Radiant (31 page)

I dwelled on it anyway. Totally fixated. But I pretended otherwise.

With no reason to choose any particular door, we started with the one nearest the entrance. It had no lock, just a push bar. Tut and I stood against the walls on either side—out of the line of fire if something bad happened when the door opened—while Festina put her foot on the push bar and gave a heavy shove.

The door swung silently open. The room beyond was as dim as the corridor—lit by dirty skylights that created more shadows than illumination. The shadows were cast by boxy machines arranged in a five-by-five grid. Obviously, the room housed mainframe computers... and just as obviously (from the silence that hung in the air) the computers were no longer running. One near the door had been cracked open, probably by a member of Team Esteem; but even in the pallid light, it was easy to see that the machine's guts were a mess of fused metal and desiccated biologicals.

"EMP'd," Tut said, looking at the remains of the computer's innards.

"What a surprise," Festina muttered. She walked around the room anyway to make sure she didn't overlook subtle details, but the place was exactly as it seemed at first glance: a room full of big, dead computers. Perhaps an army of experts could learn something about Fuentes technology from the ruined remains, but Team Esteem hadn't spent much effort on the task. They must have busied themselves elsewhere.

On to the room next door. It was trashed. At one point, it would have been a lab; but now, glassware was smashed, microscopes had been battered to mangled metal, and delicate machines were reduced to wreckage. I could still recognize the sturdier pieces of equipment—a freezer, a fridge, an autoclave—but even those had been fiercely attacked... kicked and dented and bitten.

No mystery who the attacker had been. Sprawled across the debris was a dead pseudosuchian, a human-sized protodinosaur much like the one that tried to kill Tut. It had withered to nothing but skin over skeleton... and the skin was so thin, we could see where the underlying bones were fractured—its jaw, its feet, its tail.

"Poor guy," Tut said, patting the carcass. He stroked its shriveled flank. "What do you think?" he asked Festina and me. "The EMP clouds forced Rexy to come here, then drove him crazy enough to demolish the place?"

"Probably," Festina replied. "Looks like the animal was so berserk it kept bashing away, even though it was damaging itself as much as the lab. Eventually, it rolled over and died from its injuries."

"One problem with that theory," I said. While they'd been talking, I'd scanned the creature's corpse with my Bumbler. "Carbon-dating says this animal has been dead more than six thousand years."

"What?" Festina hurried to look at the readout. "Anything dead that long should be dust."

"Not necessarily," I said. "There's no weather inside this building. No insects either. And almost no microbes. Just the germs we're carrying with us, on our skin and in our guts."

"How can that be?" Festina asked. She took the Bumbler and twisted a few dials. The data remained the same.

"Maybe it's spatial distortion," Tut suggested. "This building is a pocket universe, right? Doing weird shit to everything inside. Maybe it kills microorganisms."

"It kills microorganisms but not the cells in our bodies? How is that possible?" Festina glowered at the Bumbler's display. "But this place
is
devoid of microbes. Truly mind-bogglingly clean." She looked back at the dead protodinosaur. "Which is why there's so little decay: no germs or bugs to break down the corpse."

"The corpse dates back to Fuentes times," I said. "If that's the case—and if we think the EMP clouds made the animal bust this place up..."

"That's what
I
think," Tut put in.

"Then where did EMP clouds come from so long ago? The ones we've seen so far are from Team Esteem. Aren't they?"

"Gotta be," Tut said. "Var-Lann turned into one. And he saw his fellow team members go the same way."

"If that was the work of a Fuentes defense system," Festina said, "other invaders probably turned into clouds too. The Greenstriders, for example. And any other race that tried to settle on Muta in the past sixty-five hundred years."

"And maybe the Fuentes themselves," I suggested.

"What do you mean?"

"Live by the sword, die by the sword. It's basic karma. Build a defense system that turns invaders into angry clouds of smoke, and it's only a matter of time before the same thing happens to you."

"Mom has a point," Tut said. "I've played a million VR sims where folks build a doomsday device, then some technical glitch sets it off... or saboteurs make the superweapon backfire..."

Festina grimaced. "Here's where I smack you on the head and say this is real life, not VR... except that my natural cynicism agrees with you. Building a superweapon
is
asking for trouble—especially an automated one that works in secret till the moment it lowers the boom. A design error or sabotage might well have turned the damned defense system against the Fuentes themselves. Next thing you know, all the people turn to smog, leaving cities like Drill-Press abandoned. The smog has nothing to do but drift, angry as a son of a bitch... occasionally venting hostility by driving local wildlife mad and sending poor Rexies to destroy random property."

"You think this attack was random?" I asked. "This room isn't closest to the entrance. The Rexy passed by the computer room—nothing in there had been touched. But the animal came here and stayed in the room, smashing equipment till it died."

"Yeah, Auntie," Tut said, "this looks premeditated. I mean, some clot of smog must have driven Rexy all the way from the countryside, into the city, onto the bridge, up an entrance ramp, down a dark corridor, past the first available door, and into a room in the middle of a long dark hall. Then the smog kept Rexy here breaking his own bones but still flailing about until he keeled over. If you ask me, that's not random. Some cloud had a major hate for this room."

"Fair enough," Festina said. "So why this room? What's here?"

"Look around, Auntie. Glass dishes. Microscopes. Autoclave. Doesn't that sound like a microbi lab? Where you might develop weird-shit germs as the basis for a defense system?"

Ouch,
I thought. But Tut was right. If the Fuentes had developed a bacterial defense system, part of the work would be done in a lab exactly like this. Equipped with a big bank of computers like the ones next door. And possibly, the other rooms in this building would be development labs for other parts of the system... like whatever mechanisms delivered bacteria to places where invaders had landed.

Had we stumbled across the birthplace of the Fuentes' superweapon? And if so, was that just lucky accident? No, not an accident. The Unity had been on Muta for years. They'd explored other Fuentes cities. They'd gathered plenty of data—data that led them to send their final survey team to Drill-Press. Team Esteem had, in turn, searched Drill-Press till they discovered this lab. No one in the Unity suspected the true nature of what the lab had created; if they'd known it was a weapon to turn people into smoke, they would have evacuated the planet. But perhaps survey teams at other Fuentes sites had picked up hints about "important research" or "advanced weapons development" being conducted in this location. Team Esteem had been sent to investigate. Unfortunately, they didn't have enough time to analyze what superweapon this lab had produced. Only at the last had Var-Lann put together the pieces and come to a hypothesis about what was really going on.

I glanced at Festina and Tut. Both appeared thoughtful—possibly going through the same chain of reasoning I had. For a moment, I felt another pang of loss, wishing I could reactivate my sixth sense to see what was going on inside them. I wouldn't be able to read their thoughts, but if I saw their auras, their emotions, I could tell...
no, stop, stop. Stop thinking about it; stop wanting it.

"Come on," I said abruptly. "Let's check the other rooms." Without waiting for them, I hurried back out to the corridor.

Two of the other rooms had also been attacked by pseudosuchians. (Tut said, "Aww, Rexy, are you in here too?" As if they were all the same animal—one who died tragically, over and over again, like some contaminated being who needed many protodinosaur rebirths to purge a karmic debt.) The devastated rooms were probably other laboratories, though their fields of research were unclear; they'd contained machines of various shapes and sizes, now smashed beyond recognition.

I probably wouldn't have known what the equipment was, even if it had been intact. How was I supposed to understand gadgets whose innards looked like dried green seaweed, or nests of thin blue tubes arranged like the back of a pipe organ? I imagined Team Esteem had prodded these remnants for hours, trying to discern their purpose. If the team had reached any conclusions, no record remained.

One door was left to open. We went through the usual routine—Festina insisting she be in the line of fire while Tut and I stood safely aside—and we let her have her moment of potential martyrdom. As with the other rooms, no threat pounced out when she kicked the door open... but this time we saw more than the remains of dinosaur vandalism. No Rexy had visited this room; but Team Esteem must have come here often.

It was a morgue. Or an anatomy lab. Or a torture chamber.

Fuentes corpses were laid out in a variety of positions: some flat on waist-high examination tables; some clamped to vertical slabs; some in huge glass jars; some inside shimmering silver balls of light, much like Technocracy stasis fields but transparent enough to show bodies within. Cadavers exposed to the air had dried and shriveled but not decayed, just like the Rexy carcasses in the other rooms. Cadavers sealed under glass or in stasis looked even better preserved.

All the dead belonged to the species shown on mosaic murals throughout the city—rabbit haunches, spade tails, insect eyes, and mandibles—but when I looked more closely, each specimen deviated from the norm. One's head was bloated and misshapen. Another had no skin covering its chest... not from dissection, but as if the creature had been born with bare ribs open to the world. A third had no arms, while a fourth displayed mandibles twice as big as normal protruding grotesquely from its face. All told, there were more than twenty deceased Fuentes on display in the room, each drastically maimed or disfigured.

"Hey look!" said Tut. "The Fuentes Explorer Corps."

Festina made a strangled noise. I'm not sure if it was a growl or a laugh.

Team Esteem had set up equipment around the room: scanners, data analyzers, and probes. The team had been examining the bodies—collecting DNA samples, taking X-rays/MRIs/CTs/ PPETs/JJEs, and all the other usual peekaboos—and they were also three-quarters through a complete dissection of one cadaver, who'd been conveniently lying on an operating table.

While the team's medical and bio experts plied their trades, the hard-engineering types had busied themselves with dissections of their own: taking apart Fuentes gadgets that also occupied the room. I assumed the gadgets had been the usual things one finds in autopsy labs, like devices for testing the chemistry of body fluids or for checking the state of specific internal organs. Now that the Fuentes species had vanished, the machines weren't useful in themselves, but analyzing their components might reveal important information about Fuentes technology. Team Esteem must have hoped they'd find logic systems more advanced than anything known, or cute little black boxes that could violate the rules of physics. Carefully, cautiously, warily, they'd begun to dismantle every mechanical object in the room. The resulting bits and pieces were arranged in trays awaiting analysis.

Since Tut and Festina immediately went to examine the corpses, I turned my attention toward the disassembled machinery. I had no special expertise in electronics, positronics, or neutrionics, but I decided to give everything a once-over with the Bumbler just to see if anything noteworthy stood out. It did. I turned to my companions. "These parts," I said. "They haven't been EMP'd."

Festina raised her eyebrows. "Are you sure?"

"No signs of EMP damage. Even nano-scale circuits are intact."

"Hmm," Festina said. "So in sixty-five hundred years, no EMP cloud has come in here... even though the door was unlocked, there's no security system, and we think the clouds were responsible for Rexy rampages just down the hall."

"Jeez," said Tut, "sounds like the clouds were afraid of this room. Like maybe there's some kind of monster..."

"Shut up!" Festina snapped. "Not another word!"

For several heartbeats, all three of us stood in silence. No monster attacked. I reached out with my mind as if I still had a sixth sense, but I perceived nothing beyond what was already apparent—the corpses and dismantled machinery. At last, Festina let out her breath; she didn't speak or drop her guard, but she joined me and checked the Bumbler's data.

"You're right," she said. "No EMP damage. Strange."

"The clouds
have
avoided this room," I told her in a low voice.

"I know."

"For six and a half thousand years."

"I
know."
She looked around once more. "Either something here keeps them away—
not
a monster," she added, glaring at Tut, "but perhaps some device that causes them pain... or else the clouds stay away because there's some piece of equipment they don't want to EMP."

"Like what?" Tut asked. "What kind of equipment?"

"I don't know. Something the clouds like—something that makes them feel good."

"Or perhaps," Tut said, "something that would be dangerous if it got short-circuited."

"Don't you know when to be quiet?" Festina asked. "Don't you know not to tempt fate?"

"I'm just saying it's possible," Tut replied.

"Fine, it's possible. But not likely. Not when you realize that
every
EMP cloud has left this room alone. The Fuentes. The Unity. The Greenstriders. Who knows how many others. Every race that's come to Muta in the past six millennia has probably been turned to smoke by the damned defense system. How do they
all
know there's something in here they should leave alone? Do you think Team Esteem understood these machines? I doubt it. From the look of things, they were still trying to figure out what was what. Even more important, they were carefully tearing everything apart. So why when they turned to smoke would they suddenly say, 'Oh, we'd better leave that stuff alone'?"