"And everything will turn green?"

"There’s no guarantee green will win. It depends on the composition of the sun, the atmosphere, the soil, and the usual random wiles of evolution. Maybe the plants will find some superefficient yellow pigment that’s better than green chlorophyll. Or blue. Or brown. But eventually a shakedown will come, establishing more uniformity. Twenty million years should do the trick. Then homogeneity will last until some plant comes up with the idea of sprouting flowers to attract pollinators. Which will bring back colors again."

"Shush," said Festina. "There’s the Unity camp."

While I was talking, the probe sending pictures had moved at high speed across Muta’s terrain. Now the probe was traveling upstream along the Grindstone River. In the distance, we could see the huts and buildings of Camp Esteem.

No sign of movement. Not even insects or animals. I glanced at Festina’s console — no IR readings that might indicate survivors. On the other hand, there were obvious heat sources all over: small ones in almost every hut, and larger ones in the big buildings. Festina zoomed the probe’s camera to scan the building with the largest heat source. A plaque on the front displayed a pictogram knife, fork, and plate: the standard signage for mess halls. No doubt the members of Team Esteem could remember which building was their cookhouse even if it wasn’t labeled… but the Unity was famous for flogging the obvious. They might paint DOG on a pet’s forehead just to be thorough.

"If that’s the mess hall," Tut said, "what do you bet the heat source inside is a stove somebody left on?"

"No bet," Festina replied.

"You could smash the probe through a window and see."

"Not just yet." Festina sent the probe on a looping circle of the whole camp. Still nothing unusual or out of place.

"I don’t see corpses," Li said.

"Maybe they’ve all been eaten," Ubatu suggested. "I mean, by animals and insects."

"The Mayday was issued thirty-six hours ago," Festina said. "Local time, that was early yesterday morning. Pretty fast for scavengers to consume a body, bones and all."

"Unless," Cohen said, "the scavengers on Muta are more efficient than on other planets."

"It’s possible," Festina told him. "Usually, though, native scavengers work quite slowly on human corpses. Earth flesh isn’t their normal food. It can even be poison to alien predators. So on average, human meat doesn’t get eaten very quickly on nonterrestrial worlds. Of course, Muta could be the exception."

A thought struck me. "You said the Mayday came yesterday morning. What time exactly?"

Festina checked a data display: "7:14 local."

"Then maybe we should crash the probe through a mess hall window. At 7:14, everyone on the team would be eating breakfast."

"True," Festina said. "Unity surveyors start breakfast precisely at 7:00 and end at 7:20."

"Goddamned robots," Li muttered.

"They prefer the term ‘cyborg,’ " Ubatu told him.

"I prefer the term ‘morons.’ "

"Now, now," Cohen said — more a reflex than a serious attempt to stop the bickering. Festina, however, was less inclined to put up with such nonsense. Her aura flared with annoyance.

"Enough!" she said. "Everybody shut up while I work. We’ve got four probes, so maybe it’s worth sacrificing one to see inside the cookhouse."

Her life force hinted at words she didn’t say: if the mess hall was filled with dead bodies, we’d be off the hook. For the sake of thoroughness, we’d have to check the other survey camps too; but if one team had been reduced to corpses, the rest would almost certainly be the same.

In that case, our mission was over. The Unity might want to retrieve the fallen and determine the cause of death… but that was their business, not ours. We were strictly here to save survivors. If we couldn’t find anyone alive, we’d file a report and go home.

I knew it wouldn’t be that simple. For Explorers, nothing is ever easy.

"All right," said Festina. "I’ll send in a probe."

She manipulated the controls, not just setting up the first probe to bash its way into the mess hall, but bringing a second probe into position to get footage of the process. The picture on the vidscreen split down the middle: one half from the nose of the missile that would enter the mess, the other half from a more distant viewpoint that showed both the probe and the mess hall building. The probe was lean and black, hovering on antigrav right in front of the building’s largest window. We could see nothing through the glass — the window had a reflective thermo-coat, designed to bounce off incoming light, so the interior would remain cool. Come winter, the coat would be changed to absorb light and collect heat… but at the moment, the windows were still on summer settings.

"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?"