Radiant (21 page)

Skydiving in a tightsuit is different from being exposed to the elements. I'd practiced both ways at the Academy, and much preferred fully closed jumps. When you're not completely sealed in a suit, the wind burns unprotected skin. My cheek was too tender for that kind of buffeting: the gusts felt like daggers of ice stabbing through my face over and over. By the time I reached ground on an open dive, the entire left half of my head—my skin, my hair, my ear—would be streaked with wind-dried blood.

But inside a tightsuit was safe. No wind, no cold, no roaring in the ears. It was peaceful. Like floating in zero gee. That afternoon on Muta, the sun was shining, the view was superb, and for just a few seconds, I was empty. Free of the clamor of myself.

Falling in silence. Except for the beep... beep... beep...

Momentum and the angle of my dive carried me quickly past Drill-Press city. The heads-up display in my helmet said I was traveling due north. Not far in the distance, I could see Camp Esteem, built on a rise above the river valley. What looked like a cloud of smoke still drifted outside the cookhouse... until, as I watched, the cloud whirled away from the building and sped in our direction.

At first, I thought the cloud had been caught in a puff of wind; but no wind blew so direct and fast on such a mild day. The cloud shot straight for us, like steam propelled from a high-pressure hose. I didn't know what it was, but reflex kicked in immediately.
"Pistachio,"
I said, "steamlike anomaly. A cloud of it coming in our direction. Its action seems purposeful..."

Tut and Festina were saying similar things, all of us speaking at the same time. With the three of us talking simultaneously, people on
Pistachio's
bridge probably couldn't make out our words... but the main ship computer would be able to disentangle our voices. Eventually. But not before...

The cloud washed over me while I was still telling
Pistachio
what it looked like. A moment of mist and dizziness—the dizziness from a fierce eruption of my sixth sense, like a deafening blare of noise. The cloud was ablaze with ferocious emotion. Rage? Hate? Bewilderment? Passion so intense I couldn't identify its nature; just a howling unfocused adrenaline, vicious enough that my own emotions flared in sympathy, and for a moment I screamed without knowing why.

Then the feeling was gone. The cloud had moved past me, out of sight and out of my sixth sense's range, almost as if nothing had happened. I said,
"Pistachio,
the cloud has passed by and I am still..."

The sound of my voice was muffled—just me talking inside my suit, no echo from my radio receivers. I closed my mouth and listened... to
true
silence. Nothing but my own heartbeat. In particular, no beep beep beep from
Pistachio.

So that was what it felt like to be EMP'd.

I thought back to what we'd seen as our probe jammed its nose into the cookhouse. The "smoke" had been drifting placidly through the mess hall... but as soon as the missile intruded, the cloud had shot forward, and the probe went dead.

Stupid, stupid, stupid—I wanted to smack my head with my hand. We'd all thought the smoke had been disturbed by breeze through the broken window... but the smoke was what carried the EMP. It might even be the ultimate danger that lurked on Muta: some airborne entity, perhaps a swarm of nanites left over from Las Fuentes... or a hive mind like the Balrog, but with spores as light as dust. The smoke might float its way around Muta, EMPing machines and... and...

But at least I was still alive.

My suit was defunct. The heads-up displays had vanished, and no other systems responded. My personal comm implant was also scrap—through my sixth sense I saw the fused subcutaneous circuits in my ears and soft palate, fine wires flash-melted by the energy surge. Good thing the navy's equipment designers had provided enough insulation to keep me safe when the implant got slagged; otherwise, it might have been unpleasant to have my sinuses full of molten electronics.

As it was, I felt no ill effects. I looked back at my fellow Explorers, and both seemed healthy too. They were out of range of my sixth sense, but they held their arms tight to their sides in a good airfoil position rather than just dangling limp. That meant they were still conscious, controlling their dives.

Looking up, I saw something else: the shuttle. Which should have been a long distance past us now. Its uncontrolled terminal velocity was much faster than three humans in tightsuits—we were lighter and dragged more on the air. The shuttle should have continued to spear forward at high speed, while we skydivers slowed down. But the shuttle had slowed down too. And although I was too far away to be sure, I thought the side hatch was now closed.

We'd left that side hatch open when we jumped.

At times, I regretted that swearing had never come naturally to me. I just yelled, "Li!" and left it at that.

He'd stowed away on the shuttle. I was sure of it. That's why he hadn't come to see us off; he was already on board. Ubatu was likely with him—following me to Muta on behalf of Ifa-Vodun. The two diplomats must have concealed themselves in the shuttlecraft's galley, and lucky for them, they'd been far enough back that my sixth sense didn't pick them up. Once we Explorers had jumped, the two diplomats came out of hiding, closed the side hatch, and took the controls. I had no idea why they'd do something so stupid... but as I watched, the shuttle began a slow turn toward the Fuentes city.

"Li!" I shouted again. "Li!"

I wasn't the only one to notice the shuttle's action. Festina had turned to watch them too. Without a working comm I couldn't hear her reaction; but she was probably swearing enough for both of us.

The smoke/steam/EMP-monster noticed the shuttle too. The cloud shot straight at the craft, a wispy misty stream as fast as a bullet. Moments later, the shuttle's engines went silent.

All this time, I'd been dropping in freefall. With tightsuits on, Explorers can jump from considerable altitude, and Festina had wanted us out of the shuttle as soon as practical—no sense hanging around a ship we knew was doomed to crash. (Would it still crash with Li at the controls? An unpowered "dead-stick" landing was a tricky exercise, even with a first-rate airstrip beneath you. Muta had no airstrips. Li's best chance was to aim for a long straight street back in Drill-Press and hope there was nothing dangerous in the middle of the pavement. If he hit a stone deposited by some recent river flood... or a basking crocodilian the size of a small dinosaur...)

But whatever problems Li might face, there was no way I could help him. Nothing to do now but open my parachute. One tug on the cord, and I was jolted as hard as smashing into a wall. The tightsuit helped cushion the shock, but the sudden snap still made something spurt from my cheek like slop from a wet sponge. By luck, the fluid didn't hit my helmet visor; otherwise, I'd have been forced to look at it until it dried and turned into a crusty spot on the otherwise clear plastic.

The chute splayed wide above me: a huge rectangular parasol against the afternoon sun. Its winglike shape made it easy to steer; I aimed in the direction of the rendezvous point, and floated serenely downward. No birds took notice as I fell—birds wouldn't evolve on Muta for another hundred million years. Even pterosaurs were far in the future. Only insects had mastered the mechanics of flight, and they stayed close to the ground, near their nests and food sources. I could hear their communal buzz in the last few seconds before landing, the sound so loud it pierced the muffling cavity of my helmet. Then I struck down, rolled (very awkwardly, given the mirror-spheres strapped to my suit), hit the chute release straps, and got to my feet on my first untamed planet.

Muta. Instinct made me stop... look around... take a deep breath. But the breath only gave me the smell of my own sweat. I'd have to get used to the scent—my tightsuit would soon become hot as an oven. A tightsuit is wonderfully comfortable as long as the temperature-control systems remain operational; now that they'd been EMP'd, however, I was walking around on a mild day in an airtight outfit insulated better than a goose-down parka. An hour or two, and I'd be risking heatstroke.

As for my surroundings, I couldn't see anything except a hodgepodge of multicolored ferns. My eyes weren't adept at extracting information from the motley chaos. I could hear the drone of insects and sense their exact locations with my mental awareness—a horde of them flying near the plants, crawling through the foliage, scuttling under the soil—but even knowing where to look, my sight was too dazzled by leafy reds, blues, yellows, greens, to make out slow-moving flies or beetles.

And most of the insects weren't small. Camp Esteem lay close to the tropics; according to my sixth sense, some of the bugs were as fat as my thumb and twice as long. But their coloration blended so well with the rainbow of plants, they were practically invisible.

It would be difficult not to tread on creepy-crawlies as I walked. I found that idea upsetting—not because I was squeamish about bugs, but because I'd been brought up in the tradition of
ahimsa:
avoidance of violence to all living creatures. Decent people watched where they stepped. Given so many other things to worry about, it may seem strange that my greatest conscious fear was accidentally tromping on a roach; but I'd been gripped by a sudden superstition that I had to keep my karma absolutely clean, or I'd never survive the mission.

I looked at the patch of flattened grass where I'd landed from the parachute drop. In the very first instant of my arrival, I'd squashed the local version of an anthill. Antlike corpses everywhere.

So much for clean karma.

I allowed myself a shudder. Then I shook off my misgivings and hurried to collect my parachute before it blew away in the breeze.

As I ran, I tried to ignore my sixth sense. It insisted on telling how many insects I crushed with every step.

Tanha [Pali]: Craving, in the sense of fixation. It's natural to want food when you're hungry, but it's unskillful to fixate on food. One can fixate on fears, hopes, ideas, etc., just as easily as one fixates on physical cravings. The Buddha's second truth is that fixation is the cause of all suffering.

Festina and Tut landed safely. Tut began gathering his parachute, but Festina just waved at me to take care of hers while she set up a Sperm-field anchor.

Captain Cohen would soon maneuver
Pistachio
to wag the ship's tail toward us. He'd been tracking us up to the point we got EMP'd, so he could approximate when we'd be in position for a lock attempt. Festina therefore unstrapped one of the carrying cases from her chest and drew the mirror-sphere from inside. All three of us looked for mist nearby... but the EMP cloud was nowhere in sight. Since its last target had been Li's shuttle, perhaps the cloud was staying with the craft. For some reason, I imagined the cloud hovering steamily just outside the cockpit, taking malicious delight in watching Li try to land without instruments or electricity.

Too bad for Li; but his troubles might make things easier for us. If Li and the shuttle kept the EMP cloud distracted, we could establish our lifeline back to
Pistachio
without interference. Festina set the mirror-sphere in the grass at her feet—the grass as yellow as saffron—then we waited for the Sperm-tail to arrive.

The waiting gave me time to look around again, not for hostile EMP clouds but for a sense of where we were. The Grindstone was thirty paces to my right—a slow-moving river almost a kilometer wide, filled with coffee brown water and wads of foliage floating or caught on reeds near the shoreline. We stood on the western floodplain, and I do mean flood: the Grindstone's banks were so low, the area where I stood would be underwater almost every spring. Yellow grass grew at our feet, along with the sort of scrub brush that can sprout waist-high over a single summer; but nothing more permanent had seeded on these flats, because the yearly floods drowned any plants that tried to become perennial.

To my left, a hundred meters from the riverbank, rose a second bank that bounded the floodplain. This bank was two stories high, choked with multicolored vegetation but cut by a few scrabbly trails worn through the weeds—paths that animals had made when going to drink at the river.

On top of the higher bank, the Unity huts formed a single long line like a dozen river-watching sentinels. Some study had found that a survey team's productivity improved by 0.8 percent if every member's living quarters had a scenic view of water. Therefore, as per standing regulations, the huts lined across the top of the rise so that everyone could look out a window and see the river.

The huts themselves appeared primitive: wooden walls, thatched roofs. But the wood wasn't wood and the thatch wasn't thatch—both were flameproof, weatherproof synthetics with a high insulation factor and suffused with nontoxic repellents to discourage insects. Even so, the Unity did a superlative job of simulating natural materials. They even gave survey team huts a pleasant woody smell... because, of course, another study had found that performance improved by some fraction when team members could fill their nostrils with forestlike aromas. Everything inside the huts would be similarly optimized for efficiency, safety, and salutary psychological effect; but I had no more time for gawking around, because
Pistachio's
Sperm-tail came sweeping across the valley.

Festina didn't hesitate. Usually you open a stasis field with a special needle-nosed tool that pops the outer shell like a soap bubble... but Festina simply punched the silvery surface with her fist. The mirror-field burst with a gassy hiss, revealing its cache of contents: Bumbler, stun-pistol, comm unit, and anchor. The anchor was a small black box with four horseshoe-shaped gold inlays on its upper surface. Festina grabbed the anchor and moved it to a clear patch of grass. Then she pressed the ON switch.

The Sperm-tail reacted immediately. Up till now, it had simply been wagging at random, lazily swinging like a bell-ringer's rope... but as soon as the anchor was activated, the tail's behavior acquired a sense of purpose. It raced straight toward us, responding to the anchor device's invisible pull.