If Dresser had had a weapon, he’d have shot the creature by reflex, even though his conscious mind knew he was seeing a holographic window into the Ichton’s cell somewhere else on the Stephen Hawking. The prisoner must be fairly close by, because formic acid from its exoskeletal body tinged the air throughout Special Projects’ discrete section of the vessel.
People like Dresser weren’t allowed weapons aboard the Hawking. Especially not when they’d just returned from a mission and the Psych read-out said they were ten-tenths stressed—besides having to be crazy to pilot a scout boat to begin with.
“Sit down, Sergeant,” Admiral Horwarth said. She didn’t sound concerned about what she must have seen on Dresser’s face. “I’m sorry to delay your down-time like this, but—”
She smiled humorlessly.
“—this is important enough that I want to hear it directly from you.”
Dresser grimaced as he took the offered chair. “Yeah, I understand,” he said. “Sir.”
And the hell of it was, he did. Even tired and angry—and as scared as he was—Dresser was too disciplined not to do his duty. Scouts without rigid self discipline didn’t last long enough for anybody else to notice their passing.
“I suppose it was a considerable strain,” Horwarth prodded gently, “having to nursemaid two scientists and not having a normal crew who could stand watches?”
Dresser had been staring at the Ichton. He jerked his gaze downward at the sound of the admiral’s voice. “Sorry, sir,” he muttered. “No, that wasn’t much of a problem. For me. The trip, that’s the AI’s job. There’s nothing for human crews to do. I—”
Dresser looked at his hands. He waggled them close in front of his chest. He’d been told you could identify scouts because they almost never met the eyes of other human beings when talking to them. “Scouts, you know, anybody who’s willing to do it more than once. Scouts keep to themselves. The boat isn’t big enough to, to interact.”
He raised his eyes to the Ichton again. It was walking slowly about its cell on its two lower pairs of limbs. The top pair and their gripping appendages were drawn in tight against the creature’s gray carapace.
“The scientists,” Dresser continued flatly, “Bailey and Kaehler . . . they weren’t used to it. I think they were pretty glad when we got to the landing point, even though it didn’t look like the right place . . .”
* * *
“You’ve done something wrong, Dresser!” snarled Captain Bailey as Scout Boat 781’s braking orbit brought the vessel closer to the surface of the ruined planet. “This place hasn’t beaten off an Ichton attack. It’s been stripped!”
“At this point, sir,” Dresser said, “I haven’t done anything at all except initiate landing sequence. The artificial intelligence took us through sponge spare to the star that the—source—provided. There’s only one life-capable planet circling that star, and we’re landing on it.”
He couldn’t argue with Bailey’s assessment, though. mantra—properly, the name of the project file rather than the nameless planet itself—was utterly barren. Only the human-breathable atmosphere indicated that the planet’s lifelessness resulted from an outside agency rather than incapacity to support life.
The agency had almost certainly been a swarm of Ichtons. The chitinous monsters had devoured the surface of the planet, to feed themselves and to build a fleet of colony ships with which to infect additional worlds. The Ichtons were a cancer attacking all life . . .
mantra was gray rubble, waterless and sterile. Before they left, the invaders had reduced the planet to fist-sized pellets of slag, waste from their gigantic processing mills. The landscape over which the scout boat sizzled contained no hills, valleys, or hope.
“Chance wouldn’t have brought us to a solar system, Captain,” Kaehler said. She was small for a woman, even as Bailey was large for a man; and unlike her companion, she was a civilian without military rank. “It must be the correct location.”
When Dresser thought about Kaehler, it appeared to him that she’d been stamped through a mold of a particular shape rather than grown to adulthood in the normal fashion. Events streamed through the slight woman without being colored by a personality.