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"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."

But she didn’t sound happy with the explanation. I didn’t like it either — I didn’t trust pat answers.

Li had said nothing through all this. His life force suggested he was trying to invent ways to turn this business to his advantage. "So what’s the decision on this?" he asked. "Go for a landing? Send more probes?"

"Don’t have more probes," Tut said. "Pistachio only stores four. We could manufacture new ones, but that’d take hours." He shook his head. "Can’t waste that kind of time on a Class One rescue mission."

Festina gave him a look. "A few hours building new probes is nothing compared to the time we might waste searching blindly on the ground." She sighed. "But if we sent more probes, they’d probably just get EMP’d again without telling anything new."

"So you’re landing?" Cohen asked.

Festina took a deep breath, then nodded. "I don’t see any alternative. If the problem is just some automated EMP system left over from the Fuentes, there’ll be survivors down there to be rescued. I doubt if it’s that simple…" She glanced in my direction — maybe thinking about the Balrog and why it wanted to hitchhike inside me to Muta. "…but we have no excuse to give up the rescue, and no way to see what’s going on without sending someone in the flesh."

"Once you’re down there," Ubatu said, "how do you get back up? Won’t your equipment get EMP’d too?"

"Presumably," Festina replied. "But we’ll go down by Sperm-tail, and that can’t be disrupted by EMPs. The Sperm-field is its own little universe, impervious to outside forces. Once it’s in place, a nuke couldn’t budge it."

Before Tut and I said anything, Festina gave us a warning look. What she’d told Ubatu was technically true — a Sperm-field like the one around Pistachio was indeed a pocket universe immune to electromagnetic pulses and most other natural energies. But Festina had skipped past an important step with the phrase "once it’s in place."

Here’s what she didn’t say. The Sperm-field around Pistachio had a long flapping tail — a very long tail, stretching as much as ten thousand kilometers. Pistachio could plant that tail in the middle of Camp Esteem, like the bottom of a long thin tornado. We Explorers could ride down inside the tail, sliding safely through the funnel cloud all the way to the ground. Just one problem: we needed to plant the tail where we wanted to go. We had to anchor the lower end at our desired destination… and the only way to do that was with a small electronic "anchor" that grabbed the tail like a magnet and locked the Sperm-field in place. Once the tail latched onto the anchor, the anchor became part of the pocket universe and therefore safe from EMPs… but until that time, the anchor device could easily have its innards turned to slag by a single modest-sized pulse.

How could we send down an anchor when we’d lost our four probe missiles? Each of the probes had carried an anchor that could be deposited where we wanted to land; but with the probes knocked out, and their anchors probably ruined, what did Festina think she was going to do?

The look on her face said she had a plan. I tried to read her life force, but couldn’t get anything definite. Either I didn’t have enough experience interpreting auras, or Festina was better at hiding her thoughts than people like Ubatu.

"Captain," Festina said, shutting down the Explorer console, "it’s time the landing party got suited up. Please prepare to drop the tail."

"And the anchor?" Cohen knew perfectly well there could be no landing till the tail was locked in place.

"I’ll notify you when it’s ready." Festina stood up. "Come on, Explorers. Let’s get this done."