She rose also and leaned forward on her desk, resting on her knuckles. Her voice rose as either her facade cracked or she let some of her real anger and frustration out as a means of controlling the scout. “What I see is that we have to find the weapon the Ichtons fear, because you’ve proved that no conventional weapon can defeat them in the long term.”
“Admiral,” Dresser begged.
He turned to the closed door behind him, then turned again. He didn’t realize that he was crying until a falling tear splashed the back of his hand. “Sir. The coordinates were wrong, something was wrong. The only thing left to learn on mantra was whether the last of the indigenes died of disease or starvation before the Ichtons got them.”
Horwarth softened. She’d skimmed the recordings the expedition brought back. She didn’t need Psych’s evaluation of the two survivors to understand how the images would affect those who’d actually gathered them.
“Sergeant,” she said, “something happened to the Ichtons before they spread from mantra. It made memory of the place a hell for them ten thousand years later. We have to learn what.”
“Sir . . .” Dresser whispered. He rubbed his eyes angrily, but he was still blind with memory. “Sir, I’ll go back, I’ll do whatever you want. But we failed, sir, because there was nothing there to succeed with. And since I watched mantra eaten, I know just how bad we failed.”
“We’ve got to try, Ser—” Admiral Horwarth began.
The electronic chime of an alarm interrupted her. Horwarth reached for a control on her desk.
Dresser’s gaze focused on the holographic scene behind the admiral. Three humans wearing protective garments had entered the Ichton’s cell. They stumbled into one another in their haste.
“Duty officer!” Admiral Horwarth snarled into her intercom. “What the hell is going on?”
Two of the attendants managed to raise the Ichton from the floor of the cell. The creature was leaking fluid from every joint. It was obviously dead.
The chitinous exoskeleton of the Ichton’s torso was blotched yellow by patches of the fungus whose spores had travelled with Sergeant Dresser from the surface of a dying planet.
THE TRADESMEN
Author’s note: I’m indebted to Wilkeson O’Connell, whose work showed me the way to solve a problem that had been exercising me for some time. —Dad
Colonel Evertsen heard voices in the outer room of his office in the Tactical Operations Center. An outbound convoy—a convoy headed from the interior to the front—had reached Fort Burket a half hour before; District Administrator Kuyper, Evertsen’s civilian counterpart, would be coming to discuss the latest dispatch from Capetown.
Evertsen turned, closing the maintenance log he’d been studying in a vain attempt to change the numbers into something Capetown would find more acceptable. The roads in this Slavic hinterland had been a joke before they were made to bear the weight of mechanized armies. Now they’d been reduced to dust, mud, or ice. Take your choice according to the season, and expect your engines and drive trains to wear out in a fraction of the time that seemed reasonable in an air-conditioned office in Capetown.
Instead of the rumpled Kuyper, a tall, slim officer turned sideways to enter the narrow doorway and threw a salute that crackled. He was wearing battledress in contrast to Evertsen’s second-class uniform, but the clean, pressed garments proved he was a newcomer to the war zone.
“Janni!” said Evertsen in pleasure. He rose to his feet, stumbling as he always did when he tried to move quickly and his right knee betrayed him.
“Lieutenant Jan Dierks reporting to the base commander, sir,” the newcomer said. He broke into a grin and reached across the desk to clasp Evertsen by the arm. “You live in a maze here, Uncle Jan. Is the danger so great this far from the front lines?”
Evertsen bit back the retort—because Dierks was his nephew, and because anyway Evertsen should be used to the attitude by now. He got it every time he went home on leave, after all. I see, colonel, you’re not in the fighting army any more . . .
“Not so dangerous, not now,” Evertsen said, gesturing Dierks to a chair. The room’s only window was a firing slit covering the east gate. There were electric lights, but Evertsen normally didn’t bother with them until he’d shuttered the window for the night. “The fort was laid out two years ago, after all. But although the danger has receded, one gets used to narrow doorways and grenade baffles more easily than one might to a sapper in one’s bedroom.”