"I don’t suppose we Explorers see any of that money."
Festina laid her hand on my arm. "Glad you’re keeping your sense of humor. Let’s go inside."
The shuttle’s interior was still large and luxurious, with seating for twelve and what I assumed was a gourmet galley at the back (though the door to that area was closed). Each of the twelve seats now held a shimmering mirror-sphere the size of a soccer ball. I recognized the spheres as stasis fields: pocket universes like the Sperm-field surrounding the ship, except that the mirror-sphere universes only had three macrodimensions instead of four. Time didn’t exist in a stasis field. The outer universe might age a billion years, but anything in stasis would remain as it was, caught in an instant that never advanced so much as a nanosecond.
Stasis fields couldn’t take much physical damage; a strong sharp blow from the outside would pop them like a soap bubble. But they were immune to EMPs, which simply washed past the surface of the field without affecting the contents. Stasis was perfect for protecting equipment we didn’t want to get zapped during our descent to Muta.
I picked up the mirror-sphere closest to me. If I’d done that with bare hands, I’d be risking serious frostbite — the outside of a stasis field is dangerously cold, though not as cold as the Absolute Zero inside — but with my tightsuit gloves, I was perfectly safe. Ice had begun to condense from the air near the sphere’s reflective surface. If not kept clear, the surface would develop a solid frozen crust… which wasn’t a bad thing, since the hardening frost would provide protection against accidental bumping.
"What’s inside?" I asked Festina. "Sperm-tail anchors?"
She nodded. "An anchor in each. We’ll have twelve chances to establish a Sperm-link… and I don’t think an automated defense system will EMP us that often. EMPs take a lot of energy, especially when fired at range. An automated system isn’t likely to keep pulsing targets it’s already shot. So it EMPs us once, maybe twice; but we’ll have plenty of reserve anchors left. Once we’ve anchored Pistachio’s tail, we don’t have to worry anymore."
Her aura showed she wasn’t as confident as she pretended — she knew there were never any guarantees. But with a supply of twelve anchors, each one protected from EMPs until we needed it, we really did have the odds on our side. "Anything else we should put in the spheres?" I asked. "Maybe a handheld comm or two?"
"Already done," Festina said. "Each stasis sphere has an anchor, a comm, a stunner, and a Bumbler. An extremely tight fit, but just barely possible."
"I didn’t think Pistachio carried twelve Bumblers."
"It didn’t. Last night I ordered the ship-soul to fabricate a bunch. You can never have too many Bumblers."
I agreed. Explorers could go through Bumblers as fast as eating peanuts. In Zoonau, we’d lost two on a mission that lasted only fifteen minutes. Usually, though, we didn’t have the luxury of whipping up a dozen in advance. The navy labeled surplus production as "extravagant waste" rather than "sensible precaution." Apparently an admiral on a Class One mission could disregard standard fleet policies… and I got the impression Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos thumbed her nose at regulations whenever she had the chance.
Festina began familiarizing herself with the shuttle’s controls. I was about to take an idle-curiosity tour of the craft when three ensigns arrived with our parachutes. Naturally, I had to make sure the chutes had been packed properly and were set for manual operation. (By default, parachutes were usually set for automatic deployment at an altitude considered optimal by the Engineering Corps… which was all very well if the chutes’ laser altimeters were functional, but not so good if you expected every wire to be drips of molten copper.)
Tut arrived just as I was finishing with the chutes. We’d decided in advance we should wear our standard colors — Tut yellow and me orange, while Festina said she liked white — but when Tut appeared, he’d programmed his suit’s skin to a lustrous metallic gold with all the markings of King Tutankhamen’s ceremonial casket. Horizontal stripes of black and gold ran along the sides of his helmet and down the front of his chest; bits of lapis lazuli blue were layered down his front in a sort of striped bib that ended at a broad U-shaped collar halfway down his chest. Below that, the gold/black/blue stripes resumed and extended all the way to his boots. He looked like a bumblebee with a few sky-blue inlays.
"So what do you think, Mom?" He turned so I could see the back. More stripes. "Aren’t I like the king’s sarcophagus?"
"You are."
Festina came to the door of the cockpit and gave Tut a long cool look. "I like it," she said. "There’s something refreshingly efficient about an Explorer already wearing a coffin."
We took off without ceremony — nothing but the usual "permission requesteds" and "permission granteds" that always mark a shuttle departure. No one came to watch us leave… not even Ubatu, who I thought might show up to give me some words of Ifa-Vodun wisdom. ("Don’t endanger the spores. We haven’t had a chance yet to kill something in their honor.") Festina noticed the absence of well-wishers too; just before takeoff, she murmured, "Li must have decided he couldn’t bear to see his baby go."
I said, "He and Ubatu are probably up on the bridge getting in the captain’s way."
"Probably," Festina agreed. "If the three of us don’t come back, everybody will want to say they had a front-row seat when Festina Ramos met her doom."
"Fame’s a bitch, isn’t it?" Tut said. "Bugs the crap out of me." We both looked at him, wondering what he thought he was famous for. I could have looked into his aura, but decided I didn’t want to know.
Li might have been a bullying, self-absorbed man, but he had excellent taste in shuttles. He’d chosen a model whose cockpit was almost entirely transparent: a clear plastic bubble bulging from the front of the craft and providing a panoramic view of our surroundings. Overhead was Pistachio, a long white baton surrounded with its milky Sperm-field, set against deep starry black. Beneath us lay the sunlit blue of Muta, streaked with clouds and shining hospitably in the emptiness of space. Festina was in the pilot’s seat, Tut in the copilot’s, me in the pull-out chair behind… and the bubble around us was so close to invisible, I felt we were sitting on some outer-space patio, casually open to vacuum.
"Starting descent now," Festina said into her comm.
"Acknowledging your descent," Cohen answered. "Good luck, Admiral." His voice came through my tightsuit’s radio as well as my comm implant; then it was replaced by a faint regular beep produced by Pistachio’s ship-soul. Festina had asked for the beep as a way of detecting EMPs: if the beep went silent, we’d know we’d been pulsed. Of course, we probably wouldn’t need outside confirmation — when the shuttle’s lights died and its steering yoke went sludgy, we’d have a good clue what had happened — but Festina liked redundant backups.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
As we angled down toward Muta, Pistachio began to turn from horizontal to vertical. Soon it would be straight up and down, nose toward the stars and stern pointing directly at Camp Esteem. The long swishing Sperm-tail would dangle like an unruly fishing line, down through the many layers of atmosphere until it reached the ground below. Once we landed, we’d catch that line with an anchor and secure an EMP-proof escape from Muta’s dangers.
Or so we hoped.
Pistachio was soon out of sight: lost in the distant dark. Our descent path would circle Muta once, easing gently, down, down, down. None of us spoke as the sun (or should I say GoL?) disappeared behind the rounded edge of the planet. The dark half of the world, rolling far beneath us, showed no lights at all. In the age of Las Fuentes, that blackness must have been punctuated by the illumination of cities… but now there was only seamless night.