Rand looked at the mecha. “You’re talking about one helluva raft, there. D’you know anything about rafts, spaceman?”
Annie started demanding that she be allowed to supervise and that the raft be named in her honor. Rook scolded her and said that this wasn’t some dumb jungle movie where all you need is a couple of vines and a coconut.
Things began to turn into one of the team’s signature free-for-alls. Lancer rose, stretched, and paced away toward the river. “Since I don’t know the first thing about marine engineering, I volunteer for lookout duty.”
“Probably afraid he’ll break a fingernail,” Lunk grunted.
Rand was agreeing, “The guy’s just a lazy bum,” when something heavy tapped his shoulder.
Scott was handing him the ax. “Country boy, it’s time you showed us your stuff. I know this thing’s a little primitive, but at least it works without Protoculture. Just think of a raft as a very large ski.”
Lancer drank in the quiet beauty of the place. He found himself in a very quiet, serene world.
Coming to the shore of a fast-moving stream, he decided the current was too swift for predators and elected to bathe. In a moment, he had stripped, taken soap and personal articles from his belt pouch, and plunged in.
Several miles downstream from the team’s landing spot, another Invid stronghold straddled the river on five asymmetrical legs. It looked like a bulbous insect with a glowing, low-hanging belly.
Inside was a Hive Center like and yet unlike that of the fortress. The Sensor there was identical to the other in its physical shape, but its color was a putrid, lit-from-within green. But in one particular way, this was a very different scene: The Regess had manifested herself.
An oval energy flux surrounded by a blue nimbus, its long axis vertical, hung over the Sensor. The mauve flux gave off solar prominences of light. Within it were swirling lights and within the swirl, barely discernible in the brilliance, was the female form of the Regess.
“Our Matrix is now approaching the bio-energy level needed for transmutation.”
Regess and Sensor were attended by several Shock Troopers. One of these the Regess instructed, “Trooper, step forward!”
The Shock Trooper obeyed, somehow seeming subdued despite its immense size and armaments. The incandescence played across its armor as it stared at its ruler-deity, the Regess.
“You have proved yourself time and again,” she told it, “as both a soldier and a shape-changer. In both these capacities you have helped ensure the survival of our race. Your outstanding achievements won you the honor of engaging the enemy in the Shock Trooper armor that now enfolds your being.”
Her face was little more than a blank mask with shadowed eye sockets and the ridge of a nose. “Now the time has come for you to continue your evolution, to take the next step upward in the spiral of Protogenetic progress! Are you ready?”
The Trooper, watching her with its single optical sensor, made a biotechnic gurgling and a kind of hunching bow of obeisance.
“Very well! As I have spoken, so it shall be done! Prepare yourself for disembodiment and transmutation!” The Regess flung her arms wide, and the green Sensor was aglow. Energy crackled and sizzled through the Hive Center.
Vines of living Protoculture power snaked out from the Sensor to envelope the Trooper. In another moment it seemed to be in a rictus of agony, its superhard armor crumbling from it like plaster, as it stood in the center of a globe of transplendence.
Abruptly the armor was gone, and a pulsating egg hung in the center of the solar fury. “The disembodiment is complete,” the Regess decreed. “You are yourself, unadorned, without identity, awaiting transmutation into the shell that will make you invincible!”
The egg beat like a heart. What it held was like the drone Rand and Annie had seen, and yet unlike it, the product of a long evolutionary progression.
The Regess gathered her indistinct hands to her blank breasts, palm to palm. “Behold the final stage in your evolution! Behold the Enforcer!”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
They had moved so fast they they had forgotten something. They were racing to save a world, and particularly the Human species, but nobody had ever said anybody was going to be grateful. It was just as well that they started getting used to that fact then.
Xandu Reem, A Stranger at Home: A Biography of Scott Bernard
The Invid anome hung before the Regess, a minor sun throwing off streamers of starflare. She threw her hands out wide, and the sunlet was swallowed up in a roaring pillar of ravening power. It burned upward like a huge searchlight beam, as something took shape within.
The light died and it was revealed. Twice the size of the Shock Troopers, it mounted a shoulder cannon like theirs but had a suggestion of the Controller’s long muzzle. Its claws were proportionately smaller, adapted for finer work, but much more powerful than those of the mecha standing around it paying homage. It held all the power of the Matrix outpouring that had created it.
Its optical sensor fixed on the Regess, the Enforcer awaited her command.
The cool, clean water felt so good that Lancer could almost believe he was back at the o-furo, the bath. When he had lathered and rinsed himself, he began a little Muslime exercise, like the ones his masters used to give him.
Using a theatrical depilatory, he removed the hair from his chest, legs, armpits, and so on. Then Yellow Dancer performed a maiden’s bathing ritual, abandoning self for role. Each stylized gesture and movement would make an audience believe in the demure young girl; each pose and motion, handed down for centuries, contained a hundred subtleties.
But Yellow had become so clumsy, so out-of-practice! Surely Master Yoshida would have broken three sticks upon Lancer by now! Still, the exercise brought a feeling of calm serenity, a reminder of gentility and the frailty of beauty—a renewed faith in the high value and evasive exquisiteness of life itself.
Yellow emerged from the bath, still moving with the grace of the art. She held a towel close for modesty, even in that solitary place. She combed her long purple hair out carefully with her free hand. Then Yellow Dancer stretched out, stomach down, towel wound around middle, to nap in the warm sunlight that found its way down through gaps in the jungle roof and the forest canopy.
Gradually, Lancer reemerged, working on the problem of how to carry on the mission to Reflex Point. Had Scott’s singlemindedness blinded him to the drawbacks in his rafting scheme?
A sudden sound made him look up, all freedom fighter now. He couldn’t believe someone had managed to steal up on him; it had never happened to Lancer before. But it was too late; a knobby branch, padded by windings of creeper, thumped across the back of his skull.
“Tim-ber-rrr!”
Rand stepped back as the tree went down, dragging vines and creepers, branches from other trees with it. It sent up leaves and dust and all sorts of sounds as the creatures living in the tree fled in panic or anger.
“I’m gettin’ pretty good at this Paul Bunyan stuff, huh?” he asked his teammates proudly.
But nobody seemed very impressed. Annie, looking up from where she and Rook and Marlene were making cross-members for the raft, snarled, “Whaddaya want, a standing ovation?”
Marlene giggled, and everyone stared at her. “Looks like our patient’s finally starting to loosen up a bit,” Scott smiled.
But inside, he was trying to sort out his feelings. If Marlene was improving—if she began regaining her memory—that might mean she would go her own way soon. He had tried not to think of that other life that she had obviously left behind. He tried not to think about the lover or even the husband who might be waiting for her, but now that was less and less possible.
In the midst of Scott’s thoughts about Marlene, a long spear with a gleaming, machined-metal head suddenly arced out of the treeline and buried itself in a forest giant right next to him. The long shaft of stripped, dried wood bobbed slowly.
More spears followed, as Scott roare
d, “Follow me!” and led the way back toward the mecha. The rest of the group pounded after him. Miraculously, no one had been hit. They had to veer from a direct course, as a virtual hedgehog of spearpoints was thrust through a wall of undergrowth.
Scott detoured, hoping he wouldn’t lose his bearings, gun in hand. He yelled for Lancer, but got no answer, and feared the worst. Scott had no idea who was attacking, but it clearly wasn’t the Invid, and he had no wish to hurt any Human if he could help it. As the team members sprinted across a clearing, leaves and dirt flew as ropes of braided grass creaked, and all six travelers were hoisted aloft in an enormous net.
They were squashed in together against each other every which way, Scott losing his pistol, the others too tightly pinned to get to theirs. The world spun and swayed below them, but after a moment Scott saw people come out of concealment and into the open.
The spears had Rand expecting some lost tribe, a bunch of Yanamamo, perhaps, who had somehow survived the Wars and left their traditional territory. But instead, the team was looking down at men in factory-produced shoes and boots, albeit tattered and decaying ones, and trousers made from machine-woven fabric.
But the men were a bearded and mustached and headbanded bunch, carrying homemade bows, arrows, and spears, although the weapon heads were of metal. They wore beads and feathers and shell jewelry. Nothing made sense.
“W-whoever they are, they look like they’re honked off about something,” Annie observed.
An older fellow with snow-white hair and beard gestured up at them with a warclub whose head had been set with flakes of sharpened steel. “Bring them to the temple!”
The way he said “temple” had Rook expecting something from one of the venerated oldtime movies, but she was wrong. The natives marched them at spearpoint downriver to an aging, massive, hydroelectric power dam that looked to be in disrepair.
They were soon disarmed and standing out on a platform of lashed timbers on one of the dam crest piers. The green river valley seemed to stretch out forever, and the waters of the spillway basin fought and swirled far below them. All gates appeared to be open, and water fell in huge, white cascades, filling the area with mist.
Their hands had been tied, and each captive had been fitting with an ankle shackle riveted to a heavy weight. Scott was looking around for some sign of Lancer, hoping that he had gotten clear and could come to their rescue.
“Now you will pay for your sacrilege!” the white-haired leader said. “You are outlanders and your presence in this place has offended the river god.”
He gestured to where the open taintor gates and low-level outlets were letting the level of the reservoir fall. “It is because of you that the river god has turned his back on us and is leaving the valley!”
“Oh, come on!” Rand shouted, and some of the spearheads wavered close to his chest. “You’re not telling me you’re going to kill us just because this friggin’ dam’s had a malfunction?”
Scott already saw that that was exactly what the locals had in mind, but could make little sense of the matter. How could such a tribal society, such a primitive belief system, spring up in a single generation?
The only answer he could think of was the fact that the team was now in the region that had become a Zentraedi control zone, back when Khyron took refuge after the apocalyptic battle in which Dolza’s force was wiped out. The Zentraedi would certainly have found good use for the hydroelectric power, but their giant size would’ve made it difficult for them to operate and maintain the dam. The answer would have been to spare a picked group of Micronian techs.
Most of the men in the group were in their mid-twenties or so, Scott judged. If a lot of the techs had been killed, inadvertently or otherwise, upon Khyron’s departure, that would have left kids and a few oldsters—like the white-haired man with the slightly unhinged look in his eye—to put together a new society of their own. Perhaps they had borrowed elements of their crude culture from local Indians.
As to why the whole area had been roofed over, apparently by the Invid—Scott could only conclude that this was another of their experimental labs, a kind of grandiose ant farm.
“Silence!” the old man was howling. “The only way to bring back the river god’s den is to sacrifice you!” He gestured to the shrinking reservoir.
He must be old enough to recall the days before the Wars, Scott saw—and certainly the days before the Invid and the Robotech Masters. But something had wrenched his mind away from the days of sanity and rational thought, and locked him into supersition.
“My lord, I think I have an idea,” Scott interjected. “If we’ve sinned against your god, we plead ignorance. But we will set things right by bringing the river god’s den back to your valley.”
The old man looked at Scott; perhaps he recalled the techs in their worksuits—not so different from Scott’s uniform—who had once made the dam do their bidding. “You can do this?”
“If, in return, you let us go.”
The old man stroked his beard with gnarled, black nailed fingers. “Very well, outlander. But if you fail, your companions die!”
Scott angled a thumb at Lunk. “I’ll need his help.” And I hope it’s enough.
Scott surprised himself by recalling as much about dam construction as he did from a years-ago Officer Candidate engineering class.
Lunk followed him at a dead run, and they soon reached the outlet control structure, further along the dam. But when they got to the control room, they found a musty room of half-corroded machinery and a bewildering collection of long-outmoded technology. Switches were frozen in place; CRTs were dark and silent.
Scott had concluded that some malfunctioning auto-system had opened the gates to release the reservoir waters. “We’ll shut off everything until we find the right one,” he told Lunk. Reopening them at a later time would be the locals’ problem.
“The outlanders have been gone a long time, Silverhair,” a warrior said to the white-haired chief.
“Yes.” Silverhair considered that. “Perhaps they abandoned their companions to save themselves.”
“Hold on a second!” Rand protested. “If Scott says he’ll do something, then he’ll do it! Just give him time!”
The old chief nodded slowly. “It is hard for you to face the fact that they have deserted you. Ulu!”
The warrior addressed as Ulu brought up his spear blade and leveled it at them.
After some time, Lunk stopped pulling levers and spinning manual valve wheels at random and began reading designation plates on the various consoles. By miraculous good fortune, he found a mildewed manual. The covers were rotted to soggy filth, but the schematics themselves had been laminated.
Lunk might have his problems with social interaction, but he had never been outwitted by an inanimate object yet. He puzzled over the highpoints of the operating procedures for long minutes, then moved decisively. “Hey, Scott! I found it!”
It was a massive, two-bladed lever, an emergency manual control that would in cases of power failure close the gates by means of a fluidic backup system. But it, too, had suffered from the decades of neglect.
Lunk strained at it, the muscles of his shoulders and arms bunching and swelling. Scott threw his strength into the fight, too, their hands clamped around the switch.
Ulu’s spear blade was close. “Trust us, will you?” Rook said, not able to take her eyes off it. “They’ll do it and be back.” The spearpoint edged closer, and a half dozen other warriors came after Ulu, to see that the job was done thoroughly.
The lever moved, an unbelievable quarter-inch, down its grooves. Scott and Lunk braced their feet against the console, teeth gritted, heaving for all they were worth. The lever moved another half inch.
“I warned your companions that all of you would pay the price of their failure,” the chief said. The spear blades hemmed in the team members.
Suddenly there was a change in the sound of the water gushing through the gates and outlet. The flow was les
sening.
“They did it,” Rand exulted. “They shut off the valve!” Annie managed a cheer. As the team and the tribe watched, the flow was shut off, at both the top of the dam and the bottom.
“The valley is saved,” the old chief said. “The river god is appeased at last!” His men were a little frightened by what they had seen, but joyous anyhow.
Scott and Lunk got back to the dam crest as fast as they could, only to find that their teammates had been unshackled and were receiving the tribesmen’s clamorous thanks.
“We invite you to become members of our tribe,” the old man said when Scott and Lunk got there.
“Thank you, but first there’s a missing brother of our tribe we have to find,” Scott deflected the invitation.
“Hey! Silverhair!” came a shout. “I did it! I got myself a wife!”
There was a barefoot kid in ragged cutoffs and T-shirt, maybe an undersized thirteen years old or so, coming their way. “I’m a man now!” he puffed, dragging a big, heavy old duffel bag after him.
“It’s Magruder,” said Silverhair the chieftain.
“Did he say ‘wife’?” Rand murmured.
Magruder staggered to a stop before Silverhair and dropped the rope, as the warriors gathered round. “I captured myself a wife,” he panted again, “so according to tribal law, you have to make me a warrior!” He pushed his narrow chest out proudly.
Rook got the distinct impression that Magruder was more excited about the prospect of being a warrior than about having a wife. Typical for his age, she decided.
Just then the duffel bag heaved and fell open. Everyone there gasped.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Protoculture Garden: Eden or Gethsemane?
Samizdat Readers Digest article, November 2020
Rand found himself looking down at a familiar mass of purple hair. “Lancer!”
Lancer, gagged, glared up at Rand and at the rest of the world. Scott turned to Magruder with a rare smile. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, kid. Y’see, your fiancée is a man. And not one that I’d like to have mad at me, if you catch my drift.”
Invid Invasion: The New Generation Page 32