Radiant (20 page)

I picked up the mirror-sphere closest to me. If I'd done that with bare hands, I'd be risking serious frostbite—the outside of a stasis field is dangerously cold, though not as cold as the Absolute Zero inside—but with my tightsuit gloves, I was perfectly safe. Ice had begun to condense from the air near the sphere's reflective surface. If not kept clear, the surface would develop a solid frozen crust... which wasn't a bad thing, since the hardening frost would provide protection against accidental bumping.

"What's inside?" I asked Festina. "Sperm-tail anchors?"

She nodded. "An anchor in each. We'll have twelve chances to establish a Sperm-link... and I don't think an automated defense system will EMP us that often. EMPs take a lot of energy, especially when fired at range. An automated system isn't likely to keep pulsing targets it's already shot. So it EMPs us once, maybe twice; but we'll have plenty of reserve anchors left. Once we've anchored
Pistachio's
tail, we don't have to worry anymore."

Her aura showed she wasn't as confident as she pretended—she knew there were never any guarantees. But with a supply of twelve anchors, each one protected from EMPs until we needed it, we really did have the odds on our side. "Anything else we should put in the spheres?" I asked. "Maybe a handheld comm or two?"

"Already done," Festina said. "Each stasis sphere has an anchor, a comm, a stunner, and a Bumbler. An extremely tight fit, but just barely possible."

"I didn't think
Pistachio
carried twelve Bumblers."

"It didn't. Last night I ordered the ship-soul to fabricate a bunch. You can never have too many Bumblers."

I agreed. Explorers could go through Bumblers as fast as eating peanuts. In Zoonau, we'd lost two on a mission that lasted only fifteen minutes. Usually, though, we didn't have the luxury of whipping up a dozen in advance. The navy labeled surplus production as "extravagant waste" rather than "sensible precaution." Apparently an admiral on a Class One mission could disregard standard fleet policies... and I got the impression Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos thumbed her nose at regulations whenever she had the chance.

Festina began familiarizing herself with the shuttle's controls. I was about to take an idle-curiosity tour of the craft when three ensigns arrived with our parachutes. Naturally, I had to make sure the chutes had been packed properly and were set for manual operation. (By default, parachutes were usually set for automatic deployment at an altitude considered optimal by the Engineering Corps... which was all very well if the chutes' laser altimeters were functional, but not so good if you expected every wire to be drips of molten copper.)

Tut arrived just as I was finishing with the chutes. We'd decided in advance we should wear our standard colors—Tut yellow and me orange, while Festina said she liked white—but when Tut appeared, he'd programmed his suit's skin to a lustrous metallic gold with all the markings of King Tutankhamen's ceremonial casket. Horizontal stripes of black and gold ran along the sides of his helmet and down the front of his chest; bits of lapis lazuli blue were layered down his front in a sort of striped bib that ended at a broad U-shaped collar halfway down his chest. Below that, the gold/black/blue stripes resumed and extended all the way to his boots. He looked like a bumblebee with a few sky-blue inlays.

"So what do you think, Mom?" He turned so I could see the back. More stripes. "Aren't I like the king's sarcophagus?"

"You are."

Festina came to the door of the cockpit and gave Tut a long cool look. "I like it," she said. "There's something refreshingly efficient about an Explorer already wearing a coffin."

We took off without ceremony—nothing but the usual "permission requesteds" and "permission granteds" that always mark a shuttle departure. No one came to watch us leave... not even Ubatu, who I thought might show up to give me some words of Ifa-Vodun wisdom. ("Don't endanger the spores. We haven't had a chance yet to kill something in their honor.") Festina noticed the absence of well-wishers too; just before takeoff, she murmured, "Li must have decided he couldn't bear to see his baby go."

I said, "He and Ubatu are probably up on the bridge getting in the captain's way."

"Probably," Festina agreed. "If the three of us don't come back, everybody will want to say they had a front-row seat when Festina Ramos met her doom."

"Fame's a bitch, isn't it?" Tut said. "Bugs the crap out of me." We both looked at him, wondering what he thought he was famous for. I could have looked into his aura, but decided I didn't want to know.

Li might have been a bullying, self-absorbed man, but he had excellent taste in shuttles. He'd chosen a model whose cockpit was almost entirely transparent: a clear plastic bubble bulging from the front of the craft and providing a panoramic view of our surroundings. Overhead was
Pistachio,
a long white baton surrounded with its milky Sperm-field, set against deep starry black. Beneath us lay the sunlit blue of Muta, streaked with clouds and shining hospitably in the emptiness of space. Festina was in the pilot's seat, Tut in the copilot's, me in the pull-out chair behind... and the bubble around us was so close to invisible, I felt we were sitting on some outer-space patio, casually open to vacuum.

"Starting descent now," Festina said into her comm.

"Acknowledging your descent," Cohen answered. "Good luck, Admiral." His voice came through my tightsuit's radio as well as my comm implant; then it was replaced by a faint regular beep produced by
Pistachio's
ship-soul. Festina had asked for the beep as a way of detecting EMPs: if the beep went silent, we'd know we'd been pulsed. Of course, we probably wouldn't need outside confirmation—when the shuttle's lights died and its steering yoke went sludgy, we'd have a good clue what had happened—but Festina liked redundant backups.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

As we angled down toward Muta,
Pistachio
began to turn from horizontal to vertical. Soon it would be straight up and down, nose toward the stars and stern pointing directly at Camp Esteem. The long swishing Sperm-tail would dangle like an unruly fishing line, down through the many layers of atmosphere until it reached the ground below. Once we landed, we'd catch that line with an anchor and secure an EMP-proof escape from Muta's dangers.

Or so we hoped.

Pistachio
was soon out of sight: lost in the distant dark. Our descent path would circle Muta once, easing gently, down, down, down. None of us spoke as the sun (or should I say GoL?) disappeared behind the rounded edge of the planet. The dark half of the world, rolling far beneath us, showed no lights at all. In the age of Las Fuentes, that blackness must have been punctuated by the illumination of cities... but now there was only seamless night.

"What do you think is
really
down there?" Tut asked.

Festina said, "I'm afraid we'll soon find out."

Down and down. A digital display on the shuttle's console showed our altitude in kilometers: 900... 850... 800... descending through the ionosphere, a constantly surging bath of electrically charged particles. Cumulatively, the electric fury outside had much more energy than the EMPs we worried about; but it was thinned over time and distance, rather than striking the shuttle in a single disruptive pulse. Our shielding could protect us without difficulty. I hoped.

500... 450... 400... 350...

We rounded back into sunlight and my helmet visor darkened to protect my eyes. I wanted to ask the others when they thought we'd get EMP'd, but they didn't know any more than I did; perhaps the Balrog had better information, but I avoided asking, for fear the spores might actually answer. As for my newly acquired sixth sense, its range was far too limited to tell me anything—it didn't even reach to the back of the shuttle's passenger cabin, let alone several hundred kilometers to the ground. My alien awareness could feel the hypersonic rush of thin atmosphere just outside the cockpit, but my perception stopped well short of the shuttle's own galley.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Our comms were still alive. Beep. Beep. The computerized signal was soft but unnerving in the otherwise silent cockpit. To break the tension, I opened my mouth to make some inane remark... but Festina must have heard me getting ready to speak because she quickly cut in. "Nobody say anything. Not a word."

Tut looked at her in surprise, obviously wondering what she was worried about. I had the advantage of being able to read her life force: Festina exuded a superstitious dread that if anyone said, "So far so good," the words themselves would make all hell break loose.

She was probably right.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

300... 250... 200... things would get bumpy soon. The shuttle's wings were set to full extension; as the atmosphere thickened, they'd drag against the air, leading to random skips and flutters. Festina had said our course would pass directly over Camp Esteem, but that was only the computer's best-guess scenario. If we got EMP'd and lost control while bumping/jumping/thumping high in the atmosphere, we might veer hundreds of kilometers off course. The shuttle allowed for manual steering—wrestling the yoke without powered assistance—but it wouldn't be enough to get us back on track if we deviated too far too early.

Beep.

150... 100... 80... then a Brahma-bull buck as we hit the mesopause, the line of demarcation between the outer atmosphere and the lower layers. Festina kept her grip on the yoke, pressing our nose into the dive. We could see nothing but planet now: a great wide plain filled our view, grasslands veined with wandering rivers that occasionally wandered too far and diffused into Mesozoic bogs. Those bogs would be full of reptiles and amphibians... not exactly like terrestrial species, but with points of similarity. Evolution was like weather—chaotic in specific details, but falling into large-scale patterns with a limited repertoire of effects. Muta's development would approximately echo Earth's. Its swamps would have quasi-crocodilian predators dining on quasi-frog amphibians and quasi-minnow fish...

Another bump—50 klicks on the altimeter. We'd entered the stratosphere. Within seconds, the cockpit bubble was surrounded by heat glow as we rammed into air particles and crushed them together. My sixth sense could feel the hull temperature soaring—still within safety limits, but higher than a normal entry. Festina had based our course on the possibility we'd get EMP'd much earlier than this; though the shuttle still had power, we were following the same path as if we'd been in an uncontrolled dive.

Fast and hot. Blazing through the sky.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

"You know," Tut said, "I thought—"

"Shut up!" Festina and I yelled in unison.

40... 30... going through Muta's ozone layer, and still no EMP. I was sure that's what Tut had intended to say:
I thought we'd be pulsed by now.
I'd thought the same. But EMPs take a lot of energy—especially at long range. It would be more efficient to shoot us close to the ground.

Twenty kilometers up. Festina turned from the controls. "It's time. Get ready to jump."

I got to my feet reluctantly. It seemed a pity to bail out of the shuttle while it was still working... but if we didn't jump when we were over Camp Esteem, the shuttle's momentum would take us far past our target. Then if we got EMP'd, we'd have a long walk back to where we wanted to go. Better to follow the original plan.

So I went back into the passenger cabin and strapped four iced-up mirror-spheres to my tightsuit, using specially padded carrying cases. Tut and Festina did the same. The cases hung from our necks like oversized pendants; I adjusted the straps until all four spheres rested evenly on my chest, then I secured them with a holding harness. The completed rig wasn't heavy... but with four soccer-ball-sized containers on my front and a full parachute on my back (over top of the tightsuit's backpack), I felt like a pagoda with legs. My only consolation was that Festina and Tut looked just as ridiculous.

"Skydiving like this should be fun," Tut said. "Is there anything else I can carry? Hey, I bet these seats detach! Ever seen someone parachute while holding a chair?"

The passenger seats
could
be detached by flipping release levers on each leg. Fortunately, Tut was too burdened with mirror-spheres to reach the levers. He was still trying to bend over as I went to the side hatch and grabbed the red door handle. "Everyone ready?" I asked.

Tut straightened up. "Sure," he said. "Immortality awaits."

Festina slapped him lightly on the arm. "Bastard. Don't you know the admiral gets to say that?"

"Grab something solid," I told them. Beep. Beep. Beep. I pulled the lever, and the door slid open.

Wind whipped through the cabin. If I hadn't been holding the lever, I might have been swept off my feet... but after a moment, the gale lessened as the pressure inside the shuttle equalized to the pressure outside. Neither pressure was high; fortunately, my tightsuit protected me against burst eardrums and subzero cold. Far below, the ground seemed to drift past slowly, though we were actually going faster than the speed of sound.

"Not long now," Festina said over her comm unit. We were using the Fuentes city as a landmark. When Drill-Press appeared beneath us, we'd hit the silk. Our momentum would carry us on toward Camp Esteem, and we could easily steer the chutes toward our destination. We'd already agreed on a rendezvous point just east of the huts.

Beep. Beep. Land slipped beneath us. The lower the shuttle dropped, the more our speed became apparent—racing through scattered clouds, rushing above small river valleys and copses where ferns rose as tall as trees. Beep. Beep. The broad river Grindstone appeared, a few low buildings, then suddenly the central skyscrapers of Drill-Press, towering like giants. The city streets were dirty but intact, and so were a score of bridges spanning the river, glimmering white in the sun. We waited till the last bridge was directly beneath us... but nobody had to say a word when the time came. Tut, Festina, and I threw ourselves forward, out the hatch, and into open air.