Radiant

CHAPTER 8

Shunyata [Sanskrit]: The trait of being transitory and interconnected with other things. No thing is absolute or complete in itself. Where, for example, is a chair’s chairness? Not in any of its parts: a chair leg is not a chair; a backrest is not a chair. But even a complete assemblage of chair parts is not enough for chairness. Chairs can be chairs only in appropriate environments — they need gravity, a species whose anatomy can fit into the chair, and various other external conditions. Chairness is therefore not a property of a particular object, but a set of relationships between the object and external factors. This quality is shunyata… often translated as "emptiness." In isolation, a chair may exist as an object but it’s "empty." Chairness arises only when the object relates in a specific way to the rest of the world.

I ate more that breakfast than at any other meal in my life. And I’d never been a hesitant eater: my high-powered gene-spliced metabolism always needed plenty of fuel. But that morning, I surpassed all previous records. I just couldn’t stop shoveling in food.

The phrase "eating for two" kept echoing in my head. I pictured the Balrog siphoning off my intake, not letting a single mouthful reach my stomach… but even that image wasn’t enough to slow me down. I remained so hungry I found myself casting ardent looks at the mess’s meat section — bacon, sausage, kippers, and slabs of dead animal I couldn’t even identify — to the point where I might have renounced my lifelong vegetarianism if Tut hadn’t walked in the door.

He was looking surprisingly dapper, with his face burnished far beyond his usual shiny-finey standards. Gold glinted like pure rich honey under the mess’s bright morning lights; either Tut had found some new metal polish or he’d spent untold hours buffing it to a perfect mirror surface.

"Hey, Mom," he said, "I’ve been looking for you. Were you messing with the door to the equipment room? It’s locked, and it won’t let me in."

"Festina did that. Admiral Ramos. She won’t let us near the equipment, for fear we’d do something bad."

Tut made a noise like his feelings had been hurt. I told him, "Don’t pout, it’s mostly me she mistrusts. Or rather, the Balrog inside me."

"Huh." He looked down at the dishes all around my place at the table. There was nothing for him to steal this time — I’d eaten everything and practically licked the plates clean. "So when do we get to this planet?" he asked.

I tongued a control on the roof of my mouth. In the bottom corner of my right eye, a digital time readout appeared. "We’ll be there in two hours," I told him. "Do you know what we’re doing once we arrive?"

"Auntie gave me the basics last night. Mystery threat. Search for survivors. Save anyone we find. I’m also supposed to stun the knickers off you if the Balrog tries any tricks."

"Good luck. You’ll need it."

My sixth sense was still in perfect working order; I hadn’t asked the Balrog to turn it off after the previous night. Not only did I know the position of everything near me, including objects behind my back and out of sight around corners, but I’d begun perceiving life forces again. If Tut decided to shoot me, his intention would ring out loud and clear from his aura: enough warning to let me dodge, or even shoot him first.

It seemed unfair, in a way — having this extra edge over Tut’s mere human perceptions. But if I asked the Balrog to turn the sixth sense off, what good would that do? The Balrog itself would still have its full mental awareness; Tut and everyone else would still be at a disadvantage relative to the spores. So why should I blind myself when it wouldn’t help anyone? Staying augmented put me on a more even footing with the moss inside me. It might even give me the strength to resist any power plays the Balrog might attempt.

Yes. I’d keep the sixth sense for the time being.

As soon as I’d made that decision, my voracious hunger abated. It felt like a return to sanity.

A short time later, Festina called to say that Tut and I could check out the tightsuits we’d wear for the landing. She let us into the equipment area one at a time and kept close watch on everything we did.

I wasn’t allowed to touch anything except my own suit. Festina said she’d checked the other equipment herself. I couldn’t help asking a barrage of questions, mostly about how Festina had dealt with new gear and procedures — things that had changed since she’d been on active Explorer duty. But it turned out "Auntie" Festina had kept up with recent developments in the Explorer Corps: she’d done everything exactly the way I would have. She even let me look at the results of diagnostic tests she’d run earlier that morning. All equipment was working at optimal.

Once we’d finished with the tightsuits, Festina took Tut and me to the bridge, where she seated herself at the seldom-used Explorers’ console. Sometime during the night, she’d programmed four probe missiles to perform initial reconnaissance on the site where we’d land. The missiles would be sent down as soon as Pistachio reached Muta orbit. Based on their data, we’d decide how to proceed.

"And what site are we going to?" I asked.

"The one that sent the Mayday."

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 obvious heat sources all over: small ones in almost every hut, and larger ones in the big buildings. Festina zoomed the probe’s camera to scan the building with the largest heat source. A plaque on the front displayed a pictogram knife, fork, and plate: the standard signage for mess halls. No doubt the members of Team Esteem could remember which building was their cookhouse even if it wasn’t labeled… but the Unity was famous for flogging the obvious. They might paint DOG on a pet’s forehead just to be thorough.

"If that’s the mess hall," Tut said, "what do you bet the heat source inside is a stove somebody left on?"

"No bet," Festina replied.

"You could smash the probe through a window and see."

"Not just yet." Festina sent the probe on a looping circle of the whole camp. Still nothing unusual or out of place.

"I don’t see corpses," Li said.

"Maybe they’ve all been eaten," Ubatu suggested. "I mean, by animals and insects."

"The Mayday was issued thirty-six hours ago," Festina said. "Local time, that was early yesterday morning. Pretty fast for scavengers to consume a body, bones and all."

"Unless," Cohen said, "the scavengers on Muta are more efficient than on other planets."

"It’s possible," Festina told him. "Usually, though, native scavengers work quite slowly on human corpses. Earth flesh isn’t their normal food. It can even be poison to alien predators. So on average, human meat doesn’t get eaten very quickly on nonterrestrial worlds. Of course, Muta could be the exception."

A thought struck me. "You said the Mayday came yesterday morning. What time exactly?"

Festina checked a data display: "7:14 local."

"Then maybe we should crash the probe through a mess hall window. At 7:14, everyone on the team would be eating breakfast."

"True," Festina said. "Unity surveyors start breakfast precisely at 7:00 and end at 7:20."

"Goddamned robots," Li muttered.

"They prefer the term ‘cyborg,’ " Ubatu told him.

"I prefer the term ‘morons.’ "

"Now, now," Cohen said — more a reflex than a serious attempt to stop the bickering. Festina, however, was less inclined to put up with such nonsense. Her aura flared with annoyance.

"Enough!" she said. "Everybody shut up while I work. We’ve got four probes, so maybe it’s worth sacrificing one to see inside the cookhouse."

Her life force hinted at words she didn’t say: if the mess hall was filled with dead bodies, we’d be off the hook. For the sake of thoroughness, we’d have to check the other survey camps too; but if one team had been reduced to corpses, the rest would almost certainly be the same.

In that case, our mission was over. The Unity might want to retrieve the fallen and determine the cause of death… but that was their business, not ours. We were strictly here to save survivors. If we couldn’t find anyone alive, we’d file a report and go home.

I knew it wouldn’t be that simple. For Explorers, nothing is ever easy.

"All right," said Festina. "I’ll send in a probe."

She manipulated the controls, not just setting up the first probe to bash its way into the mess hall, but bringing a second probe into position to get footage of the process. The picture on the vidscreen split down the middle: one half from the nose of the missile that would enter the mess, the other half from a more distant viewpoint that showed both the probe and the mess hall building. The probe was lean and black, hovering on antigrav right in front of the building’s largest window. We could see nothing through the glass — the window had a reflective thermo-coat, designed to bounce off incoming light, so the interior would remain cool. Come winter, the coat would be changed to absorb light and collect heat… but at the moment, the windows were still on summer settings.

"Ready," Festina said. "In we go."

On the overview half of the vidscreen, the probe moved toward the window in slow motion; on the nose camera half, the window itself came closer and closer until it shattered under the probe missile’s strength. We had time to see a large square table with twelve chairs around it, something cloudy in the air like smoke, the smoke rushing forward as if stirred by a breeze from the broken window… then the pictures on the vidscreen abruptly vanished into random digital snow.

Both halves of the screen.

"God damn!" Festina said. "We got EMP’d."

"EMP’d?" Ubatu asked.

"An electromagnetic pulse," I told her. "It fried the probe’s electrical circuits." I waved toward the screen, both sides showing nothing but static. "The EMP took out both probes. That’s pretty powerful."

"You don’t know the half of it," Festina said. "The pulse got my other two missiles too — the ones held back in reserve. Twenty kilometers away."

"Whoa." Tut gave a low whistle. "A pulse that big makes me think of a nuke."

"It wasn’t a nuke," Cohen said. "Any significant explosion would show up on Pistachio’s sensors." He was looking at the console on his chair. "We got nothing."

"Did the sensors pick up the EMP?" Festina asked.

"No. And we should have, if it was large enough to damage probes at twenty kilometers. The pulse must have been directional, and so tightly focused there wasn’t enough spillover for our sensors to pick up."

Tut frowned. "Can EMPs be tightly focused?"

"If they’re properly generated," Cohen said. "A while back, the navy looked into EMP cannons. The Admiralty thought big EMP guns might be nice nonlethal weapons — one shot could melt an enemy ship’s electronic circuits without hurting the people on board."

Festina looked sour. "Kill a starship’s computer systems and the people inside won’t stay healthy for long."

"True," Cohen admitted, "you couldn’t go shooting indiscriminately. Still, an EMP weapon would be nice to have in the arsenal — to give more tactical options. Too bad the cannons weren’t practical at normal space-engagement distance. We needed something with a range of one hundred thousand kilometers; EMP guns that big took way too much power. The idea’s been shelved a few decades, till we get better energy-production technology."

"So maybe," Tut said, "the Fuentes had solved the technical problems in building EMP guns. Maybe they built an automated EMP defense system. And even though it’s been sixty-five hundred years, maybe the systems still work. They could have been dormant, but somehow the Unity reactivated them. Next thing you know, zap: the survey teams are EMP’d to rat shit. Their equipment went into meltdown, but the people are all just fine."

Cohen turned toward him. "You think that’s why they’ve gone incommunicado? Their communicators have just gone dead?"

"Could be."

"How’d they get out a Mayday?" Cohen asked.

"Someone might have cobbled together a distress signal from spare parts — bits and pieces untouched by the EMP. No weapon is one hundred percent effective, right? Especially if the EMP was tightly focused. And the newest camp would have the most spare parts on hand, so it makes sense they’d be the quickest to build a makeshift signal."

Tut had a point. I didn’t honestly believe the threat on Muta was as simple as leftover EMP guns… but Tut’s scenario was possible.

While I pondered the point, the vidscreen came back to life: a still shot of the mess hall interior. The table and empty chairs. Apparent smoke in the air. "All right," Festina said. "I’ve backtracked Pistachio’s record of the probe’s data. This is the visual a moment before the probe went dead."

With the image frozen on the screen, we could notice more details. On the table, plates and bowls contained half-eaten portions of food: fruit, fiber-mush, and protein power-crunch. (The Unity loved to combine nutrients into artificial concoctions with the texture of gruel or hardtack.) A cup of juice had toppled over; after thirty-six hours on the tabletop, the spill looked dry enough to be sweet and sticky, but no insects were taking an interest. No insects on the food either. Why? Because the mess hall had been shut up tight and insectproof until our probe went through the window? Because Mutan insects didn’t like the taste of Earthling food? Or because something had killed all the insects that should have been swarming over a meal left out for a day and a half?

One thing was sure: the picture showed no people. I looked at the empty chairs, half expecting to see little heaps of clothing — as if Team Esteem had been vaporized between one bite and the next. But no. The twelve chairs were pushed back from the table, the way they’d be if all the surveyors had run outside. Maybe the Unity folk had heard a noise; they’d thrown down their knives and forks, then raced to investigate.

At least, that’s how it looked. Suppose that was how it happened. Then what? If the Unity teams just got EMP’d into radio silence, why did the mess hall still look like the Mary Celeste? If the people of Team Esteem had survived, wouldn’t they come back to the mess hall eventually? Wouldn’t they finish their breakfast, or at least clean their dirty dishes? Unity surveyors loved routine. If something unexpected happened, they’d deal with it as quickly as possible, then try to get back to their normal schedule. But it looked like they’d abandoned the mess hall the previous morning and hadn’t been back since.

"What’s the smoke?" Ubatu asked, looking at the picture. "Is something on fire?"

"Could be," Festina said. "The IR readings showed a large heat source in the mess hall. If someone left a stove burning in the kitchen — a gas stove, unaffected by EMPs — it could have been blazing away for thirty-six hours. Eventually, all that heat might have set fire to something. Hence the high IR readings. And the smoke."

But she didn’t sound happy with the explanation. I didn’t like it either — I didn’t trust pat answers.

Li had said nothing through all this. His life force suggested he was trying to invent ways to turn this business to his advantage. "So what’s the decision on this?" he asked. "Go for a landing? Send more probes?"

"Don’t have more probes," Tut said. "Pistachio only stores four. We could manufacture new ones, but that’d take hours." He shook his head. "Can’t waste that kind of time on a Class One rescue mission."

Festina gave him a look. "A few hours building new probes is nothing compared to the time we might waste searching blindly on the ground." She sighed. "But if we sent more probes, they’d probably just get EMP’d again without telling anything new."

"So you’re landing?" Cohen asked.

Festina took a deep breath, then nodded. "I don’t see any alternative. If the problem is just some automated EMP system left over from the Fuentes, there’ll be survivors down there to be rescued. I doubt if it’s that simple…" She glanced in my direction — maybe thinking about the Balrog and why it wanted to hitchhike inside me to Muta. "…but we have no excuse to give up the rescue, and no way to see what’s going on without sending someone in the flesh."

"Once you’re down there," Ubatu said, "how do you get back up? Won’t your equipment get EMP’d too?"

"Presumably," Festina replied. "But we’ll go down by Sperm-tail, and that can’t be disrupted by EMPs. The Sperm-field is its own little universe, impervious to outside forces. Once it’s in place, a nuke couldn’t budge it."

Before Tut and I said anything, Festina gave us a warning look. What she’d told Ubatu was technically true — a Sperm-field like the one around Pistachio was indeed a pocket universe immune to electromagnetic pulses and most other natural energies. But Festina had skipped past an important step with the phrase "once it’s in place."

Here’s what she didn’t say. The Sperm-field around Pistachio had a long flapping tail — a very long tail, stretching as much as ten thousand kilometers. Pistachio could plant that tail in the middle of Camp Esteem, like the bottom of a long thin tornado. We Explorers could ride down inside the tail, sliding safely through the funnel cloud all the way to the ground. Just one problem: we needed to plant the tail where we wanted to go. We had to anchor the lower end at our desired destination… and the only way to do that was with a small electronic "anchor" that grabbed the tail like a magnet and locked the Sperm-field in place. Once the tail latched onto the anchor, the anchor became part of the pocket universe and therefore safe from EMPs… but until that time, the anchor device could easily have its innards turned to slag by a single modest-sized pulse.

How could we send down an anchor when we’d lost our four probe missiles? Each of the probes had carried an anchor that could be deposited where we wanted to land; but with the probes knocked out, and their anchors probably ruined, what did Festina think she was going to do?

The look on her face said she had a plan. I tried to read her life force, but couldn’t get anything definite. Either I didn’t have enough experience interpreting auras, or Festina was better at hiding her thoughts than people like Ubatu.

"Captain," Festina said, shutting down the Explorer console, "it’s time the landing party got suited up. Please prepare to drop the tail."

"And the anchor?" Cohen knew perfectly well there could be no landing till the tail was locked in place.

"I’ll notify you when it’s ready." Festina stood up. "Come on, Explorers. Let’s get this done."