"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."