Radiant

a sharp-edged scoop like a garden spade. The creatures’ heads were insectlike, with bulging faceted eyes and strong-looking mandibles: one mandible attachment on each side of the mouth, plus one on the top and one on the bottom, forming a diamond arrangement.

I wondered what the mandibles were for. Holding food? But the creatures had perfectly good arms — slightly shorter than human arms, but ending in well- proportioned hands with three fingers and an opposable thumb. You don’t need mandibles when you have hands… unless the mandibles were for social display. Or for cracking some special kind of food. Or they played a role in mating, communication, perception, hunting, or some other aspect of life I couldn’t imagine. Evolution doesn’t create body parts for any particular purpose; the body parts always come first. If the parts prove useful to the creature that has them, both the parts and the creature survive. These creatures must have made the most of what they had, because they were probably the ones who’d built this city.

'Are those Fuentes?' I asked Festina.

She nodded. 'Furry bad-tempered beetles. They may look ridiculous, but don’t underestimate them — they’re damned dangerous in a fight. Strong arms, stronger kicks, wicked bites from those mandibles, and they can swing their tails like maces. Not to mention they’re immune to stun-pistols…'

'I thought there were no Fuentes left,' Tut said.

'I thought the same till I met two. They told me they were the last, but I prefer to reserve judgment.'

'So there might be fur beetles somewhere in Drill-Press?' Tut lifted the bear mask hanging on his belt. 'I could put this on so they’d see me as a friend. You know… furry.'

'No!' I told him. Sharply.

Festina looked at me with a raised eyebrow. Tut just let go of the mask. 'Jeez, Mom, ease up, okay?'

'This is as eased as I get,' I told him. 'We’re walking into a city of ghosts.'

'You believe in ghosts?' Festina asked.

'Yes. Don’t you?'

'No. But I’ll give you this much,' she said. 'In a universe full of weird-shit aliens, there’s always something to fill ghosts’ ecological niche. Scary things that jump out and go ‘Boo!’ I can’t tell you how often…' Her voice trailed off, apparently lost in memories of the past. After a moment, Festina said, 'I take it back. There are ghosts. Problem is, we don’t recognize them as such till we’re in over our heads.'

Without another word, she started into the city.

The streets were covered with silt, laid down whenever the river overflowed. When the Fuentes were here, they would have prevented such flooding by adjusting dams — the Unity files had noted a series of dams and sluices, starting hundreds of kilometers upstream and extending all the way to the sea. Once the Fuentes had gone, however, the system broke down; no one had lowered or raised the dams in millennia, so they’d become useless concrete waterfalls. The river had returned to its age-old pattern of rise and fall, occasionally swelling high enough to soak the city’s feet.

At the moment, the water was low, and the dirt on the streets was dry. No plants grew in that soil; either the silt was too shallow to support plant roots, or the lack of vegetation had a more sinister cause. Some alien civilizations impregnated their paving materials with herbicides — a toxic way to prevent grass and weeds from sprouting. If the Fuentes had used the same trick six thousand years ago, the streets might still contain enough chemicals to discourage local plant life.

I didn’t use the Bumbler to see if that was true. When you’re walking on poison, sometimes you just don’t want to know.

There’s something eerie about uninhabited cities. Walking in the unnatural quiet. Drill-Press wasn’t absolutely silent — insects buzzed, a soft breeze was blowing, and the river provided a constant babble — but without the noise of people or machines, the city seemed as hushed as a sickroom.

A thousand looming mosaics of furry beetles didn’t help. Alien giants looked down on us, holding unknown objects (tools? toys? symbols of office?) or working at unknown tasks. I wondered if the pictures might be advertisements for consumer products or tributes to illustrious citizens. No way to tell. Each picture was probably rich with iconography… perhaps a particular position of the mandibles indicated a saint, or a gesture of the tail a sex-star… but that was a study for archeologists, if any ever visited this planet. Certainly, Team Esteem hadn’t spent much time thinking about the pictures. In all the reports I’d read, the mosaics weren’t even mentioned.

Then again, the reports said little about anything in the city. Team Esteem had been dropped on Muta by the last luna-ship to visit the system. Since then, whatever the team had learned was stored in computers at their camp — useless EMP’d computers, whose data had never been downloaded back to the Unity homeworld. Someday someone might manage to recover the data and read the surveyors’ findings; but from our point of view, the only records Team Esteem had left were scuff marks in the soil.

Those scuff marks showed where the team usually went when they visited Drill-Press. Without a word of discussion, we followed the path most traveled. The Unity people had spent months searching this city for points of interest; gradually, however, they’d settled on a single trail to a single destination.

It would be useful to know what that destination was.

We walked down the street, our eyes and ears open. Tall buildings rose around us: nothing less than twenty stories. Obviously, the Fuentes hadn’t believed in single-family dwellings, or little shops with a homey feel. They’d had plenty of room to expand the city — there’d been no other settlement within a thousand kilometers, and no geographical barriers to prevent them from spreading out as far as they liked. But the Fuentes had kept their city tightly compact. Either they preferred to squeeze together (some species instinctively liked to live in one another’s laps) or they stuck to a crowded lifestyle established on planets where space was more limited.

My mental awareness penetrated a short distance into nearby buildings, but only showed mud-covered floors and water-damaged walls. No remains of furniture or other belongings. Floods had rotted or washed away the contents of all rooms at ground level, and my sixth sense didn’t reach to higher floors.

So what had these places been? Homes? Stores? Amusement centers? How had the Fuentes lived? How had they filled their days? What did they consider important? Explorers seldom asked such questions — we were too busy assessing immediate threats to worry about more ephemeral concerns. We were scouts, not archeologists. But I found myself asking why the Fuentes had come here so long ago. Why journey tens or hundreds of light-years to a planet that would never feel like home? Why build a city in the middle of nowhere, not even close to other cities on the same planet? What would you do in such a place?

Aloud I said, 'Do you think they were running from something?'

'What do you mean?' Festina asked.

'The Fuentes who lived here. Do you think they were running away? Maybe they followed an unorthodox religion, so they came to avoid persecution.'

'It’s possible,' Festina said. 'Why do you ask?'

'Because the cities are so far apart. Only two on this entire continent… and just four more Fuentes cities on the rest of the planet. Why space things out so much? Because the people wanted to avoid each other? Didn’t want to be ‘contaminated’ by outsiders’ beliefs?'

'Maybe they needed a lot of land,' Festina suggested. 'Maybe each family belonged to a separate clan, and they divided all of Muta between the clans. The Fuentes might have had the same sort of territorial instincts as Greenstriders.'

'Or maybe,' Tut said, 'each city was doing dangerous shit, and they didn’t want to blow each other up.'

Festina and I looked at him. He shrugged. 'You two come from civilized worlds. Farms, parks, gardens, all homey and domestic. Me, I was born on an ice moon where we kept blobs of liquid helium as pets. So why did my family live in a shithole whose temperature was damned near absolute zero? Because my old man was a nanotech guy, developing stuff so potentially lethal, one slipup could wipe out everything in sight. Gray goo meltdown. The only place he was allowed to work was that godforsaken moon, far from anything else.'

I considered that a moment. 'You think the Fuentes might have used Muta for risky research? And the cities were spaced far apart for safety?'

'We all have our own colored lenses, Mom. You see a city in the middle of nowhere, and you think it’s because of religion. Auntie says maybe they were trying to grab the most land possible. I see the same setup and wonder if they were doing something so damned dangerous, they were sent to an isolated site on an isolated world to reduce casualties if someone dropped a test tube.' He smiled a broad golden smile. 'All a matter of perspective, isn’t it?'

'True,' Festina said. She looked around. 'One more lethal possibility to worry about. Just bloody wonderful.' She took a few steps, then turned back to Tut. 'I understand now why you ran away from home as a teenager. Even the Unity must have looked better than an ice moon.'

'Nah,' he said. 'I left home cuz my helium pets evaporated.' He started up the street… which is when I yelled, 'Look out!' and grabbed for the pistol on Festina’s belt.

My sixth sense had limited range: about ten meters. That’s why I hadn’t sensed Li and Ubatu stowed away in the shuttle, and why I didn’t sense the ambush till almost too late. Fortunately, our attacker’s life force was strong — a blazing ball of hatred that burned so fiercely, I knew it was trouble the instant it registered on my inner eye. Even so, I barely had time to shout my warning before Tut was under assault.

In loose zoological terms, the creature was a pouncer — a predator who lies in wait till prey walks by, then leaps from concealment and makes a fast kill. In comparative evolution terms, the beast was Muta’s version of a pseudosuchian — a bipedal reptilelike land animal whose descendants would evolve into dinosaurs. In immediate life-or-death terms, what we saw was a mass of teeth and claws hurtling from a gap between buildings — the same height as Tut, but built along the lines of a slender T. rex. Big legs, small arms, strong tail, huge head, the whole of its body fast and light but as powerful as a striking hawk. Its scaly skin was leopard yellow with spots of red and brown: excellent camouflage for hiding in Muta’s foliage, but also good when standing in shadows against a motley mosaic wall. Normal vision could easily miss it… until the moment it made its attack, hurtling toward Tut with its fangs poised for action.

At the last moment, it screamed — like an eagle’s piercing cry, but as loud as a lion. No doubt the scream was intended to freeze the prey in terror; but Tut had started moving the instant I shouted my warning, and he didn’t let the monster’s caterwaul slow him down. Tut pivoted fast as soon as I yelled, looking for the source of danger. He spotted the attacking animal a split second after it started its charge… and instead of trying to dodge or escape, he ran toward the beast on a collision course. Just before impact, Tut angled off and threw out his arm in a classic 'clothesline' maneuver. The animal (so primitive its species would need twenty million years just to become as smart as a dinosaur) didn’t have the intelligence or reflexes to deal with a surprise tactic. The big reptile just continued its forward charge as Tut’s arm caught it cleanly across the throat.