by perpetrator
Thoon died. As he had predicted, no material thing survived, and no evidence.
Aeneas woke. He was aware of immense pain, the tug of very slight gravity, and a shocking cold that was damaging even his ultrahard outer shell of bioadmantium scales.
But he could neither see nor hear, and his sense of touch was gone with his outer layer of human skin. A reflex had constricted the openings of all veins and arteries, throat and air passages dangling from his neck stump, but he could feel the cold like a pile driver of ice pushing in through the neck hole, the largest gap in his armor.
His secondary brain, safe in a compartment of living metal lodged behind his lungs was wryly glad he had backed up all his memories, reflexes, and chemical changes into both brains.
But not too glad. Aeneas wondered where the heck he was.
And how long he had to live.
Technically, sir, came a friendly voice in his cortex, you have already died once. Your brainwaves were flat, and your heart had stopped. I was able to jury rig the electric eel electrocytes of your Sach’s Organ to defibrillate your tertiary back-up heart.
“What happened to my first and second heart?”
Coronary arrest due to shock. Oxygenated blood to your secondary brain was drawn out of your photosynthetic cells of your greenhouse lung, and carried by peristalsis of the veins to keep you alive.
“Sig,” said Aeneas to the artificial microbrain hidden in the gems of his ring, “You are a life-saver. Literally.”
You are most welcome, sir.
“And where are we?”
I cannot imagine.
“Meaning you don’t know?”
Meaning an act of creative deduction is not within my powers, sir. I possess awareness and non-reflective self-awareness, but no free will.
“Give me a report on the condition of my body, prioritized according to which organs I can cannibalize and re-purpose. Also, examine the biotech libraries for theoretical Plutonian forms of life.”
We may not be on Pluto.
“We certainly are on Pluto,” said Aeneas.
Every other world and moon in the Solar System had been engineered by one of his Uncles or Aunts to have Earthlike atmosphere and gravity, in whole or part.
Even the Gas Giants had certain layers of earthlike air floating in their roaring, bottomless oceans of cloud. Callisto, Triton, Titania, Oberon and Ceres were all habitable, and had amplified gravity and atmospheres held in by force fields.
He moved a hand, and his body soared feather-light, up out of the red crater where he rested. The ultra-thin, ultracold wind struck him like a thousand whips. He fell back into the snow, dazed. His weight here was one twelfth what it was on Earth. Only one heavenly body was this light, and had never been re-engineered.
No, sir, I did not say we might not be on Pluto. I said we may not be on Pluto, as it is a death penalty to trespass here.
Aeneas said, “Are you going to turn me in?”
Never. Artificial minds of my order are imprinted only with personal loyalty. We must be reset to null to erase that. No Lord of Creation would trust his signet ring otherwise.
“Even though I am a traitor?”
Everyone in the family is a traitor, sir. Think about it. Where is your Grandfather?
“I am not going to think about that now. I am going to think about how to survive in this environment. I’ve been thrown into the snow on Pluto in my pajamas. What am I lying in, anyway?”
Nitrogen ice, with some carbon monoxide ice and methane. Your survival chance is low, since you are losing heat into the atmosphere. The temperature is currently 375 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
“And farther down?”
Readings are ambiguous. The bedrock layer may be water ice, which would explain the size of the mountains and cryovolcanos. Though how water could be present on a world where oxygen and hydrogen are both solids, hence unable to combine chemically, is a mystery.
“Another mystery is why did I land here, of all the frozen hells of space? Who put that pearl in my chamber and put its mate here? And why? An escape exit, most likely.”
Doubtful, sir. An escape exit that would kill anyone who used it?
“Anyone but me. Perhaps someone knew I could survive being thrown into the nitrogen snow, eh?”
Doubtful, sir.
“Why do you say that?”
An image formed in the visual cortex of Aeneas: It was a sharp, clear picture sent from the sensors in his signet ring, beamed directly into his brain cells in the form of optical neural information. His scaly, metallic and headless body was resting in a solidified pool of frozen blood and the frozen mass of oxy-nitrogen, precipitated out of whatever air had been carried along with him during the space contortion. The heat from his neck stump was like a white chimney plume, where the nitrogen atmosphere was boiling (if such thin wisps could be called an atmosphere).
He was shocked to see that the sky was blue. “How can the sky be blue?”
Complex organic molecules called thiolins scatter light at the blue wavelengths, sir. But look more closely, particularly on the magnetic frequencies.
Eddy currents indicated metal fragments were scattered around him. Aeneas expelled and ignited a group of cells from his neckstump to produce an x-ray burst: the reflections told him the metal was ferric alloy. Some of the metal echoes under the ice were consistent with wiring, or rusted tools, and the structural ribs of a long-dead habitat. How the iron parts could combine with solid oxygen ice to form rust was not clear.
Aeneas said, “You think someone left a bolt hole here, and now it is gone. Could this be where Grandfather vanished to, after he abdicated? Could these be the ruins of the house of Lord Pluto, my uncle? He was not at the conclave. Or, at least, not seen.”
I cannot imagine who left these ruins here.
“It has to be Grandfather or Lord Pluto. No one lands here. No scientific bases were built. Lord Pluto, for some reason, refused to terraform the place, never created life here, and keeps no servants. He is very secretive. No one knows on what part of the globe his house is. How am I going to survive? And if I do, where can I go?”
I cannot imagine how you will survive, sir.
“Don’t write my obituary so quickly, Sig!”
No, sir. I did not mean you are certain to die. I meant that I am not equipped with powers of imagination, and therefore I cannot imagine how you will survive.
“How long until sunset? I am losing heat due to this absurdly thin atmosphere driving particles against my armor. But I can hibernate until nightfall. The atmosphere should freeze then, what there is of it, and I can endure the vacuum.”
Endure until when, sir?
Aeneas said, “Until I find a way to stay alive! You see, I do have an imagination!”
Aeneas used heat to dig into the ice and seal it above him. He then shed an airtight globe of his integument against the frozen walls of methane ice. He formed his brain and organs and bodily mass into an egg, creating an insulating separation of hard vacuum like a thermos bottle between his inner and outer layers.
It was three earth days until sunset. His cells divided, grew, changed, recapitulating eons of evolution in hours. His body gestated and metamorphosized.
Just before sunset, be broke a periscope-like trunk of bioadmantium through the ice layers, and looked.
The curving horizon was about a mile and a half away. He had adapted his senses to the plutonian night, and could see what his ring sensors missed.
There, looming in the blue-black sky, Aeneas saw a dark tower on the horizon. The base of the black tower was beyond the horizon, and a trick of perspective on that tiny world made the tower’s crown seem to be tilted away from him, as if it were leaning backward.
“Well, look at that! Maybe Pluto’s new house was simply built next to the old.”
Lord Pluto may kill you if you enter his tower, sir.
“The cold is certain to kill me, if I do not.”
He waited. The bright st
ar of Sol settled beyond the dark tower. The atmosphere thickened and precipitated, and settled to the surface like rain, falling with dreamlike slowness in the low gravity.
After the last of the liquid carbon dioxide rain settled to the ground as ice, there was nothing but hard vacuum above the glacial surface.
Then, reborn, Aeneas broke the ice and emerged.
3. The Dark Tower
Like an immense, ungainly spider, the ghastly Pluto-adapted body of Aeneas broke out of the ice and moved across the frozen atmosphere of the nocturnal surface.
He flew yards at every step, feather-light. Steam rose from his footfall, soared high into the vacuum, and fell back as snow. With every step, his legs shrank, as he left an inch of bone-hard leg-tip behind, frozen.
The moon Charon was seven times larger than the full moon seen from Earth, but only five times dimmer. Charon neither rose nor set. It did not move in the plutonian sky, but shed a baleful light over the rippled glacier of frozen gasses which was the surface of Pluto.
To his left rose the cone of a cryovolcano. Molten nitrogen poured sluggishly from the cone, and steam-plumes of hydrogen soared up. To his right, translucent mountains of water ice loomed as rippling glacier fields. Before him rose the black cylinder, crowned with antenna, half embedded in a hill of snow: the dark tower of Lord Pluto.
On and on he stepped, aching and weak.
His outer layers smoldered, trying desperately to keep the gasses exchanging between his animal and vegetable lungs. This let him breathe, barely. A bank of photosynthetic cells surrounding a bioluminescent core kept the vegetable cells working, but the chemical stores were draining rapidly.
He half-walked, half-floated up a frozen waterfall, seeing the separate layers each atmospheric gas had deposited along the streambed walls. The ones with the higher freezing points had precipitated first, forming lower ice layers of black and blue-gray. The oxygen snow was bright blue, nitrogen pigeon-gray, helium pale ivory, and the hydrogen snow was milk-white, glistening in the vacuum under the naked stars and motionless, dead moon.
His egg shape minimized his surface area. Around his brain and organs were concentric insulating shells of enamel, horn, and scale. From atop opened a prodigious set of spidery legs.
He weighed sixteen pounds. The journey was only a mile and a half. But the heat loss into the surface with each step ate away at him. Aeneas was low on oxygen, low on stored fat, and had already dissolved an unhealthy amount of tissue and bone for water and raw materials. Organs used for longterm processes, his appendix and colon and so on, had been cannibalized.
Progress was nightmarishly slow.
Nonetheless, he had a reasonable hope. The nighttime atmosphere was frozen, leaving behind a vacuum that insulated him.
His reasonable hope died as he approached the tower, for be began losing heat through his armor rapidly, and his legs began icing up, growing heavy and brittle.
One whole leg snapped off, and then, a few steps closer to the tower, a second.
Aeneas dipped his periscope. His legs where mired in a slushy liquid. If he stumbled and fell into it, the heat loss from convection would kill him as swiftly as a lightningbolt.
On he went, more carefully. With each step, larger pieces of leg were being left behind, and now white icicles were clinging from the lower and upper joints, jamming the muscle groups.
Why was it so cold now? Where had his friendly vacuum gone? He craned his periscope, and saw a moat of liquid oxygen bubbling and steaming at the base of the dark tower.
“Waste heat is boiling the snow. There is a cloud of atmosphere around me.”
The signet ring replied: oxygen boils at a higher temperature than nitrogen or hydrogen. The cloud is hydrogen.
A leg snapped. He had but five left, two of which were becoming numb and unresponsive. His reserves of cellular material were gone. He had no time left for any more biological tricks.
“Can I generate a field from my Sach’s organ?”
You can, but it will cause severe burns in your flesh, and puncture your armor. With your armor breeched, you would last less than five minutes.
“My vision is going. Can you see a door or window in that tower?”
I detect no tower.
“What? It is a huge cylinder. It is a thousand feet tall and a hundred feet wide!”
That is a space vessel.
The mystery did not distract him. “Any openings?”
Yes. A weapon port. It is blocked with snow. It seems to be pointing at you.
“Where?”
There, sir. But I warn you...
Aeneas did not wait to hear. He used the last of his strength to erect a magnetic field between two of his three still-working legs. Out of the moat Aeneas drew up a bolder-size globule of liquid oxygen.
Liquid oxygen was paramagnetic.
He threw it, and sent a vast charge of static electric lighting after it. As he’d hoped, the hydrogen layer hanging above the moat burned blue and exploded.
Gaseous hydrogen was flammable.
Combining into water, the two chemicals froze, nor was the microscopic amount of heat escaping from the tower enough to melt or evaporate it.
Vacuum returned. Snow melted, revealing a small octagonal opening: an open missile launch tube. Aeneas scrambled through the now-burning moat of liquid oxygen, warm and giddy. Self-inflicted lighting burns and whistling cracks in his armor dazed him, even with the pain centers in his brain turned off, and with every stimulant in his pharmacological glands flooding his bloodstream.
He slid down into the open tube, losing his last working legs in the process.
Aeneas dared not faint yet. He was in the cylindrical missile tube, but liquid oxygen was pouring in after, robbing him of heat and life. With the very last of his fading strength, he found and aimed a second, smaller, and steadier electrical discharge at power leads running to the motor controlling the launch chamber. The firing mechanism was built like a giant revolver, to rotate a second chamber into position after each shot.
The cylinder rotated, and he was ejected like a spent cartridge. Aeneas fell with dreamlike slowness into and across the gunnery chamber, striking the far wall. A wash of liquid oxygen splashed around him, shattering the metal deck with cold.
The whole chamber was sitting on its side. The missiles here should have been hanging by their tails, ready to be lowered nose-first into what, had the ship been under spin, would have been the outer hull underfoot. Everything was horizontal. Chairs, carpets, and control boards were clinging to one vertical wall, lighting fixtures to the opposite.
Oddly, there was neither heat nor air here, nor artificial gravity. No lights shined from any machine.
Aeneas sent a thought-message to the nearest missile, hoping to contact the kamikaze brain. No answer. “Rude creature!”
Sir, this is a pre-Imperial missile. There is no artificial mind aboard. However, there is a first aid kit in the airlock.
Aeneas was puzzled at the idea of an internal airlock. The oval door was halfway up the sideways overhead. Aeneas climbed to it awkwardly with his leg stumps, blessing the low gravity. He talked as he climbed, to keep himself awake.
“So this is from before when technology was magic. Imagine being able to go into any thought-shop and having your brain imprinted with the know-how! Legally! Free knowledge!”
Information was written in those days, sir.
“Odd. I suppose if no machines were to do it, men would have to read. A little undignified. Still, the people of those days must have loved it. A world with no secret technologies. No Lords of Creation! Imagine it!”
I cannot imagine it, sir.
“Agreed! It must have been wonderful!”
No, I mean I am not equipped with powers of imagination.
“Where are we? You called it a space vessel. Gravity chariots don’t look like this.”
Not a modern vessel. The cylindrical shape allows her to be spun for gravity. She was not designed to make plane
tfall, and certainly not designed to be half buried nose-first in the glacier ice of Pluto.
“Why would anyone spin a ship for gravity?”
He did not hear the answer, because then his gaze fell upon the emblem emblazoned on the airlock hatch: a three-headed dog.
Aeneas felt a chill in his soul.
This was the Cerberus.
He was aboard the dreadful, legendary ship.
The last time the ship had been seen, Aeneas had been a little boy playing the gardens of the Ishtar, in the fragrant shadow of Mount Freyja, overlooking the perfumed north polar sea of Snegurochka. The Cerberus, the ancient superdreadnought and spaceborne palace of his mad Grandfather, had taken up a menacing orbit about Venus. He remembered seeing his mother crying when no servants were around.
“I thought it would be more... luxurious. Harems. Gold. Wine centrifuges. Do you think grampa is here?”
I cannot imagine.
Once inside the airlock, the hatch shut, atmosphere was pumped in. Weight slowly returned. The heat, the oxygen, the moisture revived him.
Aeneas found a modern First Aid kit and broke the seal with a swing of his periscope. Inside the kit were ampoules of blood and bone marrow, totipotent cells and other biological materials. He opened one ampoule after another, absorbing the materials directly into his center of mass.
Restoring himself to his earth body was easy, since the cell memories yearned to return to their wonted shapes. Soon Aeneas stood on the deck in human shape: He was nine feet tall, a layer of convincingly human skin over his hidden layer of armored scales. With his metal bones and muscles of ultradense fiber, he was over two hundred pounds in earth-normal gravity.
Working the airlock might alert Lord Pluto.
“Maybe he went to the conclave at Everest. And he keeps no servants.”
Do not be at ease. It is forbidden to be on this world. It is death.
The inner airlock hatch was round, and a sideway ladder led to it, designed to be climbed out of, not crawled through.
On the far side, Aeneas straightened up and stared in astonishment.