“You’re doing very well, Sergeant,” the voice cajoled. “Now, I’m going to open the door in the end of the compartment. Just follow the hallway out. Don’t be in a hurry.”
Dresser’s right front leg bumped the table, but he didn’t fall. He was terrified. His mind tried to focus on anything but what his legs were doing. The doorway lurched closer.
It was like being in freefall. But he knew there was no landing possible from this mental vacuum.
3
Rodriges manipulated his controls. The screen split. Its right half showed the back of the cloned Ichton shambling through the doorway, while a frontal shot of the creature approached down the hallway on the left.
“He’s gonna get t’ meet the brass,” the technician muttered. “Horwarth and Doctor del Prato. Bet you never thought you’d be meeting an admiral and a top biochemist personal-like, did you, sarge?”
Dresser grunted.
Rodriges touched the controls again. The right image leapfrogged to the interior of a three-bed medical ward which included a well-appointed office. The admiral, seated behind a desk of what looked like real wood, was a stocky female. She wore a skull & crossbones ring in her left ear, and her right ear was missing. To her right sat a florid-faced civilian whose moustache flowed into his sideburns.
The door to the ward had been removed and a section of bulkhead cut from the top of the doorway. Even so, the Ichton lurching down the corridor would have to duck or bang its flat head.
“Why didn’t they wake him up here?” Dresser asked. He made a tight, almost dismissive, gesture toward the medical ward.
Rodriges looked sidelong at the scout. “Umm . . . ,” he said. “They didn’t know quite how you’d—how he’d react when he woke up, y’know? They got me here for protection—”
The technician tapped carefully beside, not on, a separate keypad. It was a release for the weapons whose targeting was slaved to the screen controls.
“—but they don’t want, you know, to lose the work. There’s five more clones on ice, but still. . . .”
Dresser’s face went hard. He didn’t speak.
The Ichton paused in the doorway and tried to lower its head. Instead, the creature fell forward with its haunches high, like those of a horse which balked too close to the edge of a ditch.
“That’s all right,” said Admiral Horwarth brusquely. Her voice and the hypersonic translation of her voice echoed from the paired speakers of the observation room. “You’ll soon have the hang of it.”
“Part of the reason he’s so clumsy,” Rodriges said as he kept his invisible sight centered on the clone’s chest, “is the body’s straight out of the growth tank. It hasn’t got any muscle tone.”
His lips pursed as he and Dresser watched the ungainly creature struggle to rise again. “Of course,” the technician added, “it could be the bugs’re clumsy as hell anyhow.”
“The ones I saw,” said Dresser tightly, “moved pretty good.”
* * *
The leading Ichton vehicle started to climb out of the dry wash; the nose of the last vehicle dipped to enter the end farthest from Dresser.
The scout boat’s artificial intelligence planned the ambush with superhuman skill. It balanced the target, the terrain, distance factors, and the available force—the lack of available force—into a 70% probability that some or all of the scout team would survive the contact.
The AI thought their chance of capturing a live Ichton was <.1; but that wasn't the first thing in any of the scouts' minds, not even Dresser's. The convoy's inexorable progress led it to the badlands site within two minutes of the arrival time the AI had calculated. A wind-cut swale between two tilted sheets of hard sandstone had been gouged deeper by infrequent cloudbursts. The resulting gully was half a kilometer long. It was straight enough to give Dresser a clear shot along it from where he lay aboard his skimmer, on higher ground a hundred meters from the mouth. The Ichtons could easily have gone around the gully, but there was no reason for them to do so. From what Dresser had seen already, the race had very little tendency to go around anything.