Pandora's Star

by Peter F. Hamilton

  She soared silently and smoothly over the towering cliffs of Aphrodite’s Seat which guarded the eastern approach to Her-culaneum’s summit. Many kilometres below them was the glacier ring that encircled the entire volcano, extending hundreds of metres across the bare rock. Sunlight glinted from the gritty fractured ice, producing a halo-like aura at the upper limit of the atmosphere. Sheltering beneath the glare were the alpine forests, genemodified Earth-pines which had been introduced here as a beacon of life and colour that could be seen for hundreds of kilometres. She smiled down on them, as she would any old friend, grateful for the comfort of familiarity which they brought.

  Ghostly waves of blue and green began to shimmer across the weather radar screen as the hyperglider sank back into the upper atmosphere, showing her the pressure building outside the fuselage. Justine extended the wings again, shaping them into a broad delta. After a while, the cockpit began to tremble as the leading edges bit deeper and deeper into the air. Aerodynamic forces started to take over from the ballistic impetus.

  Justine slowly shook off the dreamy lethargy that had captured her during the flight over the volcano. Practical decisions had to be made; from this altitude she could easily coast along for four or five hundred kilometres, putting her well clear of the volcano. But ahead, that would put her into the Dessault Mountains; while north and south would take her back into the divided wings of the storm. There was also distance to consider: the further she flew now, the longer it would take the caravan to recover her. She altered the hyper-glider’s pitch, putting the nose up so the air would start to brake her speed. Her rate of descent increased, which she balanced against the slope below, maintaining the same height above the ground. Clouds flashed round her, ablaze with bright monochrome light, as she passed through the level of the glacier ring. When the hyperglider fell out of their base she was above the pine forests. She could see grassland stretching out beyond them. Easy enough to land on, but they were still high. It would be cold.

  The grasslands grew more lush and verdant as she flew on. Swirls of wind from the lower slopes began to affect the hyperglider, shaking it with growing strength. Bushes and trees speckled the grasses, building swiftly to a dense tropical rainforest which formed an unbroken skirt around the eastern base of the volcano. Looking down, she could see the small black dots of birds flitting amid the treetops. She was already eight hundred kilometres from where she’d started, and that was in a direct line. The caravan would have to go all the way round Mount Zeus before it even reached Herculaneum. Justine sighed, and pushed the hyperglider down towards the rainforest canopy.

  This close, it wasn’t as dense as she’d thought. There were clear swathes, shallow valleys with fast silver streams that had hardly any trees at all, lines of dangerous crags. Several times she saw animals racing across open spaces. The Commonwealth Council’s biosphere revitalization project had certainly been successful here.

  The radar switched to ground-mapping mode. Justine was searching for a reasonable patch of ground to land on. Although, in extremis, the hyperglider could come down in a patch barely a hundred metres long, she didn’t fancy trying that. Fortunately, the scans revealed a straightish stretch two miles ahead and to the north. She brought the hyperglider’s nose round, lining it up. The clear ground was easily visible amid the trees. It looked like there was a clump of rock a third of the way along. Nothing too serious. When she switched the radar to a higher resolution, it showed a narrow, shallow gully running across one end of the clear ground. She started her pre-landing flare, shrinking the wings in again, enhancing the camber. The edge of the long clearing rushed towards her. Three of her console display screens distorted into a hash of random colour.

  ‘Shit!’

  Her e-butler was slow to respond, reporting several processors dropping out of the on-board array, even her inserts were degraded.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she demanded. Her virtual hands flickered and vanished.

  A gust of wind slewed the hyperglider to starboard. She groaned in dismay as the cockpit tilted. The console screen displays were making no sense.

  ‘Multiple electronic system failure,’ the e-butler said. ‘Com-pensating to restore core function.’ Hands wavered back into her virtual vision. ‘You have control.’

  Justine automatically countered the dangerous roll with a simple wing twist. The little craft responded sluggishly, forcing her to accentuate the manoeuvre. When she glanced up from the console she cursed. She was already over the clear ground, and losing altitude fast. All her display screens had righted themselves. Control surface responses were instantaneous again.

  She initiated the landing sequence. The wings rotated through almost ninety degrees, braking the last of the hyper-glider’s speed. It began to sink as if it were made from lead. Twenty metres from the ground, and with almost no forward motion at all, she altered the wings again. They shot out into huge, thin concave triangles, generating as much lift as possible from her stall speed. The landing strut wheels touched and rebounded. Then she was bouncing over the rough terrain for forty metres before the wheels finally halted. The wings and stabilizer shrank back into their buds.

  Justine let out a huge breath of relief. The cockpit canopy hissed as the seal disengaged, and it hinged upwards. Plyplastic flowed away from her hands, and she let go of the grip bars. She released her helmet catches, and took it off. A somewhat nervous laugh escaped her lips as she shook her sweaty hair out. All the hyperglider’s electronic systems were back on line.

  The craft had come to rest on a slight incline in grass and some purple-leaf plant that were long enough to brush the bottom of the fuselage. A stream burbled away, twenty metres to her left. Hot humid air was already making her perspire. Birds were crying overhead. The surrounding wall of the rainforest was draped in thick ropes of vine that were sprouting a million tiny lavender flowers.

  Justine clambered over the side of the cockpit and dropped to the ground in an easy low-gravity curve. Only then did the enormity of what she’d done hit her. Both legs gave way, and she fell to her knees. Tears blinded her eyes, and she was laughing and crying at the same time, while her shoulders shook uncontrollably.

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ, I did it,’ she sobbed. ‘I did it I did it, I goddamn did it.’ The laughter was turning hysterical. She gripped some of the grass strands and made an attempt to calm herself. It had been a long time since she gave in to raw emotion like this, a sure sign of youthfulness.

  Her breathing steadied, and she wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, smudging away the tears. She climbed to her feet, careful not to make sudden moves. In this gravity her inertia played havoc with all normal motions. A few birds were flapping about overhead, but that was about the only motion. The sun shone down, making her squint. Its heat made the skin on her face tingle. And the humidity!

  She puffed out a breath, and began to struggle her way out of the leathery flightsuit. Her e-butler triggered the hyperglider’s locator. A small section of the fuselage behind the open cockpit irised open, and shiny folds of balloon fabric slithered out. It inflated quickly, and rose up into the bright sapphire sky, trailing a thin carbon wire aerial behind it.

  Justine checked the transmitter was working as she slathered on suncream. She kept her boots on, but the flightsuit was hurriedly discarded in favour of simple white shorts with matching T-shirt. Everyone on the convoy swore there were no dangerous animals around, certainly not on the Grand Triad. And the Barsoomians, with their weird creatures, were thousands of miles away on the other side of the Oak Sea. So she should be all right dressed like this.

  She slipped her multi-function wrist array on, a bronze malmetal bracelet with emeralds set along the rim, a gift from her last husband. He’d laughed about her using its extensive capabilities to survive the department store sales. That deteriorating sense of humour of his had hurried their divorce forward by several years.

  The bracelet contracted softly, connecting its i-spot to her OCtattoo. Her e-b
utler expanded out from her inserts into the larger array, increasing its capacity by an order of magnitude. She ordered it to open the hyperglider’s cargo compartment underneath the cockpit, and checked through her equipment and supplies. It would probably take the recovery vehicles three days or so to reach her; she had decent food for a week, and dehydrated rations for another thirty days, though she really hoped she wouldn’t have to eat any of it.

  Right at the front of the compartment was a box from the tour company, with a chilled bottle of champagne in a thermal jacket, and a box of chocolates. She was tempted, but the first thing she fished out of her personal case were her sunglasses, an expensive steel designer band that fitted snugly round her face, adjusting themselves to her skin. A floppy old bushman hat followed. She’d picked it up in Australia decades ago, the stupid cheap thing had been to more planets than most people, and was now bleached almost white by all those different suns.

  ‘Okay, so what happened to the electronics?’ she asked the e-butler as she took the wrapping off the chocolates. They’d started to melt in the heat.

  ‘The cause of the systems failure is unknown. The on-board array lacks the diagnostic facilities to make a detailed analysis.’

  ‘There must be some indication.’

  ‘It would appear to be an external event. The recorded effect was similar to an em pulse.’

  Justine glanced round in shock, a chocolate strawberry half-eaten. ‘Someone was shooting at me?’

  ‘That is unknown.’

  ‘Could it have been a natural phenomenon?’

  ‘That is unknown.’

  ‘But is it possible?’

  ‘This array does not have any data on possible natural causes.’

  ‘Can you sense any em activity?’

  ‘No.’

  Justine gave the trees surrounding the open space a more careful look. She wasn’t frightened, more like irritated. She simply wasn’t used to not getting a definitive answer from her e-butler. All of human knowledge was available in real-time anywhere within the Commonwealth. But here, cut off from the unisphere, data was a rarer, more precious, commodity. And being shot at was a possibility, albeit remote.

  Firstly, there were the Guardians of Selfhood, who roamed the planet at will. As everyone knew, they were well armed and prone to violence. Then there were other people, locals, who could make a great deal of money out of recovering a dead pilot’s memorycell insert. Families would pay a big finder’s fee to insure their lost loved one’s conscious-continuity when growing a re-life clone. Hypergliding was uniquely dangerous, dozens of pilots were killed each year. Most were recovered by the tour operator, and their memorycells returned home. But any whose flight was flung dramatically off course before crashing risked being lost for a very long time. Locals who came across the crash site were in for a bountiful time once they’d finished the gruesome task of cutting the memorycell free of the corpse. So it certainly wasn’t beyond possibility that there were groups who facilitated a few crashes.

  If the em pulse truly had been an attempt to crash her, they were piss-poor at their job, she thought.

  Right at the back of the cargo compartment was a small ion pistol for her ‘personal safety’ should the landing site prove hostile. Nobody in the caravan had ever really defined hostile for her; the unspoken implication being wild animals. She gave the secure alcove a thoughtful look, then ordered the compartment to close and lock. If it was a criminal gang hunting her, she wouldn’t stand a chance, armed or not.

  ‘Time to find out,’ Justine told the hyperglider. Her voice sounded very loud in the long, tranquil clearing.

  She filled her water bottle from the stream, the semiorganic top sucking up the slightly muddy liquid, immediately filtering and cooling it. Then she set off into the trees, using the wrist array’s inertial guidance function.

  It took her quite a while to backtrack the thousand or so metres where she’d roughly estimated the interference came from. The undergrowth could be vigorous in places, and where it was low, the vines and creepers filled the gaps between tree trunks. Her whole route seemed to be one giant detour. There was certainly no sign of any track, animal or human. Nor could she hear any voices.

  As she approached the general area, she began to feel sheepish. She’d jumped to a lot of conclusions very quickly. Pirates and conspiracies just seemed to fill her adrenaline-pumped mood. Now she was back to mundane reality. Hot, sweaty, having to swat creeper leaves out of her face the whole time, boots sinking in to the damp peaty soil. The one blessing of tramping through this jungle was the lack of insects, at least any of the varieties which feasted on humans; the revitalization team hadn’t introduced any. Though there were plenty of tiny multi-legged beetles roving around her feet, a great many of which looked alien to her. A lot of the plant species were certainly non-terrestrial.

  After about twenty minutes, Justine simply stopped. She was feeling ridiculous now. There was no sign of any human activity. And if there was a band of hunter pirates creeping down to the landing site through the trees, they were crap at tracking her when she was walking straight at them.

  ‘Can you sense anything?’ she asked her e-butler.

  ‘This unit’s sensors are registering some weak electromagnetic activity,’ it replied. ‘It is difficult to locate an origin point. It appears to be operating on a regular cycle.’

  ‘Some kind of radio signal?’

  ‘No. It is a multiband emission, there is no identifiable modulation.’

  ‘A powerburst, then?’

  ‘That is a source which would fit the sensor data.’

  ‘What kind of equipment would generate that?’

  ‘That is unknown.’

  ‘Okay, which direction is it coming from? Give me a graphic.’

  The e-butler expanded a simple map into her virtual vision. Justine started walking, pushing the vines apart.

  ‘The emission just repeated,’ her e-butler said after she’d gone about fifty yards. ‘It was much stronger. The sensors are registering a degree of residual activity. There is no pattern to it.’

  ‘Am I still going in the right direction?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about the pulse duration? Does that correspond to the one which hit the hyperglider?’

  ‘It is very close.’

  The trees seemed to be spaced slightly further apart. Although that could have been her imagination. The undergrowth and vines certainly didn’t slacken off. She’d got long scratches on her legs.

  The overlaid map faded from her sight. ‘What’s happening?’

  There was no reply from her e-butler. She halted and looked at her bracelet. The little power light behind one of the emeralds was winking red.

  ‘Reboot complete,’ her e-butler announced abruptly.

  ‘Did the pulse hit you?’

  ‘No data from the event was retained. Another pulse is the most obvious explanation.’

  ‘Can you safeguard against another one?’

  Silence answered her.

  ‘Damn it,’ she muttered. But she was intrigued now. Something was close by, and it wasn’t pirates.

  She almost missed it. The vines had completely swamped the low walls, making the small building look like nothing more than another impenetrable cluster of greenery. But the door had sagged inwards, leaving a dark cleft amid the leaves.

  Justine pushed up her sunglasses to study the structure for a moment. It certainly wasn’t a house, it was too small for that; just a simple square shelter five metres to a side, with a sloping roof no more than three metres high at the apex. When she pulled the thick cords of creeper from the wall around the door, she found the surface beneath was made of some dull grey composite. Simple panels bolted onto a metal frame, put together in a few hours. It could have been made anywhere in the Commonwealth, even Far Away had the resources to produce this. By the look of the material, and the vegetation clinging to it, the shelter had been here for decades.

  There
was no lock, so she put her shoulder to the warped door and shoved. It flew open after a few pushes. Light streamed in through the opening; there were no windows. The floor was a single sheet of enzyme-bonded concrete, wet and crumbling. In the middle was a black cylinder just over a metre in diameter and eighty centimetres high. When she went over to it she saw it was actually embedded in the concrete, so she had no idea of its true length. It seemed to be made from a dark metal. Two sets of thin red cable emerged from the top, and ran across the floor to disappear into a translucent disk, half a metre wide. Examining that, she found the disk was also set into the concrete. It glowed with a faint vermilion light which originated deep inside, seemingly well below the concrete floor.

  Justine narrowed her eyes at the disk as memories began to stir. She wasn’t even sure why she’d kept such old times in her head when she rejuvenated. But she’d seen something like this before; a lot of buildings on Earth used them as a power back-up, places like hospitals and police and transport control centres. A solid state heat exchange cable sunk kilometres down into the crust, where the geothermal energy could be tapped. They didn’t generate a huge amount of electricity, just enough to keep essential systems functioning in case of emergency.

  So what the hell is one doing in the middle of a jungle, halfway up the biggest volcano on Far Away?

  She stared at the cables, which were presumably superconductors. The cylinder they were feeding power into must be the source of the em pulses. And the whole arrangement had obviously been here for a long time, at least a couple of decades, and probably a lot longer than that. Certainly nobody had visited for ages, and concrete didn’t crumble overnight. So what could possibly use or absorb that much electricity year after year?