Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  When the time was right—when everything useful on Mantra had been processed into Ichton equipment or Ichton flesh—the myriad colonies would blast off from the stripped planet. Each would be the mother ship of a fresh brood, capable of destroying a further world in logarithmic progression.

  “What sort of equipment do the defenders have?” Captain Bailey asked. He was looking at Kaehler.

  “They don’t have anything, sir,” Dresser replied. He knew—all three of them knew—that Kaehler wasn’t going to speak. “I thought they were dead, but a few minutes again, they moved a little.”

  Military operations on Mantra had ceased generations before. The Ichton columns grinding away the rock on which the pair of indigenes sheltered were miners, not troops.

  “Pan back a little ways, Kaehler,” Bailey said. “I want to get a view of the enemy.”

  Kaehler didn’t respond.

  The Mantrans were life-size images above the purring console. One of them coiled more tightly. Bright yellow blotches of fungus were the only color on either body. Illumination from the Ichton colonies turned the hue to sickly green.

  Bailey cursed under his breath. He stamped back toward the support module.

  When her superior was halfway to his proper position, Kaehler adjusted her controls. The apparent viewpoint lifted, giving Dresser a view of the approaching Ichtons.

  The plateau on which the pair of Mantrans lay was artificial. Mining equipment ground away the rock from six directions, lowering the surface of the plain—of the planet—by twenty meters. A snake of tubing connected each of the grinding machines to one of the Ichton colonies that squatted on the horizon. There the material would be sorted, processed, and built into the mother ship growing at the heart of each colony.

  The closed conveyors gleamed with magnetic shields. Such protection was now unnecessary. Not even rain fell. Separate conveyor lines carried tailings, the waste that not even Ichton efficiency could use, into the ocean basins already drained by the invaders’ requirements.

  Cutting heads snuffled up and down the face rock, then moved in a shallow arc to either side with the close of each stroke. An Ichton in shimmering body armor rode each machine, but there was no obvious need for such oversight. The cutters moved like hounds casting, missing nothing in a slow inexorability that was far more chilling than a cat’s lithe pounce.

  Bits of the upper edge of the plateau dribbled into the maw of a cutter rising to the top of its stroke. One of the Mantrans coiled because the ground was shifting beneath its segmented body. Dresser wasn’t sure that the movement was conscious. Certainly the indigene made no concerted effort to escape.

  Not that escape was possible.

  Kaehler touched her controls, focusing down on the two Mantrans. The images swelled to larger than life size. Edges lost definition.

  One of the creatures was chewing on a piece of cloth. Its chitinous jaws opened and closed with a sideways motion. The fabric, a tough synthetic, remained unaffected by the attempt to devour it.

  “The left one has a weapon!” Captain Bailey suddenly cried. “Increase the resolution, Kaehler! This must be it!”

  Dresser could see that the Mantran, writhing as the plateau disintegrated beneath it, didn’t have a weapon. The yellow fungus had eaten away much of the creature’s underside. Most of its walking legs were withered, and one had fallen off at the root. That, hard-shelled and kinked at an angle, was what Bailey’s desperation had mistaken for a weapon,

  Kaehler turned toward her superior. “I can’t increase the resolution with a hundred-millimeter aperture,” she said in a voice as empty as the breeze.

  Bailey stood at the edge of his module. His head was silhouetted by the telltale behind him. “You could if you were any good at your job!” he shouted. “I’m tired of your excuses!”

  The cutting head rose into sight on the display. The Ichton riding it pointed his weapon, a miniature version of the flux generators that had devoured armor denser than the heart of a star.

  Kaehler stared at Bailey. Her left hand raised a panel on the front of her console. She didn’t look down at it.

  Dresser touched the woman’s shoulder with his left hand. He was icy cold. “Ah, ma’am?” he said.

  “All right, Captain,” Kaehler said in a voice like hoarfost. “I’ll enlarge—”

  “Wait!” Bailey shouted.

  Dresser didn’t know what was about to happen, but he wouldn’t have lived as long as he had without being willing to act decisively on insufficient data. He gripped Kaehler and tried to lift her out of her seat.

  Kaehler’s hand yanked at the control that had been caged within the console. Dresser saw Captain Bailey’s face lighted brilliantly in the instant before another reality enveloped the imaging module and the two humans within it.

  The Ichton fired, knocking the head off the nearer indigene with the easy nonchalance of a diner opening a soft-boiled egg. Rock beyond the Mantran disintegrated also, spraying grit into Dresser’s face as his right hand snatched his cutting bar.

  The air was foul with poisons not yet reabsorbed by ten thousand years of wind blowing through a filter of porous waste. The sky was black, and the horizon gleamed with Ichton colonies gravid with all-destroying life.

  Kaehler had opened the viewing aperture to the point that it enveloped herself, her equipment—

  And Sergeant Dresser, who hadn’t carried a gun on a lifeless desert, for God’s sake, only a cutting bar that wouldn’t be enough to overload Ichton body armor. Dresser lunged for the monster anyway as it turned in surprise.

  A stream of flux projectiles blew divots out of stone as the Ichton brought its weapon around. Kaehler didn’t move.

  Dresser’s powered, diamond-toothed blade screamed and stalled in the magnetic shielding. He tried to grab the Ichton weapon but caught the limb holding it instead. The scout’s fingers couldn’t reach a material surface. Though he knew his arm was stronger than the exoskeletal monster’s, his hand slipped as though he were trying to hold hot butter.

  Dresser looked down the muzzle of the Ichton weapon.

  He thought, when he hit the ground an instant later, that he was dead. Instead, he was sprawled beside SB 781. Plasma spewing from the fusion bottle formed a plume that melted the upper surfaces of the support module. It was brighter than the rising sun . . .

  Dresser met Admiral Horwarth’s eyes. “He’d vented the containment vessel,” the scout said. “Bailey had. He knew it’d kill him, but it was the only way to shut the apparatus off fast enough from where he was.”

  “I’ve recommended Captain Bailey for a Fleet Cross on the basis of your report, Sergeant,” Horwarth said quietly. “The—cause of your transition through the aperture will be given as equipment failure, though.”

  Dresser shrugged. His eyes were wide and empty, with a thousand-meter stare that took in neither the admiral nor the image of the motionless Ichton on the wall behind her.

  “It wasn’t Kaehler’s fault,” the scout said. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “She cracked, people do that. It wasn’t a fault.”

  He blinked and focused on Horwarth again. “Is she going to be all right?” he asked. “She wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even move on the trip back.”

  “I’ll have a report soon,” Horwarth said, a bland placeholder instead of an answer.

  Dresser wrapped his arms tightly around his torso. “Maybe it wasn’t Bailey’s fault either,” he said. “I figure he cracked, too. Even me, I’m used to the Ichtons, but it bothered me a bit. He wasn’t ready to see the things he saw on Mantra.”

  “A bit” was a lie obvious to anyone but the man who said it.

  Dresser’s smile was as slight and humorless as the point of a dagger. “I brought his feet back in cold storage. Everything above the ankles, that the plasma got when he dumped the bottle.”

  “There doesn’t appear to have been any flaw in the equipment itself, though,” Horwarth said. “Until the damage incurred in the final accident.”<
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  “I was the one who screwed up,” Dresser said to his past. “I should’ve grabbed her quicker. I was supposed to be the scout, the professional.”

  “When the equipment can be rebuilt,” Admiral Horwarth said, clamping the scout with the intensity of her gaze, “there’ll have to be a follow-up mission to complete the reconnaissance.”

  “No,” said Dresser.

  Horwarth ignored the word. “I’d appreciate it if you would consent to pilot the mission, Sergeant,” she said. “You know better than almost anyone else how impor—”

  “No!” Dresser shouted as he lurched to his feet. “No, you don’t need a follow-up mission! We’d completed the mission, and we’d failed. That’s why it happened, don’t you see?”

  “What I see is that the incident aborted Captain Bailey’s mission before it reached closure,” the admiral said.

  She rose also and leaned forward on her desk, resting on her knuckles. Her voice rose as either her facade cracked or she let some of her real anger and frustration out as a means of controlling the scout. “What I see is that we have to find the weapon the Ichtons fear, because you’ve proved that no conventional weapon can defeat them in the long term.”

  “Admiral,” Dresser begged.

  He turned to the closed door behind him, then turned again. He didn’t realize that he was crying until a falling tear splashed the back of his hand. “Sir. The coordinates were wrong, something was wrong. The only thing left to learn on Mantra was whether the last of the indigenes died of disease or starvation before the Ichtons got them.”

  Horwarth softened. She’d skimmed the recordings the expedition brought back. She didn’t need Psych’s evaluation of the two survivors to understand how the images would affect those who’d actually gathered them.

  “Sergeant,” she said, “something happened to the Ichtons before they spread from Mantra. It made memory of the place a hell for them ten thousand years later. We have to learn what.”

  “Sir . . .” Dresser whispered. He rubbed his eyes angrily, but he was still blind with memory. “Sir, I’ll go back, I’ll do whatever you want. But we failed, sir, because there was nothing there to succeed with. And since I watched Mantra eaten, I know just how bad we failed.”

  “We’ve got to try, Ser—” Admiral Horwarth began.

  The electronic chime of an alarm interrupted her. Horwarth reached for a control on her desk.

  Dresser’s gaze focused on the holographic scene behind the admiral. Three humans wearing protective garments had entered the Ichton’s cell. They stumbled into one another in their haste.

  “Duty officer!” Admiral Horwarth snarled into her intercom. “What the hell is going on?”

  Two of the attendants managed to raise the Ichton from the floor of the cell. The creature was leaking fluid from every joint. It was obviously dead.

  The chitinous exoskeleton of the Ichton’s torso was blotched yellow by patches of the fungus whose spores had traveled with Sergeant Dresser from the surface of a dying planet.