Bursts of blinding light strobed across a sky littered with ships and crosshatched by tracer rounds and hyphens of laser fire. Rand watched from the edge of the woods as Veritechs swooped in on release runs and booster-climbed into the sunlight. The sounds of battle rumbled through the surrounding hills and shook the ground beneath his feet. He could see that the battalion was meeting with heavy resistance, despite what Captain Harrington had said about underplaying their hand. The Invid knew exactly what was at stake, and they weren't about to be tricked.
I can't do it, he thought. I can't just stand here and watch them go!
Without a word to Rook or Annie, he donned his helmet and made for his Cyclone. They called out after him.
"I'm not going to sit it out after coming this far," he told them. "I figure the time has come for a little well-meaning insubordination."
Rook tried again to stop him, to talk some sense into him, but her words lacked conviction-even she didn't believe what she was saying. "That idiot's going to get himself killed without somebody to look after him!"
Annie saw what was coming but didn't bother to try to stop her other than to shout a halfhearted, "Wait!"-and that was only because she didn't want to be left behind. She began to chase after them, leaving the woods and risking a mad unprotected dash across the battlefield, but it was Lunk she ultimately caught up with.
He had been riding escort to various Cyclone squads, adding his own missiles to the riders' laser-array fire, when an Invid command ship he had finished off with heat-seekers almost toppled on him, sending the APC out of control. Suddenly he was flung into the shotgun seat, and the vehicle was skidding to a halt in the thick of the fighting. And the next thing he knew Annie was in the driver's seat, practically standing up to reach the pedals and shouting: "I'll show you how to handle this thing!"
"What the heck are you doing here?" he demanded, grateful and concerned at the same time.
Annie accelerated, pinning him to the seat. "What's it look like I'm doing?!"
"Come on, Mint, gimme the wheel"
"Forget it!" she yelled into his face as he made a reach for it. "I'm not gonna be left behind anymore, Lunk!"
Lunk backed off and regarded her. She was a trooper, he had to admit, a regular workout.
Deep within the hive, the instrumentality sphere glowed with images of the battle-a Cyclone charge, an aerial encounter, death and devastation. A
living flame of white energy now, the Regis beheld the spectacle and understood.
"The Earth people have risen in great numbers against us," she addressed her troops, in position elsewhere in the hive. "And now they dare to attack our very center, to threaten all that we have labored to achieve. But this time we will put an end to it. Corg, I call upon you to defend the hive. Destroy them, as they would us, for the greater glory of our race!"
"It will be my pleasure and my privilege," Corg answered her from the cockpit of his command ship. Behind him, his elite squad of warriors readied themselves as the hive began to open, the subatomic stuff of the barrier shield pouring in to fill the drone chambers with white radiance.
But Corg was suddenly aware of a Human-sized figure silhouetted against that blinding light. "No, wait! You mustn't!" it shouted.
Ariel, in her Human guise and garb, was below him, searching for sight of him in the cockpit. "So, you've returned...What do you want?"
"I want to speak to the Regis. Let me through-this madness must be stopped!"
"Madness?!" he shouted, stepping his ship forward menacingly. "What are you saying?
Ariel gestured to the outside world. "They're only fighting to regain the land that is rightfully theirs...the land we've taken!"
"You've lived among them too long, Ariel," Corg told her. "Or should I call you Marlene?...Now stand aside!"
Corg leapt his ship over her head, nearly decapitating her, but she had ducked at the last instant and was on all fours now, weeping, Sera's pink and purple ship towering over her.
"Sera, you must listen to me," Marlene pleaded, getting to her feet. "Have we forgotten our past? You yourself opened my mind to these things. Have we forgotten that our own planet was stolen from us? What gives us the right to inflict the same evil on these people?"
Sardonic laughter issued through the ship's externals. "So suddenly our Ariel remembers," sneered Sera. "And you would have us surrender...Well,
we have traveled too far to concern ourselves with this barbaric life-form's needs. Soon this will be our world, and our world alone."
"We've traveled far, and yet we have learned nothing."
Sera engaged her ship's power systems and leapt into the light, the roar of the thrusters drowning out Marlene's anguished pleas.
Outside, the barrier had been breached by antimatter torpedoes delivered against it by two Veritechs and subsequent blasts from the battalion's destabilizer cannons. Cyclone riders and Battloids were now punching through the rend and battling Pincer Ships on the ground nearest the hive wall.
The outpouring of Protoculture energy released from the shield was working a kind of seasonal magic across the landscape, reconfiguring not only local weather patterns but the life processes of the flora itself. Rand and Rook, riding at the head of a contingent of Cycloners, moved from winter to spring in a matter of seconds. Spores and pollen clusters the size of giant snowflakes were wafting through the newly warmed air; young grass was spreading like some green tide across the valley, and trees and flowers were blossoming in vibrant colors.
"This sure wasn't in the forecast!" Rand commented over the net. "Look at all these wildflowers! Poppies, marigolds-"
"Yeah, but I don't like the look of that big cornflower up ahead."
Rook saw a blue Enforcer ship surfacing in front of them, its cannon tips already aglow with priming charges. "Fan out," Rand ordered the rest of the Cyclone group as energy bolts were thrown at them. The two freedom fighters launched their Cycs and changed over to Battle Armor mode.
"Draw its fire!" said Rook, boostering up and off to the left.
Rand remained at ground level, taunting the blue devil with trick shots, while Rook came in from behind to drop the thing. But a second Invid suddenly appeared out of nowhere and swatted her from the air with a cannon twist that smashed one side of the armor's backpack rig, shearing away one of the mecha's tires. She went into an uncontrolled fall with her
back to the larger ship, but Rand swooped in to position himself between the two of them.
"It's okay, I've got you covered."
"Leave it to me!" she told him, voice full of anger, as Rand triggered off a series of futile shots.
"If I'd left it to you, you'd be a pile of smoking rubble by now, and I'm just too fond of you to let that happen!"
"You're what?!"
Rand risked a look over his shoulder at her. "You heard me-I'm fond of you, dammit!"
It was a hell of a time to be confessing his feelings, she thought, but it was turning out to be one of those days. "I-I don't know what to say... "
Rand swung back to his opponent and saw that the Invid ship's cannons were about to fire. "Don't say anything," he yelled in a rush, "just moooove!"
The cannons traversed and followed the Cycloners up, but the pilot's aim was off, and Rand managed to sweep in and bull's-eye the ship from behind.
"Nice shooting there, cowboy," Rook said, coming alongside him later. "I bet you try to impress all the girls that way."
There was a sweetness in her voice he had never heard before and a smile behind the faceshield of her helmet that lit up his heart. "No, only the ones who can outshoot me," he laughed.
They were both some fifty feet off the ground, almost leisurely in flight, as though the battle had ended. Then, without warning, there was something up there with them: a kind of towering diamond-shaped flame of white energy inside of which, naked and transcendent, was a Human female with long, flowing red hair...
The vision, if that indeed was what it was, also appeared to L
unk and Annie, who were down below in another part of the arena.
"What the devil is that thing?!" Lunk said, back behind the wheel of the APC now.
At that the flame seemed to tinkerbell across the sky, as though calling to them. Annie swore to herself that she was seeing Marlene up there but dismissed the thought as wishful thinking. The flame, however, did seem to be beckoning to them.
"Do you get the feeling it wants us to follow it?"
"That seems to be the idea," said Lunk, putting the vehicle into gear. "And I've learned that you never say no to a hallucination."
At the same time, almost directly over the hive, where the fighting had been fast and furious, Scott and Lancer were reconfiguring their fighters to Battloid mode in the hope that some of the Expeditionary Force fly-boys would follow their lead. The air combat units had been sustaining heavy losses, and Scott reasoned that the boys had been flying far too long in zero-gee theaters. He recalled the fear he had felt when Lunk first surprised him with the Alpha-and back then he was only going up against two or three Troopers ships, nothing like the swarms of Invid aircraft that were in the skies today.
Reconfigured, the two teammates demonstrated what a year of guerrilla fighting had taught them, they dropped down close to the hive, rifle/cannons blazing, and took out one after another Invid ship-even the most recent entries to the aliens' supply: the Battloid-like Retaliator ships, upscale versions of the Invid Urban Urban Enforcer street machines. Lancer went so far as to bat a couple of them with the rifle/cannon, showing just how to make gravity work to one's advantage.
Then suddenly there was a kind of flame whisking along beside them, tipped on its side and incandescent.
Lancer said: "It's some sort of vapor cloud, I think. But I can't get a decent fix on it. See if you can get close to it."
Scott banked his fighter toward the apparition and trained his scanners on it. But it was his eyes that gave him the answer: Inside the flame cloud a naked figure swam, larger than life and recognizable.
No, it can't be! Scott thought.
All at once Lancer's voice pierced the cacophony of sounds coming over the tac net.
"I'm hit, Scott! The gyro-stabilizers are shot! I can't get myself turned around! Can't get the canopy up, either. I'm down and out-,buddy!...A memory!"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
One of the intriguing (and unanswered) questions of [the Third Robotech War] is how Ariel/Marlene accomplished her minor miracle in the skies above Reflex Point. Nesterfig (in her controversial study of the social organization of the Invid) advances the theory that Ariel somehow "borrowed" Protoculture energy leaking from the hive barrier shield-the same that so affected the surrounding countryside. But this does not really answer the question. Neither Corg nor Sera was endowed with similar abilities, and most experts agree that they were the most highly evolved of the Regis's creations. The Lady Ariel herself was never able to shed light on this curious incident.
Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point
In the cockpit of her command ship, Sera flashed a self-satisfied smile at her display screen. The Human pilots had hoped to get the better of her troops by reconfiguring their craft, but, vastly outnumbered, they were sustaining the same losses in Battloid mode as they had in Guardian. But suddenly her scanners revealed that Lancer's fighter had been one of those to feel the Invid wrath, and although his ship had not been destroyed, it was plummeting toward Earth, hopelessly out of control. As she watched him fall, memories of his face played across the screen, and when she could bear no more of it, she engaged the thrusters of her ship and fell in to rescue him. Ariel's words came back to her now: We have learned nothing Sera, nothing! And she answered back: "You're wrong, Ariel. I have learned to
love at least one of our enemies, enough to betray my own people."
Lancer caught sight of the rapidly approaching Invid command ship and guessed that it was corning in to finish him off. He had been struggling with the canopy release switches but had since abandoned any idea of freeing up the jammed mechanisms. His teeth were gritted now, and he was resigned to death. But all at once the Invid was actually scooping up his
wounded ship in its armored arms, and far from annihilating him, the enemy was pulling him out of his fall. He glanced up and saw through his canopy and the enemy ship's bubble cover that it was the blond woman pilot. Whether she was XT or Human had yet to be learned; but whoever, she was saving his life.
"Why?" he shouted. "Why?!"
And somehow her voice found its way through the VT's command net to answer him: "Don't ask me to explain," she told him. "But in saving your life I have forfeited my own!"
At the same time her ship let go of his, but the Alpha's systems were revived now, and the foot thrusters were able to maintain it at treetop level. Lancer had the Battloid's rifle/cannon raised, and it would have been a simple matter to destroy the command ship, but instead he let it escape unharmed, confused by this latest turn of events.
Closer to the hive, Scott was still staring at the flame cloud Marlene inhabited. Several other Battloids were similarly suspended, awed by the sight.
"Marlene...is it you?" Scott asked the thing hesitantly. "Is it really you?" In response, the flame leapt toward the hive. Cocooned within its radiance, Marlene, tike some living filament, stretched out her arms, and
sinuous waves of lightning leaked into the sky.
Scott engaged the VT's boosters and shot after her. Lancer was right behind him.
Corg's ship was not far off; while he watched the two Earth mecha streak off in pursuit of Ariel's projected image, the voice of the Regis entered his ship, informing him of Sera's betrayal.
"She did what?" Corg said in disbelief.
"It is true, Corg," the Regis repeated. "She has saved the life of one of the Robotech rebels."
"Then she is as tainted as Ariel." How was it that this Human species could make his sisters abandon their duty? he asked himself.
He vented his rage against two Battloids and three Alphas, destroying all of them with blasts from the forearm cannons of his ship; then he soared after Ariel and her rebel friends.
But if the flame had begun to alter itself, so had the weather. The land had suddenly passed from spring to summer, and now autumn leaves were falling. Rand and Rook were still following Marlene's form, a flickering sun trailing tendrils of light.
"Marlene," Rand shouted over the net, hoping she could hear him. "What does all of this mean?! What's going on?"
If they had any doubts that what they were seeing was truly Marlene, the voice they heard put an end to all of them.
"Can't you understand?" the flame seemed to ask, oscillating as it moved, its naked filament regarding them over her shoulder, long red hair streaming out behind as though it were a part of the light itself. "We are only trying to find a place where we can live in peace and security."
"Yeah, but you forgot something," Rand reminded her angrily. "This planet is our home, not some Invid retirement community."
"You must believe me, it was never our plan to destroy Humanity."
Marlene's flame shot ahead of them, a free-floating electrical disturbance against the crimson and yellow surface of the hive.
"Then what was your plan?"
"I am neither Human nor completely Invid. I am a new form of life that is a blending of the two. I see that now, although my Regis does not. I can see that it was never our destiny to remain in this Human form. But I must somehow make her understand."
Even though they were scattered, the rest of the team-Scott and Lancer, Lunk and Annie-were monitoring the conversation.
"And this new form of life is planning to replace the old one, I suppose," said Lancer, still thinking about the humanoid pilot who had saved his life.
"My friends, follow me into the central core, the heart of the Invid
civilization. There all your questions will be answered."
With that the flame dove into the hive, opening a radiant portal in the
side of the dome.
"She went in," Annie said in an amazed voice from the shotgun seat of the APC. "You're not going to follow her, are you?" she added, tugging on Lunk's arm.
"You better believe I am," he told her firmly. "Listen, Mint, if you're scared, you can hop out. I'll be back for you."
"I'm not scared," she harumphed, turning her back to him. "I don't think... "
They were approaching a blinding white hole in the side of the hive now, driving entirely out of their own world, destined perhaps never to return.
It was a little like being underwater or within a living bloodstream, replete with cells and corpuscles. In the distance they could discern a blinding white sphere, bisected by a horizontal ray that spanned the field from one side to the other.
And Marlene's form was still leading them in.
"I can't believe it," Rand said to Rook over the net. "We're inside Reflex Point. I thought we were supposed to be destroying this place, not taking the grand tour."
"I think I prefer the view from the outside. Where do you suppose she's taking us?"
"Over the rainbow," said Rand.
Almost everyone emerged at the same moment: Rook and Rand, still in Battle Armor mode, Lunk and Annie in the APC, and Lancer and Scott in their fighter mode Alphas. The place was a huge cavernous chamber, filled with light and supported by what seemed to be webwork strands of living neural tissue. Suspended overhead was an enormous globe of pure Protoculture instrumentality, a kind of veined bronze sphere with dark
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