Copulation without conscience. Riot without responsibility. It was easy to see the attraction… and just like the Unity to cold-bloodedly design their religious practice as a psychological release valve rather than genuine spirituality.
Still… when I thought about the masks in the huts, I wondered what totem I might have chosen if I’d been a Unity child. What mask would I hide behind when I wanted to lose myself? Unbidden, a mental picture arose: a smooth woman’s face sculpted in copper-brown leather, but with the left cheek gashed open by a knife.
Trying to force the image from my mind, I hurried to join the others.
We went to the mess hall next. It was just as the probe had shown — abandoned partway through breakfast, food on the table undisturbed by insects. I hadn’t seen or heard any insects in the entire camp; the only living creature I’d spotted was that lizard who scuttled away when Tut yelled. I wondered if local fauna could have been "eaten" by the EMP cloud… but that didn’t make sense. If nothing else, the cloud was mobile: it had, for example, enveloped us on the floodplain. But there’d been plenty of insects down on the flats. So even if the cloud was an insectivore, why would it devour all the bugs around camp but leave the floodplain swarms untouched?
Festina stuck her head out of the kitchen. "I found the source of the probe’s IR reading. There’s a gas stove still burning. Anybody want scrambled eggs that have gone all black and crispy?"
Tut immediately said, "I’ll try some."
"Before you do," I said (knowing the only way to keep Tut from consuming burned eggs was to distract him till they vanished from his mind), "have you noticed there are no insects on the food? Don’t you find that odd?"
"Nah," Tut said. "The Unity are great at insect repellants. It’s one of the first things they do on a new planet — figure out what disgusts local insects, then gene-jiggle themselves to pump out the appropriate chemicals. Usually in their sweat. Remember, Mom, Unity folks have no sense of smell. They don’t care if they stink to high heaven. Makes for some pretty exotic reeks in Unity cities, let me tell you."
Though I’d been breathing cookhouse air for at least a minute, I couldn’t help sniffing in search of "exotic reeks." It didn’t smell like much of anything — just a slight burned odor from the kitchen. The eggs had incinerated themselves more than thirty-six hours ago, so the worst of the char stench was gone. Tut also gave a sniff, then shrugged. "Mutan insects don’t have Earthling noses. Maybe this place stinks of something we can’t smell."
"Or maybe," I said, "the camp did stink while the Unity people were here — enough that insects cleared out and built their nests elsewhere. Now that Team Esteem is gone, the smell has faded too… but it’s only been a day and a half, so the insects haven’t found their way back yet."
"Hmph." That was Festina, returning from the kitchen. She went to the dining table and studied it. Tut and I did the same. Just like the recon photos — cutlery set down haphazardly, chairs pushed back… as if everybody had suddenly decided to rush outside and never returned.
But wait. Now that I looked, I saw not every place had been abandoned hurriedly. One chair on the far side of the table was tucked away tidily. The plate was clean except for a few crumbs, and the juice glass was empty. The cutlery had been neatly set aside. "See that?" I said. "One person had finished eating and left the table."
"Looks like it," Tut agreed. "But even in the Unity, there’s always one person who eats faster than anyone else."
"Maybe," said Festina, "that person had reason to eat faster yesterday morning. Pressing work to be done. He or she ate quickly, then left the mess hall. Probably to get started on work."
"Then everyone else ran outside," I said. "Like maybe the person who left first called for help. Or there was some noise that made the rest of the team think the first person was in trouble."
Festina nodded. "It would have to be something like that — something that made everybody’s reflexes kick in automatically. Unity survey teams are smart about survival. If they’d just heard a strange sound, they wouldn’t let everybody investigate; they’d send two or three people to scout, keeping in constant contact by radio. The only time they’d respond to a threat en masse would be if one of their own was in danger right under their noses."
"True," Tut agreed. "Unity folk love following procedures. They’d only give in to impulse if, like, a friend was screaming, ‘Help, help, help!’ "
"So," Festina said, "this person X who left breakfast first must have got in trouble while crossing the compound. Except that we didn’t see any bodies lying out in the dirt."
Tut said, "Maybe X got as far as one of the other buildings. Stepped inside, and bam, something happened."
"We’ve already checked the huts and this mess hall," Festina said. "Three other buildings to go."
As we walked across the compound, Festina reported our latest findings to Captain Cohen. We still had comm access to Pistachio: the EMP cloud hadn’t zapped us since we’d opened our second stasis sphere. That meant we also had a working stun-pistol and Bumbler. Festina carried the stunner holstered at her hip — she wouldn’t let Tut or me touch the weapon — but she made no protest as I took the Bumbler and strapped it around my neck.
I felt better having a Bumbler… not that its sensors revealed anything useful. The three remaining buildings gave off no special readings. In particular, there were no IR hot spots big enough to indicate human life — just a few patches of mild warmth, probably from the afternoon sun shining through windows and raising the temperature of objects that could absorb heat. The Bumbler showed no notable sources of other types of energy: no tachyons, no terahertz, no radio or microwaves. I’d seen more interesting readings from a patch of ragweed.
So it came as no surprise that we found nothing noteworthy in the first building we entered — the survey team’s laboratory. It was a prefab design, with a single corridor down the center: two rooms to the left and two to the right, all four labs of equal size. One was devoted to plants, animals, and soil samples; another was obviously where team members studied microbes (with microscopes, petri dishes, and DNA sequencers); and the last two labs were both dedicated to technological artifacts that must have been retrieved from Drill-Press.
Most of the artifacts were typical products of high tech: nondescript boxes made of plastic and other artificial materials. Las Fuentes apparently liked their gear in earth-tone colors — every box was some shade of brown, from light biscuit to dark umber, sometimes in mottled combinations like desert camouflage — but apart from the color scheme, I drew no other conclusions. I certainly couldn’t guess what the devices might do.
Perhaps the Unity had figured out the machinery’s purpose, but there was no way to tell. A brief search showed the survey team had kept no notes on paper or in any other hard-copy form. That didn’t surprise me — Unity people all had wireless computer links embedded in their brains. Why scribble notes in a journal when they could download their thoughts directly to a computer?
At least Team Esteem stored their data in bubble chips that used long-chain organic molecules to encode information. Such molecules weren’t damaged by EMPs. Therefore, whatever the surveyors had learned about Fuentes technology could eventually be recovered.