Metamorphosis

by Jack McKinney

  Acting as a scout for its unit just as Scott had done for his, an Invid Shock Trooper closed in on its target.

  Normally the Invid were slow to detect Humans unless the prey had been specifically targeted, or there had been a sizable expenditure of Protoculture. This time, however, the Regis's fearsome war machines had been sent to guard a specific area and herd specimens into the Genesis Pit. The Humans had come into their territory. By some oversight, there were no specific orders of any kind concerning Humans, and so the Troopers simply evaluated, the interlopers as they would any other life-form, and decided they too would be worthwhile subjects of experimentation.

  The Trooper kept its distance from the Humans, but some trick of the last filtering light of sunset piercing the dense trees betrayed it. Or perhaps Scott Bernard just had a feeling that they were being followed.

  Scott slid to a side-on stop, ready to trigger and image the change that would meld his Cyclone and his armor into a Robotech killing machine. Rand stopped, too, Annie clinging close, white-faced. "What's wrong, Scott?" Rand's voice came over the tac net.

  Scott shook his head slowly. "I'm sure I saw something moving. Back there."

  But how could it be an Invid? Scout or Shock Trooper, their instant

  reaction was to attack.

  "Don't tell me we're being watched!" Annie snapped at Scott, her lower lip trembling. "The Invid can't be everywhere!" She tried to get her arms all the way around Rand's armored midsection.

  Contrary to its genetic programming, the Shock Trooper drew back-in accordance with the special instructions given to the sentinels of the Genesis Pits. Here were more samples from present-day life-forms to interact with the Regis's replicated marvels.

  And an Entrapment intake waited near.

  "Calm down, Mint," Scott was saying in that strangely relaxed tone he took on when other people's neck hair was standing on end. He had used Annie's team nickname-"Mint," from her ongoing affair with peppermint candy-to calm her.

  "We've got to make sure the area's safe before the others get here. Or d'you want to see them ride into an ambush? No? Good. Rand, stay close. And cover me on the left."

  The Cycs moved out, Protoculture engines gunning.

  The Trooper floated back, almost delicately, close to the ground but leaving no print. As it circled it left its prey a clear path. All through this area, the Entrapments, a living part of the Genesis Pits, were growing in profusion, waiting to gulp down specimens.

  Scott suddenly wondered if they should pull back; if he should send Annie and Rand hurrying for safety and cover their retreat with a barrage of Cyclone firepower.

  But he realized that he and his companions had been led off to one side. Time had passed and Rook, Lancer, and Lunk were already near. It would be better to warn them first and then carefully withdraw.

  He couldn't raise the other three over the tactical communication net, though, and couldn't tell if it was his position among the terrain features or whether the Invid were jamming the system. He spied a spot of high ground ahead and headed towards it, hoping for a clear commo link.

  Then a shadow seemed to move across the hilltop-a shadow much

  larger than a bear or anything else that walked Earth's surface. It was going the other way, apparently oblivious to the scouts-heading for a point that would intersect Lancer and the others.

  Ambush! Scott had no doubt. He revved his superbike, giving Rand a hand signal so that the Invid could not intercept a transmission. The sand felt a little treacherous, but that didn't matter under the circumstances, the two Cycs were fully armed, and for once, it seemed, the team had caught the Invid mecha with their iron trousers at half-mast.

  He was about to order Rand to drop Annie off where she could take cover, then follow him on a stealthy approach-for-attack. But just then the ground opened up.

  All Scott could see was that a flap of thick, brown-mauve stuff-like a flap of canvas twenty yards wide and seven yards thick-had been drawn back. It was thickly edged with long purple hairs, or perhaps they were feelers because in that horrible instant Scott could see that they were moving in different directions.

  It seemed as though a monster's mouth had opened up in the Earth, ready to swallow them. But although Rand was extremely frightened and disgusted, he knew what this was. A pit! Oldest trap of 'em all!

  The Entrapment's mouth was gruesome, bending inward at all four midspans rather than from the corners.

  All thoughts of proper commo procedure faded like dew in the sunshine, and all Scott and Rand could hear over the tac net were one another's terrified howls; all they could hear over their external pickups was Annie's scream.

  We're not fated to win after all, it occurred to Scott, as the Cyclones spun down into a deep, dark shaft that gleamed wetly like a gullet. The Cyc riders kept their seats by sheer instinct; Annie clutched Rand's waist. They, fell into blackness, and what little light they had was cut off as the quadripartite Entrapment flaps above them closed serenely.

  "Switch to Battle Armor!" Scott hollered, too loudly, over the tac net. He operated the gross hand controls on the Cyc, but more importantly,

  imaged the transition through the receptors in his helmet. He knew Rand would be doing the same. But just then Rand felt Annie lose her grip and drift free in the powerful air currents of the pit.

  Mechamorphosis. That was the name Dr. Emil Lang had given these transitions so long ago, even before the start of the First War-that techno-origami shifting of shape.

  One moment, there were two young men in armor tumbling through the moaning air currents of the Entrapment, and the next, there was something going on.

  An onlooker might have thought that the Cycs were leukocytes destroying their riders, sliding up around them, Cyclone components meshing with armor components. The machines broke down into subunits to slide into their appointed places around the armor, as certain microorganisms might whip some critical hurt on certain other microorganisms.

  The Cycs' tires were up high and out of the way on the Cycloners' backs, allowing them free play and unlimited fields of fire with their Robotech weapons. But even the thrusters in their suits didn't help them against the enormous vacuum that drew them down. There was no way back up.

  Their armor flared anyway, to cushion the fall, and then somehow Rand heard a small, plaintive cry and realized that not everybody was protected.

  "Hold still, Annie!"

  It was a precision catch, possible only through Robotechnology. They were falling very fast, and simply rocketing armored arms under her would have only served to break the sweet, loudmouthed, red-haired soul of the team into three or-more likely-more pieces.

  But as it was, Rand matched velocities and made the save.

  He opened his helmet, careless of what might happen to him, holding Annie close-her pale face against his so that she could breathe the air his suit was pumping up in an effort to keep positive pressure.

  Her small fingers moved, clasping the lip of his helmet's

  chinguard...then she was still, though she kept breathing. Rand hugged her to him, shielding her as much as he could. Neither Rand's armor's thrusters nor Scott's could stop their fall; whatever was pulling them down, it was more than just gravity and air currents. Scott wasn't even sure they were being drawn straight downward.

  Rand, who was falling head first, was first to see it. "Scott! Look down there at that red glow coming right at us! Maybe there's a bottom floor after all!"

  A lighted area on the shaft's floor? A lava pool? The light down there seemed to shift and waver, but it had the glow of extreme heat.

  "A lot of good that'll do us if we go splat! Hit your burners!"

  Rand and Scott simultaneously hit their burners, while Annie moaned and cried. But the retrothrusters did no good, and in another moment they plunged into the hellish fire.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kraneberg, an oldtime historian of (North) American technology, once said-in the form of a First Law-"Technology
is neither positive, negative, nor neutral."

  Indeed. It is all three. And omnipresent.

  Scott Bernard's notes

  "Huh?"

  Scott was amazed that he wasn't being boiled alive. Instead, orange-yellow light played all around him, Annie, and Rand, reflecting off their armor and helmet facebowls.

  The light seemed alive, moving like writhing eels. It seemed to knot together in places with its ends exposed, like twists in snarled barbed wire. Elsewhere it had settled into layers, like the colors in a sunset. The radiance brightened, enveloping them.

  Their facebowls polarized to shield them, while poor little Annie squeezed her eyes shut and buried her head against Rand's armored chest. Scott checked his instruments, but the sensors were not working. "I, I think we're in some kind of energy field."

  "Unbelievable," Rand breathed. Then all at once the light was above them, and they were plummeting through utter blackness-or so it seemed, their facebowls still darkened. "We went straight through it! Are we near the bottom?"

  "Y'got me," Scott said, straining to see as his facebowl slowly depolarized. The place looked pitch black. The idea of a jagged rock floor racing up at them filled him with a cold despair.

  "Emergency power to retros-" he was saying, just as the Cyclone warriors hit the water with a tremendous splash.

  The first thing that Scott knew when he came to was that he had a monstrous headache. The next thing was that his eyes wouldn't focus properly, even taking into account the fact that he was trying to see through a helmet facebowl. He realized that he was sprawled out on his stomach. Before him, he saw his Cyclone armor's gauntlet-hand.

  He groaned, trying to flex his fingers. They barely moved. He saw that he was lying on...on soil. Dirt.

  He tried to see beyond the hand, his head trembling as he tried to lift it.

  His eyes were responding a little better, but what he saw made no sense.

  Those giant fern things we saw on Praxis? No; wait a second...'S not it...This's a diffr'nt planet...Earth...

  It didn't look like any place he had ever seen or heard about on Earth.

  It looked...primeval. Where are we, a swamp? What happened?

  Scott saw Rand sprawled out a few feet away, along the little stretch of sandy bank where they had landed.

  Scott crawled over to him, groaning and hoping the pain he felt in his side wasn't a cracked rib. "Rand! Rand, are you okay?" He shook the Forager's shoulder pauldron. "Come on, fella, speak to me!"

  Rand began to stir a bit. Through the external pickups, Scott heard a tiny moan. He looked beyond Rand and saw Annie lying a few yards away along the bank. She was making feeble attempts to sit up. "Annie, are you all right?"

  She sat up suddenly, wide-eyed but apparently unafraid, blinking at the dawnworld landscape. "What happened to me?"

  "We must've hit the bottom of the pit," he told her. Just then, Rand started coming around. "Take it easy, pal."

  But Rand rose to his feet. "What, d'we miss a turn somewhere?"

  He shook his head to clear it a bit. What he was staring at appeared to be seedferns. Cycads; club mosses and horsetails. Big and huge; small and almost microscopic. Off in the distance he could see what appeared to be conifers, ginkgoes, and more.

  What is this, a damn coal forest?

  Annie heard something that sounded a bit like a heavy-duty dentist's drill and ducked instinctively as something flashed by her ear. In a moment there was a cloud of them going past, though they seemed uninterested in the Humans. Their double wingsets were making silver blurs in the strange light of the place.

  "Dragonflies!" Rand burst out. But these were dragonflies the length of his forearm, with enormous wings-slower than their modern counterparts.

  Annie, seeing that they wouldn't hurt her, laughed with delight and skipped after them a few steps, the water splashing around her ankles.

  Scott and Ran had instinctively reconfigured their armor, the Cyclone combat bikes under them once again. "And this water's nice and warm!" Annie was saying. She was wrinkling her nose, though; the air of the place was thick and steamy-the heaviness of rotting vegetation, of primitive life.

  Annie's mood had turned to wonder, and she kicked up bright plumes of water. "Why don't you guys come in and give it a try?"

  She was still trying to get them to join her when the surface of the water broke behind her, and something huge began to rise. "Annie! Behind you!" Scott shouted, his voice sounding a bit strange and processed over his suit's external speaker.

  Both men were off their cycles, groping for their sidearms. Annie stood rooted as a plated head the size of a small fishing coracle reared, shedding water in all directions. It opened its mouth and revealed rows of teeth like thick pegs. Rand's mind threw up a strange word, Eogyrinus?

  Pieces of torn flesh still clung to the teeth, and it reeked of death and the marshes it hunted. Annie knew that through their helmets Scott and Rand couldn't even smell it.

  Scott and Rand were jockeying for a clear line of fire. It was seemingly hopeless with Annie standing frozen right in front of the thing, hypnotized like a mouse before a rattlesnake. They were both armed with MARS-Gallant Type-H90s-the latest word in hip-howitzers, but that firepower was of little use with Annie in the crosshairs.

  The thing had gotten very close. Rand saw that it was wide and flat, like

  a big croc with a bobbed, broad snout-no doubt an experienced shore hunter, just like the books said.

  Scott hollered at Annie to get out of the way. She backpedaled and fell on her rump in the wet sandy shore. She stared into hungry, merciless eyes that, she could see, saw her as nothing more than another morsel of food. She threw herself flat on the ground just as the creature reared up to lunge for her. Then the neon-blue blasterbolts flew, making a mewing sound.

  As the H90s spat, the torrid air got even hotter. Rand fired with the modified two-hand stance that Scott had taught him. The thing heaved up as the dazzling hyphens of energy hit it. Pieces exploded from it as the furious heat of the shots turned the moisture in its cells into superheated steam, blowing it apart. There was no blood from those wounds; instead, the gaping holes in the thing had the look of broiled meat. The stench of it made the atmosphere that much more repugnant.

  The monster thrashed and twisted. Roaring and bellowing, it swiped at the air with thick claws, snapping its jaws at the radiant bolts. Unable to understand what was happening, it nevertheless knew that it was dying. Its rage shook the air, the primeval plant-forest, and the sluggish lake waters. It fell back with a mighty splash, still quivering and contorting.

  Annie kept screaming as Scott and Rand dragged her back to shore by her jacket. "Mint, he didn't bite you, did he?" Scott asked anxiously.

  That seemed to bring her around a little. "N-no, but almost. And don't call me Mint, okay Scott?"

  He held out his hand to her. "Sure thing. Come on; up you go." But even as she was scrambling to her feet, Rand yelled and pointed, sounding thoroughly rattled.

  "Here comes more company!"

  Three more of the things had surfaced and began ripping away at the first, while it spasmed. They tore out huge gobbets of flesh, snarling and whistling. Scott remembered hearing somewhere that real Earthly gators usually left their prey to rot, if it was too small to swallow in one gulp. That wasn't the case with this lunch crowd. In seconds, flesh, bones, blood, and

  viscera surged and rolled in the oily waters.

  Rand gulped. "They passed on the salad course, I guess." "Just look at them," Annie breathed.

  Just then one of the three paused in its gorging to hiss a piercing whistle at them, giving them that same hungry, pitiless stare.

  "They're looking at us!" she cried.

  If we shoot, these three, do nine more show up? he wondered. Even Robotech weapons had their limits. He grabbed Annie's arm. "Let's get out of here! Move, move!"

  In another moment the armor had mechamorphosed, and the two Cyclones leapt away, Annie clinging
to Rand once more, the tires automatically adjusting to travel over the soft soil. The Eogyrinuses came swarming up at them moments too late.

  "Guess we lost 'em," Annie reported, glancing back over her shoulder to be sure. "I don't think they're built for long-distance events."

  "But where did they come from?" Scott murmured.

  Rand gazed upward. The sky held no sign of the energy field; instead there was a low gray haze. They sped up another dry watercourse, past tall, odd-looking conifers and cycads and some bennettitaleans.

  "The Lost World, " he said softly.

  Lancer looked at Rook hopefully as he hopped down from the cockpit of Scott's abandoned Alpha fighter. Let it be good news! Let her have found something!

  But as Rook slid her cycle to a stop, Lancer was already listening to negative results over the armored suits' tac net. "I followed the path north and cut a circle for a mile around. There wasn't a trace of them."

  As she finished her report, Lunk showed up in his olive-drab APC truck. "If they circled back, they weren't leaving tracks," he reported.

  That left another question. Scott's Cyclone was gone, and there were no tire marks anywhere. But why would they have gone straight to full armor and flown away, without leaving a message or trying to make commo

  contact with their teammates?

  Maybe the tire tracks had been obliterated by someone? That would be easy enough to do in this kind of soil.

  Lancer yelled out, "They know better than to do this to us. " Rand might be a bit impetuous, and Annie was flighty to say the least, but Scott, a trained officer and team leader, would never simply ignore his responsibilities.

  There was only one explanation that might make some sense of the situation, and that was the appearance of Invid.

  "Shouldn't one of us scout ahead?" Rand asked as the two Cyclones sped through the eerie landscape of the subterranean world. "I've had enough surprises for one day."

  "We'll stick together for now," Scott ordered.

  "Well, do you have any idea where we're headed?" The instruments were all useless.