Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  “—the response that’s important, not some explosion.”

  The glowing mother ship remained steady. The Mantran reaction to being invaded was violent and sustained. War swirled around the huge vessel like sparks showering from a bonfire.

  Kaehler advanced the temporal vernier at an increasing rate, letting the ball roll off her finger and onto the palm of her hand. She reached across her body with the other hand and switched a dial that increased the log of the rate.

  A convoy of Ichton ground vehicles left the mother ship while the rock of the crater still shimmered from the antimatter explosion. The twenty vehicles had not escaped the frame of the display when the Mantrans engaged them from air and ground.

  Ichton weapons fired flux generators like those that served the creatures as armor. The shearing effect of their magnetic gradients—particularly those of the heavy weapons mounted on the mother ship—wreaked havoc with the defenders, but the quickly mounted Mantran counterattack nonetheless overwhelmed the convoy vehicle by vehicle. The last to disintegrate in a fluorescent fireball was a gigantic cylinder carrying the eggs that were to be the basis of a new colony.

  The Ichtons didn’t send out further convoys. Instead, they ripped at the defenders with their flux generators. At intervals, the mother ship lofted missiles that exploded with the flash and actinics of antimatter when the Mantrans blew them up. Very rarely, a missile disappeared from Kaehler’s display without being destroyed.

  Mantran earthworks grew around the mother ship like mosaic virus expanding across a tobacco leaf. The defenders’ weapons bombarded the vessel ceaselessly, but the Ichton armor absorbed even fusion bombs without damage.

  “This isn’t where they’ll develop it,” Bailey said abruptly. “We need to check their arsenals, their laboratories.”

  Kaehler didn’t react. She continued to move the image in time without changing the spatial point of focus.

  “This is where they’ll deploy any weapon,” Dresser snapped. “This is where we need to be for now.”

  Bailey was in command of the expedition and the scout’s superior by six grades. Dresser didn’t care. The command had been foolish. One of the reasons Dresser was a scout was his inability to suffer fools in silence, whatever the fools’ rank.

  On the display, seasons blurred between snow and baked, barren earth. All life but that armored within the mother ship and the defenders’ lines was blasted away by the mutual hellfire. The sky above SB 781 darkened, but the huge hologram lighted the boat and the watching humans.

  “Stop playing with the scale, Kaehler,” Captain Bailey ordered. “I’ll tell you if I want a close-up.”

  Kaehler looked startled. Her hands were slowly working the temporal controls, but she hadn’t touched the spatial unit since she initially focused on the mother ship.

  “It’s not the scale that’s changing,” Dresser said. “It’s the ship. It’s expanding the volume covered by its shields, despite anything the Mantrans can do.”

  The innermost ring of Mantran defenses crumbled as the blue glare swelled, meter by meter. Seasons washed across the landscape like a dirty river . . .

  Dresser unclenched his hands. He looked at Admiral Horwarth in embarrassment for being so close to the edge. “It was like gangrene, sir,” he said. “Have you seen somebody with gangrene?”

  She shook her head tautly. “No,” she said. “I can imagine.”

  “You can’t cure it,” the scout said, speaking toward the Ichton again. The creature was huddled in a corner of its cell. “They just keep cutting pieces off and hope they got it all. Which they probably didn’t.”

  “But the Mantrans were able to hold?” Horwarth prompted.

  The scout shrugged. “For years,” he said, “but it didn’t matter. The fighting was poisoning the whole planet. The atmosphere, the seas . . . The land for hundreds of kilometers from the mother ship was as dead as the floor of Hell. The Ichtons didn’t care. The whole Mantran infrastructure was beginning to break down.”

  Dresser laced his fingers again. “Then the Ichtons sent out another convoy . . .”

  Dresser looked from Kaehler to Bailey. Both scientists were glassy-eyed with fatigue.

  “Ah, Captain Bailey?” Dresser said.

  Bailey didn’t reply. He may not even have heard. The display was a fierce blue glare that sparkled but never significantly changed. It was like watching the play of light across the facets of a diamond, mesmerizing but empty.

  “Cap—”

  Thousand-meter fireballs rippled suddenly at the north side of the mother ship’s shields. Through them, as inexorable as a spear cleaving a rib cage, rocked a column of Ichton vehicles.

  The leading tank spewed a stream of flux projectiles that gnawed deep into the Mantran defenses until a white-hot concentration of power focused down on the vehicle. The tank ripped apart in an explosion greater than any of those that destroyed it, widening the gap in the Mantran defensive wall.

  The convoy’s second vehicle was also a tank. It continued the work of destruction as it shuddered onward. The defenders’ fire quivered on the Ichton shield, but the Mantrans couldn’t repeat the concentration that had overwhelmed the leader.

  “They can’t stop it,” Dresser whispered. “It’s over.”

  The image volume went red/orange/white. The dense jewel of the mother ship blazed through a fog that warped and almost hid its outlines. The blur of seasons was lost in the greater distortion.

  “Kaehler, what have you done, you idiot?” Bailey shouted. He stepped out of his module; hands clenched, face distorted in the light of the hologram. Except for the blue core, the image could almost be that of the display’s standby mode-points of light in a random pattern, visual white noise.

  Except for the Ichton mother ship at the blue heart of it.

  “It wasn’t . . .” Kaehler said as her hands played across her controls with a brain surgeon’s delicacy, freezing the image and then reversing it in minute increments.

  “ . . . me!” The last word was a shout, the first time Dresser had heard Kaehler raise her voice.

  The image froze again in time. A disk of the planet’s surface, hundreds of kilometers in diameter, slumped and went molten. Its center was the Ichton vessel. Vaporized rock, atmospheric gases fused into long chains, and plasma bursting upward from subterranean thermonuclear blasts turned the whole viewing area into a hellbroth in which the states of matter were inextricably blended.

  The scout understood what had happened before either of the scientists did. “They blew it down to the mantle,” Dresser said. “The Mantrans did. Their weapons couldn’t destroy the Ichtons, so they used the planet to do it.”

  And failed, but he didn’t say that aloud.

  Kaehler let the image scroll forward again, though at a slower rate of advance than that at which she had proceeded before. The Ichton convoy vanished, sucked into liquescent rock surging from the planet’s core. Plates of magma cooled, cracked, and up-ended to sink again into the bubbling inferno.

  Sulfur compounds from the molten rock spewed into the stratosphere and formed a reflective haze. The sky darkened to night, not only at the target site but over the entire planet. Years and decades went by as the crater slowly cooled. Night continued to cloak the chaos.

  “Bring it back to the point of the explosion, Kaehler,” the captain said. Bailey spoke in what was a restrained tone, for him. For the first time during the operation he used the intercom instead of shouting his directions from the support module. “Freeze it at the instant the shock wave hit them. That must have been what destroyed the ship.”

  “It didn’t destroy the ship,” Kaehler said. Her voice had even less effect than usual. The image continued to advance.

  The magnetic shields of the Ichton vessel provided the only light. The ship floated on a sea of magma, spherical and unchanged.

  “They’re dead inside it!” Bailey shouted. “Focus on the micro-second of the first shock wave!”

  “You damn
ed fool!” Kaehler shouted back. “I don’t have that degree of control. We’ve got a hundred-millimeter aperture, or have you forgotten?”

  Dresser watched Kaehler’s profile as she spoke. She didn’t look angry. Her face could have been a death mask.

  The display continued to crawl forward. Lava crusted to stone. Cracks between solid blocks opened less frequently to cast their orange light across the wasteland. Century-long storms washed the atmosphere cleaner if not clean.

  Bailey blinked and sat down in his module. Kaehler turned back to her controls. “Their own people,” she said in a voice that might not have been intended even for Dresser. “There were thousands of them in the defenses. They all died.”

  There had been millions of Mantrans in the defense lines.

  “They couldn’t pull them out,” the scout said softly. “The defenses had to hold until the last instant, so that the mantle rupture would get all the Ichtons.”

  “Did they know they were going to die?” Kaehler whispered.

  “They knew they’d all die anyway,” Dresser said.

  Everything in the universe would die.

  The mother ship released a sheaf of missiles, bright streaks across the roiling sky. Their antimatter warheads exploded in the far distance, flickers of false dawn.

  Three convoys set out from the mother ship simultaneously. Mantran forces engaged one convoy while it was still within the display area, but the vain attempt lighted the hummocks of lava as briefly as a lightning flash . . .

  “I knew it was over then,” Dresser said to his hands in the admiral’s office. “I’d known it before. They don’t quit. The Ichtons don’t quit.”

  He looked at the captive again. It now lay on its back. Its six limbs moved slowly, as though they were separate creatures drifting in the currents of the sea.

  “It may have been the failure of conventional techniques that forced the Mantrans to develop their superweapon,” Horwarth suggested. She wasn’t so much arguing with the scout as soothing him.

  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 mother ship.

  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 that 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 sulfurous yellow that made Ichton shields pulse at the edge of the ultraviolet. Just as Kaehler switched away, an antimatter 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 that the planet as a whole had thrown up around the Ichton mother ship. Though the defenses were kilometers deep, they were only a shadow of those that 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 mother ship’s main armament. Three of them fired together. A section of the Mantran defenses vanished in a sun-bright 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 that hadn’t quite emptied their magazines.

  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’ segmented 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 that 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 non sequitur. 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 prelanding 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 in the same way. They weren’t focused on the long-term result anymore.”

  He shook his head at the memory. “They were too tired, and it was getting toward 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 mother ship was when it landed.