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.