"Can you hear me?" he enquired, via the aug channel to Sadist.
For a moment there was no clear reply, just occasional bursts of static, then abruptly Sadist spoke. "I can hear you, just." The AI's voice was clear to Cormac so he guessed it must be using a narrow-beam transmission aimed precisely at his location, while using all sorts of clean-up programs to sort out what Cormac was transmitting. He unstrapped himself and headed for the door, knowing that, though there would be a lot of radiation outside, his envirosuit would protect him from much of it as would his own internal suite of nanites and the anti-mutagenic tweaks to his own immune system. However, he called up the main menu in his aug, then sorted through numerous submenus until he obtained what he required. Once this facility of the aug initiated, a simple dosimeter appeared in his third eye, presently reading in the green. Anyway, even if he received what once would have been considered a lethal dose, the medical facilities aboard Sadist would certainly be able to deal with it—dealing with the effects of radiation was something ECS Medical had become quite expert in during the years of the Prador war.
Stepping outside, he scanned around. Visibility was just over twenty feet and cinders were still dropping from the sky this close to the hypocentre. He wondered what Sadist hoped for him to achieve here, and what he hoped to achieve himself. He knew Golem could move very fast and that maybe, given time, Travis and Crean might have been able to get Gorman and Spencer clear. But they had not been given time. It seemed likely that they had all simply been vaporized.
"It is becoming clearer," said the ship AI. "I am sending direction finding to your aug. Key to envirosuit reactive visor."
He hadn't even thought of that. As an information package arrived from Sadist he searched for the channel to the suit he was wearing, found it and initiated visor projection. Immediately the dosimeter appeared down in the corner of the visor; shortly after that he opened the package from Sadist and ran it too. Now a locator arrow appeared in the lower half of the visor with his present coordinates on some planetary grid, in red numerals, to one side, and coordinates of some other location aligned underneath them in green numerals. The arrow presently pointed to his left, he turned until it was pointing straight ahead, which put the shuttle right in from of him, so he walked round the craft, aligned the arrow again, and headed off. Already the dosimeter had shifted to a pale yellowish green and checking one of its attached functions he realised his time here was limited to an hour and ten minutes.
"So what is it you've found?" he asked.
"A regular energy signature, but beyond that I have no idea."
Cormac again checked the given coordinates against his own and worked out that he had half a mile to travel. Maybe, out there, either Spencer or one of his unit was lying injured. He broke into a jog, then accelerated, going just as fast as he could over the churned ground through this poor visibility. Within a couple of minutes a hundred-yard length of a huge pipe loomed out of the murk to his right, five yards wide and flattened by its impact with the ground, almost like some massive sea creature washed ashore and decaying. Then lay chunks of twisted building superstructure, deposited on the ground like sections cut out of a steel forest. He had to slow here because, as well as the ground being uneven, the ends of I-beams and jagged edges of metal protruded from it. His own set of coordinates gradually drew closer to the others, then eventually the arrow blinked out.
"Within five yards of your present location," Sadist informed him.
Cormac halted and scanned around, disappointed, since there was no immediate evidence of any of his companions here. He spotted a short length of aluminium extrusion, tugged it from the earth, then stabbed it down upright where he had been standing; then walking out in a spiral from this, he closely inspected the ground. Now paying greater attention to what lay about his feet, he noted all sorts of items scattered amidst the earth. There were numerous small fragments of greenish brown matter. He stooped and picked one of these up and crumbled it between his fingers, guessing it to be a piece of dried up algae from one of the silos. There were also numerous hard chunks of something and it was only when he picked one of these up and cleaned the soot off that he realised these were spatters of molten metal that had hardened. But still no sign of what he was looking for.
"What was this signal?" he asked again.
After a brief delay, Sadist replied, "Merely a regular energy signature—possibly from a power supply of some kind."
Then he saw something he at first took to be a red object on the ground which, only as he drew closer, resolved as a patch of red light cast by an LED. He stooped down to inspect it more closely and saw that the small light was inset in some sort of metal object. He dug underneath it with one hand and levered it up, and as the object came free he instantly recognised the breach section of a pulse-rifle. He grabbed it and pulled it free. The barrel was missing as was most of the buttstock; the barrel stock, which was in fact the power supply, was still partially attached. He instantly dropped the weapon and stepped back.
"A pulse-rifle," he said.
About the rifle the ground was smoking, and he realised he had just had a close call, for the power supply was discharging into the ground.
"Nothing else?" asked Sadist.
"Perhaps I should dig?" Cormac wondered.
"No," replied the AI. "There's as much chance of anyone being down below there as anywhere else within a hundred miles. I will however deep scan that area when the ionization has cleared. Move on to the next coordinates."
These coordinates appeared on his visor and he saw that the next location was a mile away. His dosimeter had now edged into a yellow-orange on its way across the spectrum to the red. He was about to set out when there came a crack from the ground, the pulse-rifle jerked, sparks momentarily spreading about it, then these drained away and the LED went out. For a moment he considered it an ominous sign, then felt a tight sadness in his chest, because really the time for omens was past. However, he set out, again running as fast as he could. Abruptly, there came a drumming sound and he felt something pattering against his envirosuit. Halting, he saw great globular drops of black tarlike rain. This struck him as odd, since there was not a great deal of water on this world. Some sort of atmospheric reaction caused by the heat of the blast. No matter, he set out again.
More wreckage, and acres and acres of churned earth. His dosimeter was into the orange when he reached a great mountain of wreckage, which he realised was an entire building, uprooted to its foundations and dumped on its roof. Was the power source in this? He followed the arrow until it disappeared, and found himself still twenty yards from the nearest wall, though amidst a strewn wreckage of chainglass pipes and large chunks of ceramic he recognised as vats he had seen in the building his unit had entered through.
"Within five yards of your present location," Sadist again informed him.
Again he approached this as before, this time picking up a length of chainglass pipe to jab into the ground as the start point of his search, but he did not have far to go. Nearby a sheet of muddy chainglass jutted up from the earth, and just seen through it, something was moving against the underside. He stepped over, thinking for a moment he was seeing one of the insects of this world, then realised it was a black skeletal hand. He paused for a moment, not sure he wanted to see more, then felt a sudden disgust at this reaction and forced himself forwards. As he stepped round the sheet a head turned towards him, severely blackened and burnt, but with shiny metal showing through where some of the crisped synthetic skin had fallen away.