Across the wide desk, Mayor Maxwell said, “You should be proud, Mr. Truman. I know what you had to go through to get this, but not one man in a hundred succeeds like this.”
Truman nodded tiredly. It had been explained to him, long since, why Maxwell’s map cost so much. Certain parts of the route had to be changed constantly, to reflect new Invid activities and patrolling patterns. And there was the need for Maxwell’s Lurp teams to set up safe resting places and resupply caches along the route. The cost of maintaining the teams was high, not to mention the fact that a cut of all proceeds went to the Resistance effort against the Invid.
Or so Maxwell insisted. There were rumors to the contrary, but there were rumors about everything in Deguello. Reliable people swore they had heard from friends and relatives who had made it to Paradise, and that Maxwell was a trustworthy man. Truman was too tired to hesitate anymore, too ground down by the loss of a daughter and the dead-end of life in Deguello. He just wanted to be on his way, to get his family to the safety of Paradise.
Maxwell handed over a folded, waterproofed bundle. “And here’s a current map showing the safe route through the mountains. It was updated by my Lurps just this week; you’ll be safe with this.”
Truman accepted it with a trembling hand. “Thank you, sir.”
“In Paradise, you’ll live a better life,” Maxwell said. “I’m glad you’re the one getting this, Truman. I know what some people think of me, asking all the market will bear for these maps, but—the traffic along the secret route has to be kept to a minimum, and there’s still the Resistance to finance. Still, I sleep better when the people I help deserve it.”
Carla, on the other side of the ballroom, stared through the big tropical fishtank there, watching the scene played out as she had watched it played out dozens of times before. She looked at the map Truman held, wishing—struggling with herself.
Truman was quickly on his way, eager to get a start in what was left of the day. Carla sat in a wing chair near a window, looking up at the nearby mountains.
The team, minus Annie, was making a poor afternoon snack of a few canned party tidbits—salted nuts and the like—of prewar vintage, at an outdoor table. Buying local food, even at high prices, seemed wiser than eating current-dated Mars Division rations out where people might take notice.
All their inquiries had gotten them nowhere. There were other people with mysterious maps—in fact, it seemed to be one of the town’s major industries. But what little reliable advice they had been able to get said that none were to be trusted—except, perhaps, the mayor’s. And the price of the mayor’s help, payable in gold, was beyond the team’s reach.
Lancer had told the team about his contact with Maxwell. But he told them nothing of his old ties with Carla, and so there seemed to be no avenue of map-acquisition there; Maxwell was all businesss.
Scott was seriously considering letting Maxwell know who and what the team members were, but held off. More than one purported Resistance sympathizer had turned out to be an Invid stoolie.
Meanwhile, the team was concerned about Annie and her new adopted family. They couldn’t blame her for wanting to restore some kind of stability to her life, even though her trip to Paradise did sound like a pipe dream. But Scott worried that she would inadvertently tell more than she should. However much she was sworn to silence, there was always the chance that she would betray the team’s secrets.
Rand, chasing one of the few surviving pistachios around the dish, said, “They’ll be serving free buffets in Deguello before we can ever scrape together the money for Maxwell’s map! So what’re we gonna do now?”
Scott stared down at his coffee. He had a plan to fall back on, and as much as he regretted using it, it seemed like the team’s only hope now. Scott’s plan was to pay a call on Maxwell, in full armor, with VTs in Battloid mode, and force the man to hand over the map. Then they would make a break for the mountains, leaving the mayor incommunicado. Hopefully they would get through before anybody could alert the Invid.
Scott was about to bring it up, but Rook spoke first. “Hell, it seems like this one never worries about anything.” By that, she meant Ariel, who still wore Rook’s jacket, and who still looked at the world with the lost expression of a total stranger.
And yet, Scott thought, it wasn’t really irritation Rook was showing. Instead it was concern. Most traumatic-amnesia cases recovered in a few days, but this woman had been a blank for a week now.
Scott sighed. “I’m glad you brought that up. Isn’t it about time we gave her a name of some kind?”
The Simulagent made a little questioning sound, aware that they were talking about her. Rand smirked, “Hey Lunk! How ’bout you giving us a few suggestions?”
Lunk looked upset, as he always did when anyone asked him to take a lead. “I, ah, I bet Scott could come up with a nice name.”
Scott had intended to say something else, but found himself asking, “Why don’t we call her Marlene?”
Rook’s brows knit; she knew the story of Scott’s fiancée’s death. Lancer broke in, “Why don’t we just let her tell us when she’s good and ready?”
Rook shrugged. “Until then, Marlene’s as good a name as any.”
But none of that solved the map problem. They discussed the situation again, until Lancer rose from the table. “I want to look into a few more things. I’ll catch up with you later.”
They watched him go. Rook thought, Why do I get the impression he just made a decision? She heard a murmuring and saw that the young woman was repeating the name Marlene to herself.
Maxwell was away on more of his unnamed business; and Carla invited Lancer in, bringing him to the balcony overlooking the ballroom. She poured some of the green tea she knew he loved, a true rarity in that part of the world nowadays, and made him sit by the grand piano Maxwell had bought her.
Carla played a soft Minmei melody, her touch much more deft than it had been two years before.
Lancer went to the open French doors, to stare at the snowcapped mountains. “Carla, tell me: how does Donald Maxwell make his money?”
Her smile slipped, then was back in place. “You know the lyrics to this one; would you like to—”
“What is Donald doing that you can’t talk about?”
“I, I can’t tell you.”
He went and held her hands down so that the music stopped on a discordant note. “Now listen to me: there’s something terribly wrong about this map business. Won’t you tell me what it is, before somebody gets hurt? And then we can leave this place together, Carla. Carla, tell me!”
She hesitated, but swayed toward him for a moment, her eyes on his, as if some greater gravity had hold of her.
“I’ll find us a place that will be much better for both of us,” he promised.
She stood to look across at the balcony’s opposite windows, to look west. “Lancer, let’s go that way! To the warm sea breezes and the sunlight! I’ll make you happy there, I swear it!”
“I’ve been down there, Carla. I’m being hunted, and so are the people with me. And we have a job to do. The only way out for us is over the mountains.”
Her eyes dropped. In a very small voice, she confessed, “There’s no way across those mountains, Lancer. The Invid control everything. Everyone who tries it dies, I’m sure of that now.”
“Here’s a copy of the map,” Annie said in secret-agent tones, looking around, slapping it into Scott’s gloved palm. “The real map, the mayor’s!”
She was hitching up the pink brushed-suede rucksack she had been wearing when Scott first met her, the one that contained everything she had in the world. Scott gaped at her.
“I, um, borrowed it from Eddie’s father and photocopied it!” she gushed. “I’m off now to Paradise with my new family. Eddie’s mother and father are so-ooo nice! You guys make sure you follow quick, okay? The route’ll probably change again in a coupla days, because the Invid are always changing their surveillance. Bye, Scott! Bye, Marlene! B
ye, everyone!”
She frolicked away, laughing giddily.
Scott, watching her go, unfolded the map slowly. Rand and Rook and Lunk were ecstatic. The other team members went off to see to their vehicles.
Reflex Point was suddenly much nearer.
Scott looked at the map, matching it up with a hand held display that showed aerial survey records from the memory banks of his Alpha. It didn’t take long for his face to go from elation to scowling anger.
A fake.…
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Who will ride?
Who will fall?
Cyclone Psychos!
Deguello ballad
“That’s his business, selling fake maps,” Carla was telling Lancer.
“And nobody knows because nobody comes back. Did he start the rumors about Paradise, too?”
She gulped and nodded. Lancer looked around him. “And that’s what pays for all of this. Sheer dumb, stubborn Human hope and longing. Maxwell’s going to pay—”
He stopped as he heard an engine roar at the edge of town. From his vantage point high up, Lancer could see over the mansion wall to the street where Annie and Eddie sat in the back of the Truman family’s all-terrain truck.
Most of the cargo bed was taken up by the Trumans’ goods and baggage, lashed under tarps. As the ATT pulled away, Maxwell and a half-dozen of his Lurp scouts waved. Near them were two all-terrain jeeps.
“Annie!”
Lancer dashed for the door.
• • •
Armored and mounted, the team made final checks, ready to begin the pursuit. Cycs were tested for battle-readiness; Lunk made sure that the ammo well for the Stinger autocannon mounted in his APC’s prow was filled to the brim with linked ammunition. Marlene sat next to Lunk, looking more bewildered than ever.
Scott was ripping up the map, though he already entered its directions in the displays, in order to trail the Trumans. “When I get my hands on Maxwell—”
Lancer snapped, “There’s no time to think about Maxwell now! We’ve got to catch Annie before it’s too late!”
All four Cycs went into wheelies, a way of releasing energy and yet not getting too far ahead while the APC accelerated. They streaked away toward the mountains.
Carla had watched from her vantage point in the mansion. Now she raced down the stairs and past the three silent fighter planes, flinging herself at the door, determined to steal a car or do whatever it took to catch Lancer and go on with him or die with him. She was determined not to be left behind ever again.
But Maxwell came through the door. “Hey! What’re you doing, Carla? What’ve you been up to?”
“I told them, Donald! I told them everything!”
The team roared up the mountain roads, the Cyclones taking curves as only Robotech mecha could, Lunk doing his best to keep from falling behind. “We’re comin’, Mint!”
Marlene suddenly cried out, holding her head as if she had been hit by a migraine. “I, I heard them. Something … there’s trouble!”
Truman slowed down his all-terrain truck, adjusting his glasses, squinting at the map. “I can’t understand it. I can’t orient this map; it doesn’t make any sense.”
His wife, a kindly woman with an open, fleshy face and hair pulled back in a black bun, looked on disheartenedly, doing her best not to distract him.
Suddenly she looked up in terror, as shadows crossed the windshield.
At the back of the cargo bed, Eddie was joking with Annie. She understood that he regarded her as a kid sister and had decided to wait until she got to Paradise to make her move. If a little makeup could work wonders for Yellow Dancer, she could imagine what it could do for Annie LaBelle!
Then she heard a roaring of thrusters, and bulky mecha heliographed the sun in a close pass.
“Invid!” She could see four Pincer Ships, claws folded close to them while they made their attack dives. Mr. Truman had seen them, too, and began swerving as the first annihilation discs hit. The all-terrain truck wove back and forth on the road, the Invid seeming to drive it almost playfully, until at last Mr. Truman swerved sidelong into a boulder, and Annie and Eddie were thrown from the cargo bed.
A strafing Pincer chopped a line of explosions along the road, and Eddie rolled into the ditch with Annie in his arms. Mr. Truman and his wife fell along after, clutching one another. The Pincer’s wing-mates held back while the leader came in for the kill.
Then there was an additional explosion and they saw that the leader was wobbling and tumbling through the air, like an unstrung, burning puppet. It erupted into a balloon of energy, smoke, and shrapnel just before it struck a nearby cliff.
Annie looked up, dazed. Suddenly there were Cyclone knights everywhere in the sky. All at once, the Invid were getting a costly lesson in dogfight tactics and learning that the sky was still a hotly contested killing ground.
Lancer pulled up nearby, still on his Cyc, and Lunk in his truck. “Get them out of here while we cover!” Scott’s voice came over the tac net.
Rook’s red-and-silver armor was sleeker, more maneuverable than the others’, and had that wide-bore long-gun that was unique to it. Scott’s blue-and-silver was more heavily armed than before, with an assault-rifle module acquired in the wreckage of his strikeforce’s graveyard; he stood straddle-legged, letting the Invid come at him, and held the trigger down.
Rand’s armor, light-blue-and-silver, seemed more specialized for handgun-firing, and that suited him just fine, the armor wielding a bigger, more powerful version of the H90.
Then Lancer scooped up Marlene, who had dismounted in a numbed astonishment, set her behind him on his Cyclone, and started off. Annie and Eddie helped his parents into Lunk’s truck, and it accelerated to catch up. The Cycs fell back in good order, firing, as the Invid came down at them, but then split up as the firing became too intense.
Scott jetted backward on thrusters that set the brush among the trees afire, awaiting his chance. He could see Rand and Rook doing the same. Trees and mounds of soil and rock exploded, the Invid lashing out at everything in their frustration.
At last the defenders were driven down to a lowermost verge. From that spot they could either go to the open sky, where they would be shot like clay pigeons, or to the forest that lay a few hundred yards below. Invid fire turned nearby trees into Roman candles.
Scott said, “We have to make them think they’ve won.” I hope Lunk and Annie and the rest have gotten far enough away! He dismounted two missiles from a forearm pod, twisted their warheads to adjust, and waited, as the Invid rushed down. “On three! One …”
The armored Cycriders set up a network of fire, crisscrossing the sky with brilliant bursts, jostling the Invid as the Pincer Ships came within range.
Scott gave the warheads a final twist, then tossed the missiles down, and took up firing again. “Two …”
He and Rand and Rook were throwing up a furious barrage, heels hanging over the edge of the cliff, the dirt and gravel they had scuffed loose falling. The Invid’s attack-pass cut the air.
“Three!”
The Cycs jumped back, dropped. Invid annihilation discs hit the ledge where they had been standing, raising huge gouts of flame and debris and smoke.
Although the Regess’ awareness was not in the Invid there, they spoke to one another with her voice. They did not know that Marlene was among the prey, and that she was part of a greater plan.
Instead they heard the Regess’ standing orders in their minds, Eliminate all resistance! Neutralize rebel forces. They must not be allowed to escape! Kill them all!
Clinging to Lancer’s armored middle, Marlene suddenly cringed. “The, the voices again!” She seemed about to faint. “Rand and the others—they ran!”
Lancer had his hands full with the pitched descent of the mountain road. But he wondered, Does she mean Scott and the rest? And how does she know?
Then Lancer, followed by Lunk, rounded a corner and had to stop. The way was blocked
by Maxwell and a score of armed men.
They were equipped to tackle even Cyc armor, with old LAW rockets, RPGs, a few Manville X-18s, and a truck mounted with a heavy machine gun. Lancer fought off the urge to break away and come back later. But Maxwell might not let the others live long enough to be rescued, and above all, Carla was with the mayor, standing in the back of his staff car, her hand caught up in his.
Truman was standing up in the bed of Lunk’s truck, gripping the cab frame. “Maxwell, you lied.”
“I’m a good businessman and you’re not; don’t come crying to me. There is no way through the mountains. Congratulations on being the first to ever come back. However—”
Maxwell showed a thin smile. “Now that you know my secret, you can’t be allowed to return. You understand, I’m sure. Will you please step down and line up over there?”
Maxwell’s men had the angle on them from all sides with high-powered rifles, pump shotguns, and some Galil heavy assault pieces loaded, no doubt, with armor-piercing rounds. The Trumans, Annie, Lunk, Lancer, and Marlene dismounted and did as they were told. Lancer read his displays and braced himself.
Carla caught Maxwell’s hand. “What are you doing?”
“They must be eliminated.”
“No!” she wrestled against him for a moment. He threw her back against the bed of the converted truck, knocking the wind from her, ignoring her when she husked, “No, Donald …”
The blue-and-silver Cyclone rider had gathered the captives back some distance from the trucks, Maxwell noticed, most of them sheltering behind him. But Maxwell smiled. “This is the end of the road, folks.” He raised his arm for the signal.
“If you move it, I’ll burn it off,” an amplified voice promised. Maxwell spun around just as Robotech weapons opened fire. Many of his men dropped their guns and all of them cringed, as the dazzling rays opened the ground around them and sent novaflame curling into the air.
Invid Invasion: The New Generation Page 27