Scott saw Rook's fingers, the ones on her free hand, curl into a fist and then open again, away from Rand's sight. It was like some quick debate.
Scott watched Marlene's lithe grace in the spray and surf. Maybe they're right about this place. We should enjoy it while we can.
Corg and Sera and the mecha they led split up to search the chain of islands for the rebels and for the Simulagent, Ariel. Sensor triangulations indicated that there was a strong possibility she was near.
They understood their orders. If possible, they were to contact Ariel. If not, they were to observe her interaction with the Humans in order to determine the cause of her malfunction. Failing any of the above, they were to destroy her utterly, and the outcasts who had swayed her.
Lancer grew despondent looking at the pointless destruction the Invid had inflicted on the island. He followed a stream he had spotted from the air and found a small waterfall in a grotto a few hundred yards up an overgrown trail into the jungle. He tried not to reflect upon all the people who had come that way before him, and what their eventual fate had been.
This time he put aside the Musume persona. He waded in and began washing the sweat of fear and battle and the rankness of too many hours in the cockpit from him. He sang loudly in Lancer's voice. He sang as if he were trying to drown out some other tune, perhaps a funeral dirge...
It might have been memory of the Magruder ambush that kept him alert. Even though the little waterfall was splattering, he heard foliage parting and swinging back, and caught the movement of a shadow out of the corner of one eye.
Sera had picked up those strange auditory impulses through the superattuned senses of her mecha. The Regis had given her crowned offspring the means to know what it was to be a demigod, to soar over oceans and continents-to see each movement of the blades of grass, hear each bend of a leaf.
But the Regis never guessed what a trap that could be. The strange sonic input kept Sera from firing on its source. It kept her from contacting her brother Corg, or the Pincer Ships. The only thing she could do was stalk closer. She had heard the music of the spheres, but she had never heard Human singing before.
Before she realized what she was doing, she was out of the all-embracing armored safety of her mecha, padding through the strange smells and sights and sounds of the island, the terrifying intimacy of it. She was drawn by the siren song.
She couldn't put a name to what she felt. She knew that not all of her genetic coding came from the Regis, of course. Some of it was Human. Was that what was forcing her to this aberrant activity? She repressed any doubt; she must see what was making these compelling, beautiful sounds. Information wetware input told her that it was what the Humans called "singing" but that word was a mere cipher...
The Human had long purple hair and was a male. He was standing under a precipitation runoff as some sort of an ablutionary function or perhaps a superstitious rite. The Human sang, and Sera hunkered down to listen. But her hand pressed frond to frond, which made slight noise and changed the silhouette of vegetation against the westering sun.
She saw him tense and look around, and she drew back. When she edged one eye up for another look, he was pressing into the heavier part of
the waterfall, off to the right, where the view was screened from her by the thickness of the foliage and the weight of the water.
This was madness. She should kill him, summon her brother Corg, and eradicate all the rest of them. But there was something about the sounds he made. His "song" was so haunting, so soft and knowing, as if he had been given instruction in the things most intimate to her.
The feelings that stirred in her had no name. Sera pushed forward a little in the undergrowth to hear more before she would be obliged to still that voice forever.
She could hear nothing. She waited, standing on the rim of the waterfall's pool, looking this way and that. With the song ended, a measure of sanity returned. Better to kill the Human now and forget the aberration of his singing.
Two hands closed on her ankles, pulled, and Sera screamed. Then she was swallowing water.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
There were all these escapist books (as Rand called them) at the resort-I couldn't make out the name of the joint too well from the sign, but I think that for some reason or other it was called "Club Mud."
These books were all about what fun. everybody was gonna have living action-packed lives after some global disaster. They didn't mention radiation sickness and self-aborting children and plagues and famine and pillagers and-oh, you jaded oldtimers! I'm sick of you!
Escapist? From hot showers and hot meals and dentists and intercontinental airline flights and inoculations and a planet that belonged to the Human race? Escape me there!
Annie LaBelle, Talking History
Sera opened her eyes and saw a pale face and purple hair riding the water lazily, before her.
Lancer saw an indistinct figure in some sort of body suit. This certainly wasn't an Invid. That didn't mean it couldn't be another turncoat. The person squirmed, blowing breath in silver bubbles of alarm, thrashing to the surface.
Lancer held his captive by one wrist, shaking the water out of his own hair. "All right, pal! You're not going anywhere until...until...Um. You're a woman."
She seemed transfixed, a slim Human female, medium-tall, with short-trimmed blonde hair and the strangest red eyes-the kind of thing you see in a bad flashphoto. Her hairstyle was, even wet, some short, green-blonde upswept thing: Peter Pan Meets the Razor and Car Vacuum People. She was dressed in a bodysuit of colored panels of black, purple, and pink.
Lancer's nerveless fingers had gone limp on her wrist. "Ah wo-mahn?" she repeated back at him, breathing quickly, as nervous as-as someone he
remembered. They were knee-deep in the pool now, and she just stared at him.
She lurched to get away from him, but Lancer cuffed his hand around her wrist again, more astounded than alarmed. "Sorry, but we'll have to know where you're from."
He looked over her dermasuit, a second skin. "At least you're not armed. Or is beauty your weapon?" His lips were close to hers.
She pursed her own, parted them, then suddenly struck at him, and struggled frantically to break free, sobbing.
Rand shook the water out of his thick red hair. Marlene, listening to a shell, flinched a bit as the water hit her but never lost her smile. She laughed at the water that was being sprayed at her; there was light everywhere she looked.
Rand was panting, leaning on the boogyboard he had found in the ruins of the resort. "Scott, you're missing a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Quit pretending to be a sand crab."
"Rand, I am not pretending to be a sand crab. Uh, what is a sand crab?" "What're you talking about? At least take off that dumb flight suit!" Scott had no way of refusing Rand's demands short of physical violence.
Flight suit and all, Rand dragged him into the water. Rook watched them, easing her aching leg and arm. Rand seemed so young and limber and in the water, especially, he seemed slick and carefree as a pink sea otter. What hope could she have for a life with someone like that? He hadn't accumulated the chronicle of sins that she had. Rook sighed.
Scott confessed that he didn't know how to swim; virtually none of the spaceborne generation did. Rand only took that as a challenge to teach him. About thirty seconds of Rand's instruction had Scott spitting water, and heaving, and vowing to stick to solid ground from then on.
Out where the mecha were parked, Lunk was running repairs and listening to Annie's apparently endless heartbreak stories. "I'm beginning to
think I'll die an old maid! I might even wind up as a librarian!"
That comment brought Lunk's head up out of the cockpit of Rook's Alpha, where he had been working. The only meaningful relationship he had had was a romance with a librarian. She was a fiery young woman who knew how to handle a gun and was determined that the books would live and that they would be there when Homo Sapiens eventually started picking up the pieces.
He drew a great breath and told Annie, "You're such a heartbreaker, you'll probably get married five or six times. Do me a favor and invite me to every wedding."
She shrieked with laughter, grabbed the thick hair of his sideburns and showered his face with kisses.
Lancer thought he had spied his prey. He dodged into a clearing, but he saw that he had been fooled by a trick of the light. He stopped, froze, then called out, "Wait! I only want to talk to you! There may be Invid nearby! You may be in great danger!"
He heard a thrashing behind him, turned to see the pink along one flank as she ran, and yelled after her even as he sprinted to pursue. "Please stop-"
Sera could have gotten away if she had really wanted to. Why had she lingered? Why had she watched him?
"I just want to know who you are and where you're from! It's very important to me! Hey!"
Lancer could hear her ahead, sobbing and stumbling. He ran with an even breath, hopping some obstacles and ducking others. At last he bounded into a clearing where hot, blinding light shone down on him. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand and gazed up.
It was an alien mecha like nothing there had ever been before, anywhere. The late morning sun glinted all around it, and reflected off
enormously strong purple components and pink trim, making the machine-mountain difficult to see.
Lancer blocked the light with his hand, moving a little.
It must have landed while I was swimming, but-it didn't attack me! It seems abandoned. But how could that be? According to all reports the drones are helpless eggs outside their mecha.
He heard a sound and sensed some movement. The young woman stepped out from behind one of the machine's colossal legs. He saw now that the color pattern of her bodysuit reiterated the colors of the alien Trooper.
He stared at her as she watched him silently. "Y-you can't be the pilot!
You're Human, not an Invid drone; where's the pilot, the alien?"
Something galvanized her; she leapt, incredibly high, as the mecha bent toward her, the turret in its muzzle blossoming open to receive her. Rather than the egg-nest described by Rand and Annie, the new Trooper's control nacelle was a padded cockpit completely encased in armor.
Lancer was still yelling to her as the cockpit closed and the Trooper's back and foot thrusters fired up. He was nearly blown from his feet and singed by the backwash; the invader lifted off, leaving the grass burned and smoldering where it had stood.
He blinked, coughing from the smoke and the sand she had kicked up. By the time he opened his eyes again, the Trooper was a diminishing meteor racing to the east.
This is unbelievable! She was the pilot of that mecha! Does this mean Humans are fighting for the Invid?
Shaken by her encounter with Lancer, and unable to unravel the complex series of feelings and impulses that had assailed her, Sera rejoined Corg and the contingent of Shock Troopers. But she made no mention of what had happened and that, too, confused her.
But Corg and the Troopers' sensors had detected Lunk's test activations, as he checked his repair job. Sera had barely rejoined them when they
assumed attack formation and rocketed toward the island where Humans had been sensed.
Rand eased himself into a frayed chaise longue next to Rook. Scott threw himself down on all fours in the sand, resolving never to go swimming in a flight suit again. As he hunched around to sit down, his hand happened to touch Marlene's shoulder.
She gasped as if she had been touched with a live wire, and seemed to go into shock. "Must've pinched some kinda nerve," Rand diagnosed.
"I tell you, I barely touched the woman!" Scott shot back angrily, face reddening at the thought of how he longed to caress her.
"Su-uure, Scott," Rook teased. "Probably just your sexual magnetism." She looked to Marlene, who was gazing into empty air. "This might be a good sign, though, if she's having flashbacks or something; maybe it means her memory's returning."
"I hope so," Scott said, but he wondered if he really did, or if he would be sorry on the day that happened.
Marlene abruptly clutched at her hair. "I feel them coming closer!
They're here!"
But the thunder of the attack had already made the Humans look up. Down through the clouds plunged Corg and Sera, leading their Pincer Ships and Shock Troopers. "Invid squadron heading this way!" Rand hollered, bounding out of his beach chair.
"Invid," Marlene was moaning. "Reflex Point...Regis..."
"We're out of time, but I think we can still make a break for it," Scott said, tight-lipped. "I'll run the boats. Rand, Rook: suit up and make sure you're ready for my signal."
They snapped to it, fast as any Mars Division elite troops, sprinting away, feet throwing up sand. Scott grabbed for Marlene's arm, but this time she showed no reaction to his touch.
The Invid completed several sweeps of the island, preparing to go in
closer. Then they noticed the pair of PT boats moving out to sea at maximum speed.
Corg felt delighted at the chance to slay Humans. With voice and arm signals, he ordered the attack. Pincer Ships followed him for the first pass. Scott, on shore, watched and did his best to evade the enemy's strafing runs, but the jury-rigged remote controls were slow in responding.
Rand and Rook rushed to get into their armor, dragging the camouflage nets off their VTs even while Lunk was working, with infuriating deliberateness, to finish the last of his repairs on Rook's Alpha.
Two passes had both PTs leaking smoke and had blown open the weather bridge on one. Receiving no counterfire, the Invid dropped lower to recon. They saw the boat's wheel moving with no living hand upon it, and noted the remote transmissions it was receiving.
The Regis's voice spoke from their computer/commo net. "Scanners reveal no Human units in target vessels. Warning! Possible strategic entrapment maneuver!"
Scott figured he had played the possum hand for just about all it was worth. Here we go; firing all missiles.
The team had loaded the PT boats' racks with surface-to-air missiles, since surface-to-surface combat was unlikely. Now the launchers rose and traversed and targeted. Guided by their radars, the racks emptied, and sixteen Tarpon heat-seekers came boiling and corkscrewing up at the Invid. Caught by surprise, three of the Pincer Ships were blown to bits. The rest went into evasive maneuvers.
Corg studied the situation. The computer delivered its analysis in the Regis's voice. "Tracking sensors place origin of remote control transmissions at coordinates delta 6-5. Presence of Human life-form at that location is also confirmed. "
Corg's optical sensor showed him another ocean craft, a bigger one,
docked at a quay under a sheltering boatyard roof. Corg dove toward it, with the Pincer Ships and, eventually, Sera failing in behind.
Scott watched as they neared the island.
Lancer charged into the clearing where the VTs were being readied for flight. "I just found out-something horrible," he panted.
Rand was armored, helmet in hands. "What is it? We just sprang the trap!"
"The repairs are all finished and it's time to scramble," Rook added. "What's the problem now?"
Lancer gave them a devastated look. "I just found out that the Invid are using Human pilots!"
Scott sat behind the controls of the cutter's main gun battery, in the forward turret. The pumped-laser cannon was outmoded by Mars Division standards, but it still delivered a terrific shot.
Corg and Sera, dodging the cannon blasts, homed in on the cutter like angry dragonflies. Scott had already shot down one Pincer Ship, but these new mecha were frustratingly fast and maneuverable. Their annihilation disc shots chopped up the water and the quay around the cutter, and Scott clenched his teeth. C'mon Rand! Rook, Lancer! Don't let me down!
Then the VTs were on the scene, closing in on the oncoming Invid, both sides pitching wit
h all the firepower they had. The new-style mecha dodged, but two more Pincer Ships went down. The aliens broke and evaded, scattering to re-form and change their tactics.
Scott knew they would be back shortly though. He pulled himself from the turret as Annie, Marlene, and Lunk hurried over. Lunk tossed his tool cases in the direction of the little stern chopper pad, where his trusty truck was hidden-covered with a tarp in preparation for the voyage.
Scott assured Annie that he was all right and Lunk apologized for the repairs' having taken longer than he expected. Scott gave the big ex-soldier's shoulder a squeeze. "Save your breath; you worked miracles for us, Lunk."
As per plan, Lunk assumed command of the cutter while Scott ran off to get his VT into the air. Just as Annie and Marlene were preparing to help free up the berthing lines, a growling in the air made Lunk look out to sea.
The Pincer Ship Scott had winged, its portside claw missing, trailing smoke and fire, had come around for a suicide run. It was aimed straight for the cutter.
Lunk sent Marlene and Annie to seek shelter, then dove into the forward gun turret and began pounding away at the alien with the pumped-laser cannon. Because the Pincer Ship's aerodynamics had been changed by the damage it had suffered, it bucked and was buffeted by the air, evading Lunk's fire more effectively than it could have if it had been whole.
The alien filled his targeting scope. A moment later the world went dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
By this time, the Mars and Venus Divisions should be well engaged in their battle with the Invid, and building toward the final blow at Reflex Point.
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