"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.