CHAPTER THREE
Solana’s first impression of the habitat ring was grim. Every surface was covered with dust, frost, and black mold. Everywhere she looked, she could spot human bones or mummified bodies.
And yet, even without her enhanced vision Solana could see that under the dried black blotches and the gray shroud, the town had once been quite pretty. Most of the houses were low, with lots of windows and sliding wall panels opening onto wide galleries. Away from the commercial district the buildings were grouped in little hutongs around what had once been elaborate gardens. Years of uncontrolled tumbling had tossed the elegant ponds and streams into a layer of shattered dirty ice covering multicolored tile pavement and dead plants, but one could still see the decorative bridges and little pavilions standing empty.
“I found a perfect place for us to camp,” said Utsuro, lifting one of the big supply bags. “There’s a medical clinic a few hundred meters to spinward. It has its own emergency power, and I think we can start up air and water recycling so that you three can be more comfortable.”
“Are there more bodies there?” asked Solana.
“Not many. I left them in place for the moment.”
The four of them walked silently for a few seconds. Atmin’s travel sphere took to the air using its lift fans. The three on foot went slowly to avoid stepping on bones.
Finally Pera spoke up. “Nobody else is saying it, so I will: this hab wasn’t destroyed by accident. Somebody murdered Safdaghar. Killed all the inhabitants, messed up the main mind.”
“And?” said Solana.
“What do you mean?”
“I agree with you. Somebody attacked Safdaghar and killed everyone inside. Sixteen standard years ago. What are we supposed to do about it now?”
“We can at least record the scenes of bloodshed and decay,” said Atmin. “Bear witness to the crime done here, and document as best we can. Perhaps we may inspire some with power to pursue whoever bears the stain, that justice—though delayed—may yet be done.”
“We won’t get paid for that,” she said.
“More to life than gigajoules,” said Pera.
“I’m saving up to get my brain redone,” said Solana. “That’s not cheap. It takes a high-level mind and a whole bunch of nanoscale surgery. Do you know how much four hour’s work by a Level Three intelligence costs? How much is justice going to make us?”
“There’s no reason for us to quarrel,” said Utsuro. “Looking for valuable salvage will require a lot of searching—and so will looking for clues to what happened here. We can do both at the same time. Here’s the clinic.”
The medical clinic was a sturdy-looking two-story cylinder, colored bright safety green. Unlike the rest of Safdaghar’s structures the clinic had a sealed shell like a spaceship hull, with transparent window bands and pressure membranes at the entrance. At some point the membranes had failed and emergency doors closed, so that the crew had to use an old-fashioned manual backup airlock next to the main entrance.
When the inner door opened Solana almost gasped with astonishment. The clinic’s interior was all self-cleaning matter, so even now where the light from Pera’s and Atmin’s lamps fell they illuminated pure white surfaces, free of dust or mold. The furniture was blocks of smart matter in various sizes, ready to take on any shape desired.
The only light inside the clinic came from glowing lines where walls met ceilings and floors, outlining the entire interior like a diagram. Doors had outlines in different colors: green for rooms open to all, yellow and orange for partly restricted, red for hazards.
The center of the building was a two-story atrium which also served as a waiting area. A dead flowering vine still clung to a trellis shaped like a double helix which reached all the way to the ceiling. Utsuro climbed the spiral stairs to the second floor while Atmin poked into the rooms around the atrium.
“I don’t get it,” said Solana. “There’s no damage. The furniture isn’t even out of place.”
“Spacecraft standards,” said Pera. “Everything’s got grip surfaces. The chairs won’t move unless you tell them to let go. I bet those offices have some shattered bric-a-brac—no human’s ever been able to resist putting decorative junk in a workspace.”
“The printers are intact!” Atmin called out. “A bounty for us all. One for tissues, one for tools, and one that builds up molecules. Each costs a million gigajoules when new. Yanai may wish to keep one for herself.”
“The air seems safe,” said Solana, looking at her tester. “Open up?”
“Beware the chill,” said Atmin. “This air can freeze the moisture on your eyes.”
“I’m hot enough. Verify first,” said Pera, and looked at her tester. “Mine says okay. Looks like a consensus.” She pulled back her hood and inhaled. “Yow. That is cold. Smells nasty. Something went bad in here a long time ago.” She sealed up again and climbed up the spiral stairs to the second story.
Utsuro was already at the top. “There are six fatalities. All up here.”
Solana hesitated, then walked upstairs slowly, making herself take each step despite a strong urge to go somewhere else and let the others deal with corpses.
Upstairs the gallery around the atrium opened into twelve little rooms. Utsuro and Pera stood outside the treatment chambers, as if nerving themselves to go in. Solana looked past Utsuro’s metal body and saw why.
The treatment tanks were occupied. Patients had been put in them for stabilizing. Dozens of slender branching limbs entered each body, immobilizing the patients, providing support, injecting drugs and nano, seeking out foreign objects, and knitting together torn tissue. Power, control, and matter came through conduits from the wall.
Except that someone or something had ripped the conduits apart. The power and data links hung useless, and ancient stains showed where matter-enriched liquid had sprayed. The patients had lain trapped, restrained, and impaled until they died, then rotted into soup before freezing. One had tried to get loose, even managing to get the lid open so that he had mummified instead of rotting. The dried flesh was shredded where he had pulled the treatment limbs out of himself before dying.
Atmin’s travel sphere hovered over Solana. “I think that these machines should best be left alone. Their value to us scavengers is not the equal of the price the patients paid.”
Utsuro picked up the dangling end of the armored conduit. “Who did this?”
“Somebody strong,” said Pera. “A mech. A borg. Maybe a bio in a power suit. Not an accident, that’s for sure. You said there were more?”
“In the surgeries,” said Utsuro.
Those two rooms were worse. One held two bodies, the other three, all mummified by time and cold. The years of rough precession had left all the equipment neatly stuck in place, but the bodies had been tumbled back and forth until each was just a shapeless bag of leathery skin.
“Stabbed, I think,” said Utsuro. “At least, the injuries don’t look like those of the dead people outside.”
“Patient on the table, medics working. One hole each. Whoever did this knew exactly how to kill someone and wasn’t wasting time,” said Pera.
“Where’s the power supply?” asked Solana. “I’ll see if I can get us more than emergency minimum.”
“Downstairs, I think,” said Utsuro. “What shall we do with these bodies?”
“Long dead, they cannot do us harm—yet I confess I would enjoy my sleep far more without so many corpses in the house. Can you two move them out? I saw a garden in the back, a fitting place for them to rest,” said Atmin.
“You get the tanks, I’ll get these,” said Pera, sticking her laser to one of her massive thighs. She knelt and picked up one mummy. “Not heavy.”
“I do not envy your lighter work,” said Utsuro.
Solana found the service room at the back of the clinic downstairs, right by the door to the garden. As she worked she heard the tramp of Utsuro and Pera going back and forth, taking out the dead.
The emergency power unit was a standard radiothermal unit, as ancient and reliable as an iron axe. No moving parts at all. It was good for another half century of steady output. But the power-switching system wasn’t working. Not hard to see why: the unit had been ripped away. Solana got out her tool kit and dismantled the room’s manual light control, scavenging the important bits to cobble together a switch for the emergency power.
Utsuro had just deposited the second treatment tank and its horrifying occupant in the garden when Solana connected her improvised switch to the building power and turned it on. Lights came on, fans began to hum, and a dozen pieces of equipment began sounding emergency alerts.
Solana closed up the utility room and went through the building shutting down or resetting everything making noise.
“A lovely piece of work, Solana dear,” said Atmin. “With light and heat this place looks good as new. We only need select a place to camp.”
“Upstairs is safer,” said Pera.
Solana thought about the bodies now lying in the garden. Which would be worse? Trying to sleep a couple of doors away from where they had died, or downstairs—with the awful choice of facing the door to outside or turning her back to it?
“We can use the isolation and recovery rooms upstairs,” she said. “Nobody died there.”
“I don’t need a bed,” said Utsuro. “I can sit out in the gallery on guard while you three sleep.”
“You don’t sleep?” asked Pera.
“I do, but with this body I don’t need quiet or a comfortable place to lie down. I just mute my senses. The body wakes me if it detects anything.”
“Atmin and I can share a room to give you more space,” said Solana to Pera.
“I’ll be fine. I once spent a ninety-day transit from Venus to the Main Swarm sharing a room that size with three other dinos and all our combat gear.”
“I hope this talk of sleep does not imply that any wish to go to bed,” said Atmin. “The wealth of Safdaghar awaits!”
“Split up,” said Pera. “Two go out on patrol, two set up camp. Atmin, you and me.” She trotted toward the airlock. Atmin clucked and got back into his travel sphere before following.
While they were gone Solana checked over the life-support system and tried opening her suit hood. The air was cold enough to stiffen the hairs in her nose when she inhaled. The old filters were doing their best but the odor of rotting flesh was still very strong. She decided that she could get used to the smell more easily than she could spend a week in a full suit.
Utsuro moved methodically about the medical center, as if inspecting it. He had extended some kind of sensor from his left arm, and was passing it over various surfaces—walls, seats, handrails, and doors.
“Find anything?”
“Not much. They must have been good doctors. Everything is very clean.”
Solana didn’t say anything for a moment. “It’s a big hab. Molecules are small.”
“Ah, but we biologicals are constantly shedding. If I was ever here, there’s a trail of my DNA everyplace I went.”
“And if you don’t find anything?”
Utsuro scanned a chair with excessive thoroughness before answering. “Physics doesn’t lie. I was here. Whatever happened here happened to me, too. Finding the truth is worth more to me than loot.”
“It’s not worth more to me,” she said, not realizing how angry she was until she heard her own voice. “What I want is to see other humans face-to-face, instead of just a bunch of colored circles. My share of this mission will be enough to get my brain fixed—but not if you’re just going to waste your time on some little side project.”
“If my work is unsatisfactory, you are welcome to tell Yanai. She is the one who hired me.”
Neither of them said anything else until Atmin and Pera returned half an hour later.
“Our time is short, the hab is large. Efficiency must be our guiding star,” said Atmin. “Despite what Pera says I think we must split up. Divide the hab and each one search alone. My plan is this: Solana takes the side north of the central road, proceeding east, or spinward if you like. Utsuro goes the same way but will search the south. To westward Pera goes, and I. She takes the northern half and I shall cover what remains. Though separate in space we stay in touch by comms, so none of us is far from help.”
“I still don’t like it,” said Pera. “In war or salvage or anything else, you work in pairs.”
“We simply do not have the time. This hab contains ten thousand homes, plus shops and space for work. Yanai gave us a week to search—that means we each must check four hundred spots each day. A mighty task, but one we barely can achieve if all of us use all our wits. To go in pairs would leave the search half done.”
“Better safe than greedy.”
“That’s very easy for you to say,” said Utsuro. “You signed on to get passage to the Jovian system, and that is already accomplished. You have the luxury of time. We do not.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll do the job. And if anybody gets hurt because we’re taking risks, you’ll have to listen to me say I told you so.”
Yanai’s voice spoke from their comms. “Enough bickering. Eat some food, get some rest, and start up again in four hours.”
Solana woke promptly at zero hundred and ran through her exercises. She had not been in anything more than microgravity since boarding Yanai, and the muscles in her calves and back were not happy to be back in full gee.
She always exercised in private. The regimen of stretches, light aerobics, and isometrics she had been taught as a child was familiar and felt good, but like every other remnant of her early life in Kumu hab it was a bit overtly sensual to watch. Even a bird or a dino would notice.
After her half-hour workout she used cleaning goo and had a couple of peanut dumplings, then dressed in her suit and coveralls for the day’s work.
The others were all ready by one. Pera wore her armored suit and combat engineer’s laser. Atmin very reluctantly squeezed back into his travel sphere. Utsuro printed a flimsy set of coveralls to keep dust and mold from getting into his joints.
Yanai had printed up a couple of simple hauler bots—a flat bed a meter square, a single arm, and four rugged wheels. They waited patiently outside while Atmin explained the search plan. “We each must check a rectangle, five hundred meters long and half as wide, one corner here. What pattern used is up to you. Just look for things, and flag the spots where those of value rest. These two stout bots will take away the loot. Twelve hours of work, rest as you must. When that is done we eat and sleep, and do it all again.”
The section assigned to Solana that first morning was laid out in a grid, eight blocks by four. The streets were lined with trees, though a decade of precession wobbling had shaken away all the leaves and smaller branches. Aside from that the streets were dull and utilitarian, faced by unadorned walls, often windowless. The blocks faced in from the street, with houses and some small businesses grouped around courtyards laid out as gardens linked by footpaths at the corners.
It was only after about fifteen minutes of exploring that Solana finally figured it out: the neighborhood was two grids, superimposed on each other. The road grid, oriented parallel to the hab axis and the circumference of the spin section, was for bots—transport, maintenance and repair units, and emergency response. The footpath network, skewed forty-five degrees from the roads, was for people, and passed through the heart of every block.
She walked around the first court, trying to judge which houses were worth entering. Most of the buildings were in good shape. The vast majority of Safdaghar’s structures were made of simple, almost indestructible materials like graphene, diamond, and aerogel. Those had survived years of slow, relentless shaking with little damage. A few had lost doors or sliding shutters, and the wide gallery on one house had come unfastened from the building and slid into the frozen ruin of the garden.
No time to waste, she reminded herself, and directed her steps to the nearest door. It was locked, but there was a single half-centimeter hole disrupting the smooth red lacquer just at Solana’s eye level. She took out her tool kit and got the lock open in less than a minute, then slid the door open.
A woman had been leaning against the door with her back to it, and something had shot her in the head, right through the sturdy silicon-carbon panel. Her body, now just bones and freeze-dried skin, tumbled out at Solana’s feet. There was no face for Solana’s goggles to filter out, just some bone and teeth sticking out of a mass of black mold.
Solana jumped back, heart pounding. After a minute of controlled breathing she scanned the interior. A table and a wooden chest had slid around the room battering themselves to bits, but there were built-in storage cabinets along the walls packed with cloth. Whoever had lived here apparently made clothing by hand, favoring light fabrics in bright colors.
Valuable? Solana found some finished pieces on the floor and shook the wood chips out. Nice-looking, probably comfortable…but nothing particularly unique. She stepped over the body and went to the next house.
Atmin checked in with her after an hour. “What progress have you made in seeking costly things to take?”
“Not much,” she admitted. “I’m only on my third court.”
“You cannot enter every house. I do not even try. Seek those which once were home to humans skilled in craft, or who accumulated rare things from afar.”
“It’s hard to tell that from outside. And I don’t like seeing the people. I tagged one place—they had some seashells. Real ones, I think. Any sign of your poet yet?”
“The houses here hold neither brush nor ink.”
After that she tried to be more efficient. She ignored the bodies, tried not to think of who these people had been and what their lives had been like. Just force open a door or find a transparent window, give the interior a quick scan, and move on.
She passed through one court which was much more badly damaged than the others. The houses had been built of real wood, which the years had reduced to piles of expensive splinters. As she passed into the next court she glanced down the service roadway and saw something written on a wall.
The surprising thing was that it was obviously painted by hand. In an age of self-cleaning surfaces and eyes everywhere, graffiti was almost a lost art. A few habs permitted or even encouraged it, but in most of the Billion Worlds a slogan scrawled on a wall wouldn’t last more than an hour.
Solana approached it, making her suit lamps brighter and cranking up the magnification of her goggles. Despite years of cold, damp, and the ever-present black mold, the strokes of crimson paint looked perfect.
no hate as red and hot as love
hungry cubs born in blood
She stared for a moment, then shook her head hard. No time for memories now. Time to work. The routine soothed her, and she didn’t even mind the bodies so much. Look, scan, tag, walk, look…
When Atmin checked in again she could report six more courts checked. “Twenty-one to go.”
“Eight hours remain for checking them, so do not slow your pace. What new loot have you found?”
“One house had a set of platinum coins from the Lunar Republic. Seventh Millennium; I couldn’t tell if they were real or printed. Also one place had some really nice paintings so I tagged them, too. I don’t know if they’re worth anything.”
“My greatest hope, and greatest fear, is that we find the work of some great talent yet unknown.”
“Why fear?”
“To know a genius died shot down in some old senseless strife, with many works unborn within her head, should sadden anyone that beauty loves.”
At ten o’clock Solana limped back to the clinic. She was tired, thirsty, hungry, and her feet were swollen and bruised. She was thoroughly sick of seeing abandoned houses and freeze-dried bodies.
The others didn’t look any better. Utsuro said nothing at all. Atmin announced he was taking a nap for the next hour and urged everyone to do the same.
Only Pera seemed unfazed by her day poking through the remains of Safdaghar. “Any pets in your sector?”
“I saw a bird in one house, on the floor. I’m pretty sure it was sub-baseline,” said Solana. “I think it died of thirst.”
“Found some feral cats in my area. They’d been chewing on the dead humans. Froze to death, finally. All five of them were curled up together.”
“Did you see any sign of Atmin’s poet?”
“Nothing handwritten. If he actually was here, my guess is that he stored all his text in the hab’s memory, like normal people do. Which means it’s all long gone. We should be up near the hub moving machinery.”
“Don’t worry. There will be plenty of that before we leave.”
“Utsuro?” Pera called over to the cyborg, who was sitting on the floor near the entrance. “Find your DNA?”
When Utsuro didn’t answer Pera glanced at Solana and lashed her tail. “Guess not.”
“I found a…a baby,” said Utsuro, very quietly. “A human baby. I couldn’t see any sign of injury. It was next to a woman, shot through the spine. I think it died of hunger.”
Pera broke the silence a minute later. “We could move back up to the hub…”
“No,” said Utsuro more firmly. “I want to find out what happened. If I am the only survivor I owe it to the others.”
When Atmin woke, the three full biologicals had dinner, and then began the task of evaluating the day’s finds. This meant Atmin surveyed the pile of loot the bots had put in the little vehicle parking area next to the clinic. At the bird’s direction the others separated the items into things worth keeping and those which weren’t worth the effort of hauling back to the hub.
Solana’s suit did its best for her feet, injecting painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and making the inside of her boots as soft and snug as possible. But she still winced with each step. Pera didn’t admit any discomfort, but Solana could see that she sat down as often as possible, and walked with her jaw clenched. Utsuro was as silent and tireless as a bot, picking up the heaviest loads without effort or complaint.
By the time they finished for the day Solana was dead on her feet. If she didn’t concentrate on staying awake she found herself drifting into dreams as she walked. Even Atmin sounded tired when they returned to the clinic.
“How much is all this worth?” Pera asked, gesturing at the little pile outside.
“My guess is sixty thousand gigajoules, or maybe more,” said Atmin. “Which makes your wage a thousand gigs an hour. Does that satisfy?”
“Sixty thousand?” Pera still sounded skeptical.
“That picture is an ancient print—an image made by metal pressing ink against a virgin sheet of paper made of cellulose from plants. From Earth; the date is Sixth Millennium, and I think that is real. Ten thousand gigs, if so. That set of bowls are modern work, but shaped by hand of Martian clay and fired. The set of six should fetch at least six thousand gigs. The table is of wood, a kind I have not seen before, with rainbow pigments in the grain. The table’s worth may be ten thousand gigs, its genome half again that sum. Must I go on? I know my trade.”
“No, I believe you. Never realized people would pay so much for stuff just because it’s old or hard to get.”
“Our errant children of the Inner Ring may be content to know that matter can be rearranged at will, and higher-level minds say that a copy printed up today is just as real as its original, five thousand years ago or more. But living things like you and I all wish for continuity, and love to hold the things which others held in vanished times. The wish for authenticity may be irrational, but that irrationality can make us rich. So do not sneer.”
“If everybody was rational, soldiers would be out of work, too. I’m not complaining.”
“Then let us do as soldiers should, and take our rest when now we can.”
In the perpetual darkness inside Safdaghar, morning looked like every other time. Solana woke when Yanai called the team. “It’s zero hundred again. Time to get up and get to work. We have twenty-six days before undocking.”
Pera and Solana both groaned aloud as they got up, feeling every sore joint and muscle. Atmin had the opposite problem: he spent the days inside his travel sphere and got very cramped and fidgety. Utsuro, of course, woke instantly and got smoothly to his feet with no sign of fatigue.
They ate with good appetite. “We may need to get Yanai to send down more food in a few days,” said Solana around a mouthful of surimi.
“We’re definitely burning more fuel than expected,” Pera agreed. “How about you, Utsuro? Need any groceries?”
“As long as I have energy I can recycle my nutrients. My power supply will last another standard year at normal output.”
“I’ve thought about getting machined up,” said Pera. “A lot of mercs go full borg, but that’s dangerous.”
“Why is it dangerous to have a more durable body?” asked Utsuro.
“You’re strong and tough, but you’ll never be as fast as a mech. Electrons move a million times faster than nerve impulses. I’ve seen too many idiots forget that.”
“I shall try to keep it in mind,” said Utsuro.
The four of them split up at the door. “Another day, another set of blocks,” said Atmin. “As time goes on the distance we must walk will grow, so we must learn to do our work with greater speed.”
Solana and Utsuro walked together along the main avenue which ran down the center of the town level. The center of the avenue was a strip of grass and shrubs, with a double set of tram tracks. All the plants were frozen and black with mold. They passed a tram car. The hab’s years of wobbling had rocked it off the track and slid the car on its side into a bodypainting salon.
“There’s nobody in it,” said Solana as they passed the wreck. “I checked.”
“I scanned it yesterday, too,” said Utsuro. “I thought a public conveyance might be a good place to find DNA traces.”
“Any luck?”
“No.”
Half a kilometer down the avenue they parted company and began searching. This section had more of a mix of uses: about a quarter of the buildings had workshops or kitchens on the ground floor and living quarters upstairs. The workshops were fascinating, and Solana wound up tagging things in more than half of them.
For most of recorded history machines made things better than biologicals could. A bot’s movements were more precise, they could withstand any conditions, and could labor without ceasing. Printers and utility fog just made that work more effortless.
But humans, most biologicals, and even a surprising number of mechs liked to own things made by another baseline being. Part of it was status display, of course: anyone could print something out for little more than the cost of materials, but owning an original handmade item showed both wealth and taste.
There was also the irrational but very strong desire for authenticity. A printed copy of a Washikyosho bracelet was identical to the original down to the atomic level—but buyers bid billions of gigajoule credits for the ones made by a young prodigy goldsmith living inside Luna, who drank vodka as he worked and spent months adjusting the alloy mix for each piece. The copies were just worth their matter plus a license fee.
All this meant that a hab like Safdaghar, with no matter or energy to export, could earn precious foreign exchange wealth by selling goods made by human hands, either the originals or scans for printing. The result was the seeming paradox of finding potter’s wheels and handlooms in a hab with matter printers.
Solana had been working her way back and forth across her search area when the alert tone screeched in her ears. “Halt-halt-halt!” said Atmin, in a ragged croak unlike his usual voice.
Two seconds later he spoke again, sounding a bit more normal—but obviously still rattled. “Something struck my travel sphere a mighty blow. It knocked me half a block away. A trap or foe, I cannot say. All hold while I investigate.”
“Location?” demanded Pera.
“It struck me where the streets which bear the labels 12 and L upon our reference map do cross. But please do not approach me yet, until I find out what it was.”
Solana looked around her nervously, wishing for a weapon even if she didn’t know how to use one. Ignoring Atmin’s command to hold in place, she retreated into the workshop she had just left, and took shelter behind a sturdy kiln made of silicon blocks. If there was some enemy lurking about she didn’t want to be immobile out in the open.
About a minute later Atmin spoke again, sounding much calmer. “A trap, it was: a wire strung across the road did trip a blade on springy mount which struck my sphere a glancing blow. A crude affair, it did no harm to me. I hope the three of you were not alarmed.”
“Improvised?” asked Pera.
“I judge it so. The bladed head appears to be a cerametal cooking knife. The springy arm which stored the striking force is simple carbon fiber rod. I think that even I could build this thing.”
“Get back from it and wait for me.”
“There is no need for you to come. My sphere can rise above this trap. Why it was set and why this place, I cannot say. Utsuro and Solana, have you seen the like in those parts you do search?”
“I have seen nothing,” said Utsuro.
“No traps, at least,” said Solana.
“Then we must not allow this harmless trap to frighten us. Proceed.”
Solana looked around the pottery workshop and found a suitable tool—a two-meter metal pole covered in heat-resistant carbon, with one flat end like a spatula. The craftsman whose mummy lay in the corner of the room amid a jumble of broken porcelain had used it to move things around inside the kiln.
She left the shop carrying the pole in front of her angled forward and up, to snag any tripwires. Of the four of them she was the most vulnerable. Utsuro’s chassis was metal and graphene, Atmin’s travel sphere was diamond composite, and Pera had combat armor that could stop bullets up to four kilojoules. Solana’s suit could handle less than a tenth as much energy—the kind of jolts and bumps produced by humans moving mass around or swinging tools. It might protect her from whatever had hit Atmin, or it might not. She preferred not to find out.
Carrying the pole slowed her down, and Solana was exhausted by the time they finished the day’s search. The others must have been going more cautiously as well, as it took them all an extra hour to return to the medical center.
Atmin was already there when Solana and Utsuro arrived. The bird was out of his travel sphere and was putting a hull patch on it with help from one of the bots.
“I thought you said the trap didn’t damage your sphere,” said Solana.
“I did, and it did not, but still I think it wise to place a patch upon the impact spot in case of microscopic cracks invisible to me.”
“Let me check.” She peered closely at the diamond bubble with her goggles at high magnification, rotating the polarization to check for stress. Through the patch she could see a jagged scratch five centimeters long where ultra-hard cerametal had chipped at the diamond even as its cutting edge had shattered. The damage didn’t penetrate all the way through the three-millimeter shell, but it had definitely made a gouge.
“Are you all right?” she asked Atmin. “That must have hit pretty hard.”
“My sphere has safety webs which held me in a soft but firm embrace. I have no broken bone or bruise. Fear not.”
Pera showed up last. “I checked your trap,” she said. “Improvised, but pretty nasty. If you’d been walking or riding a vehicle, instead of flying around, it could have cracked your sphere open. Maybe your head, too.”
“Then fortunate it was that I was not. The subject is unpleasant, let us speak of something else. What treasures have we found today?”
Their haul was pretty good—some original ceramics and textiles, a thousand-year-old formal vest from the Trojan Empire cluster with hand-embroidered designs in gold thread, a pair of ruby earrings that projected holographic images when the light caught them at the right angle, and a data stick holding ready-to-print scans of a hundred superb original meals.
“If we can’t sell that one, I’d like to keep it,” said Solana about the data stick.
“Getting a taste for the high life?” asked Pera.
“I plan to.”
Pera turned to Utsuro. “Find anything today?”
“I’m not quite sure. There was one partial match, very degraded and noisy, but better than random chance. I found it on the central avenue, by that fountain shaped like a wing.”
“Have you…” Solana began. Her throat was suddenly dry. “Have you checked the bodies?”
“I scan each one. If I could find a relative or a clone it would be wonderful,” said Utsuro. After a moment he added, “I close their eyes, too. It seems appropriate.”
“Everyone gets broken down for elements in the end,” said Pera. “Eyes open or closed, it won’t matter.”