“—sooner or later, they cover the whole land surface, so I don’t guess they worry about when they get around t’ this piece or that.”
The scout boat shuddered to a halt that flung Dresser against his gel restraints. His display continued to glow at him with images of the wrecked city, enhanced to crispness greater than what his eyes would have showed him at the site.
Ichton weapons fired beads the size of matchheads which generated expanding globes of force. Individual weapons had a range of only three hundred meters or so, but their effect was devastating—particularly near the muzzle, where the density of the magnetic flux was high. The force globes acted as atomic shears, wrenching apart the molecules of whatever they touched. Even at maximum range, when the flux formed an iridescent ball a meter in diameter, it could blast the fluff off the bodies of this planet’s furry natives.
Dresser was sure of that, because some of the Ichtons’ victims still lay in the ruins like scorched teddy bears.
“They’re Gersons,” Dresser said to his crew. “The natives here. One of the races that asked the Alliance for help.”
“Too late for that,” Codrus muttered. His slim, pale hands played over the controls, rotating the image of the Ichton fortress on his display. From any angle, the blue glare was as perfect and terrible as the heart of a supernova. “Best we get our asses back to the Hawking and report.”
This was Dresser’s first mission on SB 781; the previous team leader had wangled a commission and a job in Operations. Thomson and Codrus came with the boat . . . and they were an item, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.
It didn’t work on SB 781. Both partners were too worried about what might happen to the other to get on with the mission.
“Not till we’ve done our jobs,” Dresser said softly. He raised the probes, hair-thin optical guides which unreeled to the height of twenty meters above SB 781’s camouflaged hull. His display immediately defaulted to real-time images of a wind-sculpted waste.
The immediate terrain hadn’t been affected by the Ichton invasion—yet. Eventually it too would be roofed by flux generators so powerful that they bent light and excluded the blue and shorter wave lengths entirely. Within their impregnable armor, the Ichtons would extract ores—the rock had a high content of lead and zinc—and perhaps the silicon itself. The planet the invaders left would be reduced to slag and ash.
Thomson tried to stretch in the narrow confines of her seat. Her hands trembled, though that might have been reaction to the tension of waiting above the flight controls against the chance that she’d have to take over. “No job we can do here,” she said. “This place is gone. Gone. It’s not like we’ve got room t’ take back refugees.”
Dresser modified his display. The upper half remained a real-time panorama. The glow of an Ichton colony stained the eastern quadrant in a sickly blue counterfeit of the dawn that was still hours away. The lower portion of the display became a map created from data SB 781’s sensors gathered during insertion.
“Command didn’t send us for refugees,” he said. He tried to keep his voice calm, so that his mind would become calm as well. “They said to bring back a live prisoner.”
“We can’t get a prisoner!” Codrus said, maybe louder than he’d meant. “Anything that’d bust open these screens—”
He gestured toward the Ichton fortress on his display. His knuckles vanished within the holographic ambiance, then reappeared like the head of a bobbing duck.
“—’d rip the whole planet down to the core and let that out. The place is fucked, and we need to get away!”
“They’re still sending out colonies,” Dresser said.
His fingers raised the probes ten meters higher and shrank the image area to 5° instead of a full panorama. The upper display shuddered. The blue glow filled most of its horizon.
Five Ichton vehicles crawled across terrain less barren than that in which the scout boat hid. Trees grew in serpentine lines along the boundaries of what must once have been cultivated fields. For the most part, the land was now overgrown with brush.