…and he turned to smoke.
It was sudden, but not violent. His skin had already been peeling away in flakes and powdery grains. Now his entire body fell in on itself with the sound of sifting sand. His tissues withered into leaf-thin fragments; the fragments broke down into pinpoint particles; and the particles rose in a cloud that wafted toward the storage building’s roof. My sixth sense saw the cloud’s life force, first rejoicing in release from the flesh, glorying in the departure of pain… then turning angry, furious at something, frustrated… outrage growing till it reached the level of madness, a fury that banished all rationality. The cloud whirled in frenzy, spinning more and more frantically until it was nothing but pure distilled wrath. It hurtled down upon us, wanting to hurt us, as if we were horrid abominations it hungered to kill; as if the cloud truly was a hungry ghost, a preta. But all the preta could do was swirl ineffectually, trying in vain to do us injury. When it saw its efforts were futile, its aura blazed with fresh anger at its failure. It left in a rage, sweeping out of the building, a mist-elemental searching for others of its kind.
"Whoa," Tut said. "What just happened?"
"We found out what happened to the survey team." Festina glanced at the Bumbler, still strapped around my neck. "Surprise, surprise. The Bumbler’s been EMP’d."
There was nothing left of the Unity man — not even the flakes and powder grains that had previously fallen off him. When I looked for the bits of skin on the floor, they were gone too… as if every part of the man had turned to smoke simultaneously, each component waiting till the whole was ready to go.
The man’s clothes remained on the ground. Also an assortment of small electronic devices: the implants from inside the man’s body. I recognized the cyberlink that would have connected his brain to Team Esteem’s computers — it sat on the concrete, right where the man’s head had been — but most of the other gadgets were unfamiliar to me. Perhaps if I’d had the time to examine them… but after ten seconds, the implants burst simultaneously into fizzing flame.
"Self-destruct mechanisms," Tut said as we all stepped back from the heat. "An automatic chemical reaction kicks in on exposure to open air. To prevent anyone from analyzing the gadgets."
"Personally," Festina said, "I’d be damned reluctant to have equipment planted in my body if the blasted stuff could explode."
"Think of the alternative," Tut said. "If the equipment didn’t explode, we nasty Technocracy villains could dissect everything and figure out how to hack the systems. The Unity really doesn’t want that. If we found a way to disrupt their brain-links… or the doodads that augment adrenaline flow… or any of the other implants they depend on… we could blackmail the crap out of the whole population."
"Still," Festina muttered, "I wouldn’t-"
She was interrupted by a flash of flame as the man’s uniform caught fire. It had been lying under the still-burning implants; probably the clothes had been treated with flame retardants, but the heat from the implants had reached some critical temperature the fabric couldn’t withstand. In a few seconds, the uniform was nothing but flyaway cinders… and the implants were nearly the same. Nothing was left of the man and his effects but scorch marks on the floor and a burned metallic smell that made my eyes water.
"Huh," Festina said. "The Unity must really save money on gravediggers."
While I was still staring at the absence of remains, Festina opened another of the stasis fields strapped to her suit. She handed the anchor and Bumbler to me, but kept the stun-pistol and comm unit for herself. "See if there’s anything left of the dead guy," she told me. "I’ll call Pistachio. And you…" She pointed at Tut. "Get ready to report what the man said. You can tell Captain Cohen the same time you tell us."
Tut gave her a sheepish look. "I didn’t follow a lot of it."
"You followed more than I did."
Festina hailed the ship. While she told the captain what had happened, I dumped my dead Bumbler on the floor and strapped the new one around my neck. The Bumbler confirmed what my sixth sense had already told me — the dying man was utterly gone, not a cell of him left. Not a hair, not a toenail, not a fleck of dandruff; the man had entirely disintegrated into mist/steam/ preta. Even skin flakes separated from his body had joined in the transformation. As for his clothes and equipment, they were pretty much gone too. A few of his implants had left behind dollops of metal and melted plastic, but nothing bigger than a pebble. Mostly they’d turned to smoke and fumes, now wafting out the storage shed’s door.
The rest of Team Esteem had probably vanished the same way: their bodies turned into hungry ghosts, their implants and clothing burned and dispersed on the breeze. A Bumbler scan of the camp might turn up little nuggets left behind by the implants, but to the naked eye, there’d be nothing to see. Even my sixth sense would detect nothing — the team members’ life force had vanished.
Gone up in smoke. Smoke with shadowy chromosomes.
Which raised a discomfiting worry: whatever had done this to Team Esteem could already be working on Festina, Tut, and me. We’d all been exposed to native atmosphere. If there was some kind of airborne agent… microbes, nanites, or chemicals…
I adjusted the Bumbler and took more readings.
"So that’s what we’ve found so far," Festina said into the comm. "Tut — time to report what the guy told you."
She handed the comm to Tut as he said, "I’ll try." Speaking into the comm, he continued, "But I gotta say, a lot went over my head. These weren’t good conditions for getting the guy’s story."
"We know," Festina said. "Do your best."
"Okay. Sure. Okay." Tut took a deep breath. "The deceased was named Var-Lann. Team Esteem’s chief microbiologist. That’s why he survived longer than his fellow surveyors. Var-Lann’s job was growing bacterial cultures, playing with viruses, stuff like that — so he was at special risk from germs. Before coming to Muta, he volunteered for some new experimental treatment, boosting his immune system a few hundred times."
Tut pointed at the scorch marks left behind when Var-Lann’s implants had vaporized. "One of those gadgets produced special white blood cells. Super germ-killing leukocytes. That’s why the man lived long enough to tell his story."
"What was his story?" Festina asked.
"I’m getting to that," Tut said. "The night before things went haywire, Var-Lann was working in his lab as usual. He happened to be studying live microbe cultures, trying to figure out the relationship between something and something else. I didn’t understand the details; I hope it doesn’t matter. But he was watching these little guys go about their business when suddenly a new set of microbes came barging in and ate everything in the test cultures. Really fast. Like within thirty seconds."
Festina’s eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, barging in?"
"Var-Lann was growing the cultures in what he called Level Two containment — a closed environment supposed to keep out unwanted microbes. He thought he’d taken all the necessary precautions to avoid contaminating his samples, so he was mightily pissed when these new bugs showed up. Var-Lann checked where the new bugs came from and found they were everywhere. In the air, on every piece of equipment, all over his own skin… anyplace he looked, gathering by the trillions. Quadrillions. Quintillions."