Metamorphosis

by Jack McKinney

  Eddie heaved a long breath. "Because you're going where there's more fighting, and that's not what I want, Mint. Paradise was just a lie. My dad's brother has a ranch down south; that's where we'll go. You can come with us if you want, but I'm not getting involved in any war! Besides, I have to look after my family."

  Then he had dropped her hand and run to jump into the passenger seat next to his mother and father. "So long, Annie. Good luck."

  "Eddie! Good-bye!" Annie called, but didn't move. The truck pulled away into the dusk. "l love you!"

  She whirled and threw herself into Lunk's arms and wept. Lunk held her and wept for her, too.

  Rand was sitting on and patting the crates of ordnance and the few precious Protoculture cells Maxwell had been forced to give up. "At least we got supplies and ammunition."

  Rook still had her chin on her fist. "The chance to kill him against a few supplies? I still don't like the trade." Rand knew better than to try to reason with her in a mood like this.

  Scott turned and saw the APC throwing up a trail of dust, speeding up out of Deguello. "We move out as soon as Lancer comes back."

  Lunk's borrowed APC bounced up the road from the town, Carla's suitcase loaded in the back. Lancer somehow felt stiff and absurd sitting next to Carla. He tried again. "I simply don't want you mixed up in all this; same reason as before."

  She looked across at him for an instant, then ahead through the windshield. "I'm not afraid to fight."

  "I know that."

  But Lancer wasn't so sure Maxwell would let her go, despite all the mayor's assurances. Then the subject changed from the abstract to the immediate; dashboard displays bleeped, showing three flights of Pincer Ships cresting a ridge nearby.

  Lancer stepped hard on the accelerator, ignoring the danger of the curves. He felt a coldness right down at his center.

  Good try, but-they've got us this time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  How did the Regis lose contact with Ariel, such an important agent? The technically minded hindsighters will point out several reasons. The rest of us have learned better by now.

  Nichols, Zeitgeist Reconsidered: Alien Psychology and the Third Robotech War

  The pincer ships swept in, but there were abruptly three new blips on the dashboard's scanners.

  Maxwell's trio of prized autofighters swooped in hard at the Invid armor-piercing cannon rounds, loosing missiles and, breaking left, right, and upward, following the aero-maneuvering programs in their memories-maneuvers the Invid hadn't had the time or necessity to learn...until now.

  Lancer stopped for only a moment, looking back to see the warplanes fighting their last battle. He saw the bright fireglobes of exploding Pincer mecha in the sky, and the whirling, flaring wreckage of enemy war machines.

  Go get 'em! Lancer tromped his foot down hard on the accelerator.

  Maxwell, in a secret tech-pit, watched his fighters roll up a score and then, one by one, be overwhelmed and sent down in flames. He liked to think that his father would have been happy at this last stand, even though it came late in the game.

  At least Carla will be safe. So much for the jets. What does it matter?

  Not much, without Carla.

  He leaned back in the control center chair and closed his eyes, wishing that he would never have to open them.

  Snow had begun drifting down.

  Lancer had his arm around Carla's waist. "Donald sacrificed all three of his father's fighters to save us-no, to save you."

  He could see that she knew that; she was looking back at Deguello rather than at the smoking remains of the warplanes and mecha. Lancer wanted to wrap her in her coat and take her along with him.

  "Why?" She was trembling.

  A core of honesty made him answer. "You're everything to him. He wanted to save your life."

  He was beginning to shiver, the flakes melting on his skin and the thin bodysuit. "What now, Carla?" He gripped her shoulders in strong hands. "I won't let him use you again!"

  "Oh, Lancer! I have to-I'm going back." She reached for the satchel she had left in the APC. "This time I guess I'm the one who's jumping the train." She reached up, held him close, kissed him with hopeless passion.

  "Good-bye Lancer; good-bye, Yellow."

  Then she was going back down the road, walking to the lights of the mayor's mansion. Lancer walked slowly to the truck.

  He automatically checked for the weapons the team had taken from Maxwell's goons and saw the pile was one gun light. The little palm-size shooter was gone.

  Love or death; what will it be?

  Lancer took a last look down the road at Deguello. As Yellow Dancer, he blew a last kiss to Carla. Then, as Lancer once more, he pulled on the parka Lunk had left on the seat, hardened his heart to all that had gone on before, and floored the accelerator, to go meet the Invid, to take them on on their own ground.

  Maxwell had told the truth in at least one matter: the Invid fortress blocked the only usable pass.

  The team had hoped to avoid it; the hidden road was perilous but had served for much of the way. A recent quake had brought the entire side of a mountain down, though, making further progress impossible. There was no

  choice but to tackle the fortress.

  Watching the morning patrol of Pincer Ships and Shock Troopers return, Scott did his best not the hear Annie's teeth chattering and not to think about the silent shivering of Marlene and the others.

  "It's a pattern," Lancer said, still grave after days journeying from Deguello. His skin was paler than ever from the high-country snow and chill. "The bulk of their mecha goes out at sunrise. That's the best time to make our move, Scott, whatever our move is going to be."

  They were still bickering about the best way to deal with the alien stronghold when they heard a cracking and splintering of wood, and Rand's cry, "Tim-ber-rrrr!"

  By nightfall, they were sitting around Rand's fire, wearing every stitch of clothing they had, and huddling under cargo pads from Lunk's truck as well. Under the draperied shelter of a rock overhang, Rand used the molecule-thin edge of a Southern Cross survival knife to carve skis, bringing them up every so often to sight down their lengths critically, while he explained.

  "Okay; we can't get our mecha anywhere near that fortress without being detected, right? So one of us has to get cross-country to the fortress and knock out their Protoculture detection gear."

  "And so you'll just ski on in there?" Lancer asked with a tug of a grin. But Scott admitted, "It might work. What other chance do we have?

  When Rand signals us that, he's knocked out their sensors, we'll run the gauntlet and hope nobody notices."

  "There's only one hangup, isn't there, Rand?" Rook asked, giving him a look he couldn't quite read. "You don't have any idea what an Invid sensor looks like."

  "I'll know it when I see it," he grumbled.

  Annie grabbed one of the skis and began sighting along it as if she knew what she was doing. "Hey, Rand! You're gonna let me come along, aren't'cha?"

  He shaved another paper-fine layer off the ski he was working on.

  "Actually, Mint, I'm afraid I cut these for somebody a little older and taller than you. With blue eyes and long, strawberry-blond hair and a shape that-"

  A snowball hit him in the back of the head.

  "I mean, a team spirit that we all admire," Rand amended.

  "Well, you can count me out," Rook told him. "This dame isn't wandering around in the wilderness with you, country boy-"

  It was just then that Marlene went into another seizure. Nobody but Rook saw how hurt Rand looked; nobody but Rand saw how confused Rook seemed by what she herself had said.

  Lunk, Scott, and the others kneeling near Marlene didn't seem to be of much help and she appeared to come out of the fit by herself. Rook, standing and looking down at her, said, "It's almost as if she's got some horrible memory locked up deep inside, that's trying to push her over the edge."

  Rand looked at Rook's profile in the firelight,
and wondered how much of that was something Rook was projecting.

  The Invid fortress was cut into a mountain face that resembled a miniature Matterhorn pockmarked with hemispherical openings.

  "Look: I cut those skis down for you, Mint," Rand told Annie, "but don't get cocky. Practice runs are a lot different from what we're gonna have to do today."

  "Don't call me 'Mint'!" was all she had to say, as she adjusted her improvised bindings.

  The others looked on from the treeline. Watches had been synchronized, explosives packed, weapons charged-all of it checked a dozen times over and then checked again. Rand had managed to snatch a little sleep, but he doubted that Scott had slept at all.

  The fact that Annie should accompany Rand was less and less of a surprise to them. Aside from the Forager, she was the only one with cross-country experience (she insisted that some undyingly devoted boyfriend had taught her). And aside from Rand, she was the only one who

  could hope to cross the open country to the fortress in a reasonable amount of time. The snow was so chancy that even snowshoeing was out of the question.

  At five A.M., when the sun was beginning to light the sky, Rand and Annie moved out.

  As Rand turned to go, snatching his makeshift ski poles out of the ground, Rook seemed to be about to say something or even grab his arm. But when she saw he was looking at her, she abruptly turned away.

  Annie turned out to be a better skier than Rand himself, though neither of them was very good. Then Annie got fancy, Rand tried to chastise her-a bad move while skiing-and they both ended up in a snowbank.

  It proved to be a heaven-sent spill; shadows crossed the snow and Invid Pincer Ships landed to examine things that had fallen from Annie's pink rucksack. Somehow, the skiers' tracks had been obliterated by the drift of snow on the slope.

  "That's my bikini!" Annie yelped, struggling to get to her feet and take on the entire Invid horde by herself. Rand pushed her face down further in the snow, stifling her.

  The Invid hooked the bikini bottom in question (Why was she carrying it on a ski run? Rand wondered) in its claw, and raised it close to its optic sensor for examination. The mini-panty had in turn hooked one of the metallic submarine-sandwich-like charges the team had prepared for the fortress job.

  Seeing it tottering there in the seat of the bikini, Rand pushed the struggling Annie even further into the snow. The sapper charge tottered and fell. Rand exhaled in relief when the charge proved inert. The Invid personal armor mecha dropped the bikini bottom and rocketed away on a wash of thruster-fire.

  Skiing to the base of the fortress mountain held no other terrors; they kicked off their improvised bindings. A modified grenade launcher got a grapnel up to an opening. There was terror in the climb, as they watched a patrol of Shock Troopers cruise by below them. But the Invid didn't notice

  the climbing rope, and the Humans pulled themselves up near the topmost access tunnel.

  Annie nearly fainted back into Rand's arms; a Shock Trooper mecha was standing there.

  Rand shoved the edge of his hand in Annie's mouth and she bit down so hard that she drew blood. But the Trooper appeared to be looking at the surrounding peaks with no more interest than an Alpine sightseer. It turned to go, each step sounding like a boiler being thrown down on a concrete floor, back down the dark, arched tunnel from which it had come. Rand rubbed his hand and wondered if Annie had had her shots lately.

  The two pushed their goggles back and went in after the Trooper. The tunnel was a place of heat gradients, the chamber at the end being almost womblike in its warmth and moisture. It was a bizarre landscape of structures that looked like neurons and axons (or were they stalactites and stalagmites?). Dendrites bent and arched, and the undulating ceiling resembled Liver Surprise. Cable-thick creepers ran from the squishy-looking support members. A knee-high mist obscured everything. "All this place needs is bats," Rand whispered.

  Bela Lugosi, where are you?

  They sprinted through the echoing, gutlike halls of the Invid, trying not to breath. Annie had banished all rational thought from her brain, and so she was surprised when Rand hauled her behind one of the sticky-looking dendrite pillars.

  There was a strange echo as the three smaller mecha stumped by, these ones only eight or nine feet tall, their optical sensors set in long snouts. They had the faces of metallic archer-fish. Even the two Humans heard the resonating message in the Regis's voice, the very armor of the enemy reverberating with it, "All my outlying units, report to transmutation chamber at once!"

  Rand watched them lumber off. "This could be a lot harder than we figured."

  He had pushed Annie into the shadows of a doorway of some kind, and

  she began experimenting with the wet-looking, illuminated membranes that looked like buttons.

  A door-size sphincter opened next to her; she gasped, seeing what lay beyond, then giggled. "Open Sesame!" Words she had always dreamed of using, so appropriate now. There were certainly more than forty bad guys in this cave.

  The two stepped into the next chamber, awestruck, gazing around them. Their stage whispers were lost in the size of the place.

  "Wouldja look at-" "Holy-"

  It was the size of the biggest indoor arena Rand had ever seen, the one in the radiation-glazed deathtown they used to call Houston. He and Annie walked out on a gantrylike thing, which looked like a suspended arm with dangling Robotech fingers. They looked down.

  Ringing the center of the huge dome were concentric ranks of egg-shaped objects: motionless protoplasmic things, with untenanted mecha sleeping inside like hunkered fetuses. And at the center of that vast place was a brilliant, shining dome. To Rand, it resembled those twentieth-century pictures of the first nanoseconds of a thermonuclear explosion. Around it grew a low, irregular palisade of things like budding mushrooms, but they stood ten yards high.

  Annie looked down at the embryonic mecha. "Y'think they're all asleep, or something?"

  Rand shrugged. "Y'got me, but if they are, maybe we can wake 'em up." His patented grin showed itself. "A riot in the Invid Incubator Room! That's gotta be some diversion."

  Still, the ranks of huge eggs reminded him uncomfortably of an old-time space flick he had seen as a kid, and he had no intention of having something leap up and give him some interspecies mouth-to-mouth. He held Annie back and kept his gun level as he pulled a coin out of a slit pocket over his midsection and tossed it.

  The coin glittered in the red-orange-yellow light and bounced off the

  top of one egg. Rand was expecting a gelatinous quiver, but instead the coin bounced with a metallic bonk! and skipped, to land on the floor with a faint chiming. Nothing moved, nothing happened.

  "My last quarter," Rand said ruefully. A 1/4-Cid piece from the city-state of Espana Nueva back down south. True, it wouldn't be much good on the road to Reflex Point, but still...

  "Maybe they're in suspended animation," he considered, rubbing his jaw. "And maybe they won't wake up until they're supposed to."

  He disregarded the idea of using his gun to experiment further; most likely, it would set off alarms and draw the enemy straight to him. Then Annie was crooning, "Uhohh-hh."

  A saucer-shaped air-vehicle whose underside was all glowing honeycomb-hexagons had come floating silently from among distant dendrites. Its curved, mirrorlike upper surface showed four equidistant projections like knobbed horns. It came directly at Rand and Annie.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  So? I thought you country boys could rub your psoriasis together and start a fire? Where's that pioneer spirit?

  Rook, to Rand

  The flying saucer was fifty feet wide. When it had covered most of the distance separating it from the intruders, it halted. It remained motionless, lying dead still without sound or motion.

  Suddenly the honeycomb-cells began shedding harsh light, the saucer's underside solid convex of brilliance. One of the embryo-mecha began to glow. Its egg expanded and rose into the air toward the saucer. R
and and Annie stopped their withdrawal and watched what was happening.

  Again there was the regal female voice, reverberating from the saucer, the cross-echoes making it difficult to understand. But Rand thought he heard, "Nine-X-Nineteen has been selected for transmutation. The quickening will begin. Retrieve a Scout pod and transfer it to Hive Center. "

  The egg had disappeared and the unborn Scout was enclosed in a larger globe of light, some sort of lifting field. It looked similar to the ones Rand and the team had fought. It was slowly unlimbering, its contours still curved to its confinement, the way a baby bird's are to its shell for the first few moments after it breaks free.

  Rand and Annie watched the mecha borne away by the saucer. He's being promoted? Rand tried to puzzle out. He didn't know much about how Invid society really functioned; nobody did, or at least nobody who was talking.

  Annie shook him and he realized that time was wasting away.

  In the Hive Center lay one of the bio-constructs that was the Regis's direct contact with each installation and every individual of her far-flung realm. It was the center of the hive's reverence, obedience...adoration. It

  spoke to the hive members, and with them, and for them.

  It was situated in a shallow nutrient pool about five or six yards wide, filling two-thirds of it. A half-dozen mature light-stalks blossomed around it, beaming down nourishing rays-radiating flowers like the Flower of Life and yet unlike it.

  The darker chocolate-orange of the Hive Center's floor was broken across its entire span by large and small dark pink circles. It looked as if a hundred spotlights of various sizes shone there. But the only visible path of light was the incandescent beam that shone down on the Sensor, the coordinating intellect-clearinghouse of the hive.

  Mecha stood by as the Regis spoke. Listening to her were a single looming Scout unit and a half dozen and more of the smaller, more highly evolved, trumpet-snouted Controllers.