Dresser shook his head. “There was never a superweapon on mantra, Admiral,” he said. “Just death.”
* * *
“Move us forward faster, Kaehler,” Captain Bailey ordered over the intercom. “And—change the spatial viewpoint, I think. Follow a moving column.”
For once, Dresser thought the captain had a point. There was nothing useful to be seen in the neighborhood of the mothership.
Three more convoys set out across the cooling lava. These met no resistance.
Kaehler remained fixed, as though she were a wax dummy at her console.
There was nothing useful to be seen anywhere on the planet.
“Kaehler?”
The female scientist began to change settings with the cool precision of a machine which had just been switched on again. She did not speak.
The images on the display flip-flopped through abrupt changes in time and place. An image of all mantra hung above the console. Half the planet was in sunlight. Yellow-lit cities of the indigenes and the blue speckles of Ichton colonies studded the remaining hemisphere.
For the moment, the colonies were small and there were only a few of them visible. For the moment.
Kaehler’s fingers searched discrete blocks of time and space like an expert shuffling cards, throwing up images for a second or less before shifting to the next:
A barren landscape with neither Ichtons nor Mantrans present.
A distant nighttime battle, plasma weapons slamming out bolts of sulphurous yellow that made Ichton shields pulse at the edge of the ultra-violet. Just as Kaehler switched away, an anti-matter warhead obliterated the whole scene. Ichton machinery with maws a kilometer wide, harvesting not only a field of broad-leafed vegetation but the soil a meter down. Enclosed conveyors snaked out of the image area, carrying the organic material toward an Ichton colony. The invaders’ tanks oversaw the process, but their waiting guns found no targets.
A Mantran city looming on the horizon—
“There!” Bailey called. “There, hold on that one!”
Kaehler gave no sign that she heard her superior, but she locked the controls back to a slow crawl again. Perhaps she’d intended to do that in any case.
Mantran resistance had devolved to the local level. This city was ringed with fortifications similar to those which the planet as a whole had thrown up around the Ichton mothership. Though the defenses were kilometers deep, they were only a shadow of those which the invaders had breached around their landing zone.
The Ichton force approaching the city was a dedicated combat unit, not a colonizing endeavor. Turreted tanks guarded the flanks and rear of the invaders’ column, but the leading vehicles were featureless tubes several hundred meters long. They looked like battering rams, and their purpose was similar.
The city’s defenders met the column with plasma bolts and volleys of missiles. A tank, caught by several bolts and a thermonuclear warhead simultaneously, exploded. The failure of its magnetic shields was cataclysmic, rocking nearby vehicles as the Mantran bombardment had not been able to do.
For the most part, Ichton counterfire detonated the missiles before they struck. Plasma bolts could at best stall an Ichton target for a few moments while the vehicle directed the whole output of its power supply to the protective shields.
The tubular Ichton vehicles were built around flux generators as large as those of the mothership’s main armament. Three of them fired together. A section of the Mantran defenses vanished in a sunbright dazzle. It shimmered with all the hues of a fire opal.
The gun vehicles crawled closer to the city. The height of the flux gradient of their projectiles was proportional to the cube of the distance from the launcher’s muzzle. Even at a range of several hundred meters, the weapons sheared the intra-atomic bonds of the collapsed metal armoring the defenses.
All the available Mantran weaponry concentrated on the gun vehicles. The ground before their treads bubbled and seethed, and the nearest of the indigenes’ fortifications began to slump from the fury of the defensive fire.
The Ichtons fired again; shifted their concentrated aim and fired again; shifted and fired. The gap before them was wide enough to pass the attacking column abreast. Counterfire ceased, save for a vain handful of missiles from launchers which hadn’t quite emptied their magazines.