![]() There's almost an energy web across the planet. "The whole population within some hundred enclaves?" "Not a chance. "What are the energy concentrations?" "They look to be a combination of transport hubs, service maintenance and manufacturing centers, with some transient housing." "Everyone's there?" Gibreal's words lashed like a laser along the net channels. There may be smaller sets, but nothing else that exceeds two hundred meters." "Two monuments, one set of ruins, and one hundred plus energy concentrations, that's it?" "Within the system parameters so far, ser." The sense of exhaled breath flooded the net, and the nav winced at the gale that whistled through the circuits. "No other ruins? Just the one set?" "There's the Great Wall, but we knew about that, and the non-talking heads. The laffodils wilted under the image of a blazing sun. "Technology? Structures?" "There aren't a lot of visible structures, except for those hundred or so energy concentrations-and that mass of ruins east of the mountains in the middle of old NorAm, that's what the records call it." The nav projected laffodils across the web with her words. They don't stay long, but their technology doesn't approach ours, or that of the old Rebuilt Hegemony." The commander snorted soundlessly, and his disgust colored the net with brown and the unsmelled odor of animal defecations. Anyway," added the commander, "that was thousands of years ago, and the old colonies have sent traders and envoys without harm for generations. No one's ever been able, not even the demis, to master telepathy. Healthy bodies just don't die." "What about telepathic auto suggestion?" asked the envoff. People died in full cleansuits and armor, in extreme trauma, and without any form of radiation, or any other trackable internal or external cause." "Of course, there aren't any real records or tissue samples left." Gibreal's words smoked across the net with the bitterness of aqua regia. Whatever the effect was, it wasn't anything known to their medical science. "The former colonies were pretty clear about that. "Certainly not enough to account for the reputation of the place as the planet of death." "What about viruses, bacteria, that sort of thing?" Gibreal knew the answers, again, before he received them. "There have been what look to be deliberate genetic manipulations, some subtle, some not so subtle," signaled the envoff to the Gibson's commander. Does the DNA match or doesn't it? What about the geography? A planet doesn't change that much in ten thousand years, does it?" asked Commander Gibreal, knowing the answer, but seeking, as do all those of human DNA type, confirmation of the obvious. "I don't like those terms-base, within parameters. ![]() "And there was no hostile reaction to the samplers." "They were scanned," interjected the weapons controller. "The DNA has the same base across all the samples," added the environmental officer. The geography is within parameters," answered the cybnav, but since all the crew members, especially the line marines were cybs, her tag on the net was nav, navigator, subcommander, or, less frequently, her given name. "Are you certain?" "It's Old Earth, all right. If the conversation had been offline and spoken, neither of which was possible within the working systems contained in the adiamante hull of the Gibson, the words would have followed old patterns, patterns based on the spoken words that seldom echoed within the bulkheads and networks of the Vereal ship.
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