"Personally," Festina said, "I’d be damned reluctant to have equipment planted in my body if the blasted stuff could explode."
"Think of the alternative," Tut said. "If the equipment didn’t explode, we nasty Technocracy villains could dissect everything and figure out how to hack the systems. The Unity really doesn’t want that. If we found a way to disrupt their brain-links… or the doodads that augment adrenaline flow… or any of the other implants they depend on… we could blackmail the crap out of the whole population."
"Still," Festina muttered, "I wouldn’t-"
She was interrupted by a flash of flame as the man’s uniform caught fire. It had been lying under the still-burning implants; probably the clothes had been treated with flame retardants, but the heat from the implants had reached some critical temperature the fabric couldn’t withstand. In a few seconds, the uniform was nothing but flyaway cinders… and the implants were nearly the same. Nothing was left of the man and his effects but scorch marks on the floor and a burned metallic smell that made my eyes water.
"Huh," Festina said. "The Unity must really save money on gravediggers."
While I was still staring at the absence of remains, Festina opened another of the stasis fields strapped to her suit. She handed the anchor and Bumbler to me, but kept the stun-pistol and comm unit for herself. "See if there’s anything left of the dead guy," she told me. "I’ll call Pistachio. And you…" She pointed at Tut. "Get ready to report what the man said. You can tell Captain Cohen the same time you tell us."
Tut gave her a sheepish look. "I didn’t follow a lot of it."
"You followed more than I did."
Festina hailed the ship. While she told the captain what had happened, I dumped my dead Bumbler on the floor and strapped the new one around my neck. The Bumbler confirmed what my sixth sense had already told me — the dying man was utterly gone, not a cell of him left. Not a hair, not a toenail, not a fleck of dandruff; the man had entirely disintegrated into mist/steam/ preta. Even skin flakes separated from his body had joined in the transformation. As for his clothes and equipment, they were pretty much gone too. A few of his implants had left behind dollops of metal and melted plastic, but nothing bigger than a pebble. Mostly they’d turned to smoke and fumes, now wafting out the storage shed’s door.
The rest of Team Esteem had probably vanished the same way: their bodies turned into hungry ghosts, their implants and clothing burned and dispersed on the breeze. A Bumbler scan of the camp might turn up little nuggets left behind by the implants, but to the naked eye, there’d be nothing to see. Even my sixth sense would detect nothing — the team members’ life force had vanished.
Gone up in smoke. Smoke with shadowy chromosomes.
Which raised a discomfiting worry: whatever had done this to Team Esteem could already be working on Festina, Tut, and me. We’d all been exposed to native atmosphere. If there was some kind of airborne agent… microbes, nanites, or chemicals…
I adjusted the Bumbler and took more readings.
"So that’s what we’ve found so far," Festina said into the comm. "Tut — time to report what the guy told you."
She handed the comm to Tut as he said, "I’ll try." Speaking into the comm, he continued, "But I gotta say, a lot went over my head. These weren’t good conditions for getting the guy’s story."
"We know," Festina said. "Do your best."
"Okay. Sure. Okay." Tut took a deep breath. "The deceased was named Var-Lann. Team Esteem’s chief microbiologist. That’s why he survived longer than his fellow surveyors. Var-Lann’s job was growing bacterial cultures, playing with viruses, stuff like that — so he was at special risk from germs. Before coming to Muta, he volunteered for some new experimental treatment, boosting his immune system a few hundred times."
Tut pointed at the scorch marks left behind when Var-Lann’s implants had vaporized. "One of those gadgets produced special white blood cells. Super germ-killing leukocytes. That’s why the man lived long enough to tell his story."
"What was his story?" Festina asked.
"I’m getting to that," Tut said. "The night before things went haywire, Var-Lann was working in his lab as usual. He happened to be studying live microbe cultures, trying to figure out the relationship between something and something else. I didn’t understand the details; I hope it doesn’t matter. But he was watching these little guys go about their business when suddenly a new set of microbes came barging in and ate everything in the test cultures. Really fast. Like within thirty seconds."
Festina’s eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, barging in?"
"Var-Lann was growing the cultures in what he called Level Two containment — a closed environment supposed to keep out unwanted microbes. He thought he’d taken all the necessary precautions to avoid contaminating his samples, so he was mightily pissed when these new bugs showed up. Var-Lann checked where the new bugs came from and found they were everywhere. In the air, on every piece of equipment, all over his own skin… anyplace he looked, gathering by the trillions. Quadrillions. Quintillions."
Tut paused… maybe trying to think of what came after quintillions. Then he just shook his head. "Var-Lann had never seen this new microorganism before. Nothing even close. It certainly didn’t match native Mutan life. This bug was one hundred percent alien."
Festina winced. "Why am I not surprised?"
"On this planet?" Tut said. "Of course, it’s no surprise. The Fuentes and Greenstriders had colonies here. They tracked in microbes from their homeworlds — maybe from other worlds too. By now, Muta’s biosphere has lots of bugs that aren’t native. It wouldn’t even be surprising if a bug became superaggressive. Organisms outside their native environment can develop all kinds of fluky behavior."
"Really?"
Tut gave Festina a look. "I specialized in micro, Auntie. Bugs released on other planets usually just die because they can’t find the right food or living conditions. Once in a while, though, they multiply like a son of a bitch — either because they have no natural enemies or because they’re just stronger and meaner than anything on the new world. Sometimes you get a die-off and a bloom. The bugs dwindle down near the point of extinction and limp along for years… then suddenly, pow! Some tiny mutation lets them adapt to their new world, and they grow like gangbusters." Tut shrugged. "Var-Lann knew all this. That’s why he didn’t issue a red alert the second he noticed the weird microbial buildup: what he was seeing might just be natural behavior.
"But," Tut continued, "Var-Lann realized these new germs might also be Muta’s Big Bad Nasty Horror — the thing that wiped out the Greenstriders. He decided to be supercautious: he equipped himself with a hot-button gadget that would let him send a trans-galactic Mayday within a heartbeat."
I looked down to where the man had been lying. No sign of any Mayday device. It must have self-destructed with everything else. Still, it didn’t surprise me that Team Esteem had a few hair-trigger Maydays among their supplies… nor was I surprised that Var-Lann had only donned one when he thought he might be facing special danger. Years ago, our own fleet tried giving every Explorer an Instant Mayday signal. The experiment failed from too many false alarms. It was just too easy to hit the button by accident… but if you made the signal more difficult to trigger, the person in trouble was often killed or incapacitated before the button got pushed. Eventually the navy decided that hair-trigger Maydays were only appropriate to carry for short periods of time, and then only when an obvious, imminent danger threatened not just you but others as well. That way, even if you died a split second after pressing the button, your warning might save your companions.