Symphony of Light

by Jack McKinney

  A short distance away, Rook sucked in her breath as she witnessed Scott narrowly escape decapitation. Fortunately, the snow beneath his feet

  had given way and he had fallen backward into a shallow ravine at the same moment the Trooper's claw had descended. But now the thing was poised on the edge of the hollow, preparing to bring its cannons into play. Rook turned her profile to the ship, the H90 long gun gripped in her extended right hand, and fired two blasts. Given the near-blizzard conditions, it was too much to ask that her shots find any vulnerable spots-although her second burst almost made a hole through the ship's eyelike scanner. The Trooper swung toward her, almost the impatient turn one would direct toward a mischievous child, and loosed two discs in response, one of which tore into the earth twenty yards in front of her with enough charge to blow her off her feet.

  By now, five Invid Troopers had put down in the cirque; their colorful commander was still on the ridge monitoring the scene. The team, meanwhile, had been herded toward the steep glacial slope at the basin's edge. Scott leapt up out of his hollow after Rook took the heat off him and waved everyone toward his position. "Everyone over the side!" he yelled into the wind. "Slide, down the slope back to the tree line!"

  "But the mecha!" Rand returned, gesturing back to the basin. "Forget it! We've gotta make for the woods!"

  Scott saw Annie go over the side and ride down the chute on her butt, trailing a scream that was half fear, half thrill. Lancer and Marlene took to the slope next, then Lunk and Rand. Scott waved them on, yelling all the while and triggering the handgun for all it was worth against the Invid who had nearly taken his head off a few moments before. He managed a lucky shot that blew the thing's leg off, and it settled down into the basin snow and exploded.

  Only Scott and Rook remained in the cirque now, along with the four undamaged Troopers that were moving toward them with evil intent.

  "Rook! Are you all right?!" Scott yelled.

  She gave him the okay sign and started to make her way toward his position, pivoting once or twice to get a shot off at her pursuers. The Invid were pouring a storm of discs at them, so they had to flatten themselves

  every so often as they attempted to close on the chute. Scott continued to send out what his blaster could deliver and wasn't surprised to see the enemy split ranks and head off for a flanking maneuver. Rook was a few yards in front of him when the two of them went over the side. Scott tried to dig his heels in, then realized why the rest of the team had disappeared so quickly. Under a thin layer of snow the chute was a solid sheet of glacial ice.

  Sera saw the apparent leader of the group whipping down the slope and lifted off to pursue him. She paused briefly on the edge of the slide to issue instructions to her troops, then engaged the thrusters that would send her down toward the tree line along the Humans' course.

  Although Lancer might have given Sera pause, she had no bonds with the rest of the team. She came alongside Scott, realizing that he could see her through the command ship's transparent bubble, and trained her cannons on him. But at the last minute, Scott's heels found a bit of purchase and he suddenly ended up somersaulting out of harm's way, each of Sera's shots missing him as he rolled down the slope.

  The Invid princess came to a halt at the bottom of the chute where the others had taken up positions behind groupings of terminal moraine boulders. Lunk was loosing bursts against the cockpit canopy that made it impossible for Sera to tell in which direction the leader had headed.

  Sera allowed the brutish Human to have his way for an instant, then turned on him, aware of the blood lust she felt in her heart. But all at once one of the Human's teammates ran from cover and pushed the big one off his feet and out of the path of her shots. Angered, Sera traversed the command ship's cannons to find him, realizing only then that it was the lavender-haired Human.

  Her hand remained poised above the weapon's ovalshaped trigger, paralyzed.

  Elsewhere, the rebels and Shock Troopers continued to trade fire. Marlene cowered behind a boulder as lethal packets of energy

  crisscrossed overhead, her hands pressed to her head, as if she were fearful of some internal explosion.

  "Fight or die!" she screamed, her words lost to the storm. "There must be another way...another life!"

  Then, a moment later, the fighting itself surrendered. Scott heard an intense rumbling above him and looked up in time to see enormous chunks of ice fall from the buttresses surrounding the cirque, avalanching down into the basin, scattering the Invid Troopers and burying the Cyclones and Veritechs under tons of crystalline snow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Scott had assumed that the "waning" [sic] of Yellow Dancer had something to do with Lancer's infatuation with Marlene; but while Scott was certainly on the right track, he had the wrong cause-a fact that contributed to the rivalries that arose later on. Had the two men sat down and talked things out, perhaps they would have realized that Marlene was not the amnesiac Scott wanted to believe she was, nor Sera the Human pilot Lancer assumed her to be. Time and time again this failure to communicate would undermine the team's movement toward unity, right to the end.

  Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point

  It was Scott's idea that they separate into three groups. The avalanche had indeed buried the VTs and Cyclones, but at the same time it had forced the Invid out of the basin area and bought some breathing space for the team. Reunited, they had picked their way farther down the mountainside, splitting up when they reached the tree line. There they left obvious evidence of their separate paths in the snow, hoping the Invid commander would similarly redeploy her Troopers. This way, Scott hoped, his irregulars would stand a better chance of circling back to the chute and retrieving the mecha.

  Somehow.

  The squall had moved through, but the temperature had actually risen a couple of degrees. Nevertheless, the freedom fighters were soaked to the skin and feeling the chill. Annie felt it more than the others-her jumpsuit had little of the thermal protection afforded Rook by the Cyclone bodysuit, and she simply wasn't as inured to the cold as Rand. As a result, she had ridden piggyback into the woods, her shaking arms draped around Rand's neck.

  "It'll get better when we get into the trees," Rand had assured her. "I can't promise you a fire right away, but at least you'll be out of this wind."

  At this point Rand had no real plan beyond finding temporary shelter where they could regain some of their strength. All of them had taken a beating, and Rook had some severe facial burns. Rand didn't imagine that Scott and Lunk were in much better shape, and even though Lancer had been spared real harm, he had Marlene to look out for, which was in some ways worse than being out there alone. Rand had berated himself for having left his survival pack in the Alpha. For the past few weeks he had been complaining to Scott that everyone was becoming too reliant on the mecha systems for survival, and now here he was out in the woods with nothing more than a handgun and his fenceman's tool. But a few steps down the, forest's wide trail his attitude began to improve considerably, especially after he spied the snare.

  Evidently at one time the place had been occupied by others who were less than sympathetic to the Invid. There were three small, almost igloolike shelters containing foodstuffs, tools, and lengths of cord and cable, but more important, the trees along the trail had been rigged to repel intruders.

  Rand left Annie in Rook's care in one of the shelters and went off into the moonlight to investigate. That the designers of the traps had been after big game was immediately obvious, but each of the tree and cable mechanisms was in need of attention, and Rand realized that he was going to have to work fast if the snares were to serve their purpose. So while Rook and Annie warmed themselves, he went to work replacing worn cables, resecuring counterbalances, and sharpening stakes. He had to fell several medium-size trees, but he had been careful to select only those that would topple with the least amount of noise. And thus far there had been no sign of the Invid.

  He was busy on a final piece
of handiwork now, down on his knees in the snow using cutters on the cable that guyed the central snare.

  "Aren't you finished yet?" he heard Rook ask behind him.

  He turned from his task to give her a wry look. She was ten feet away, arms folded and a smirk on her face. "Hope you and Mint have been comfortable," he answered with elaborate concern.

  Rook made an affected gesture. "Oh, we'll manage until the servants arrive. Have you been having fun with your cat's cradle?"

  Rand twisted a final piece of cable around itself and stood up, regarding the contraption in a self-satisfied way.

  "Sometimes I amaze myself."

  Rook walked over and gave the wire a perplexed tug. "This is the better mousetrap you promised us?"

  "You two just stay put in the shelter and leave the metal nightmares to me, okay?"

  She scowled. "Your confidence is underwhelming." "Pretend to believe in me," he quipped.

  Just then Annie ran into the clearing, breathless and pointing back toward the foot of the chute.

  "They're coming!"

  Rand told Rook to see if she could do something about the tracks they had left in the snow, so she and Annie went to work with conifer switches while he smoothed the snow around the snare. He briefed his teammates on its workings and ran rapidly through the contingency plan he hoped they wouldn't have to resort to. Fifteen minutes later, he was climbing up into one of the trees and Annie and Rook were back in the shelter.

  Rand squirreled around a bit until he found a good place for himself in the upper branches, then cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, "Help! Help me, I'm hurt!" directing his false alarm along the trail that led to the base of the snowslide. Rook and Annie heard his call and hunkered down in the shelter, peering out at the clearing through a narrow slot in the wall. Soon they heard the sound of heavy footfalls, and a Trooper lumbered into the clearing, its blood-red scanner searching the trees.

  Rand drew his H90 and reminded himself to remain calm. He could see that the Trooper was following the footprints they had purposely left intact on the trail.

  "A little farther..." Rand encouraged, whispering to himself through gritted teeth.

  The Invid took two more perfectly placed steps, which brought each of its cloven feet down into the trap's ring mechanisms. Cables cinched and tightened, while others grew taut, straining at turnbuckles and activating pulleys that had been concealed high in the surrounding branches. Elsewhere, poles and trees began to spring loose, groaning as they straightened up, released at last from their bowed bondage. The Trooper's feet were pulled out from under it, and suddenly it was being hauled into the air, captive and inverted.

  Grinning in delight, Rand moved out onto the branch to view the hapless thing's ascent. But a moment later his smile was collapsing: the snare had been well engineered but underbuilt. Either that or the lashed trees had seen too many seasons. One after another they were beginning to splinter under the Trooper's weight; cables stretched and snapped, and pulleys were ripped from their moorings. As the ship plummeted headfirst toward the snow, Rand armed his weapon and squeezed off four quick shots, only one of which connected. But all that served to do was alert the Invid to his presence. Before he could react, the Trooper's cannons came to life and discharged a blast that connected squarely with the trunk a few feet below his shaky perch. The tree came apart, and Rand and the upper section were blown backward by the explosion.

  He and the Trooper hit the ground at almost the same instant, both of them knocked senseless by their falls. But the Invid was the first to stir. As the Trooper rose slowly to its feet, Rook and Annie saw the ship's scanner wink into awareness. Rand was still unconscious, facedown in the snow, one outstretched arm hooked around the base of the tree he had slammed into on his way down. Annie began to scream.

  Horrified, Rook watched the Invid take three forward steps and position itself over her fallen teammate. She barreled out of the shelter, yelling for Rand to wake up, raising her blaster even as the Trooper was raising its claw. She had to put five shots into the alien's back before it swung around, and when it did, it was clever enough to use its pincer as a shield. Undaunted, Rook continued to fire until she saw those telltale globes

  of priming light form at the ship's cannons; then she spun around and hastily tried to retreat. The Invid dropped her with a disc that threw her into a headlong crash. She rolled over, struggling to regain her breath as the Trooper approached, uncertain if she should be thankful that the thing had let her live. Suddenly she heard Annie's taunting voice close by and watched amazed as her diminutive friend began to pelt the towering ship with snowballs.

  Rook raised herself and resumed fire, hoping to draw the Invid's attention before Annie succeeded in enraging it. Rand had meanwhile come around and was contributing his own bursts, and together they somehow managed to send the Trooper to its knees.

  "Go, go!" Rand yelled, motioning Rook and Annie past him.

  They both knew what he was up to and broke for the trail where Rand had rigged the second trap. Rook turned around to see if he was following.

  "I'm right behind you!" she heard him yell.

  And so was the Trooper, looming up over them and the trees, monstrous-looking in the moonlight, like the nightmare it was.

  But it performed just as Rand had expected, stepping boldly along the path, unaware that one area held a special surprise. And in a moment the Trooper was sinking to its waist through the snow, down into a pit that had been dug underneath the trail.

  "Cut your lines!" Rand shouted to the women.

  Rook ran to the area he had indicated and drew her knife. She severed the cables as he called out the numbers. Instantly, sharpened logs swung down toward the trapped Trooper from the surrounding treetops. Thrusters blazing against the pit's hold, the Invid dodged the first two and parried the third with its pincer targone, but the fourth punched through the ship's scanner and immobilized it. The Trooper was lifted up out of the pit and sent flat on its back in the trail. The sharpened log protruded out of its blood-red eye like a stake thrust into a vampire's heart.

  "God...we did it," Annie said in disbelief.

  Rook wiped sweat from her brow. "Too close this time, just too close."

  "Not bad." Rand smiled, striding over to the bleeding ship. "A bit primitive perhaps, but I had confidence in it.

  Rook scoffed at him. "Sure thing, Rand. And I suppose almost getting yourself killed was part of the plan?"

  "That's always part of my plan," he told her. "Just to impress you a bit." "You're never scared?" Annie said, taken in.

  Rook looked over at Rand, then down at Annie. "Only when no one's looking at him," she told her.

  Somewhat closer to the chute, Scott and Lunk were attempting to bring their own primitive plan into play. They had skirted the edge of the woods, keeping themselves just above the tree line, then worked back toward the western buttress of the cirque. As hoped, the Invid commander had split its forces-her forces, Scott was now telling himself-but two of the four Troopers had picked up their trail and were narrowing the gap.

  The avalanche had touched off secondary slides in several of the tributary crevasses below the basin, and in one of these, an exposed grouping of moraine boulders perched precariously above the gully's narrow floor. Scott thought that if they could lure the Troopers into the ravine, then somehow manage to loosen those boulders...

  Lunk was skeptical, but he didn't see that there were any alternatives. The VTs and Cyclones hadn't been completely buried by the snow, but they couldn't even think about reaching them until they had cut the enemy down to size. So he volunteered to go up top and see if he could pry some of the rocks free, while Scott set out to bait the two enemy ships.

  Lunk had found what he considered to be a persuasive boulder that would force the entire group into a slide, and he had his shoulder to it when Scott entered the ravine at a run, the Troopers right behind him. The lieutenant reached the end of the ravine and turned to fire a few shot
s at his pursuers, meant more to antagonize than to inflict any damage. But more than that, Scott's short burst was aimed at keeping the Troopers at bay for just the few seconds Lunk needed to send the boulder crashing down

  toward them.

  "Hurry!" Lunk heard between H90 reports. "They're in position!"

  Lunk shoved his bare shoulder to the stone, boots trying to find purchase in the snow. Down below, one of the Troopers opened fire on Scott. The anni discs threw up a fountain of snow that momentarily buried him, but Lunk saw Scott shake himself out of it. And perhaps it was the sight of his friend's peril that gave him the extra push he needed, because all at once the boulder was toppling over and commencing its slide and tumble toward the pack.

  Scott heard the rock impact the mass and decided to help things along by training his weapon on the ledge itself. The charges from his MARS-Gallant did what sheer momentum alone couldn't, and in a moment the whole mass was avalanching toward the bottom of the ravine with a ground-shaking, deafening roar. Scott threw himself up the opposing slope, figuring the Invid would blast free of the ravine, giving him and Lunk a chance to reach the VTs. He never hoped they would actually catch the Troopers unaware, but that was exactly what happened. They had both tried to lift off, but the bounding rocks had shattered the ships' sensors, and in the confusion the things got caught up in the slide and were overturned and buried.

  When the snow settled, Lunk appeared at the top of the ravine, a triumphant look on his face.

  "Not bad, eh, Commander?!" he yelled down.

  Scott surveyed the damage they had wrought and could only regard it in wonder. "Yeah, great, pal," he called back. "Just like we planned."