselves out from under a pair of cloven feet. One mecha was stomping the ground, trying to pulverize them, even while Rem and Kami were stinging its ladybug-shaped carapace with Wolverine fire.
Rick disentangled himself before the first Scout could strike again, dropping, tucking, and rolling out of harm's way, and somehow managing to come up with his weapon raised. He nailed his giant assailant in the knee joint and brought it down in an earsplitting crash; then put a second shot through its scanner, and ducked for cover as the thing blew up.
The force of the blast threw one of the other Scouts hard against the trees, where it stumbled and fell after ripping open half-a-dozen bulbs. Rem saw to it that the ship didn't get up, lancing it open from crotch to scanner. Rick had been left dazed and temporarily deaf from the explosion, but he came to in time to see the remaining mecha raising its left foot to smash Karen and Lisa, who had also been leveled by the blast. He ran up behind the Scout, as if preparing to clip it behind the knee, and emptied his handgun straight up into the underside of the ship's rear tapered head armor, eliciting a cascade of energy bolts and a muffled roar that decapitated the ship, spilling its Invid pilot to the ground. Kami and Karen holed the creature, even though it was probably already dead, and moved quickly to Lisa's side. Rick did likewise, suddenly terror-stricken. Her suit was torn open; she was bloodied and unconscious.
"We've got to get her back to the cycs!" Rick said, looking up at his teammates. But all he got in return was a look of resignation. Rick saw Kami and Karen toss their weapons aside. He whirled around, still in a crouch, in time to see more than a dozen Invid soldiers emerging from the orchard to surround their patch of green-stained ground.
"Throw your weapon down," one of the Praxian-size soldiers said in Tiresian, brandishing an evil-looking rifle/cannon and gazing down at Rick through an elongated helmet.
Rick did so, just as an officer came shouldering its way through the circle. It regarded Lisa a moment, then swung its snout toward Rick.
"The hive has been expecting you," it announced.
"Our Regent has said that he finds your race most curious, and now I understand why.
You are a little more like worms than I'd imagined, and i
ndeed there is the stench of death about you."
The interior of the hive was greenhouse-hot, but the scientist's voice was cold and analytical. Rick, Rem, Kami, and Karen had been marched at gunpoint through the same entrance Rick had spied from the crater rim. There, their helmets and transpirators had been removed. One of the soldiers had carried Lisa in over his shoulder. She was still unconscious, groaning every so often in her delirium. Rick was being kept from her side. Kami, already succumbing to the hive's artificial atmosphere, had been shackled and dumped in a corner.
"That smell is the stink of your own soldiers' blood," Rick snarled at the scientist, gesturing to his green-smeared suit.
"The cornered creature's final attack," the Invid said to his white-robed group of barefoot assistants, in Tiresian for Rick's benefit. "The being uses words as weapons."
"What do you want with us? Why didn't your soldiers kill us?"
The scientist's snout sensors twitched, as if he was sniffing the air. "Perhaps we shall. But there is some information we require first. It would save us much bother if you'd simply agree to answer our questions-it might even save your lives."
Rick snorted. "Dream on, slug."
"As I thought," the scientist directed over his shoulder. He studied Rick a moment, then began to move down the line, pausing in front of Kami. "You were one of the Garudans selected by Tesla for the Regent's zoo, were you not?"
Kami leaned in as if to whisper something and snapped at the Invid's face, missing it by inches. Just as suddenly, a soldier threw a stranglehold on Kami from behind; in his weakened state, the Garudan was easily subdued.
The scientist shrugged it off and continued his appraisal of the group, leering, Rick thought, at Karen, and puzzling for a moment over Rem. "Why, you're Tiresian." he said at last, and whirled through an excited turn to face his group. "We have a marvelous opportunity here to accomplish something invaluable for the realm. For the record," he added, looking to Rick, "where are the Robotech Masters?"
Rick beetled his brows. "The Masters?"
"Yes. Where is the Protoculture matrix?"
Rick groaned. The thing had become a thorn in the galaxy's side. "I don't know what
you're talking about."
"That is hardly the response we require to justify sparing your lives, Earther. Be reasonable; you have Protoculture-fueled ships, Protoculture-based weapons...How did you come by these if not through contact with the Masters or the matrix? Unless, of course, the Flowers of Life grow on your homeworld..."
Rick fought to keep his surprise from registering. So that's what they're after, he thought, and recalled something Roy Fokker had told him almost ten years ago about the warning Lang had inadvertently keyed in the SDF-1-Zor's warning about the Invid! The Tirolian knew!-he knew the Invid would eventually go in search of the matrix. Cabell's words to Lang rang in Rick's ears: You must destroy the Invid here, destroy them while you still can!
"I see something in your eyes, Human," the scientist was saying. "You know something."
Rick tightened his lips to a thin line.
"Then perhaps your dreams will tell us what we wish to know." The Invid waved a hand at the soldiers. "Take the Humans outside."
"You can't!" Kami bit out, his windpipe pinced in the soldier's grip. Others had stepped in to take hold of Rick, Karen, Rem, and Lisa. "They'll die!"
"Yes," the scientist said matter-of-factly, "they probably will."
CHAPTER TEN
The psy scanners the Invid employed on Garuda (on Hunter and the rest) were patterned on similar devices developed by the Tiresians. Ironically enough, the Robotech Masters had used the scanners on Zor shortly after his death, (and would use them again to monitor Zor Prime after the clone had been inserted into the Fifteenth ATAC), much as the Invid were using them on Rem.
History of the Second Robotech War, volume XXXI, "Tirol"
Dream a little dream with me.
Late twentieth-century song lyric
The male human was dreaming of pursuit. He was being chased by some sort of bird creature with an enormous wingspan, and-an Invid scientist had noted-a body shaped curiously like those of the raptorial birds depicted face-to-face on the Human's uniform insignia patch. The Human was running downhill, hopelessly out of control, with the bird pecking at his neck and back, flapping its great wings all the while. The backdrop for the dream was a world of ravaged landscapes, barren, cratered expanses of solidified
volcanic flow. The Human was, and at the same time was not, both the pursued and pursuer. Crowds of other Humans seemed to be viewing the event from the sidelines, gesturing, pointing, applauding, laughing. One wore the face of the injured Human female who was presently being terrorized by dreams of her own-although she was sympathetic here, eager to help the running man, so it appeared.
"There's nothing of use to us in this one's thoughts," the head scientist said dismissively. Disappointed, he turned from the images in the instrumentality sphere and moved to the sphere his assistants had set up to monitor the dreams of the injured female.
Lisa, like Rick, Karen, and Rem, was strapped on her back to a kind of gurney, with her head positioned beneath a thick and heavy-looking ring-shaped device that resembled a scaled-down version of an MRI scanner. What the Invid scientists were calling dreams, however, were of the wide-eyed variety-altered states of consciousness, hellish ones by and large, normally kept locked away behind those proverbial doors of perception. Five minutes of exposure to Canada's tainted atmosphere had been enough to elicit them. The scientists had no way of knowing whether this constituted what would amount to a lethal exposure-some Invid had lasted as long as half an hour without suffering irreversible effects. But these Humans were fragile things; physically strong for their size, it was true, but with limited tolerance for even the slightest of psychic assaults. They were inhabitants of the base realms, the sensate worlds at the lower end of the spectrum, as insubstantial as interstellar dust, and therefore highly expendable.
The leader of the white-robed group now activated the sphere attached to the device above Lisa's head, and here, too, the scientists encountered images of pursuit. Kami, muzzled and shackled in a corner of the hive's lab, was too deep into his own delirium to take note of their dismay.
"It seems to be something of a fixation with them," one of the assistants ventured.
The Human female was for all intents and purposes trapped on a spiral staircase that lacked any clear-cut terminus. Moreover, whatever it was that was pursuing her, hunting her, was so vague a thing as to be untranslatable by the sphere's Protoculture circuitry. There were momentary flashes of a feline creature, however, that brought to mind the Invid's own Hellcats. But the central concern of the dream and dreamer was the female's seemingly reduced size.
"Some reference to the Zentraedi, perhaps?"
The master scientist made a disgruntled sound. "Who can tell with these beings? Let us move on."
They grouped together in front of Karen's sphere next, arms folded and four-fingered hands tucked into the sleeves of their robes. The master among them had found himself
strangely moved by this green-eyed, honey-haired Human; but unfortunately her dream-terrors proved to be as pedestrian and unrevealing as the previous ones. Her world was at least populated with a host of other beings, but they were there principally to insure that Karen was suitably horrified by the prospect of being buried alive.
The master expressed his distaste wonders why they don't walk in traumatized than Optera itself."
after a minute's viewing. "What a pitiful race...One fear of their own shadows. They've been more
By now they had reached Rem-the Tiresian-and to their absolute astonishment, there in living color and as big as life in the center of the attendant sphere was Optera. This much could have been accounted for and dismissed, but next they found themselves viewing images of the Regis in her pretransformed state! And this was not the defoliated Optera of their raveno
us present, but the edenic homeworld of their racial past-a verdant wonderland, with fields of Flowers basking in the warmth of the planet's twin suns, stretching as far as the eye could see across a landscape of arcadian beauty. Here was the lost harmony, the innocent splendor, the paradisiacal ease they could now access only in moments of collective trance, or at the mystical promptings of the Queen-Mother herself.
The scientists were reduced to silence, to tears of an ethereal sort.
"It's as if..."
"Say it," the master demanded.
"...as if this one knew our world before the techno-voyager's arrival."
"These are his thoughts."
With what would translate as shame, the master scientist deactivated the sphere and led his group to a sphere significantly larger than the rest-their communications instrumentality, overshadowed by a relatively small specimen of bubble-chambered brain.
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