Welcome back to the second week of Superluminary, a wonderful science fiction tale by John C. Wright that we’re pleased to present as a serial each Sunday here on Fandom Pulse.
Episode 02: The World of Death
As the undead guards opened fire, Aeneas reached down and upended the massive mahogany bed.
The thousand-pound, twelve foot long oblong of wood and metal fell on its side with a boom, blocking the view of the undead guards. Bullets and beams sliced and blasted and burned through the bottom of the bed. Aeneas hugged the floor. Fire passed over his head.
Toothpain flickered through the mouth of Aeneas: Second contortion node detected… location is…
It was on Thoon’s person. Aeneas was thunderstruck. Second node? If his signet only now penetrated the vampire field to detect the space contortion pearl Thoon carried, that meant the first pearl detected was not Thoon’s. It must be elsewhere in the chamber. Perhaps it had been hidden in here when his grandfather had first built this wing, years before…
Aeneas knew from the chiming of the nightingale floor where the walking corpses were. He flooded his muscles with a second stored charge of life-energy. In the resulting burst of hysterical strength, he threw the huge bed across the chamber.
One undead guard was crushed like a bug between bed and wall. His broken limbs writhed weakly. His eyes were dead, but continued to glare.
Aeneas had sensory chambers in his skull which could act as seismic echo receptors. The vibrations from the impact showed him where a cavity behind the wall was hidden. There was no time to puzzle out whatever secret switch his grandfather had designed to open the hidden strongbox. Aeneas plunged his hand through the ornate metal of the wall and ripped it aside.
The second guard had dodged the thrown bed. He now fired. His weapon roared and blazed, burning the human skin from the pangolin scales of living metal Aeneas wore beneath.
There! Sitting in the empty strongbox, glowing like a luminous gem of pure night, was the black pearl of an unstable space contortion node. A black node was one-use. It would destroy any material object caught at the edge of its radius of action.
Aeneas lunged for it.
Thoon saw the black and deadly little sphere, and cried out. “Kill him!”
The second undead guard focused his fire against Aeneas’ neck. Aeneas’ armor was thinnest here: his skull exploded. Blood and brain matter splashed into the air, burning.
But his fingers closed on the pearl and his thumbnail broke the surface field, activating it. His hand and then his arm turned red, shrank to wire thinness, and passed into and beneath the pearl’s surface. The unstable surface ballooned outward, filled the chamber.
Spacetime contorted, and Aeneas vanished. The atoms of his body of were translated perfectly into virtual particles with no defined location.
The other atoms, farther from the contortion, were not so fortunate, and were translated imperfectly. Atoms in every molecule for two yards in each direction were dislodged from their chemical bonds, as were electrons from their atoms, releasing heat, radiation, ionic discharges, and high energy particles. The room was like the inside of a kiln and like the inside of a supercollider.
A ball of hellish fire exploded outward through the armored walls of the palace, and the screaming, thin winds and high-altitude snow swirled into the blasted, hollow sphere of baked ash that had been the rich apartments of Aeneas.
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 the 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 six percent 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, the air surrounding him, he had brought with him. 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? If I am losing heat due to this absurdly thin atmosphere driving particles against my armor, 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, he broke a periscope 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 star 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.
Support John C. Wright’s current work, Starquest by picking up the first book in his new series, The Space Pirates of Andromeda.
Space Opera must be Great! Gallant! Gigantic! Grandiose!
This tale told by a Grandmaster vows to return the glory that was lost!
Remember the days gone by, when science fiction was fun?
Now new hope is here!
If you are weary of weak, wan, woke and wasted works, your wait is ended!
Here is an epic, as grand as any tale of old -- here you will hear wonders told!
Of course there is a Space Princess, and Space Pirates galore, and an Evil Galactic Empire.
Of course there is a super-weapon known only as the Great Eye of Darkness!
Here meet Athos Lone, Ace of Star Patrol, in his one-man mission of vengeance!
The Ancient Mariner, like an iron ghost, when slain, seems to rise again!
The mysterious spymaster called Nightshadow walks in dark worlds but serves the light!
An Imperial Deathtrooper must reverse his loyalties, and fight his own clone-brothers!
Fate has set these unlikely heroes against the Four Dark Overlords
An utmost evil the unwary galaxy thinks long dead!
Can Darkness fail and Light prevail?
Read On! For All True Tales are but Part of a Greater!
This is good.
JCW is Intriguing as always.