Radiant

Festina turned a dial on her console, and the bridge’s vidscreen changed to show a satellite photo of Muta — one of hundreds included in the files we’d received from the Unity. A red dot glowed in the middle of a region that looked like a vast plain. 'The Unity called this Camp Esteem.' She made a face. 'Typical Unity name. It happens to be the newest camp on the planet… so the survey team was fresher than any other team in residence. Maybe that’s why they managed to get out a call for help when all the other teams went without a peep. Or not. It could just be coincidence.'

'If that’s the most recent site developed,' I said, 'it should be close to Fuentes ruins. The last four teams were all investigating Las Fuentes.'

'I know. Team Esteem was poking through an abandoned Fuentes city they code-named Drill-Press.' Festina made another face. I knew from the files I’d read that the Unity had named all of Muta’s geography after wholesomely useful tools. (I was glad we weren’t going anywhere near the Fuentes city called Reciprocating Saw.)

Festina went back to the satellite photo. 'For the sake of caution, the Unity surveyors didn’t pitch camp inside the city — they set up quarters a short distance away.' She zoomed the view on the vidscreen. 'That’s the city, Drill-Press, in the lower half of the picture. You’ll notice a good-sized river running through downtown. The river’s called Grindstone. The Unity camp is here: fifteen minutes upstream from the city.'

The original photo had shown a good chunk of the continent, so the zoom had disappointingly crude resolution — pixels the size of fingerprints, with a chunky lack of detail. Nevertheless, I could make out the features Festina had described. A good-sized river ran vertically down the center of the shot; it had a few gentle curves, but essentially flowed north to south (according to a legend in a corner of the picture). In the north, just west of the river, the Unity camp was highlighted with a digitally superimposed red circle. A cluster of prefab buildings lay within the circle: twelve small huts (living quarters for the survey team’s dozen members) and four larger units… a mess hall, a lab, an equipment maintenance shop, and a general storage area.

To the south, near the bottom of the photograph, lay the Fuentes city. Drill-Press. Even after sixty-five hundred years, it was easy to identify. This was not some Old Earth archeological site where primitive peoples built houses from sticks; on Muta, the 'ruins' had fifty-story skyscrapers made from high-tech construction materials… materials as good or better than the self-repairing chintah in Zoonau. Las Fuentes had been more advanced than the Cashlings, and this city must have been constructed near the height of Fuentes achievement. It was hard to see much on the poor-resolution aerial photo, but none of the buildings showed obvious damage. Most of the roofs had rectangular cross sections, and I noticed no irregularities that might indicate holes, or edges eroded away. All of Drill- Press seemed structurally intact; 'ruins' in name only. At ground level, the city was likely a mess — in six and a half millennia, the river must have flooded its banks on numerous occasions, leaving silt and water damage on the buildings’ bottom floor — but floodwaters wouldn’t have climbed much higher. Damage on upper floors would come from other sources: insects and other local wildlife. Mold. Mildew. Microbial rot.

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