“About twenty klicks away,” Dresser continued. He felt the eyes of his subordinates burning on him; but he was in charge, and SB 781 was going to carry out its mission. “We’ll take the skimmers and set up an ambush.”
“Take the boat,” Thomson said through dry lips. “We’ll want the firepower.”
Dresser shook his head without taking his eyes off his display. “The boat’d get noticed,” he said. “You guys’ll be in hard suits with A-Pot weapons. That’ll be as much firepower as we need.”
“Lookit that!” Codrus cried, pointing across the cockpit to Dresser’s display. “Lookit that!”
A family of Gersons bolted from the row of trees just ahead of the Ichton column. There were four adults, a pair of half-grown children, and a furry infant in the arms of the female struggling along behind the other adults.
The turret of the leading vehicle rotated to follow the refugees. . . .
* * *
“You okay, Sarge?” Rodriges asked worriedly.
Dresser crossed his arms and kneaded his biceps hard. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” His voice was husky. “Seein’ the thing there—”
He nodded toward the screen. The Ichton was sitting upright. The voice from the speaker said, “Don’t try to use your conscious mind to control your muscles. You wouldn’t with your own body, after all.”
“You can’t imagine how cruel they are, the Ichtons,” Dresser said.
“Naw, it’s not cruel,” the technician explained. “You’re only cruel to something you think about. The bugs, they treat the whole universe like we’d treat, you know, an outcrop of nickel ore.”
“So cruel . . . ,” Dresser whispered.
The Ichton’s tympanic membranes shrilled through the left speaker. The translation channel boomed, “Where the hell am I? Thomson? Codrus! What’s happened to my boat!”
Sergeant Dresser closed his eyes.
“Where’s 781, you bastards?” demanded the Ichton through the machine voice.
2
“The sub-brain of your clone body will control the muscles, Sergeant Dresser,” said the voice from a speaker in the wall. “You can’t override the hard-wired controls, so just relax and let them do their job.”
The words were compressed and harshly mechanical; the room’s lighting spiked chaotically on several wavelengths. Were they torturing him?
Who were they?
“Where’s my crew?” Dresser shouted. He threw his feet over the edge of the couch on which had awakened. His legs splayed though he tried to keep them steady. He collapsed on his chest. The floor was resilient.
“Your men are all right, Sergeant,” the voice said. The speaker tried to be soothing, but the delivery rasped like a saw on bone. “So is your human self. Your memory will return in a few minutes.”
Memory was returning already. Memory came in disorienting sheets that didn’t fit with the real world. Images that Dresser remembered were sharply defined but static. They lacked the texturing of incipient movement that wrapped everything Dresser saw through the faceted eyes of his present body.
But he remembered. . . .
* * *
The male Gerson—the tallest, though even he was less than a meter-fifty in height—turned and raised an anti-tank rocket launcher. The rest of the family blundered past him. The juveniles were hand in hand, and the female with the infant still brought up the rear.
“Where’d he get hardware like that?” Codrus muttered. “I’d’ve figured the teddy bears were down to sharp sticks, from the way things look.”
The Ichton vehicles moved on air cushions; they didn’t have the traction necessary to grind through obstacles the way tracked or even wheeled transport could. The leader’s turret weapon spewed a stream of projectiles like a ripple of light. The hedge row disintegrated in bright flashes.
“They sent a starship to the Alliance, after all,” Dresser muttered. “The ones left behind still have some weapons, is all.”
Brush and splintered wood began to burn sluggishly. The leading Ichton vehicle nosed into the gap.
“Much good it’ll do them,” said Thomson.
The Gerson fired. The rocket launcher’s flaring yellow backblast enveloped twenty meters of brush and pulsed the hedge on the other side of the field. The hypervelocity projectile slammed into the Ichton vehicle.
Slammed, rather, into the faint blue glow of the defensive shield surrounding the Ichton vehicle. The impact roared across the electro-optical spectrum like multicolored petals unfolding from a white core.