by David Drake
Dresser had been staring at the Ichton. He jerked his gaze downward at the sound of the admiral's voice. "Sorry, sir," he muttered. "No, that wasn't much of a problem. For me. The trip, that's the AI's job. There's nothing for human crews to do. I—"
Dresser looked at his hands. He waggled them close in front of his chest. He'd been told you could identify scouts because they almost never met the eyes of other human beings when talking to them. "Scouts, you know, anybody who's willing to do it more than once. Scouts keep to themselves. The boat isn't big enough to, to interact."
He raised his eyes to the Ichton again. It was walking slowly about its cell on its two lower pairs of limbs. The top pair and their gripping appendages were drawn in tight against the creature's gray carapace.
"The scientists," Dresser continued flatly, "Bailey and Kaehler . . . they weren't used to it. I think they were pretty glad when we got to the landing point, even though it didn't look like the right place . . ."
* * *
"You've done something wrong, Dresser!" snarled Captain Bailey as Scout Boat 781's braking orbit brought the vessel closer to the surface of the ruined planet. "This place hasn't beaten off an Ichton attack. It's been stripped!"
"At this point, sir," Dresser said, "I haven't done anything at all except initiate landing sequence. The artificial intelligence took us through sponge spare to the star that the—source—provided. There's only one life-capable planet circling that star, and we're landing on it."
He couldn't argue with Bailey's assessment, though. mantra—properly, the name of the project file rather than the nameless planet itself—was utterly barren. Only the human-breathable atmosphere indicated that the planet's lifelessness resulted from an outside agency rather than incapacity to support life.
The agency had almost certainly been a swarm of Ichtons. The chitinous monsters had devoured the surface of the planet, to feed themselves and to build a fleet of colony ships with which to infect additional worlds. The Ichtons were a cancer attacking all life . . .
mantra was gray rubble, waterless and sterile. Before they left, the invaders had reduced the planet to fist-sized pellets of slag, waste from their gigantic processing mills. The landscape over which the scout boat sizzled contained no hills, valleys, or hope.
"Chance wouldn't have brought us to a solar system, Captain," Kaehler said. She was small for a woman, even as Bailey was large for a man; and unlike her companion, she was a civilian without military rank. "It must be the correct location."
When Dresser thought about Kaehler, it appeared to him that she'd been stamped through a mold of a particular shape rather than grown to adulthood in the normal fashion. Events streamed through the slight woman without being colored by a personality.
Dresser thought about other people only when they impinged on his mission.
Dresser remembered that he wasn't dealing with scout crewmen. "Hang tight," he said. Even so, he spoke in a soft voice.
The AI pulsed red light across the cabin an instant after Dresser's warning. A heartbeat later, the landing motors fired with a harsh certainty that flung the three humans against their restraints.
Approach thresholds for scout boats were much higher than the norm for naval vessels, and enormously higher than those of commercial ships. The little boats might have to drop into a box canyon at a significant fraction of orbital velocity in order to survive. The hardware was stressed to take the punishment, and the crews got used to the experience—or transferred out of the service.
SB 781 crunched down at the point Dresser had chosen almost at random. They were in the mid-latitudes of mantra's northern hemisphere. That was as good as any other place on the featureless globe.
"Well, sirs . . ." Dresser said. The restraints didn't release automatically. Scout boats were liable to come to rest at any angle, including inverted. The pilot touched the manual switch, freeing himself and the two scientists. "Welcome to mantra."
* * *
"Was there a problem with the equipment?" Admiral Horwarth asked. "The Mantra Project was the first field trial, as I suppose you know."
She gave the scout a perfunctory smile. "I don't imagine that information stays compartmented within a three-man unit."
The Ichton turned to face the pick-ups. It seemed to be staring into the admiral's office, but that was an illusion. The link with the prisoner's cell was certainly not two-way; and in any case, the Ichtons' multiple eyes provided a virtually spherical field of view, though at low definition by human standards.
"The equipment?" Dresser said. "No, there wasn't any difficulty with the equipment."
He laughed. He sounded on the verge of hysteria.
* * *
"There," Kaehler called as the pole set a precise hundred meters from the imaging heads locked into focus on her display. "We have it."
"I'll decide that!" Captain Bailey replied from the support module twenty meters away. He shouted instead of using the hard-wired intercom linking the two units.
The breeze blew softly, tickling Dresser's nose with the smell of death more ancient than memory. He watched over Kaehler's shoulder as the image of the pole quivered and the operator's color-graduated console displays bounded up and down the spectrum—
Before settling again into the center of the green, where they had been before Bailey made his last set of adjustments.
"There!" Captain Bailey announced with satisfaction.
They'd placed the imaging module twenty meters from SB 781's side hatch. The support module containing the fusion power supply and the recording equipment was a similar distance beyond. A red light on top of the fusion bottle warned that it was pressurized to operating levels.
Though there was a monitor in the support module, Bailey had decreed that in the present climate they needn't deploy the shelters which would have blocked his direct view of the imaging module's three-meter display. If Kaehler had an opinion, the captain didn't bother to consult it.
Kaehler folded her hands neatly on her lap. "What has this proved?" Dresser asked, softly enough that he wouldn't intrude if the scientist was really concentrating instead of being at rest as she appeared to be.
Kaehler turned. "We've calibrated the equipment," she said. "We've achieved a lock on the target post, one second in the past. We'll be able to range as far back as we need to go when the artificial intelligence harmonizes the setting with the actual output of the power supply."
"That's what the captain's doing?" Dresser asked with a nod.
"The artificial intelligence is making the calculation," Kaehler said. "Captain Bailey is watching the AI while it works. I presume."
Dresser looked from Kaehler to the pole, then to the horizon beyond. "I don't see how it could work," he said to emptiness. "A second ago—the planet rotates on its axis, it circles the sun, the sun moves with its galaxy. Time is distance. Time isn't—"
He gestured toward the distant target.
"—the same place on a gravel plain."
Kaehler shrugged. "In this universe, perhaps not," she said. "We're accessing the past through the Dirac Sea. The normal universe is only a film on the—"
She shrugged again. It was the closest to a display of emotion Dresser had seen from her.
"—surface. Time isn't a dimension outside the normal universe."
"Kaehler!" Captain Bailey shouted. "Stop talking to that taxi driver and begin the search sequence. We've got a job to do, woman!"
The target pole hazed slightly in Dresser's vision, though the holographic image remained as sharp as the diamond-edged cutting bar on the scout's harness.
* * *
"I wanted to learn what it did," Dresser said in the direction of the image on the admiral's wall display. "I don't like to be around hardware and not know what it does. That's dangerous."
Admiral Horwarth glanced over her shoulder to see if anything in particular was holding the scout's attention. The Ichton rubbed its upper limbs across its wedge-shaped head as though cleaning i
ts eyes. It raised one of its middle pair of legs and scrubbed with it also.
Horwarth looked around again. "Captain Bailey was able to find the correct time horizon, then?" she prompted.
"Not at first," Dresser said in his husky, emotionless voice. "You said five thousand years."
"The source believed the event occurred five thousand standard years ago," the admiral corrected. "But there were many variables."
"Kaehler went back more than ten thousand," Dresser said, "before she found anything but a gravel wasteland . . ."
* * *
"There," Kaehler said. Bailey, watching the monitor in the support module, bellowed, "Stop! I've got it!"
Dresser was watching the display when it happened. He might not have been. The search had gone on for three watches without a break, and mantra's own long twilight was beginning to fall.
The pulsing, colored static of the huge hologram shrank suddenly into outlines as the equipment came into focus with another time. The score of previous attempts displayed a landscape which differed from that of the present only because the target pole was not yet a part of it. This time—this Time—the view was of smooth, synthetic walls in swirls of orange and yellow.
Kaehler rocked a vernier. The images blurred, then dollied back to provide a panorama instead of the initial extreme close-up. Slimly conical buildings stood kilometers high. They were decorated with all the hues of the rainbow as well as grays that might be shades beyond those of the human optical spectrum. Roadways linked the structures to one another and to the ground, like the rigging of sailing ships. Moving vehicles glinted in the sunlight.
"Not that!" Bailey shouted. "Bring it in close so that we can see what they look like."
Kaehler manipulated controls with either index finger simultaneously. She rolled them—balls inset into the surface of her console—off the tips and down the shafts of her fingers. The scale of the image shrank while the apparent point of view slid groundward again.
Dresser, proud of the way he could grease a scout boat in manually if he had to, marvelled at the scientist's smooth skill.
"Get me a close-up, dammit!" Bailey ordered.
The huge image quivered under Kaehler's control before it resumed its slant downward. "We're calibrating the equipment," she said in little more than a whisper. "We're not in a race . . ."
Pedestrians walked in long lines on the ground among the buildings. Vehicles zipped around them like balls caroming from billiard cushions instead of curving as they would have done if guided by humans.
The locals, the Mantrans, were low-slung and exoskeletal. They had at least a dozen body segments with two pairs of legs on each. They carried the upper several segments off the ground. A battery of simple eyes was set directly into the chitin of the head.
Kaehler manually panned her point of view, then touched a switch so that the AI would continue following the Mantran she had chosen. The alien was about two meters long. Its chitinous body was gray, except for a segment striped with blue and green paint.
"They have hard shells too," Kaehler commented. "You'd think the Ichtons might treat them better."
"The Ichtons don't spare anything," Dresser said softly. He had once landed on a planet while an Ichton attack was still going on. Then he added, "On our bad days, humans haven't been notably kind toward other mammaliforms."
"Kaehler, for god's sake, start bringing the image forward in time!" Captain Bailey shouted. "We aren't here as tourists. We won't see the locals' superweapon until after the Ichtons land. Get with the program, woman!"
Kaehler began resetting the controls on her console. Her face was expressionless, as usual.
"Humans," Dresser said, looking over the stark landscape, "haven't always done real well toward other humans."
* * *
Dresser glanced at Admiral Horwarth, then shifted his gaze to the captive again. He continued to watch the admiral out of the corners of his eyes.
"They had a high tech level, the Mantrans," Dresser said. "I made myself believe that they could have built something to defeat the Ichtons. But I knew they hadn't, because—"
Dresser swept both hands out in a fierce gesture, palms down.
"—I could see they hadn't," he snarled. "There was nothing. The Ichtons had processed the whole planet down to waste. There was nothing! Nothing for us to find, no reason for us to be there."
"Our source was very precise," Horwarth said gently. "The Ichtons have genetic memory, which our source is able to tap. mantra was a disaster for them which has remained imprinted for, you say ten, thousands of years."
The 'source' was an Ichton clone, controlled by a human psyche. Dresser knew that, because the psyche was Dresser's own.
The scout began to shiver. He clasped his hands together to control them. With his eyes closed, he continued, "It took Kaehler an hour to get dialed in on the moment of the Ichton assault. Bailey badgered her the whole time . . ."
* * *
"I think—" Kaehler said.
A bead of blue fire appeared at the top of the image area. The terrain beneath was broken. The Ichton mothership had appeared in the southern hemisphere. SB 781's navigational computer told Dresser that the vector was probably chance. The Ichtons didn't appear to care where they made their approach.
The display turned white.
"Kaehler!" Bailey shouted. "You've lost the—"
"No!" Dresser said. "They follow an anti-matter bomb in. That's how they clear their landing zones."
The white glare mottled into a firestorm, roaring to engulf a landscape pulverized by the initial shockwave. For an instant, rarefaction from an aftershock cleared the atmosphere enough to provide a glimpse of the crater, kilometers across and a mass of glowing rock at the bottom.
The Ichton mothership continued to descend in stately majesty. A magnetic shield wrapped the enormous hull. Its flux gradient was so sharp that it severed the bonds of air molecules and made the vessel gleam in the blue and ultraviolet range of the spectrum.
Kaehler's right hand moved to a set of controls discrete from those which determined the imaging viewpoint in the physical dimensions. As her finger touched a roller, Captain Bailey ordered, "Come on, come on, Kaehler. Advance it so that we can see the response! It's—"
The display began to blur forward, if Time had direction. Bailey continued to speak, though it must have been obvious that Kaehler had anticipated his command.
"—the response that's important, not some explosion."
The glowing mothership 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 mothership while the rock of the crater still shimmered from the anti-matter 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 which served the creatures as armor. The shearing effect of their magnetic gradients—particularly those of the heavy weapons mounted on the mothership—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 mothership lofted missiles that exploded with the flash and actinics of anti-matter when the Mantrans blew them up. Very rarely, a missile disappeared from Kaehler's display without being destroyed.
Mantran earthworks grew around the mothership like mosaic virus expanding across a tobacco leaf. The defenders' weapons bombar
ded 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 mothership 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 mothership.
"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 mothership was as dead as the floor of Hell. The Ichtons didn't care. The whole Mantran infrastructure was beginning to break down."