The column advanced. An inner line of plasma weapons opened up—uselessly.
In the ruins of the outer defenses, a few Mantrans thrashed. Muscles, broiled within their shells by heat released when nearby matter ionized, made the Mantrans’ segemented bodies coil and knot.
Sergeant Dresser turned his head. He was a scout. He was trained to observe and report information.
There was nothing new to observe here.
“Kaehler!” Captain Bailey shouted from the edge of Dresser’s conscious awareness. “Bring us forward by longer steps, woman! This isn’t any good to us.”
When Dresser faced away from the holographic display, he could see stars in the sky of mantra. He wondered if any of them had planets which had escaped being stripped by the Ichton ravagers . . .
* * *
“Bailey figured,” Dresser said in a voice too flat to hold emotion, “that we’d be able to tell when the superweapon was developed by its effect on the Ichtons. When we saw signs of the Ichtons retreating, of their colonies vanishing, then we’d know something had happened and work back to learn what.”
Admiral Horwarth nodded. “That sounds reasonable,” she said.
“They should’ve taken a break, Bailey and Kaehler,” the scout added in a nonsequitur. His mind, trapped in the past, bounced from one regret to another. “Going straight on, I knew it was a mistake, but I wasn’t in charge.”
Horwarth looked over her shoulder at the captive Ichton. The movement was a way of gaining time for her to decide how to respond. The Ichton still lay full length on the floor of its cell. Its limbs wrapped its torso tightly.
Horwarth turned again. “Should we have sent more than one team?” she asked. “Was that the problem?”
“No,” Dresser said sharply. The harshness of his own voice surprised him.
“No sir,” he said, meeting the admiral’s eyes in apology. “I don’t think so. Time wasn’t that crucial. Bailey got focused on finding the superweapon. The more clear it was that no such weapon existed—”
Dresser’s anger blazed out unexpectedly. “The planet was a wasteland!” he snarled. “We knew that from the pre-landing survey!”
“The Mantrans could have developed their weapon when it was too late to save their planet, you know,” Horwarth suggested mildly. “What we have is evidence that the Ichtons were traumatized by the contact—not that the Mantrans survived it.”
Dresser sighed. “Yeah,” he said to his hands, “I told myself that. But Bailey—and I think maybe Kaehler too, though it didn’t hit her the same way. They weren’t focused on the long-term result any more.”
He shook his head at the memory. “They were too tired, and it was getting close to dawn . . .”
* * *
Captain Bailey walked toward them from the support module. For a moment, Dresser saw his head silhouetted against the telltale on top of the fusion bottle. The red glow licked around the captain’s features like hellfire.
Bailey didn’t speak. Kaehler had ignored the last several of his commands anyway.
On the display, two Mantrans huddled together on a plateau as invaders approached from all sides. There were probably fewer than a thousand indigenes surviving at this time horizon.
Kaehler waited like a statue. Her fingers poised above the controls. The apparatus scrolled forward at one second/second.
“How long has it been since the Ichtons landed?” Dresser asked quietly. He wasn’t sure she would answer him either.
“Six hundred standard years,” Kaehler replied without moving more than her lips. “At the time we’re observing, the Mantran year was at two-eighty-one standard. The Ichtons took so much mass with them that the planet shifted to an orbit longer by forty days.”
The atmosphere on the holographic display was so foul that the sun shone wanly even at noon. Nevertheless the image area was lighted vividly by the six Ichton colonies visible from this point. Each colony had grown as large as the mothership was when it landed.
When the time was right—when everything useful on mantra had been processed into Ichton equipment or Ichton flesh—the myriad colonies would blast off from the stripped planet. Each would be the mothership of a fresh brood, capable of destroying a further world in logarithmic progression.