Light winked from the Ichton’s faceted eyes as the creature turned its head mindlessly from one side to the other.
“Hey, no sweat,” Dresser said. A grin quirked a corner of his mouth. The first thing that had struck him funny for—
From since they’d made landfall a month and a half ago. Rodriges thought the Ichton looked ugly, but he hadn’t seen what the creatures did. . . .
The Ichton on the screen relaxed. One speaker squealed plaintively; the other asked in an emotionless voice, “Where . . . ? Where am I?”
“Sure, that was us,” Dresser said. “SB 781, not just me; but my boat, my crew, you bet. Only you don’t . . . I didn’t really look at it, you know? Bundled it up and slung it into a stasis field before we bugged out. Scout boats don’t have what you’d call great passenger accommodations.”
A separate chirping punctuated the sounds the Ichton made. In a voice identical to that provided for the prisoner, the translator said, “Please relax. The restraints are simply to prevent you from injuring yourself upon waking. When you relax, we will loosen them.”
“That’s Admiral Horwarth, the project head,” Rodriges said knowingly. “Don’t know jack shit about medicine or biochem, but she sure can make a team of prima donna medicos get on with the program.”
Dresser was lost in memory. He said, “When we landed, I was watching on my screen, and there was this city, a Gerson city it turned out. . . .”
* * *
Thomson was at the center console, watching the ground swing toward SB 781 with the leisured assurance of a thrown medicine ball. Occasionally her fingers scissored over the controls without touching them.
The approach was nerve-wrackingly slow, but that was the way it had to be. Staying out of Ichton warning sensors was the only way the scout boat was going to survive. The turbulence and friction heat of a fast approach would have pointed a glowing finger straight toward them.
“Lookit that sucker!” muttered Codrus.
Dresser and Codrus didn’t bother to back up Thomson, but the chance that she would have to take over from the boat’s artificial intelligence was a million to one—and the chance that a human could do any good if the AI failed was a lot worse than that.
Codrus was watching the nearest Ichton colony, a vast pimple of blue light projecting kilometers into the stratosphere. Ichton strongholds began as hemispheres of magnetic force. The flux was concentrated enough to sunder the molecular bonds of projectiles and absorb the full fury of energy weapons. As each colony grew, the height of its shield decreased in relation to the diameter.
This colony was already a hundred kilometers across. It would not stop growing until its magnetic walls bulged against those of other Ichton fortresses.
Lookit that sucker.
The scout boat quivered and bobbed as the AI subtlely mimicked the patterns of clear air turbulence, but the computer-enhanced view on Dresser’s screen remained rock solid. It had been city of moderate size—perhaps 15,000 inhabitants if human density patterns were applicable.
The buildings tended to rounded surfaces rather than planes. The palette was of earth tones, brightened by street paving of brilliant yellow. From a distance, the soft lines and engaging ambiance of the city as it originally stood would have suggested a field of edible mushrooms.
The tallest of the surviving structures rose about ten meters. The ragged edges in which the tower now ended were the result of Ichton weapons.
A column of Ichtons had passed through the community. The invaders’ weapons, derivatives of their defensive shields, had blasted a track across the center of the inhabited area and gnawed apart most of the rest of the city as well.
“Hang on,” warned Thomson.
“What gets me,” said Dresser, “is they didn’t attack the place. It was just there, and they went through it rather than going around.”
“They took out major urban centers with anti-matter bombs,” Codrus said. “Musta had a scale of what they blitzed and what they ignored unless it got in the way. Of course—”
“Touchdown!” Thomson said.
SB 781 fluffed her landing jets—hard twice, while there were still twenty meters of air beneath the boat’s belly, then a softer, steady pulse that disturbed the soil as little as possible. No point in inserting stealthily through a hundred kilometers of atmosphere and then kick up a plume of dirt like a locating flag.