Kaehler’s hand yanked at the control which had been caged within the console. Dresser saw Captain Bailey’s face lighted brilliantly in the instant before another reality enveloped the imaging module and the two humans within it.
The Ichton fired, knocking the head off the nearer indigene with the easy nonchalance of a diner opening a soft-boiled egg. Rock beyond the Mantran disintegrated also, spraying grit into Dresser’s face as his right hand snatched his cutting bar.
The air was foul with poisons not yet reabsorbed by ten thousand years of wind blowing through a filter of porous waste. The sky was black, and the horizon gleamed with Ichton colonies gravid with all-destroying life.
Kaehler had opened the viewing aperture to the point that it enveloped herself, her equipment—
And Sergeant Dresser, who hadn’t carried a gun on a lifeless desert, for god’s sake, only a cutting bar that wouldn’t be enough to overload Ichton body armor. Dresser lunged for the monster anyway as it turned in surprise.
A stream of flux projectiles blew divots out of stone as the Ichton brought its weapon around. Kaehler didn’t move.
Dresser’s powered, diamond-toothed blade screamed and stalled in the magnetic shielding. He tried to grab the Ichton weapon but caught the limb holding it instead. The scout’s fingers couldn’t reach a material surface. Though he knew his arm was stronger than the exoskeletal monster’s, his hand slipped as though he was trying to hold hot butter.
Dresser looked down the muzzle of the Ichton weapon.
He thought, when he hit the ground an instant later, that he was dead. Instead, he was sprawled beside SB 781. Plasma spewing from the fusion bottle formed a plume that melted the upper surfaces of the support module. It was brighter than the rising sun . . .
* * *
Dresser met Admiral Horwarth’s eyes. “He’d vented the containment vessel,” the scout said. “Bailey had. He knew it’d kill him, but it was the only way to shut the apparatus off fast enough from where he was.”
“I’ve recommended Captain Bailey for a Fleet Cross on the basis of your report, Sergeant,” Horwarth said quietly. “The—cause of your transition through the aperture will be given as equipment failure, though.”
Dresser shrugged. His eyes were wide and empty, with a thousand-meter stare that took in neither the admiral nor the image of the motionless Ichton on the wall behind her.
“It wasn’t Kaehler’s fault,” the scout said. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “She cracked, people do that. It wasn’t a fault.”
He blinked and focused on Horwarth again. “Is she going to be all right?” he asked. “She wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even move on the trip back.”
“I’ll have a report soon,” Horwarth said, a bland placeholder instead of an answer.
Dresser wrapped his arms tightly around his torso. “Maybe it wasn’t Bailey’s fault either,” he said. “I figure he cracked too. Even me, I’m used to the Ichtons, but it bothered me a bit. He wasn’t ready to see the things he saw on mantra.”
“A bit” was a lie obvious to anyone but the man who said it.
Dresser’s smile was as slight and humorless as the point of a dagger. “I brought his feet back in cold storage. Everything above the ankles, that the plasma got when he dumped the bottle.”
“There doesn’t appear to have been any flaw in the equipment itself, though,” Horwarth said. “Until the damage incurred in the final accident.”
“I was the one who screwed up,” Dresser said to his past. “I should’ve grabbed her quicker. I was supposed to be the scout, the professional.”
“When the equipment can be rebuilt,” Admiral Horwarth said, clamping the scout with the intensity of her gaze, “there’ll have be a follow-up mission to complete the reconnaissance.”
“No,” said Dresser.
Horwarth ignored the word. “I’d appreciate it if you would consent to pilot the mission, Sergeant,” she said. “You know better than almost anyone else how impor—”
“No!” Dresser shouted as he lurched to his feet. “No, you don’t need a follow-up mission! We’d completed the mission, and we’d failed. That’s why it happened, don’t you see?”
“What I see is that the incident aborted Captain Bailey’s mission, before it reached closure,” the admiral said.