Radiant (24 page)

"Looks like it," Tut agreed. "But even in the Unity, there's always one person who eats faster than anyone else."

"Maybe," said Festina, "that person had reason to eat faster yesterday morning. Pressing work to be done. He or she ate quickly, then left the mess hall. Probably to get started on work."

"Then everyone else ran outside," I said. "Like maybe the person who left first called for help. Or there was some noise that made the rest of the team think the first person was in trouble."

Festina nodded. "It would have to be something like that—something that made everybody's reflexes kick in automatically. Unity survey teams are smart about survival. If they'd just heard a strange sound, they wouldn't let everybody investigate; they'd send two or three people to scout, keeping in constant contact by radio. The only time they'd respond to a threat en masse would be if one of their own was in danger right under their noses."

"True," Tut agreed. "Unity folk love following procedures. They'd only give in to impulse if, like, a friend was screaming, 'Help, help, help!' "

"So," Festina said, "this person X who left breakfast first must have got in trouble while crossing the compound. Except that we didn't see any bodies lying out in the dirt."

Tut said, "Maybe X got as far as one of the other buildings. Stepped inside, and bam, something happened."

"We've already checked the huts and this mess hall," Festina said. "Three other buildings to go."

As we walked across the compound, Festina reported our latest findings to Captain Cohen. We still had comm access to
Pistachio:
the EMP cloud hadn't zapped us since we'd opened our second stasis sphere. That meant we also had a working stun-pistol and Bumbler. Festina carried the stunner holstered at her hip—she wouldn't let Tut or me touch the weapon—but she made no protest as I took the Bumbler and strapped it around my neck.

I felt better having a Bumbler... not that its sensors revealed anything useful. The three remaining buildings gave off no special readings. In particular, there were no IR hot spots big enough to indicate human life—just a few patches of mild warmth, probably from the afternoon sun shining through windows and raising the temperature of objects that could absorb heat. The Bumbler showed no notable sources of other types of energy: no tachyons, no terahertz, no radio or microwaves. I'd seen more interesting readings from a patch of ragweed.

So it came as no surprise that we found nothing noteworthy in the first building we entered—the survey team's laboratory. It was a prefab design, with a single corridor down the center: two rooms to the left and two to the right, all four labs of equal size. One was devoted to plants, animals, and soil samples; another was obviously where team members studied microbes (with microscopes, petri dishes, and DNA sequencers); and the last two labs were both dedicated to technological artifacts that must have been retrieved from Drill-Press.

Most of the artifacts were typical products of high tech: nondescript boxes made of plastic and other artificial materials. Las Fuentes apparently liked their gear in earth-tone colors—every box was some shade of brown, from light biscuit to dark umber, sometimes in mottled combinations like desert camouflage—but apart from the color scheme, I drew no other conclusions. I certainly couldn't guess what the devices might do.

Perhaps the Unity had figured out the machinery's purpose, but there was no way to tell. A brief search showed the survey team had kept no notes on paper or in any other hard-copy form. That didn't surprise me—Unity people all had wireless computer links embedded in their brains. Why scribble notes in a journal when they could download their thoughts directly to a computer?

At least Team Esteem stored their data in bubble chips that used long-chain organic molecules to encode information. Such molecules weren't damaged by EMPs. Therefore, whatever the surveyors had learned about Fuentes technology could eventually be recovered.

But not by us. We couldn't read the bubble chips without a computer... and all the computers in Camp Esteem had been EMP'd into uselessness.

Quite possibly, the earth-toned Fuentes devices had also been killed by EMPs... if they hadn't already gone dead in the fall of Fuentes civilization, or in the millennia that followed. All these fancy machines were probably as defunct as my tightsuit.

But I didn't put that to the test by trying to turn them on.

The next building was a repair shop/garage: a single large space that housed the usual equipment required to maintain an installation like Camp Esteem, plus a pair of antigrav vehicles built for strength rather than speed. The AGVs probably couldn't go faster than 50 kph, but they looked powerful enough to lift twenty times their own mass. Good for making trips into Drill-Press and bringing back heavy artifacts. The artifacts I'd seen in the camp had all been small, light enough to be carried by hand. But the Unity always planned for contingencies, and if the survey team needed to drag a forty-ton hunk of Fuentes machinery back to camp, they had the horsepower to do it.

Too bad the AGVs had been EMP'd like everything else and were now just giant paperweights. We left them where they were and went on to the last building.

The sign on the building was a pictograph of stacked boxes, indicating general storage. The door was locked.

"The Unity is always so damned anal-retentive," Festina muttered. "Why the hell would they lock the door on a planet with no other intelligent beings? A simple doorknob would keep out animals. But no, they installed a big-ass lock."

I said, "Maybe some team members weren't allowed in here. Restricted access to prevent pilferage."

"Stupid," Festina grumbled. "They should trust their own people."

I raised an eyebrow. "The way you trusted Tut and me when you locked us out of the equipment room last night?"

"Oh. Yeah." She stared at the closed door in front of us. "Anyone good at picking locks?"

She was joking... trying to lighten the mood after her gaffe. It had been centuries since anyone manufactured locks that could be picked. Broadcast dramas still showed thieves opening doors with piano wire and crochet hooks, but no modern lock could be opened so simply. Lock-cracking these days required extremely sophisticated equipment—ultrasound projectors, nanite bafflers, protein synthesizers—and we'd brought nothing like that with us.

In search of another way in, we walked around the building. It had no windows; it had no second door. Tut tentatively kicked a wall, but his foot made no impression on the surface—the building was made from silver-gray plastic, probably tough enough to survive a hurricane and whatever other hazards Muta might dish out. Short of cannon fire, the walls were impregnable.

"This is annoying," Festina said as we finished back at the front door. "Doesn't it feel like the answer to our questions might be inside this building?" She paused. "Of course, if we
do
get the door open, we might regret it."

"Yeah," Tut agreed. "Like VR adventures where you bust your ass getting into a locked room, then find the room has a monster inside."

"Exactly. This is too tempting not to be dangerous." Festina stepped back and examined the building again. "Still, if there were a way in..."

"There may be," I said. "Why don't you puny humans step aside and let Balrog-girl show you some moss power."

In truth, I didn't know what moss power might do. Navy files said the Balrog had earthshaking telekinetic abilities, but I didn't know whether the spores would be willing to help smash a locked door. If I was the moss's Trojan horse—if it was hiding inside me so someone or something didn't know the Balrog was on Muta—then my alien hitchhiker would avoid revealing its presence with showoff tricks. The Balrog might also consider me presumptuous for acting as if I could command it to open doors. Still, this door had "Clue to the mystery" written all over it... and if the Balrog wanted our investigation to make progress, it would help us get inside.

Therefore, I closed my eyes and reached within myself as if lowering my body into dark water.
Balrog,
I thought,
can you do this? Can you help me do this?

No answer. Not in words. But I got the impression I'd phrased my request incorrectly. A moment later, I realized what I had to say. I don't know if the answer came from my own intuition or if the knowledge had been planted in my mind; but I knew what the Balrog wanted to hear.

I took a deep breath... knowing I was moving another step down the path toward my own oblivion.
Balrog,
I said silently—feeling scared, feeling excited, feeling as if I'd once more been seduced into something against my better judgment but also feeling no desire to resist the heat of temptation—
Balrog, I will let you do this through me. I'll surrender to you that much.

Seconds passed. I felt no change. I'd imagined I might be possessed, feel my body moving without my will. Possibly I'd hear triumphant laughter echoing through my brain, the demonic exaltation that always comes when the foolish maiden succumbs to the devil in some bad melodrama. I was even prepared to black out... then to wake up who knows where, who knows when... if I ever woke up at all.

But nothing like that happened. Nothing discernible changed... except that my sixth sense returned. Even that was no great transformation—more like opening my eyes after having them closed for a few minutes. I could be blasé about it: once again perceiving the auras of Festina and Tut, as well as the microbial world and a few pseudolizards hiding in nearby shadows. I couldn't perceive life signs inside the storage building, nor did I have any mystic "X-ray" intuition about the door lock. My sixth sense told me nothing I hadn't already seen with my eyes: the lock was metal; the door was the same tough silver-gray plastic as the rest of the building; the hinges were on the inside; there was no obvious point of vulnerability.

I reached into my mind once more, hoping the Balrog might hint what I should do next. No such hint came. I'd surrendered myself to the damned moss and got nothing in return. Blazing with anger, I yelled in my mind,
What am I supposed to do? Kick the door in?
I drew back my right foot and shot it out hard, aiming for the center of the door's blank rectangular face.

Just before my kick made contact, some unexpected strength added itself to my own muscle power. Extra mass. Extra acceleration. Extra force.

Slam!

The door split in two, straight down the middle. My foot almost did the same. The boot of my tightsuit absorbed some fraction of the impact, but not nearly enough. With my sixth sense I could see bones splintering from my heel to my toes. I perceived the massive fracturing process in a clear-minded thousandth of a second before the pain made its way up my nervous system and struck the "What the hell did you just do?" part of my brain. I even had time to think, "I'm really going to hate this." Then, agony exploded with a bloody red splash, and there was nothing in my skull but torment.

Niroda [Pali]: Cure; cessation of an illness. The Buddha's third truth is that suffering ceases when you let go of your fixations.

I don't think I passed out. If I did, it was only for a moment.

And I didn't fall down. Festina and Tut caught me, holding me upright till the pain subsided and let self-control reassert itself over sheer animal anguish. The pain didn't go away, but the shock did. In a few seconds, I could think again.

I said, "Ow."

"Yeah," Festina said, "I bet that sums it up."

"That was supreme, Mom!" Tut said. "You told me you were bioengineered, but I never guessed how much."

"Neither did I."

Despite my foot's agony, the Balrog's sixth sense hadn't deserted me. It calmly reported thirty-seven full or partial fractures in the bones of my right foot and lower leg. It also disclosed a flurry of alien activity: Balrog spores at work on the injuries. For a moment, I hoped they'd repair all the cracked and shattered bones... but no. The Balrog was no magic spirit who'd graciously make my injuries vanish. The Balrog didn't give miracles for free; it always exacted a price.

So the bones remained broken, but spores took their place, cramming themselves together so tightly they assumed a solidity almost as strong as my original skeletal structure. Other spores sealed off the lacerated blood vessels sliced open by sharp bone fragments, while still more spores assembled themselves as surrogate tendons, ligaments, and cartilage. The result would be sturdy enough to walk on. It would
not,
however, be sturdy enough to kick through another door. Moss packed tightly is still just moss.

I thought of Kaisho Namida, her entire lower body turned to spores. Mentally, I asked the Balrog,
Did you eat her the same way? Did she trade herself for favors bit by bit? Did she accumulate injuries, accidentally or on purpose, and little by little she made deals to have you replace her original tissues?

No answer, of course. Nothing but raging pain. The Balrog had supplanted my bones and stopped my bleeding, but it hadn't quieted the neurons that shrieked in outrage at so much physical trauma.
Oh for Buddha's sake,
I thought in exasperation,
just eat the nerves and get it over with.

The pain stopped immediately. That's what happens when a bunch of neurons get devoured and replaced by spores.

Oddly enough, my sixth sense said the foot still looked normal... at least outwardly. The skin hadn't been broken. The displacement of the underlying bones had somehow been concealed—probably by spores eating away any outjuts and fragments that would have spoiled the foot's external appearance. All signs of damage had been forcibly eradicated.

But the foot was no longer mine. It had become alien territory.

"I'm all right," I lied as I pushed myself away from Tut and Festina. I took an experimental step. There was no muscle feeling in my foot, but my extended mental awareness let me compensate. I wasn't receiving the usual body-position information along my foot's neural pathways, but my sixth sense provided a different sort of kinesthetic feedback that made up for the loss. When I set my foot on the ground, I didn't
feel
the foot touch down, I simply
knew
it.