“The Ichtons don’t spare anything,” Dresser said softly. He had once landed on a planet while an Ichton attack was still going on. Then he added, “On our bad days, humans haven’t been notably kind toward other mammaliforms.”
“Kaehler, for god’s sake, start bringing the image forward in time!” Captain Bailey shouted. “We aren’t here as tourists. We won’t see the locals’ superweapon until after the Ichtons land. Get with the program, woman!”
Kaehler began resetting the controls on her console. Her face was expressionless, as usual.
“Humans,” Dresser said, looking over the stark landscape, “haven’t always done real well toward other humans.”
* * *
Dresser glanced at Admiral Horwarth, then shifted his gaze to the captive again. He continued to watch the admiral out of the corners of his eyes.
“They had a high tech level, the Mantrans,” Dresser said. “I made myself believe that they could have built something to defeat the Ichtons. But I knew they hadn’t, because—”
Dresser swept both hands out in a fierce gesture, palms down.
“—I could see they hadn’t,” he snarled. “There was nothing. The Ichtons had processed the whole planet down to waste. There was nothing! Nothing for us to find, no reason for us to be there.”
“Our source was very precise,” Horwarth said gently. “The Ichtons have genetic memory, which our source is able to tap. mantra was a disaster for them which has remained imprinted for, you say ten, thousands of years.”
The ‘source’ was an Ichton clone, controlled by a human psyche. Dresser knew that, because the psyche was Dresser’s own.
The scout began to shiver. He clasped his hands together to control them. With his eyes closed, he continued, “It took Kaehler an hour to get dialed in on the moment of the Ichton assault. Bailey badgered her the whole time . . .”
* * *
“I think—” Kaehler said.
A bead of blue fire appeared at the top of the image area. The terrain beneath was broken. The Ichton mothership had appeared in the southern hemisphere. SB 781’s navigational computer told Dresser that the vector was probably chance. The Ichtons didn’t appear to care where they made their approach.
The display turned white.
“Kaehler!” Bailey shouted. “You’ve lost the—”
“No!” Dresser said. “They follow an anti-matter bomb in. That’s how they clear their landing zones.”
The white glare mottled into a firestorm, roaring to engulf a landscape pulverized by the initial shockwave. For an instant, rarefaction from an aftershock cleared the atmosphere enough to provide a glimpse of the crater, kilometers across and a mass of glowing rock at the bottom.
The Ichton mothership continued to descend in stately majesty. A magnetic shield wrapped the enormous hull. Its flux gradient was so sharp that it severed the bonds of air molecules and made the vessel gleam in the blue and ultraviolet range of the spectrum.
Kaehler’s right hand moved to a set of controls discrete from those which determined the imaging viewpoint in the physical dimensions. As her finger touched a roller, Captain Bailey ordered, “Come on, come on, Kaehler. Advance it so that we can see the response! It’s—”
The display began to blur forward, if Time had direction. Bailey continued to speak, though it must have been obvious that Kaehler had anticipated his command.
“—the response that’s important, not some explosion.”
The glowing mothership remained steady. The Mantran reaction to being invaded was violent and sustained. War swirled around the huge vessel like sparks showering from a bonfire.
Kaehler advanced the temporal vernier at an increasing rate, letting the ball roll off her finger and onto the palm of her hand. She reached across her body with the other hand and switched a dial that increased the log of the rate.
A convoy of Ichton ground vehicles left the mothership while the rock of the crater still shimmered from the anti-matter explosion. The twenty vehicles had not escaped the frame of the display when the Mantrans engaged them from air and ground.
Ichton weapons fired flux generators like those which served the creatures as armor. The shearing effect of their magnetic gradients—particularly those of the heavy weapons mounted on the mothership—wreaked havoc with the defenders, but the quickly-mounted Mantran counterattack nonetheless overwhelmed the convoy vehicle by vehicle. The last to disintegrate in a fluorescent fireball was a gigantic cylinder carrying the eggs that were to be the basis of a new colony.