In the observation room, Dresser turned his back on the screen. “How much does he remember?” he asked Rodriges harshly.
The technician shrugged. “Up to maybe thirty-six hours before the transfer,” he said. “There’s some loss, but not a lot. You okay yourself?”
“Fine,” said Dresser. “I’m great.”
On the screen, a uniformed man without rank tabs outlined the physical-training program. The clone’s new muscles had to be brought up to standard before the creature was reinserted.
Dresser shuddered. Rodriges thumbed down the audio level, though the translation channel remained a distant piping.
“When I volunteered . . . ,” Dresser said carefully. “I didn’t know how much it’d bug—bother me. To see myself as an Ichton.”
“Naw, that’s not you, Sarge,” Rodriges said. “Personalities start to diverge at the moment the mind scan gets dumped in the new cortex—and in that cortex, the divergence is going to be real damn fast. None of the sensory stimuli are the same, you see.”
Dresser grunted and looked back over his shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “Well. Bet he thinks he’s me, though.”
“Sarge, you did the right thing, volunteering,” Rodriges soothed. “You heard the admiral. Using somebody who’s seen the bugs in action, that improves the chances. And anyway—it’s done, right?”
The clone was moving its forelimbs—arms—in response to the trainer’s direction. The offside supporting legs twitched unexpectedly; the tall creature fell over. A civilian expert jumped reflexively behind a female colleague in Marine Reaction Unit fatigues.
“It’s going to be just as hard for him when they switch him back, won’t it?” Dresser said. He turned to the technician. “Getting used to a human body again, I mean.”
“Huh?” Rodriges blurted. “Oh, you mean like the admiral said. Ah, Sarge. . . . A fast-growth clone—”
He gestured toward the screen. Dresser didn’t look around.
“Look, it’s a total-loss project. I mean, in the tank we got five more bodies like this one—but the original, what’s left of that’s just hamburger.”
Dresser stared but said nothing.
Rodriges blinked in embarrassment. He plowed onward, saying, “Cost aside—and I’m not saying it’s a cost decision, but it’d be cheaper to build six destroyers than a batch of fast-growth clones. Anyway, cost aside, there’s no way that thing’s gonna be back in a body like yours unless yours . . . You know?”
The technician shrugged.
“I guess I was pretty naive,” Dresser said slowly.
Rodriges reached over and gripped the scout’s hand. “Hey,” the technician said. “It’s not you, you know? It’s a thing. Just a thing.”
Dresser disengaged his hand absently. He looked toward the screen again, but he didn’t see the figures, human and alien, on it. Instead, his mind filled with the image of the baby Gerson, stretching out its chubby hands toward him—
Until it vanished in tears that diffracted light into a dazzle like that of the weapon in Dresser’s three-fingered hands.
FAILURE MODE
In the mirror-finished door to the admiral’s office, Sergeant Dresser saw the expression on his own face: worn, angry, and—if you looked deep in the eyes—as dangerous as a grenade with the pin pulled.
“You may go in, sir,” repeated Admiral Horwarth’s human receptionist in a tart voice.
Dresser was angry:
Because he’d gone through normal mission debriefing and he should have been off-duty. Instead he’d been summoned to meet the head of Bureau 8, Special Projects.
Because it had been a tough mission, and he’d failed.
And because he’d just watched a planet pay the price all life would pay for the mission’s failure. Even the Ichtons would die, when they’d engulfed everything in the universe beyond themselves.
“The admiral is waiting, Sergeant,” said the receptionist, a blond hunk who could have broken Dresser in half with his bare hands; but that wouldn’t matter, because bare hands were for when you were out of ammo, your cutting bar had fried, and somebody’d nailed your boots to the ground . . .
Dresser tried to stiff-arm the feral gray face before him. The doorpanel slid open before he touched it. He strode into the office of Admiral Horwarth, a stocky, middle-aged woman facing him from behind a desk.
On the wall behind Horwarth was an Ichton.