Before the Invid Storm

by Jack McKinney

  Nova smiled without showing her teeth. Two could play Fredericks's game. "I have a candidate in mind."

  Fredericks leaned forward to watch her prize a thick intel report from her briefcase. The report's red cover told him that it had come from the lab of the late Lazlo Zand.

  Skids stacked high with cargo crates crowded the greasy floor of the GMP armory building in Denver. All of it had been shuttled down the well from The Homeward Bound, which remained in lunar orbit. Wooden bleachers had been erected along the walls of the spacious, high-ceilinged room, and nearly every inch of bench seat was occupied by GMP, TASC, and Southern Cross personnel.

  Jonathan Wolff, wearing a tight-fitting REF uniform, moved commandingly among the crates and a dozen REF officers, including Major John Carpenter. A wireless microphone clipped to the collar of Wolff's tunic carried his tenor voice throughout the room, and a trio of huge, overhead display screens supplied real-time close-ups of weapons and mecha, or

  battle footage of Invid assault craft and Inorganics.

  "It's possible that we won't be going up against the Hellcats, the Jack Knives, and the Blue Eyes," Wolff was saying, referring to the ghoulish, long-armed robots that were marching across the display screens. "The Regent employed them primarily as occupation forces, and rarely as frontline troops. But there's no evidence to suggest that the Regis will employ them. That's why we'll be stressing tactics more appropriate for combat against the Scout, Trooper, and Shock Trooper assault units, all of which are outfitted with a type of chitinous armor, and are equipped with plasma-disk delivery systems."

  Dana was sitting in the upper-tier bleachers, close to the armory's principal doorway. Having arrived late, she had missed Wolff's introductory remarks about the weapons of the REF arsenal, which, by Earth standards, were almost fifteen years out of date—or out of fashion, at any rate.

  At the insistence of Anatole Leonard—who loathe anything that smacked of the Robotech Defense Force—the Army of the Southern Cross had mothballed much of what had been developed for the Expeditionary mission. Hovertanks, A-JACs, and Logans had taken precedence over the Alpha and Beta Veritechs, the Destroids, and the Alpha-portable Light Combat Cyclones. Hermes helmets and flare-shouldered torso harnesses had replaced CVR-3 Body Armor. And the Southern Cross had generated its own line of weapons to substitute for the R Burke—designed Gallant H-90, FAL-2 pulse laser rifle, SAL-9 single shot laser pistol, and Wolverine assault rifle.

  However, the remnants of Leonard's army, deprived of much of their mecha, grasped that they were going to have to refamiliarize themselves with the arms and armaments of their former rivals if they expected to integrate with returning waves of REF forces—should they arrive from Tirol. On returning from Wolff's ship, Dana had gone directly to the Emerson cabin. Fifteen more Tiroleans had died during her absence, and conditions at the compound had continued to deteriorate. Where she thought Bowie would take heart from what Wolff had told her, the five-year-old stories

  about his parents, Jean and Vince, had only plunged Bowie deeper into desperation. She blamed herself for not having been able to predict as much from her own delayed reaction to Wolff's well-meaning words about Max and Miriya. And as for Sean and Angelo, they were about ready to re-up if something wasn't done about the Tiroleans.

  There was no justification for her returning to Denver, or, indeed, for attending Wolff's discourse on battle tactics. After all, she was a diplomat now; even those she had fought alongside during the War had begun to treat her with a deference she wasn't accustomed to and didn't appreciate. But it didn't take much self-examination to realize that she had been missing Wolff—Jonathan. She wanted to convince herself that he was important to her as the sole link to her parents; but she knew it went deeper than that. She was enchanted with him, and not simply because his photo had graced the wall of her locker.

  This wasn't a crush, it wasn't infatuation, and she refused to so much as consider the older-man-as-replacement-dad psychobabble she had heard from Rolf during her short-lived romance with Terry Weston. No, what she felt for Jonathan had welled up from her heart, and she couldn't dismiss it or explain it away, despite her best efforts. And tried she had, by reminding herself that Jonathan was not only fresh from a disastrous—though admittedly incomprehensible—affair with Lynn-Minmei, but that he had a wife and son with whom he was attempting to reconcile. Besides, who was she to think that he would have similar feelings for her, or that she had the right to step in and make matters worse for him?

  Still, he had seen her enter the armory and he had made meaningful eye contact with her several times since . . .

  Wolff's lecture lasted another three hours, only to conclude in heated debates between TASC and REF officers. What did a former Hovertank commander know about combat flying? the Cosmic Unit commanders argued. Just because he had ridden a star ship home from Tirol, Wolff was suddenly entitled to preferential treatment?

  Also, many of the officers in the room resented Wolff for the parade the

  provisional government had staged. Weren't they owed one for having defeated the Masters? At the end, Wolff was practically shouting to be heard above an audience of disgruntled veterans, many of whom were filing through the exits in patent distrust.

  "This is hopeless," Wolff was telling Carpenter and a couple of members of the Wolff Pack by the time Dana had worked her way down to him. "They have no faith in guerrilla tactics. They're used to meeting the enemy head-on, and they're convinced that the same approach is going to work against the Invid."

  Everyone who had remained agreed and commiserated. The way Dana saw it, their devotion alone spoke to Wolff's abilities as a leader. Seeing her coming, however, they started to disperse, intent on providing Wolff with some private space.

  He managed a sardonic smile for Dana. "What the hell's the good of being portrayed a hero if no one's willing to listen to you?"

  "You have to be patient, Colonel," Dana said in a low voice. "For better or worse, we were raised on a certain combat style, and the notion of hide- and-strike fighting is going to take some getting used to. But I do understand your frustration."

  He gave her hand an affectionate squeeze. "Call me Jonathan, Dana."

  She perched herself on the edge of one of the cargo crates and began to tell him of her own ambivalence about going back to war, and about the Tiroleans the 15th were sheltering from everything but dislocation and death, and about her yearning to be reunited with her parents.

  "I know it sounds strange," she said. "I mean, I hardly remember Max and Miriya, but . . ."

  "But what?" he encouraged, planting himself next to her.

  She waited a long moment before saying, "Something happened to me on the Masters' flagship. I mistakenly grabbed hold of a canister of Protoculture and I experienced . . . well, a kind of hallucination. I know you'll think I'm crazy, but I saw my sister, Aurora, and Max and Miriya. They told me they were with the Sentinels, and they warned me that the

  Flowers of Life were going to draw the Invid to Earth." She looked at Wolff. "I saw them, Jonathan, almost as clearly as I'm seeing you now."

  Nonplussed, Wolff stood up and paced away from her. "The Awareness," he said, turning to face her. "The artificial intelligence at the heart of Haydon IV. Somehow . . ." He shook his head.

  Dana stared at him. "Jonathan, I don't understand."

  He approached her and took hold of her hands. "All I'm trying to say is that your experience aboard the flagship wasn't just some hallucination. It was something real, Dana."

  She wanted desperately to rid herself of the rest of the vision: that a ship would arrive to deliver her to Tirol. But she thought he might misinterpret her meaning, so she said nothing. What would be the point, anyway, when that ship obviously wasn't The Homeward Bound.

  Unexpectedly, when she lifted her face to him, he kissed her softly on the mouth.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The identity of the operative the GMP infiltrated among the Starchildren had bee
n the subject of much speculation and, at times, heated debate, until the matter was laid to rest by Shi Ling, in his posthumously published tome, Sometimes Even a Yakuza Needs a Place to Hide. Her name was Martha Fox, and Shi Ling puts her age at fifty-five when she was killed in the Invid attack on the Starchildren's colony [January. 2033]. A first-rate mecha engineer, Fox was serving a twenty-year sentence in Monument's Bitteroot Correctional Facility for acts of [Zentraedi] terrorism committed during the Malcontent Uprising. Recruited by Nova Satori in 2031, Fox was sent to Argentina, where she rose effortlessly to a high-level position in the Starchildren cult, and became the mistress of [Kaaren Napperson's husband] Eric Baudel. Promised an even more lofty position in Tokyo, Fox was in turn recruited by Eiten Shimada, only to betray the Family the following year by selling information to the GMP about the Shimada's financial ties to the Starchildren.

  Channing DeMont, The Secret History of the GMP

  Misa and Izumi sauntered through Japantown, watching people going about their business. Shawls were being knitted, shoes mended, chickens plucked, bicycles repaired. Come sundown, the Argentine air could turn bitterly cold, but tonight there was no breeze sweeping in from the Andes and the temperature was almost balmy.

  They held hands while they walked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Pairs of girls hurried past them, arm in arm; pairs of boys, as well, with their arms around each other's shoulders. The dirt streets were lighted by lanterns or solitary incandescent bulbs. A brew of appetizing aromas swirled in the air.

  "I love it here," Misa told her new friend.

  Izumi nodded in agreement. "That's why I couldn't care less about

  leaving."

  "And when the ship launches?" "We'll begin work on another one." "And if the Invid come here?" "We'll ask for their help."

  Two weeks at the Starchildren's pampas colony—variously referred to as Launch City (Ciudad Lanzar), Napperson Naval Station, or Noah's Follow-up Folly—had confirmed Misa's first hunch about the place. The saucer ship was almost incidental. It was the dream itself that had drawn and continued to unite everyone. Half the people she'd met expressed little or no interest in leaving aboard Napperson's Hope; they were content merely to be part of the effort. And it was that pioneer spirit that distinguished the colony from Tokyo. For where the Starchildren were constructing a future—though for a relative few—Tokyo seemed intent on waiting one out.

  In good-natured dismissal of Misa's protests, Kaaren Napperson and Eric Baudel had insisted on treating her as a VIP, which meant that she had been permitted to wander as she would, even into areas of the ship and its encompassing dome that were off-limits to all but the engineering elite of the Starchildren. Kan Shimada's ambassador of a sort, Misa had a motorized cart and driver at her beck and call, was free to question whomever she might, and dined nightly with Kaaren and Eric themselves, who sometimes seemed intent on adopting her.

  The results of Tokyo's sudden generosity were already having a powerful impact on the colony—a trial launch was scheduled and final selection of the twenty-five hundred passengers was under way—so Misa could understand why the project chiefs would want to keep her happy and well fed. But their innocence troubled her. They had no notion of the favor they were doing the Shimadas by assisting in the disabling of Jonathan Wolff's ship.

  From Tokyo, Terry had told her what he could about the initial survey of The Homeward Bound, which had apparently gone well—well enough, at

  any rate, for the Shimadas to have reciprocated by sharing technology with the Defense Force. Terry was being placed in charge of that; and Louie Nichols, the Shimada Building's newest fixture, was to serve as liaison with the GMP.

  Given the number of deserters and "retirees" that had been turning up at the colony, it was a wonder to Misa that the Defense Force was still vital. Each day saw the arrival of soldiers and their families, from Monument, Mexico, Cavern, Brasília, Buenos Aires, and other cities strafed or ruined by the Masters. Misa listened to story after story detailing the horror of the attacks. And during each, she would find herself reflecting on how quiet Tokyo had been during the same period, the tranquility interrupted only by the occasional blare of the early-warning-system sirens, the economy bolstered through trade with other Asian and Pacific Rim centers.

  The increase in immigration had led to tightened security throughout the colony, though primarily in the crowded residential zones that surrounded the dome. The interior of the dome was patrolled by a legion of fifteen-year-old Destroids, which were part of a larger arsenal of Veritechs, Logans, and Hovertanks. The Starchildren's militia, made up of some two thousand former soldiers, practiced regular drills, but had yet to be deployed against any threat, real or imagined. Argentina was far removed from what passed for the world's industrial centers, and those who came to the pampas usually had had their fill of war.

  Without deliberately setting out to do so, Misa had found herself spending most of her time among the colony's sizable population of Nihon- jin. Many of them were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of cattle ranchers and soybean farmers who had emigrated to the Amazon basin at the turn of the century, and the enclave they had fashioned for themselves was rich in traditions that had been abandoned by ethnically diverse, modern Tokyo. Ironically, the simple life Misa had sought since her youth in the communal orphanages was alive and well, there on the vast, rolling plains of the Southlands.

  Izumi Sasaki had become her unofficial guide to the narrow streets that

  comprised Japantown. He was thin and always smiling, and only an inch shorter than her. They had met at a noodle shop and formed an instant friendship that gave every indication of harboring at least the seeds of romance. Izumi was in fact one of the main reasons she hadn't returned to Tokyo with Terry Weston.

  Yes, she still loved Terry, but whatever future they might once have forged had been undermined by his reenlistment in the military—a military that had once branded him unfit for duty, no less. She had come to realize that she couldn't be partnered with a soldier; a soldier in the Defense Force, or for that matter, a soldier in the Shimada Family.

  "So, do you love this place enough to delay your return to Tokyo?" Izumi asked her now. He knew that much about her—that she was visiting the Argentine—but not much else.

  "I've already delayed my return by two weeks." "And your family is missing you?"

  She smiled inwardly. "Yes. I think so." "You have a large family there?" "Well, an extended one, anyway."

  "Then you'll probably leave before the launch?" "I might."

  He sighed dramatically. "You're going to miss a great party."

  She was about to reply when the ground shook with earthquake force and a deafening explosive report assaulted them from the northeast. Shaken, they turned in time to see an enormous fireball rise into the night sky.

  Izumi's face was a mask of anguish. "The dome!" he said, in a tremulous voice. "The ship!"

  Dana was aware that the Shimadas had sent Louie to Denver to negotiate with the GMP, but she hadn't expected him to arrive unannounced at the cabin. She had returned to Monument only two days earlier, largely in flight from Jonathan and the confusion brought on by the sudden and upsetting change in their relationship. Sean had shown Louie

  up the hill to where Dana and Angelo were utilizing one of the Hovertanks to excavate graves for the Tiroleans. Three more had succumbed since Dana's trip to Denver. At the same time, there was reason for cautious optimism, in that Bowie and Musica had succeeded in reprogramming one of Bowie's synthesizers to emulate the eerie harmonies and dissonances of the Cosmic Harp.

  Louie's ever-present tinted goggles couldn't conceal his distress at seeing the grave sites, though it was equally apparent that his visit hadn't been prompted by concern for the health of the clones. Surely, his uneasiness had something to do with Shimada business. Even when he and Dana had put some distance between themselves and Sean and Angelo— much to their outrage—Louie remained agitated and wouldn't loo
k her in the eye.

  "Louie, will you quit pacing around and tell me what's on your mind!" she said at last. A cliff face along the ridge caught hold of her words and sent them echoing through the canyon.

  He hemmed and hawed for a moment, then said, "Dana, it's The Homeward Bound. Wolff failed to mention that we wouldn't be able to penetrate the on-board computer because it's secured by a voice code. As it turns out, he's the only one with full access to the data."

  Dana puzzled over the assertions. "Why would he conceal that from you?"

  "We're not sure. Maybe the computer contains additional information about the Sentinels or the REF, or about the true purpose of his mission? We just don't know. But we can't get anywhere without a deeper look."

  "But why didn't you say anything at the time, Louie—when we were all on board the ship?"

  "We didn't want to confront Wolff openly. He obviously has a reason for keeping quiet about the code. If we mentioned that we'd encountered it, he might have done something rash."

  Dana quelled a sense of mounting panic. Did the computer contain data about her parents or her sister? Was Jonathan lying about T. R.

  Edwards or the Invid? "Why are you coming to me with this?" she asked. "You should be talking to Jon—to Wolff."

  Louie caught the slip and touched his chin. "I will talk to him—if you agree that that's the best way to proceed. See, I haven't mentioned anything about the code to Nova or Fredericks."

  Dana was flustered. "What other way is there to proceed? If Wolff is the only one who can help you."

  Louie dug the tip of his boot into the soft earth. "We're certain that the computer can be made permeable by a code word or a phrase. Granted, it has to be presented in Wolff's voice, but we can get around that." He glanced at Dana. "What we need first is the code."

  It took Dana a moment to grasp his meaning. "You want me to pry the word out of him? Is that why you're here?"