Radiant

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.

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