Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  This was Dresser’s first mission on SB 781; the previous team leader had wrangled a commission and a job in Operations. Thomson and Codrus came with the boat . . . and they were an item, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

  It didn’t work on SB 781. Both partners were too worried about what might happen to the other to get on with the mission.

  “Not till we’ve done our jobs,” Dresser said softly. He raised the probes, hair-thin optical guides that unreeled to the height of twenty meters above SB 781’s camouflaged hull. His display immediately defaulted to real-time images of a wind-sculpted waste.

  The immediate terrain hadn’t been affected by the Ichton invasion—yet. Eventually it too would be roofed by flux generators so powerful that they bent light and excluded the blue and shorter wavelengths entirely. Within their impregnable armor, the Ichtons would extract ores—the rock had a high content of lead and zinc—and perhaps the silicon itself. The planet the invaders left would be reduced to slag and ash.

  Thomson tried to stretch in the narrow confines of her seat. Her hands trembled, though that might have been reaction to the tension of waiting above the flight controls against the chance that she’d have to take over. “No job we can do here,” she said. “This place is gone. Gone. It’s not like we’ve got room t’ take back refugees.”

  Dresser modified his display. The upper half remained a real-time panorama. The glow of an Ichton colony stained the eastern quadrant in a sickly blue counterfeit of the dawn that was still hours away. The lower portion of the display became a map created from data SB 781’s sensors gathered during insertion.

  “Command didn’t send us for refugees,” he said. He tried to keep his voice calm, so that his mind would become calm as well. “They said to bring back a live prisoner.”

  “We can’t get a prisoner!” Codrus said, maybe louder than he’d meant. “Anything that’d bust open these screens—”

  He gestured toward the Ichton fortress on his display. His knuckles vanished within the holographic ambiance, then reappeared like the head of a bobbing duck.

  “—’d rip the whole planet down to the core and let that out. The place is fucked, and we need to get away!”

  “They’re still sending out colonies,” Dresser said.

  His fingers raised the probes ten meters higher and shrank the image area to five degrees instead of a full panorama. The upper display shuddered. The blue glow filled most of its horizon.

  Five Ichton vehicles crawled across terrain less barren than that in which the scout boat hid. Trees grew in serpentine lines along the boundaries of what must once have been cultivated fields. For the most part, the land was now overgrown with brush.

  “About twenty klicks away,” Dresser continued. He felt the eyes of his subordinates burning on him; but he was in charge, and SB 781 was going to carry out its mission. “We’ll take the skimmers and set up an ambush.”

  “Take the boat,” Thomson said through dry lips. “We’ll want the firepower.”

  Dresser shook his head without taking his eyes off his display. “The boat’d get noticed,” he said. “You guys’ll be in hard suits with APOT weapons. That’ll be as much firepower as we need.”

  “Lookit that!” Codrus cried, pointing across the cockpit to Dresser’s display. “Lookit that!”

  A family of Gersons bolted from the row of trees just ahead of the Ichton column. There were four adults, a pair of half-grown children, and a furry infant in the arms of the female struggling along behind the other adults.

  The turret of the leading vehicle rotated to follow the refugees. . . .

  “You okay, Sarge?” Rodriges asked worriedly.

  Dresser crossed his arms and kneaded his biceps hard.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” His voice was husky. “Seein’ the thing there—”

  He nodded toward the screen. The Ichton was sitting upright. The voice from the speaker said, “Don’t try to use your conscious mind to control your muscles. You wouldn’t with your own body, after all.”

  “You can’t imagine how cruel they are, the Ichtons,” Dresser said.

  “Naw, it’s not cruel,” the technician explained. “You’re only cruel to something you think about. The bugs, they treat the whole universe like we’d treat, you know, an outcrop of nickel ore.”

  “So cruel . . .” Dresser whispered.

  The Ichton’s tympanic membranes shrilled through the left speaker. The translation channel boomed, “Where the hell am I? Thomson? Codrus! What’s happened to my boat!”

  Sergeant Dresser closed his eyes.

  “Where’s 781, you bastards?” demanded the Ichton through the machine voice.

  2.

  “The subbrain of your clone body will control the muscles, Sergeant Dresser,” said the voice from a speaker in the wall. “You can’t override the hardwired controls, so just relax and let them do their job.”

  The words were compressed and harshly mechanical; the room’s lighting spiked chaotically on several wavelengths. Were they torturing him?

  Who were they?

  “Where’s my crew?” Dresser shouted. He threw his feet over the edge of the couch on which he had awakened. His legs splayed though he tried to keep them steady. He collapsed on his chest. The floor was resilient.

  “Your men are all right, Sergeant,” the voice said. The speaker tried to be soothing, but the delivery rasped like a saw on bone. “So is your human self. Your memory will return in a few minutes.”

  Memory was returning already. Memory came in disorienting sheets that didn’t fit with the real world. Images that Dresser remembered were sharply defined but static. They lacked the texturing of incipient movement that wrapped everything Dresser saw through the faceted eyes of his present body.

  But he remembered. . . .

  The male Gerson—the tallest, though even he was less than a meter-fifty in height—turned and raised an antitank rocket launcher. The rest of the family blundered past him. The juveniles were hand in hand, and the female with the infant still brought up the rear.

  “Where’d he get hardware like that?” Codrus muttered. “I’d’ve figured the teddy bears were down to sharp sticks, from the way things look.”

  The Ichton vehicles moved on air cushions; they didn’t have the traction necessary to grind through obstacles the way tracked or even wheeled transport could. The leader’s turret weapon spewed a stream of projectiles like a ripple of light. The hedgerow disintegrated in bright flashes.

  “They sent a starship to the Alliance, after all,” Dresser muttered. “The ones left behind still have some weapons, is all.”

  Brush and splintered wood began to burn sluggishly. The leading Ichton vehicle nosed into the gap.

  “Much good it’ll do them,” said Thomson.

  The Gerson fired. The rocket launcher’s flaring yellow backblast enveloped twenty meters of brush and pulsed the hedge on the other side of the field. The hypervelocity projectile slammed into the Ichton vehicle.

  Slammed, rather, into the faint blue glow of the defensive shield surrounding the Ichton vehicle. The impact roared across the electro-optical spectrum like multicolored petals unfolding from a white core.

  The vehicle rocked backward on its bubble of supporting air. The projectile, flattened and a white blaze from frictional heating, dropped to the ground without having touched the body of its target.

  The turret traversed. The male Gerson knew what was coming. He ran to the side in a desperate attempt to deflect the stream of return fire from his family. His head and the empty rocket launcher vanished into their constituent atoms as the powerful turret weapon caught him at point-blank range. The high-temperature residue of the sundered molecules recombined an instant later in flashes and flame.

  The Ichton gunner continued to fire. Projectiles scythed across the field, ripping smoldering gaps in the vegetation.

  The refugees threw themselves down when the shooting started. As the gun traversed past, a juve
nile leaped uptight and waved his remaining arm. Before the gunner could react, the screaming victim collapsed again.

  The turret weapon ceased firing.

  The entire column entered the field. The leading and trailing vehicles were obviously escorts, mounting powerful weapons in their turrets. The second and third vehicles in the convoy were hugely larger and must have weighed a hundred tonnes apiece. They didn’t appear to be armed, but their defensive shielding was so dense that the vehicles’ outlines wavered within globes of blue translucence. The remaining vehicle, number four in the column, was unarmed and of moderate size, though larger than the escorts.

  Diesser’s mind catalogued the vehicles against the template of his training and experience: a truck to supply the new colony en route . . . and a pair of transporters, armored like battleships, to carry the eggs and larvae that would populate that colony.

  The Ichton convoy proceeded on a track as straight as the line from a compass rose. For a moment, Dresser thought that the Gerson survivors—if there were any—had been overlooked. Then the supply truck and the rear escort swung out of the column and halted.

  A Gerson jumped to her feet and ran. She took only three steps before her legs and the ground beneath her vanished in a red flash. Heat made the air above the turret gun’s muzzle shimmer.

  The supply truck’s side panel slid open, and the defensive screen adjacent to the door paled. A pair of Ichtons stepped out of the vehicle. Heavy protective suits concealed the lines of their bodies.

  “Big suckers,” said Thomson. Her hands hovered over the console controls. Flight regime was up on the menu.

  “Three of us’re gonna take a whole army of them?” Codrus asked.

  Dresser thought: It’s not an army. It doesn’t matter how big they are—we’re not going to arm wrestle. You guys aren’t any more scared than I am.

  He said aloud, “You bet.”

  One of the Ichtons tossed the legless Gerson—the body had ceased to twitch—into the bag he, it, dragged along behind. The other Ichton spun abruptly and sprayed a ninety-degree arc of brush with his handweapon.

  Though less powerful than the turret gun, the projectiles slashed though the vegetation. Branches and taller stems settled in a wave like the surface of a collapsing air mattress.

  The Ichton with the bag patrolled the swath stolidly. He gathered up the bodies or body parts of three more victims.

  “Don’t . . .” Dresser whispered. Codrus and Thomson glanced sidelong, wondering what their commander meant.

  The armed Ichton pointed his weapon. Before he could fire, the Gerson female with the infant in her arms stood up.

  “Don’t. . . .”

  Instead of shooting, the Ichton stepped forward and reached out with its free hand. It seized the Gerson by the shoulder in a triaxial grip and led her back toward the vehicle. The remaining Ichton followed, slowed by the weight of the bag it was dragging.

  Dresser let out the breath he had been holding longer than he realized.

  “Now relax, Sergeant Dresser,” said the mechanical voice. “Let the backbrain control your motions.”

  Dresser got to his feet, his four feet. His eyes stared at the ceiling. He wanted to close them, but they didn’t close. A part of his mind was as amazed at the concept that eyes could close as it had been at the flat, adamantine images from Dresser’s memory.

  “You’re doing very well, Sergeant,” the voice cajoled. “Now, I’m going to open the door in the end of the compartment. Just follow the hallway out. Don’t be in a hurry.”

  Dresser’s right front leg bumped the table, but he didn’t fall. He was terrified. His mind tried to focus on anything but what his legs were doing. The doorway lurched closer.

  It was like being in free-fall. But he knew there was no landing possible from this mental vacuum.

  3.

  Rodriges manipulated his controls. The screen split. Its right half showed the back of the cloned Ichton shambling through the doorway, while a frontal shot of the creature approached down the hallway on the left.

  “He’s gonna get t’ meet the brass,” the technician muttered. “Horwarth and Dr. del Prato. Bet you never thought you’d be meeting an admiral and a top biochemist personal-like, did you, Sarge?”

  Dresser grunted.

  Rodriges touched the controls again. The right image leapfrogged to the interior of a three-bed medical ward that included a well-appointed office. The admiral, seated behind a desk of what looked like real wood, was a stocky female. She wore a skull and crossbones ring in her left ear, and her right ear was missing. To her right sat a florid-faced civilian whose mustache flowed into his sideburns.

  The door to the ward had been removed and a section of bulkhead cut from the top of the doorway. Even so, the Ichton lurching down the corridor would have to duck or bang its flat head.

  “Why didn’t they wake him up here?” Dresser asked. He made a tight, almost dismissive gesture toward the medical ward.

  Rodriges looked sidelong at the scout. “Umm . . .” he said. “They didn’t know quite how you’d—he’d react when he woke up, y’know? They got me here for protection—”

  The technician tapped carefully beside, not on, a separate keypad. It was a release for the weapons whose targeting was slaved to the screen controls.

  “—but they don’t want, you know, to lose the work. There’s five more clones on ice, but still. . . .”

  Dresser’s face went hard. He didn’t speak.

  The Ichton paused in the doorway and tried to lower its head. Instead, the creature fell forward with its haunches high, like those of a horse that balked too close to the edge of a ditch.

  “That’s all right,” said Admiral Horwarth brusquely. Her voice and the hypersonic translation of her voice echoed from the paired speakers of the observation room. “You’ll soon have the hang of it.”

  “Part of the reason he’s so clumsy,” Rodriges said as he kept his invisible sight centered on the clone’s chest, “is the body’s straight out of the growth tank. It hasn’t got any muscle tone.”

  His lips pursed as he and Dresser watched the ungainly creature struggle to rise again. “Of course,” the technician added, “it could be the bugs’re clumsy as hell anyhow.”

  “The ones I saw,” said Dresser tightly, “moved pretty good.”

  The leading Ichton vehicle started to climb out of the dry wash; the nose of the last vehicle dipped to enter the end farthest from Dresser.

  The scout boat’s artificial intelligence planned the ambush with superhuman skill. It balanced the target, the terrain, distance factors, and the available force—the lack of available force—into a seventy percent probability that some or all of the scout team would survive the contact.

  The AI thought their chance of capturing a live Ichton was less than one tenth of a percent; but that wasn’t the first thing in any of the scouts’ minds, not even Dresser’s.

  The convoy’s inexorable progress led it to the badlands site within two minutes of the arrival time the AI had calculated. A wind-cut swale between two tilted sheets of hard sandstone had been gouged deeper by infrequent cloudbursts. The resulting gully was half a kilometer long. It was straight enough to give Dresser a clear shot along it from where he lay aboard his skimmer, on higher ground a hundred meters from the mouth.

  The Ichtons could easily have gone around the gully, but there was no reason for them to do so. From what Dresser had seen already, the race had very little tendency to go around anything.

  “Team,” he said to his distant crewmen, “go!”

  Codrus and Thomson fired from the sandstone ridges to either flank. Their weapons tapped energy from the Dirac Sea underlying the real-time universe, so the range—less than three hundred meters in any case—was no hindrance.

  Sightlines could have been a problem. Since Dresser had only two flankers, it didn’t matter that they had clear shots at only the first and last vehicles of the convoy. The tops of the huge egg transporters wer
e visible from the crewmen’s positions, but the supply truck had vanished beneath the sharp lips of the gully.

  The beams from the A-Potential weapons were invisible, but at their touch the magnetic shielding of the escort vehicles flared into sparkling cataclysm. Dresser’s helmet visor blocked the actinics and filtered the visual uproar. He continued to have a sharp view of the vehicles themselves—undamaged at the heart of the storm.

  The APOT weapons could focus practically limitless amounts of power on the magnetic shields, canceling their effect—but the beams couldn’t focus through the shields. The escort vehicles stopped dead. Their power supplies shunted energy to the shields—to be dumped harmlessly back into the Dirac Sea—but as soon as the APOT beams were redirected, the escorts would be back in the battle.

  “Mines,” Dresser said to the audio controller in his helmet, “go!”

  The gossamer, high-explosive mesh the scouts had spread across the floor of the gully went off. There was a green flash, a quick shock through the bedrock that slapped Dresser ten centimeters in the air, and—a heartbeat later—the air-transmitted blast that would have deafened the sergeant without the protection of his helmet.

  The explosive’s propagation rate was a substantial fraction of light speed. The blast flattened the two escorts from the underside before it lifted them. Their wreckage spun into the air.

  Though the supply truck’s shields were unaffected, the shock wave bounced the lighter vehicle against the side of the gully. It caromed back and landed on one side. Its shields hissed furiously, trying to repel the washed stone. The generators didn’t have enough power to levitate the truck, and the ground wasn’t going to move.

  Mass and magnetic shielding protected the egg transporters. The huge vehicles lurched, but neither showed signs of damage. The leading transporter plowed through the wreckage of the escort. The driver of the second transporter cut his controls to the right. Bow weapons, their existence unguessed until this moment, blasted an alternate route into the sandstone wall.

  The mine’s unexpected ground shock lifted Dresser, then dropped him back on the hard-padded couch of his skimmer. He tried to aim his weapon.