Radiant (18 page)

Anything subject to biodegradation would be long gone. On the other hand, anything of metal would still be intact, especially rustproof alloys. Long-life materials like
chintah
would also survive, plus certain types of glass, plastics, stonework...

Looking over my shoulder, Tut said, "I'll bet there's all kinds of great shit down there."

"I'll bet," I agreed.

"Auntie," he said to Festina, "do you think these Fuentes had really good metal polishes?"

Li and Ubatu pushed their way onto the bridge in the final minutes of our approach to Muta. Captain Cohen immediately told them to be quiet... not rudely, but with a firm "Shut up, I'm driving" tone of voice. He wasn't driving directly—that job belonged to a Divian lieutenant who sat at the piloting console—and pulling into orbit was a routine maneuver that required no input from the captain and no special clampdown of silence. Still, we
were
coming up on a planet that housed unknown dangers. Cohen had every reason to be cautious, even if we suspected the dangers to restrict themselves to the ground rather than a thousand kilometers up in the exosphere.

The vidscreen showed a computer simulation of the planet before us: blue and beautiful, a perfect circle against the black background because we were coming in with the sun directly at our backs. (The sun was almost like Old Earth's Sol—yellow and well behaved, right in the middle of the primary sequence. The Unity had named it "Generosity of Light," which they abbreviated to "GoL." Festina said this proved everyone in the Unity had been engineered to unnatural levels of pain tolerance; a normal human couldn't say "Generosity of Light" or "GoL" without coming close to vomiting.)

But Muta itself was lovely. Drifting clouds, sparkling oceans, and continents teeming with life. I'd been taught to view such worlds with suspicion—better to land on some barren ice-planet, so cold it couldn't possibly house lifeforms that wanted to eat you—but my nineteen-year-old inexperience preferred a place that stirred the blood over one that was safely sterile.

Even now, I wouldn't say I was wrong.

One circuit around the planet—Festina wanted sensor readings for the dark side as well as the light—then
Pistachio
slid into high orbit as easily as a foot into a comfortable shoe. Our target, Camp Esteem, lay on the sunlit half of the globe, just outside the equatorial zone. It was currently experiencing a pleasant midautumn afternoon; initial scans showed intermittent clouds and a temperature of 17° Celsius. Shirtsleeve weather. A storm front was on its way up from the south and would reach the area in about six hours: lightning and thunder shortly after dark. But we planned to be gone by then.

Festina kept muttering we might not land at all. We hadn't come to assess the planet for colonization or to scavenge Fuentes artifacts. This was purely a rescue mission... and Festina wouldn't risk our lives unless we had someone to rescue. Therefore, before anybody left
Pistachio,
Festina intended to search the area with her remote reconnaissance probes. If the probes found survivors, we'd do our duty; otherwise, we'd stay safely in the ship.

The probes could search more effectively than a landing party on the ground. Probe missiles scanned more territory and were far better at finding survivor life signs: things like IR emissions, radio signals, and even (if we were lucky) the afterglow of human thoughts. The mental activity of
Homo sapiens
created faint electrical impulses; navy probes could detect those impulses provided there wasn't too much masking interference from the minds of local animal life. Considering that Muta was still in its Triassic period, none of the native fauna had brains much bigger than peanuts. A human should stand out like a searchlight in a nest of glowworms.

Speaking of lights, a soft green one warmed into life above the bridge's vidscreen. Only the captain could turn on that light; it indicated we were officially in stable planetary orbit. Readouts on the Explorers' console said we'd been in orbit for five full minutes... but Cohen was slow to acknowledge our arrival, fussing with by-the-book checklists, sensor confirmations, crew status call-ins, and other delaying tactics. Captains almost never turned on the green light, even when they were in orbit for days—"going green" had official legal connotations that captains preferred to avoid. Don't ask me to explain. It's just one of those mysteries of navy procedure that no one thinks to question. Cohen would never have turned on the light if there weren't an admiral on the bridge.

"Stable orbit achieved," he said stiffly.

Festina nodded. "Request permission to launch probes."

"Permission granted, Admiral."

She turned a dial. "Probes away."

The vidscreen showed four missiles spearing toward the planet. Each was surrounded by a milky sheath: bits of
Pistachio's
Sperm-field pulled away when the missiles were launched. The sheaths dispersed as the probes entered thicker atmosphere, swirling away into eddies of unnatural energies. All four missiles disappeared soon after, becoming too small for the eye to track against the bright bluish background.

"How long will the probes take to get there?" Ubatu whispered in my ear.

"Three minutes," I said. Ubatu was so close, I had to make an effort not to lean away from her life force. With
Pistachio's
bridge so tiny, I could sense everyone present—a constant 360-degree awareness—but Ubatu's aura was the only one that bothered me: intensely focused in my direction. Staring at me with the rapacity of a stalker. I could only read her general feelings, not her precise thoughts... but she seemed to be assessing my usability, how ripe I was for exploiting. I doubted that true Vodun was geared toward selfishly taking advantage of powerful loa; real religions frowned on egotistic playing with fire. Ifa-Vodun, however (especially Ubatu's version of it), was not a real religion. It was a cynical diplomatic tool, created by inbred dipshits who'd dreamed up the totally unfounded notion that high-level aliens might respond to voodoo.

At least I hoped the notion was totally unfounded. If a creature like the Balrog could actually be influenced by herbs gathered at midnight and black rooster sacrifice...

I shifted position to put more distance between me and Ubatu's aura.

"Probe data coming in," Festina said. "Nice clear visuals." She turned a knob... and Muta appeared on the screen. The first thing that struck me was color: reds and blues and greens and purples. Every plant had staked out its own private chunk of the rainbow. Morphologically, all Muta's flora were ferns—wide multilobed fronds with single stems, whether they were tiny fiddleheads barely peeking out of the soil, midrange varieties reaching to knee height/hip height/head height, or broad-leafed giants stretching as tall as trees—but despite the plants' similarity of form, they showed no commonality in hue. As if each bit of vegetation had been colored by a child choosing crayons at random.

"What's wrong with the plants?" Ubatu whispered. "Some sort of disease?"

"No," I said. "They're just young. It's a young planet." When she continued to stare blankly, I elaborated. "This is common on early Mesozoic worlds. The plants are experimenting, trying to find an optimal color for photosynthesis. Each species has different pigments, with a slightly different biochemistry underlying the energy-gathering process. Some colors lead to better results than others... but at the moment, no single species is so superior it outcompetes the rest. They're all inefficient by mature Earth standards. Eventually, some chance mutation will lead to a significant improvement in energy production for some lucky plant; and that plant will set the standard all others have to meet."

"And everything will turn green?"

"There's no guarantee green will win. It depends on the composition of the sun, the atmosphere, the soil, and the usual random wiles of evolution. Maybe the plants will find some superefficient yellow pigment that's better than green chlorophyll. Or blue. Or brown. But eventually a shakedown will come, establishing more uniformity. Twenty million years should do the trick. Then homogeneity will last until some plant comes up with the idea of sprouting flowers to attract pollinators. Which will bring back colors again."

"Shush," said Festina. "There's the Unity camp."

While I was talking, the probe sending pictures had moved at high speed across Muta's terrain. Now the probe was traveling upstream along the Grindstone River. In the distance, we could see the huts and buildings of Camp Esteem.

No sign of movement. Not even insects or animals. I glanced at Festina's console—no IR readings that might indicate survivors. On the other hand, there were obvious heat sources all over: small ones in almost every hut, and larger ones in the big buildings. Festina zoomed the probe's camera to scan the building with the largest heat source. A plaque on the front displayed a pictogram knife, fork, and plate: the standard signage for mess halls. No doubt the members of Team Esteem could remember which building was their cookhouse even if it wasn't labeled... but the Unity was famous for flogging the obvious. They might paint DOG on a pet's forehead just to be thorough.

"If that's the mess hall," Tut said, "what do you bet the heat source inside is a stove somebody left on?"

"No bet," Festina replied.

"You could smash the probe through a window and see."

"Not just yet." Festina sent the probe on a looping circle of the whole camp. Still nothing unusual or out of place.

"I don't see corpses," Li said.

"Maybe they've all been eaten," Ubatu suggested. "I mean, by animals and insects."

"The Mayday was issued thirty-six hours ago," Festina said. "Local time, that was early yesterday morning. Pretty fast for scavengers to consume a body, bones and all."

"Unless," Cohen said, "the scavengers on Muta are more efficient than on other planets."

"It's possible," Festina told him. "Usually, though, native scavengers work quite slowly on human corpses. Earth flesh isn't their normal food. It can even be poison to alien predators. So on average, human meat doesn't get eaten very quickly on nonterrestrial worlds. Of course, Muta could be the exception."

A thought struck me. "You said the Mayday came yesterday morning. What time exactly?"

Festina checked a data display: "7:14 local."

"Then maybe we
should
crash the probe through a mess hall window. At 7:14, everyone on the team would be eating breakfast."

"True," Festina said. "Unity surveyors start breakfast precisely at 7:00 and end at 7:20."

"Goddamned robots," Li muttered.

"They prefer the term 'cyborg,' " Ubatu told him.

"I prefer the term 'morons.' "

"Now, now," Cohen said—more a reflex than a serious attempt to stop the bickering. Festina, however, was less inclined to put up with such nonsense. Her aura flared with annoyance.

"Enough!" she said. "Everybody shut up while I work. We've got four probes, so maybe it's worth sacrificing one to see inside the cookhouse."

Her life force hinted at words she didn't say: if the mess hall was filled with dead bodies, we'd be off the hook. For the sake of thoroughness, we'd have to check the other survey camps too; but if one team had been reduced to corpses, the rest would almost certainly be the same.

In that case, our mission was over. The Unity might want to retrieve the fallen and determine the cause of death... but that was their business, not ours. We were strictly here to save survivors. If we couldn't find anyone alive, we'd file a report and go home.

I knew it wouldn't be that simple. For Explorers, nothing is ever easy.

"All right," said Festina. "I'll send in a probe."

She manipulated the controls, not just setting up the first probe to bash its way into the mess hall, but bringing a second probe into position to get footage of the process. The picture on the vidscreen split down the middle: one half from the nose of the missile that would enter the mess, the other half from a more distant viewpoint that showed both the probe and the mess hall building. The probe was lean and black, hovering on antigrav right in front of the building's largest window. We could see nothing through the glass—the window had a reflective thermo-coat, designed to bounce off incoming light, so the interior would remain cool. Come winter, the coat would be changed to absorb light and collect heat... but at the moment, the windows were still on summer settings.

"Ready," Festina said. "In we go."

On the overview half of the vidscreen, the probe moved toward the window in slow motion; on the nose camera half, the window itself came closer and closer until it shattered under the probe missile's strength. We had time to see a large square table with twelve chairs around it, something cloudy in the air like smoke, the smoke rushing forward as if stirred by a breeze from the broken window... then the pictures on the vidscreen abruptly vanished into random digital snow.

Both halves of the screen.

"God
damn!"
Festina said. "We got EMP'd."

"EMP'd?" Ubatu asked.

"An electromagnetic pulse," I told her. "It fried the probe's electrical circuits." I waved toward the screen, both sides showing nothing but static. "The EMP took out both probes. That's pretty powerful."

"You don't know the half of it," Festina said. "The pulse got my other two missiles too—the ones held back in reserve. Twenty kilometers away."

"Whoa." Tut gave a low whistle. "A pulse that big makes me think of a nuke."

"It wasn't a nuke," Cohen said. "Any significant explosion would show up on
Pistachio's
sensors." He was looking at the console on his chair. "We got nothing."

"Did the sensors pick up the EMP?" Festina asked.

"No. And we should have, if it was large enough to damage probes at twenty kilometers. The pulse must have been directional, and so tightly focused there wasn't enough spillover for our sensors to pick up."

Tut frowned. "Can EMPs
be
tightly focused?"

"If they're properly generated," Cohen said. "A while back, the navy looked into EMP cannons. The Admiralty thought big EMP guns might be nice nonlethal weapons—one shot could melt an enemy ship's electronic circuits without hurting the people on board."