Welcome back to our Serial Sunday, featuring 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 06: Deathstorm
Aeneas lay on the hatch of the black and spartan presence chamber of Lord Pluto, naked, paralyzed, unable to speak, move or blink.
But he was not beaten yet. He saw the electric flows change in the faceless helmet of Lord Pluto. The one lens in the middle of his crown was turned off. It meant Lord Pluto was preoccupied with the voice-and-image conversation with Lady Venus, and looking at her.
In their current positions, the signal delay between Earth and Pluto was four hours. Conversation under such delay tended to be long monologues, rerecorded until they were perfect. Lord Pluto was distracted.
Aeneas’ voluntary nerves were paralyzed. However, the bioadmantium fibers running to the living metal of his bones and armor were not only not nerves, and not animal cells: they were not even remotely like those of any carbon-based life.
Moreover, his plutonic body constituted a third type of life, one based on hydrogen fluorides. The assemblers in his blood had not yet recycled all of his the plutonian organs. These were likewise unaffected.
And he could turn off the pain center of his brain.
Aeneas clamped shut his layer of metal scales and ignited the outside with plutonian heat-pores designed to combat absolute zero. Aeneas blazed like a bomb, hot enough to ignite the air around him.
Energy weapons struck, but their temperatures were actually less than what he was producing.
The hatch under him turned red, then orange, and then white, and started to sag. Aeneas used the biomagnetics in his bones to rip the hatch collar free. The whole molten mass, with his body riding it, plunged through the deck.
His flesh was gone, his face and features burned down to the skull. However, his radar, microwave, magnetic-imaging and echolocation were not blinded by the hurricane of fire and gunfire.
He saw the fate of the cheerless presence chamber of Lord Pluto. The bread and wine on the bare table, the book on the bare stand, were annihilated in flame. Lord Pluto, stood up slowly from his now red-hot throne. His voluminous cloak was ash-cloud. He wore black armor beneath.
He seemed unhurried, unworried. Lord Pluto blurred, contracted, and darkened strangely. Like a figure in a dream, the dark Lord of Creation vanished from the many senses of Aeneas.
Down Aeneas plummeted like a meteor. It was a nine second fall to the bottom of the shaft.
The tractor-presser could have captured Aeneas instantly had it been allowed: but in the first second of his fall, the circle of molten hatch struck the mechanism and shattered it into red-hot splatters.
In the next, Aeneas quelled his fire-pores, but too late. His plasma-hot metal body, plumed in boiling smoke, would melt any parts of the engine made of normal matter occupying normal timespace if it struck, such as the control interface, focusing units, and force sphere emitters.
The singularity core itself, of course, was invulnerable, but if the housing melted, it would fall to the center of the planet and slowly consume it, sterilizing an ever-shrinking world with x-rays.
In the third second, a cold as savage and intense as the plutonian night outside struck into his soul.
His soul, not just his body: The hungry eyes of the pale figures hanging head downward in their glass coffins were open, and their mouths were wide with screams his burn-punctured ears could not hear. The death-energies lashed him with three hundred whips. The whole thousand foot length of the drive chamber was opaque and roaring with the antiliving force.
It was a death storm.
Energy forms even somewhat lifelike were also affected. The fires surrounding him were snuffed. Frost began to creep along his still-smoking metal scales.
Any normal earthlife would have been instantly destroyed, but Aeneas’ armor scales were ununquadium-based, hence opaque to the particular wavelength of negative life energy washing over him.
But neither was he invulnerable to this attack. The armor was not thought-tight; tiny openings existed at his joints, skull, and sphincter. Worse, as soon as Lord Pluto recognized the error, and ordered an attack on the proper band, Aeneas would die.
In the third second, Aeneas told his signet ring, “One!”
It was a wild gamble. Lord Pluto had lured Aeneas into using the local neuropsionic net by leaving all the thought-ports unlocked. But when he had paralyzed his speech organs, Lord Pluto had forgotten to paralyze the specialized artificial cells in Aeneas’ brain used for mindlinking to his signet ring.
If he had also not yet remembered to shut off the local net, Aeneas could give commands to any working thing in the tower.
During the long moment when Lord Pluto had been cross-examining him, Aeneas had given his signet ring orders. “On one, order the necroforms to attack Lord Pluto.”
Done.
The vast wash of deadly energies ignored Aeneas and flooded upward into and through the red-hot circle of the broken hatch, seeking Lord Pluto.
Fourth second: “Two!”
Order two was to establish a mindlink with any control interfaces touching the warpcore.
Done.
In the fifth second, Aeneas felt the control command lines mesh with his nervous system. As if an amnesiac master pianist, who, after forgetting that he knew how to play, were to sit down at an unfamiliar keyboard, and stare in his hands in disbelief as they performed wickedly fast tremolos, frequent octave jumps and slurs, alternating articulations of staccato and legato, and complicated polyrhythms, Aeneas found he recognized all the command parameters, and knew exactly how it all worked.
He woke the great engine to life.
In the sixth second, the jet-black warpcore lit up with a sudden red glow. The silver armature rings began to revolve in a mad gyroscopic dance, blurring into a shimmering orb of motion. The deck, control boards, and golden energy feeds beneath the throbbing armature were stretched oddly, as if the scene were painted on a plastic sheet that puckered together. The supergravity fields were distorting the escaping light.
In the seventh second, the entire tower vibrated, blurred, and vanished, leaving Aeneas in mid-fall. With his skin layers burned away, Aeneas could not detect the temperature outside his metal body, nor whether vacuum surrounded him or air.
The reddish-gray ices of Pluto’s surface were below. The airless dark sky was above. Charon, like a white eye half closed, loomed huge in the icy skies. A half-moon meant the night was half spent. Wright Mons was erupting in the distance, throwing plumes of molten hydrogen into outer space.
Aeneas was shocked, unable to believe what he was seeing, or not seeing. But echolocation and radar gave him the same picture. The dark tower was gone. And the control interface that had meshed so nicely with his mind was gone. The engine was gone.
But the beam of coherent radiowaves radiating from Earth, four light hours away, was still present, according to the low-frequency antennae cells Aeneas had running from his heel to the top of his spine.
“Sig? Did the Cerberus launch at beyond lightspeed?”
And leave only you behind? Unlikely, sir. Lord Pluto does not know how to work the controls, and you have not yet. Therefore…
Therefore he was still inside the warpcore chamber. Lord Pluto had somehow turned the Cerberus invisible to all of the myriad senses of Aeneas. He was still falling, about to plunge into the warpcore and die most horribly. Or suffer endlessly.
The two seconds it took him to realize this almost cost him his life. Even though he was now blind to the neuropsionic interface linking his brain to the controls, he hoped he was still connected.
Lord Pluto had not yet turned off the control boards, or shut off the death energy feeding the engine. Perhaps he could not; or perhaps he dared not. Or perhaps he was distracted by the deathstorm.
In any case, Aeneas tried like a pianist moving fingers he could not feel on a keyboard he could not see.
A glissando of unseen, potent energies reached out, bent space, established a warp field around Aeneas, oriented itself along the radio beam from Earth, and translated him along one arc of a closed timelike curve whose endpoints occupied simultaneous points in time. To Aeneas, it seemed as if all the stars in the sky above rushed away from him, turned red and then black, while the rippled glaciers and ice volcanoes below, like a scene painted on the inside of a rapidly expanding balloon, also rushed away from him, fading to darkness.
He was alone in some place larger than the universe, but utterly empty.
Then, a dark universe of scattered red stars surrounded him, and shrank inward, and formed the night sky with its familiar constellations. A bright yellow sun hung in the midst of star-begemmed darkness. Directly before him was a blue white-swathed planet, and the sun’s reflection blazed in the mirror of the Indian ocean. A few feet from him was a satellite, its wide parabolic dish no doubt pointed at Pluto. It was peon-tech, not the work of a Lord. Merely an unintelligent thing of metal and diamond.
His body automatically reacted to the vacuum, and his organs switched over to his spaceworthy regime. He had designed this to operate without voluntary command, in case he was ever contorted into outer space unconscious.
He wondered if there were any way he could undo the paralysis?
No, sir. Lord Pluto did not use any known energies or agents that I can detect. It is most likely a manipulation on a stratonic level of reality.
“In other words, a tech indistinguishable from a magic power. Grandfather’s gift to him. How long to simply regrow a second nervous system?”
You still have some totipotent cell mass left over from what you took from the first aid kit, and you can use your bionanomachine assemblers in your bloodstream to break down and recover the cell mass from your Plutonian organs, if you had a source of carbon, iron, hydrogen and oxygen.
“And if I had the material?”
Three hours using emergency growth-acceleration.
Aeneas produced a magnetic field from his bones and slammed himself facefirst into the satellite. The blood cloud leaking from the skullholes which once had been mouth, eyes, and nose was smeared across the satellite. Even motionless, he could send signals to the nanomachines assemblers in his blood. They began the slow process of disassembling the composites from the satellite. Red streams poured back into his skull, carrying the materials.
“Three hours, eh? I arrived here simultaneously with my departure from Pluto: a thing the rules of Einstein say is impossible. Even if Lord Pluto sent a warning message instantly, or used a contortion pearl to come himself, nothing can reach the Earth from Pluto in less than four hours.”
Two hours passed.
Aeneas had restored motion to his arms and hands, and his energy-control organs. His legs were still numb. The nerve growth was not complete.
What do you plan, sir?
“In the long run? Free mankind from my family. Fly to the stars. I wonder why Grandfather never did.”
Difficult. The warpcore is back on Pluto.
Aeneas said wryly, “I am the only one who can use it, and it is the one place I cannot get to it.”
And the short run, sir?
“I have the most dreadful secret imaginable in my head, the Final Science that all my uncles fear and want. The one tech Grandfather never shared, the one thing that made him Emperor…. and…”
And…?
“And that means there is no long run, and damned little short run. When the family finds out, I am dead. Lucky for me, that knowledge is still two hours away, even if Lord Pluto broadcasts it. I am safe until then.”
The moon rose over the limb of the earth, bright, huge, and beautiful. He was admiring the face of the moon when a vast beam of deadly energy from somewhere in the Sea of Tranquility reached across the two hundred thousand miles and struck like a hundredfold thunderbolt.
Support John C. Wright’s current work, Starquest by picking up the first book in his new series, The Space Pirates of Andromeda.
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