Protein rations, bundled into transparent packets weighing a kilogram or so, littered the gully floor. The mother Gerson was only partway through processing. Her legs and the lower half of her furry torso stuck out the intake funnel in the truck body. The apparatus had stalled from battle damage.
The baby Gerson lay among the ration packets, feebly waving its chubby arms.
Thomson fired from her skimmer. She didn’t have a direct sightline to the supply truck, but her suit sensors told her where the target was. The A-Pot beam ripped through the lip of stone like lightning in a wheat field.
Rock shattered, spewing chunks skyward. At the end of the ragged path, visible to Dresser though not Thomson, the damaged truck sucked inward and vanished like a smoke sculpture.
SB 781 drifted across Thomson, as silent as a cloud. The vessel was programmed to land at the center of the gully, since the team didn’t have the transport to move an Ichton prisoner any distance from the capture site.
“Ship!” Dresser cried, overriding the plan. “Down! Now!”
The living Ichton got to its feet. Dresser, twenty meters away, grounded his skimmer in a shower of sparks and squeezed his trigger.
The rocket launcher didn’t fire. He’d short-stroked the charging lever when the transporter blew up. There wasn’t a round in the chamber.
The baby Gerson wailed. The Ichton spun like a dancer and vaporized the infant in a glowing dazzle.
SB 781 settled at the lip of the gully, between Thomson and the Ichton. She wouldn’t shoot at their own ride home—and anyway, the vessel’s A-Potential shielding should protect it if she did.
The team’s job was to bring back a prisoner.
Dresser charged his launcher and fired. The warhead detonated on the Ichton’s magnetic shield. The green flash hurled the creature against the rock wall.
It bounced back. Dresser fired again, slapping the Ichton into the stone a second time. The creature’s weapon flew out of its three-fingered hands.
At Dresser’s third shot, a triangular bulge on the Ichton’s chest melted and the shield’s blue glow vanished.
The Ichton sprawled in an ungainly tangle of limbs. Dresser got off his skimmer and ran to the creature. He dropped his rocket launcher and drew the powered cutting bar from the boot sheath where it rode.
Dresser’s vision pulsed with colors as though someone were flicking pastel filters over his eyes. He didn’t have time to worry whether something was wrong with his helmet optics. Thomson’s shouted curses faded in and out also, so the damage was probably within Dresser’s skull. Fleet hardware could survive one hell of a hammering, but personnel were still constructed to an older standard. . . .
The Ichton twitched. Dresser ran the tip of his 20-cm cutter along the back of the creature’s suit. The armor was non-metallic but tough enough to draw a shriek from the contra-rotating diamond saws in the bar’s edge.
Dresser wasn’t going to chance carrying the prisoner with in-built devices still functioning in its suit, not even in the stasis bay of SB 781. The tech mavens on the Hawking could deal with the network of shallow cuts the cutter was going to trace across the chitin and flesh. There wasn’t time to be delicate, even if Dresser had wanted to be.
The air in the gully stank, but that wasn’t why Dresser took breaths so shallow that his oxygen-starved lungs throbbed.
He couldn’t help thinking about the baby Gerson vaporized a few meters away.
4
There were two humans in the room with Dresser in his new body. The one behind the desk wore blue; the other wore white.
He wasn’t sure what the sex of either of them was.
“As your mind reintegrates with the cloned body, Sergeant,” said the mechanical voice, “you’ll achieve normal mobility. Ah, normal for the new body, that is.”
White’s mouth parts were moving. Dresser knew—remembered—that meant the human was probably speaking; but the words came from the desk’s front corner moldings. Ears alternated with the speech membranes along Dresser’s lateral lines. He shifted position instinctively to triangulate on the speakers’ precise location.
“I want to tell you right now, Sergeant, that the Alliance—that all intelligent life in the galaxy is in your debt. You’re a very brave man.”