Except for the Ichton mothership at the blue heart of it.
“It wasn’t . . .” Kaehler said as her hands played across her controls with a brain surgeon’s delicacy, freezing the image and then reversing it in minute increments.
” . . . me!” The last word was a shout, the first time Dresser had heard Kaehler raise her voice.
The image froze again in time. A disk of the planet’s surface, hundreds of kilometers in diameter, slumped and went molten. Its center was the Ichton vessel. Vaporized rock, atmospheric gases fused into long chains, and plasma bursting upward from subterranean thermonuclear blasts turned the whole viewing area into a hellbroth in which the states of matter were inextricably blended.
The scout understood what had happened before either of the scientists did. “They blew it down to the mantle,” Dresser said. “The Mantrans did. Their weapons couldn’t destroy the Ichtons, so they used the planet to do it.”
And failed, but he didn’t say that aloud.
Kaehler let the image scroll forward again, though at a slower rate of advance than that at which she had proceeded before. The Ichton convoy vanished, sucked into liquescent rock surging from the planet’s core. Plates of magma cooled, cracked, and upended to sink again into the bubbling inferno.
Sulphur compounds from the molten rock spewed into the stratosphere and formed a reflective haze. The sky darkened to night, not only at the target site but over the entire planet. Years and decades went by as the crater slowly cooled. Night continued to cloak the chaos.
“Bring it back to the point of the explosion, Kaehler,” the captain said. Bailey spoke in what was a restrained tone, for him. For the first time during the operation he used the intercom instead of shouting his directions from the support module. “Freeze it at the instant the shockwave hit them. That must have been what destroyed the ship.”
“It didn’t destroy the ship,” Kaehler said. Her voice had even less affect than usual. The image continued to advance.
The magnetic shields of the Ichton vessel provided the only certain light. The ship floated on a sea of magma, spherical and unchanged.
“They’re dead inside it!” Bailey shouted. “Focus on the microsecond of the first shockwave!”
“You damned fool!” Kaehler shouted back. “I don’t have that degree of control. We’ve got a hundred-millimeter aperture, or have you forgotten?”
Dresser watched Kaehler’s profile as she spoke. She didn’t look angry. Her face could have been a death mask.
The display continued to crawl forward. Lava crusted to stone. Cracks between solid blocks opened less frequently to cast their orange light across the wasteland. Century-long storms washed the atmosphere cleaner if not clean.
Bailey blinked and sat down in his module. Kaehler turned back to her controls.
“Their own people,” she said in a voice that might not have been intended even for Dresser. “There were thousands of them in the defenses. They all died.”
There had been millions of Mantrans in the defense lines.
“They couldn’t pull them out,” the scout said softly. “The defenses had to hold until the last instant, so that the mantle rupture would get all the Ichtons.”
“Did they know they were going to die?” Kaehler whispered.
“They knew they’d all die anyway,” Dresser said.
Everything in the universe would die.
The mothership released a sheaf of missiles, bright streaks across the roiling sky. Their anti-matter warheads exploded in the far distance, flickers of false dawn.
Three convoys set out from the mothership simultaneously. Mantran forces engaged one convoy while it was still within the display area, but the vain attempt lighted the hummocks of lava as briefly as a lightning flash . . .
* * *
“I knew it was over then,” Dresser said to his hands in the admiral’s office. “I’d known it before. They don’t quit. The Ichtons don’t quit.”
He looked at the captive again. It now lay on its back. Its six limbs moved slowly, as though they were separate creatures drifting in the currents of the sea.
“It may have been the failure of conventional techniques that forced the Mantrans to develop their superweapon,” Horwarth suggested. She wasn’t so much arguing with the scout as soothing him.