“We’re all clear, Commander,” he reported, easing up the thinking cap’s faceshield.
Gardner’s face now flashed into view on the cockpit’s small commo screen. “Scott! We must try to slip through and hit Reflex Point before the Regess’ drones have a chance to regroup. Understood?”
“Roger Commander,” Scott returned. At a signal from the HUD, he dropped the faceshield, the inside surface of which was displaying approach vectors and numerical data. He opened the tac net. “Our entrance azimuth is one-two-one-one … Reconfiguring for orbital deviation.”
Scott armed the Veritech’s shield after it had shifted mode and brought the fighter alongside Gardner’s descending transport. The hull temperature of his own ship was reaching critical levels, and he reasoned that the same thing had to be occurring on the larger ship. A glance told him he was correct and more. The underside of the command vessel was radiating an intense glow that suggested an improper angle of approach. Scott waited for the vessel to correct itself, and when it didn’t, he went on the net.
“Recommend you recalculate entry horizon, Commander. The ship appears to be entering too quickly.”
“It can’t be helped, Scott. We’ve got to put down. Our shields will never see us through another attack.”
“Sir, you’ll never live to see another attack if you don’t readjust your course heading,” Scott said more firmly. “That ship wasn’t built for this kind of gravitational pull. You’re going to tear her apart!”
Scott tried to suppress a mounting feeling of panic. He heard Marlene tell Gardner that the reserve thermal energy shields were now completely exhausted. Gardner ordered her to engage the retros.
Scott craned his neck to see if the retros were having any effect, his guts like a knot pressing against his diaphragm. He saw something break free from the tail section of the transport, glow, and burn out. He was trying to maintain proximity with the ship, but as a result his own displays were suddenly flashing warnings as well. I’d better slow down myself if I don’t want to be decorating a big part of the landscape.
Scott pulled the mode selector to G position and stepped out of his fear temporarily to think the Veritech through to Guardian mode. As the legs of the mecha dropped, reverse-articulating, he engaged the foot thrusters, substantially cutting his speed. At the same time, Gardner’s transport was roaring past him in an uncontrolled plunge.
“Commander, pull out!” he cried into the net. Marlene!
Caught between self-sacrifice and desperation, Scott could do little more than bear witness to the agonizingly slow deterioration of the command ship—the end of all he held dear in the world. The transport was a glowing ember now, slagging off fragments of itself into the void. The intense heat would have already boiled the blood of those inside.…
Marlene!
His mind tried to save him from the horror by denying the events, cocooning him in much the same way the Veritech did. But averting his gaze only worsened matters: Everywhere he looked ships-of-the-fleet were breaking apart, flaming out as they plunged into Earth’s betraying blue softness, wings and stabilizers folded by heat, delicate necks snapped, molten alloy falling like silver tears in the night.
The Veritechs were faring better, but columns of Invid were now on the ascent to deal out their own form of injustice.
They fell upon the helpless transports and command ships first, helping nature’s cruel reversal along with deliberately placed rends and breaches, spreading further ruin throughout the fleet. Scott saw acts of bravery and futility: a Battloid already crippled and falling backward into the atmosphere pouring cannon fire against the enemy; two superheated Veritechs attempting to defend a transport against dozens of Invid claw fighters; another VT, boosters blazing, in a kamikaze run toward the head of the column.
Scott instructed his ship to jettison the rear augmentation pack and increased his speed, atmosphere be damned. There was still an outside chance that some of Gardner’s crew had made it into the evacuation pods. If only the Invid could be kept away from the hapless transport.
“Please, pull out!” Scott was screaming through gritted teeth. “Please, please …”
Then, all at once, the transport’s triple-thrusters died out, and an instant later the ship was engulfed in a soundless fireball that blew it to pieces.
Marlene! Scott railed at the heavens, his fists striking blows against the canopy and console as the Veritech commenced a swift unguided fall.
CHAPTER
TWO
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the first time I laid eyes on Scott Bernard—beneath all that Robotech armor, I mean. He had the Look of the Lost in his eyes, and a stammer in his voice that was pure tremolo. The latter proved to be a case of offworld accent—some Tirolian holdover—but that Look … I just couldn’t meet his eyes; I sat there tinkering with the Cyclone, trying to figure out whether I should run for the hills or off the guy then and there. Later on—much later on—he told me about that first night in the woods. I’ve got to laugh, even now: Ask Scott Bernard the one about the tree falling in the wilderness—and prepare to have your head bitten off!
Rand, Notes on the Run
Tirol, once the homeworld of the Robotech Masters, then an Invid colony when the Masters had uprooted the remnants of their dying race and journeyed to Earth in search of Protoculture, was a reconfigured planet, much of its surface given over to humankind’s needs, its small seas and weather patterns tamed. Not like this Earth, Scott thought, with its solitary yellow sun and distant silver satellite. He yearned for Tirol. It had been his home as much as the SDF-3 had been; he missed the binary stars of Fantoma’s system, the protective presence of the motherworld itself. How remote one felt from the heavens on this displaced world.
Scott recalled Admiral Hunter’s rousing send-off speech, his talk of the “cool green hills of home”—his home, Earth. Scott laughed bitterly to himself, the planet’s native splendor lost on him.
The Alpha had found a soft spot to cushion its fall in some sort of highland forest. Oak and fir trees, Scott guessed. The VT was history, but cockpit harnesses and collision air bags had kept him in one piece. However, the crash had been violent enough to plow up a large hunk of the landscape. He had lost his helmet and sustained a forehead bruise; then came a follow-up thigh wound of his own making when he had rather carelessly climbed from the wreck.
He was sitting in the grass now, his back against the fighter’s fuselage, his head and left leg bandaged with gauze from the ship’s first-aid kit. He had gotten rid of his cumbersome armor just before nightfall but kept his blaster within reach.
The forest was dark and full of sounds he could not identify, although he was certain these were all natural calls and chirps and whistles—from what he had seen thus far, Earth was primitive and uncontrolled.
And there were just too many places for an enemy to hide.
“Give me a scorched Martian desert any day,” Scott muttered.
He heard a rustling sound in the brush nearby and reached out for the blaster—a discette-shaped weapon developed on Tirol that was a scaled-down version of the one carried by the Masters’ Bioroids during the Second Robotech War.
“Is there somebody out there?” he asked of the dark.
When the movement suddenly increased, he fired off a charge; it impacted with a blinding orange flash against a tree, flushing two small long-eared creatures from the undergrowth. Scott mistook them for Optera cha-chas at first—the Flower of Life Pollinators—then realized that they were rabbits.
What’s happening to me? he asked himself, shaken by the cold fear that coursed through him. Marlene and everything I loved destroyed, and now I’m losing my nerve. He set the blaster aside and put his gloved hands to his face. It was possible he had sustained a concussion during the crash. A delayed onset of shock …
Lifting his head, he found that Earth had another surprise in store for him: The sky was dumping droplets of water on him—it was raining! Scott got up a
nd walked to a clearing in the woods. He had heard about this phenomenon from old-timers but hadn’t expected to encounter it. Scott could see that rain might not be a bad thing under certain conditions, but right now it was only adding to his discomfort. Besides, there was something else in the air that had come in with the rain: periods of a short-lived, roiling, explosive roar.
Clouds backlit by flashes of electrical charge were moving swiftly, obscuring the Moon and plunging the world into an impenetrable dark. Soon the angry bolts responsible for that stroboscopic light were overhead, launched like fiery spears toward the land itself, ear-splitting claps of thunder in their wake.
Scott found himself overwhelmed by a novel form of terror, so unlike the fear he was accustomed to that he stood screaming into the face of it, his feet seemingly rooted to the ground. This had nothing to do with enemy laser fire or plasma annihilation discs; it had nothing to do with combat or close calls. This was a larger terror, a deeper one, springing from an archaic part of himself he had never met face to face.
Unnerved, he ran for the safety of the Veritech cockpit as lightning struck and ignited one of the trees, toppling it with a second bolt that split the forest giant along its length. He lowered the canopy and hunkered down in the VT seat, hugging himself for warmth and security. Eyes tightly shut, ears filled with crackling noise, he shouted to himself: What am I doing on this horrible planet?
As if answering him, his mind reran images of the command ship’s fiery demise, that slow and silent fatality.
“Marlene,” he said through tears.
His hand had found the holo-locket she had given him on the bridge. But his forefinger was frozen on the activation button, his mind fearful of confronting the ghosts the device was meant to summon up. Still, he knew that he had to force himself to see and hear her again … before he could let the past die.
The metallic green heart opened at his touch, unfolding like a triptych; from its blood-red holo-bead center wafted a phantom image of Marlene.
“Scott, my darling, I know it isn’t much, but I thought you’d get a kick out of this trinket. I’m looking forward to living the rest of my life with you. I can’t wait till this conflict is all behind us. Till we meet again, my love …”
The voice that had been Marlene’s trailed off, and the shimmering message returned to its place of captivity. Scott closed the heart and clutched it tightly in his fist, wishing desperately that he could so easily de-rezz the images held fast in his own heart. Outside, the storm continued unabated, echoing the dark night of his soul. Lighting fractured the alien sky, and rainwater ran in a steady stream across the protective curve of the VTs canopy.
In the morning Earth’s skies seemed as blue as the seas Scott had seen from space; the air smelled sweet, washed clean of last night’s violence. But this was little consolation. Fear and sorrow had lulled him into a fitful sleep, and the stark images of Marlene’s death were with him when he awoke.
At a clear stream near the crash site, he filled his canteens with water. Taking in morning’s soft light, the spectacle of the forest itself, the profusion of bird life, he suspected that Earth could be a tolerable place, after all, but doubted that he would ever feel at home here. He promised himself that he would turn his thoughts to the mission and only the mission from this point on. Insanity was the only alternative.
He returned to the Veritech and stowed the canteens with the survival gear he had already retrieved from the mecha. He had enough emergency rations to last him the better part of an Earth week; if he didn’t come across a settlement or city by then, he would be forced to forage for food. And given what little information he had about edible plants and such, the thought was hardly an appetizing one.
He turned his attention now to the one item that was likely to rescue him from edible plants or privation: the Cyclone vehicle stored away in the fighter’s small cargo compartment. A well-concealed sensor panel in the fuselage gave him access to this, and in a moment he was lifting the self-contained Cyclone free of the cargo hold. In its present collapsed state the would-be two-wheeled transport was no larger than a foot locker, but reconfigured it was equivalent to a 1,000-cc twentieth-century motorcycle. Which in fact it was, after a fashion.
Originally one of Robotechnology’s first creations, it had undergone some radical modifications under Lang’s SDF-3 teams. The Expeditionary Force had come to rely upon the vehicle as much as it had on the Veritech fighters, even though its design was still a basic one: a hybrid piston and Protoculture-powered transformable motorcycle that was a far cry from the Hovercycles developed on Earth during the same time period. Unlike that Southern Cross marvel, the Cyclone required the full interaction of its pilot, whose “thinking cap” and specially designed armor were essential to the functioning of the vehicle’s Protoculture-based mechamorphic systems. In addition, it was light enough to carry, and wondrously fuel-efficient.
Scott carried the Cyclone several feet from the fighter and set about reconfiguring it, which entailed little more than flipping the appropriate switches. That much accomplished, he transferred his survival gear to the cycle’s rear deck and began to struggle into the mecha’s modular battle armor—not unlike the shoulder pads, hip harnesses, and leg and forearm protectors worn by turn-of-the-century athletes, except for the fact that the armor had been fashioned from lightweight alloys.
Scott was wearing Marlene’s holo-heart around his neck now and gave a last look at it before snapping the armor’s pectorals in place. It’s time, my love, he said to the heart.
Again he told himself to concentrate on the mission. He recalled Commander Gardner’s words: If only one of you survive the invasion, you must locate the Invid Reflex Point and destroy it along with their queen, the Regess. Scott had no idea how many people from Mars Division had survived atmospheric entry, but it was unlikely that any of them had touched down near his crash site. He had been so caught up in the destruction of the command ship that he had failed to lock the proper coordinates into the VT’s autopilot. As a consequence, the mecha had surely delivered him far from any of the dozen preassigned rendezvous points and who knew how far from the Reflex Point itself. The stars told Scott that he had come down somewhere in the southern hemisphere, which put thousands of miles between him and the Regess if he was lucky, oceans between them if not. In any case, north was the direction of choice.
Scott donned his helmet and mounted the Cyclone. A thumb switch brought the mecha to life; he found his confidence somewhat restored by the throaty, synchronous firing of the cycle’s systems.
Now let’s get on with evening the score with the Regess and her Invid horde, Scott said to himself as he set off.
The worst thing about being a lone survivor were the memories that survived with you, Scott decided. If only one could erase them, switch them off somehow. But Scott knew that he couldn’t; the people one loved were more frightening ghosts than anything imagination could conjure up. And they couldn’t be outrun.…
Less than an hour from his crash site, Scott was surprised to find himself on what appeared to be a trail or an ancient roadway lined with trees. But an even greater shock awaited him over the rise: a veritable desert at the foot of the wooded foothills that witnessed his crash, stretching out toward distant barren mountains. Scott slid the Cyclone to a halt and stared homesick at the sight.
Who said there were no Fantoma landscapes on Earth?
Scott had never heard Wolfe, Edwards, or any of the old-timers brag about this. It was almost as vast as Spheris!
Now reassured as well as renewed, Scott twisted the Cyclone’s throttle and streaked down into the wastes.
Elsewhere in the wastes rode a survivor of a different campaign; but his cycle was of a different sort, (twenty years old if it was a day, and running desperately short of fuel pellets).
A clear-eyed, short, sinewy teenager with a shaggy mop of red hair and an unwashed look about him—both by necessity and by design—he called himself Rand, his inherited n
ames long abandoned. He was born about the time the SDF-3 had been launched from Little Luna, and he had seen the rise and fall of Chairman Moran’s government, the invasion of the Robotech Masters, and humankind’s subsequent regression to barbarism, a turn of events that had culminated with the arrival of the Invid and their easily won conquest.
Just now Rand was doing what he did best: keeping himself alive. His old bike was closing in on the object he had seen plummet from the night sky two days ago, something too slow and controlled to have been a meteor, too massive for an Alpha. He had made up his mind to track its fall, abandoning his earlier plans to try for Laako City in the hopes of beating other Spotters, Foragers, and assorted rogues to the find.
Rand relaxed his wrist and let the bike come to a slow stop a good kilometer from the impact point. He threw back the hood of his shirt and slid his goggles up onto his forehead. The ship was even larger than he had guessed, like some great bird with enormous hexagonally shaped cargo pods strapped to the undersides of its wings. It was still glowing in places but obviously had been cooled by the rains that had drenched the irradiated wastes during the night. Rand cautiously resumed his forward motion, completing a circle around the thing at the same safe distance. There were no tracks or footprints in the still-moist sands, which meant that no one had left or entered the wreck during the past twelve hours or so.
He cycled through a second, tighter circle and headed in, convinced that he was first to arrive on the scene. Approaching the ship now, he could discern numbers and letters stenciled on the fuselage—M___R___DIV ___ I____—but could make no sense of the whole—where it had come from or why.
The wreck had the stench of recent death written all over it. He wasn’t in the least looking forward to walking into cargo bays wallpapered with Human remains, but he was just going to have to shut his eyes to that part of it. There had to be something he could use, weapons or foodstuffs.
Invid Invasion: The New Generation Page 3