And the waltzing worlds had swung in their crazy, new looping orbits, not giving a damn that the astronomers couldn’t figure out why. By 2042, when their mission launched, Charon was eclipsing the sun regularly each Plutonian day.
Come, now! Evolution is not that swift, no way.
Unless…
Unless the strange orbital shift was what had brought the Darksiders out of wherever they hid—hibernated?—for most of Pluto’s long orbital year.
Shanna shook her head in disbelief. Centuries ago, had Charon’s orbit similarly moved to screen out the sun? Are you getting enough oxygen! her nagging inner voice asked. This is strange, even for you…
She brushed aside her doubts. Follow your nose, girl. Damn the inner critics.
Okay. Did that have anything to do with the odd—but apparently natural—radio emissions that the Space Array had discovered? The whole alarm about the big plasma storms that might be washing into the solar system, if the Voyager data were right?
Put that by for now also. Then… And then Darkside had raided Rendezvous? Old One had said lots about that, clothed in mythic jargon even Wiseguy couldn’t follow. The zand, their battle story told them, had barely survived that legendary Götterdämmerung. Or is my liking for Wagner leading me astray here? Twilight of the gods beside a methane sea? Ooooggg…
And this time, Shanna suddenly realized, if the Darksiders moved to the lightside within the next few Earth hours, they would catch the greater part of the zand helpless, immobilized in the rosy afterglow of Self-merge.
Had that happened before? Probably. Something had built those epic poems Old One recited at blinding, Wiseguy-level speed. The zand feared the Darksiders for good reason. They were both predators, but somehow the Darksiders were even better at it.
Jordin was on the comm, passing numbers and “okays” back and forth with Mary Kay on Proserpina. When he had a free moment, she asked, “You’re sure the little surprise is ready?”
He grinned. “It’s too simple to go wrong. Just oxy and hydrogen feeds from our reserves. I fitted two small nozzles and tucked them into a spare cylinder I had, to make a reaction chamber. Just a li’l trick.”
“Um. Li’l trick.” Jordin could rig up anything on short notice, it seemed. “Hope we don’t need to use it.”
“Hey—look there, near our LZ.” Jordin pointed. When she looked puzzled, he added, “Landing zone.” And she recalled that he had started out as a Marine flyer.
“This thermal armor is pretty confining.” She felt it pinch at knees and elbows. “I know you think we need it—”
“You may be the cap’n, but I’m the safety officer.” A nod of the head. “Ma’am.”
Small lights moved below. Scurrying patterns. “Those look…alive,” Shanna said.
“Maybe that’s the Darksiders.”
On the attack? she wondered. Hey, don’t get ahead of yourself.
She repeated her thoughts to Jordin as they descended gingerly, pausing at each orbital level to assess the landing zone. He said, “You got this place figured out already?”
“Not really. But something tells me we don’t have time to hold seminars on the local biology.”
He grinned. “Not that I’d attend, y’know.”
“I know.”
Shanna’s grandmother had dinned into her “reverence for life”—all life. Suppose the incessant motion below was a battle of some strange kind. Could she make a terrible choice, to save the zand? She gritted her teeth.
A circle of greater darkness yawned below, breaking the thinly moonlit landscape. It moved; she came fully alert. Quickly she called on Proserpina’s computer for data. The temperature differentials DIS could measure in the lower infrared and group into a map.
Presto! Inside a minute they had a sketch showing the walls and floor of a deep pit.
“Quite patently artificial,” she said.
“Looks like it to me, and I’m just a physicist.”
“I thought you were an engineer-pilot.”
“Hey, physicists can do anything.”
“Um. So they think. But not biology…” She told DIS to amp the center of the circle, use every pixel. In seconds it did. The screen before her and Jordin zoomed in.
Down at the bottom moved blocky somethings, jointed at odd angles, limbs stubby, each outlined in a blue glow. They moved, slow and deliberate.
“What’s that blue from?” she asked.
“Spectral lines say—let’s ee—argon.”
More movement. Ghostly forms, sluggish, as though underwater. Patterns. The jerky, angular shapes were forming into neatly aligned ranks and files, like an army on parade—or a war fleet.
“Are those organisms or machines?” she asked.
“OP DIS can’t tell us without a whole further set of assumptions, I’d say.”
“I hate to go down there, not knowing.”
He waved a hand at the starlit wastes below. “Out here do such distinctions even matter?”
“Good point. This pushes the boundaries.” She frowned. In cold so deep as to be beyond all human reckoning, maybe there were no boundaries.
The dim forms were moving into an intricate, ordered array. “Looks like a search pattern,” she said.
Jordin was busy with their hovering pattern, but in 5 percent of a g there was time to maneuver. The nuke thrummed at their backs, and its plume caught starlight in a filmy gauze. “Maybe they’re getting ready for dawn,” he whispered.
Too many possibilities, Shanna thought. “What are they?”
On an inspired hunch Jordin asked DIS to search under “Superconductors.” He added, “And match to the spectral lines below.”
It took only seconds. Good ol’ DIS reported. Yes—there were plenty of compounds down there rich in copper and oxygen, and alloys galore. He grinned and said, “Could be that makes them superconductors, at these temperatures.”
She frowned. “So?”
“So—remember those sparks that zapped us when we were walking, last time? There’s a big potential difference between the top of the atmosphere and the ground.”
“Is that usual? I mean, this place is plenty odd already…” She had never had a really intuitive feel for physics, and it was showing.
“Not so unusual. Earth’s like that, too. When you’re standing on the ground, there’s a couple hundred volts between your feet and your head. When you walk across a carpet and touch a doorknob, you’re just letting electrons from the carpet fibers make their way to the higher elevation. Zap!” He shrugged as though this was obvious.
“So knowing that, you never jump when it happens?”
To his credit he laughed. “Touché! My point here—this is a guess, okay?—is that energy is available to drive anything that can harvest the potential difference—voltage, I mean. We haven’t measured it—I didn’t think to—but from those sparks I’ll bet it’s considerable.”
“But why is it here at all?”
“Umm, good point to you! Pluto turns pretty slow, and that’s the ultimate source of the volts—spinning planets with magnetic fields are like generators whirring away in space. Pluto’s should be weaker than Earth’s…” His voice trailed away in puzzlement.
“Somehow the whole place is getting pumped by the electrodynamic weather, you think?” she encouraged him.
He gazed at the surface, now so sharp in the stretched shadows of sunset that it looked like a drawing in black and white. “One thing the Voyagers told us was that voltages are trickling in from the Oort cloud’s deep freeze somehow. Ummm… There’s that data showing the shock wave in the solar wind. I hadn’t thought that could be related.”
She hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the briefings and endless 3-D color visuals about the region farther out. The solar wind speed had dropped near the Voyagers, decades back, she recalled, and the physicists thought that meant Voyager was about to meet a shock wave. The multicolored graphics made it look something like the shock cone riding just in front of a super
sonic airplane, causing a sonic boom. That was where the solar wind, which had thinned in its expansion all the way from the sun, finally lost out to the pressure of the plasma that hung between the stars. “That’s sure a long way out,” she said.
“Yeah, but that fast probe, Ulysses, found that the shock’s much closer in now than when Voyager found it. They—we—call it a termination shock, and those are great at making fast particles and electric fields.”
Shanna retreated to what she knew: biology. “There are eels that can store charge indefinitely, I think. Swimming batteries. They use it to discourage predators and stun fish.”
He looked at her intently. “So being a battery might be a way to keep energy reserves when it’s night. Then—those zand could just connect up their internal terminals and—zap!—a quick, sure source of efficient energy. I’ll bet it’s the same for Darksiders.”
She sat upright, eyes on the main screen. “Something’s flying down there.”
Small wing-shaped things hovered, then lofted upward together, circling within the pit. Blue lights around the regimented ranks dimmed. “Hard to make them out,” Jordin said. “But they’re organizing, yeah.”
“Close-up in infrared,” she instructed DIS.
A dim view leaped into focus on the screen. Shanna squinted. “They’re…pulling something apart.”
Something bigger than the moving things. Jordin said, “Looks like they’re slicing up a…zand.”
Her stomach clenched, looking down at the black ice. “They attack the zand at night. The zand are bigger, but they’re sleeping, I guess.”
The vague forms had pulled pieces away. Quick, scurrying moves.
“Let’s have a look, okay?”
Jordin nodded and started their last deceleration. Zero hour; no more time for dispassionate study and idle speculation. It felt good.
He hit the controls. The lander danced up and away, maneuvering above the center of the great pit. Their steam blurred the view.
Shanna took a deep breath. The lives below were at risk, and maybe she didn’t fathom what was going on here…but she had to act; it was in her nature. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She had gotten here by following her instincts, the deft feel of intuition. Even if I’ll regret it the rest of my life.
They could see better. “Yep, that’s a dead zand,” Jordin said. The shapes nearby moved into a circular pattern. “They see us. Maybe hear us, too—if they have ears.”
Shanna said tightly, “That li’l trick you rigged up—”
“On it,” Jordin said.
“They’re coming fast—”
“Man, they look—”
“Yeah, dangerous.” He put his hand on a little switch on the far side of the module from her. She hadn’t noticed it before, and he hadn’t mentioned it, either.
So I wouldn’t bump it by accident? But the call is mine…
More shapes swarmed in below. Jordin said very casually, “Y’know, we can’t hover forever.”
“Check. Okay, land in that big broad spot. Looks rocky.”
“Yep, it is.”
He took the lander into a bare plain, several kilometers from the Darksiders. They touched down, and the steam plume seemed to blow off the hard ice nearby without even provoking a liquid shimmer.
Jordin read off the shutdown protocol, and she echoed it. They spent several minutes checking the engine readouts, relayed the digital package up to Proserpina, and Jordin carefully evaluated the lander pads. “No melting under us.”
“Good, let’s—” Their audio rang with pops.
Jordin put their local radar on the big screen. “Yeah, I see it.”
Dots were converging from all around, making local radar give off a chorus of pings.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said quickly.
“Done.” He slapped the overrides, and the nuke flared again. A quick burst took them up a hundred meters.
“I think,” Jordin said mildly, “a professional biologist would label that aggressive behavior.”
“I tend to agree.”
Below, gray boxes moved with startling speed. They had rushed in under the lander’s plume, meeting just below. They now clustered and dispersed in quick, jerky movements.
“Ummm,” Jordin said. “Walking washing machines.”
“More like combinations. Legs that end in wheels. See that one? It’s rolling over the flat rock, then steps over the small boulders. Ingenious.”
“Wheels. Gotta be machines, not zand.”
“Right. And look, they’re extruding pipes out the top.” She pointed where a cluster was poking narrow tubes upward. Their steam dispersed quickly, so the boxy forms seemed to ripple. More came in steadily from the sides. There were at least a hundred within view. As the newcomers arrived, they, too, started extending their tubes.
“Ummm. Don’t like the look of that.”
“Me, either.” She felt a sudden prickle of fear.
“Like they were ganging up to…shoot at us.”
“That switch?”
“Yeah.”
“Draw them in.” She thought, Jordin and I have fashioned an instrument designed for delicate exploration of an alien world… into a bomb. “Then…do it.”
Something flickered in Jordin’s face. “You—really—”
“I know, it’s a big step—”
“Let’s just clear out of here.” His lips set firmly, resolved.
“We’ve got to act,” she said quickly.
He looked at her. “We?”
“Okay, me. I’m captain, I’ll take the responsibility.”
He nodded, lips working, then nodded again. “Right. Your call.” His thumb touched the jury-rigged relay. He made the lander lower a bit. Darksiders came flocking in from the sides, moving even faster. Shanna felt sudden fear. They were so fiercely agile, and in this deep cold. How could anything—
“Should drop some.” Tensely Jordin counted. The minicam showed the rocks below growing larger. An instant before impact, he hit the probe’s cutting torch. The oxy-hydrogen mixture exploded.
A giant yellow fist blasted out of the pit. Vapor boiled up, thick fog condensing at once into glinting crystals. Debris shot far and wide.
A shock wave slammed into the lander. The deck rocked. Something solid screeched right through from wall to wall, in and out again. Its passage rang like a giant’s handclap.
Shanna was in her armor—otherwise explosive decompression would have finished her. In the air around her she saw crystals rattle down in a frigid shower. Air screamed out of the lander.
Jordin fought the lander’s controls. The vehicle swayed and sank like a drunken express elevator. Deceleration jets sputtered, then coughed out. With a shriek of twisting metal the lander thumped down. Too hard. Three legs groaned and buckled under, canting the deck steeply.
Shanna slammed against the wall and felt blood run down one cheek. Her right shoulder hurt, sharp and biting. The silence in the shattered cabin, after so much thunder, seemed eerie. Pluto’s cold gases sighed in. She saw her breath frosting over the faceplate and turned up the armor’s heater. It gave a wan warm breath at her neck. She breathed in shallow gasps, and the air cut her throat. Her legs were already getting numb. Not much more time.
She glanced sideways, stopped. Jordin was sprawled halfway out of his couch, mouth sagging, unconscious. She shouted, but he didn’t move. Dead? She couldn’t tell if he was breathing.
Proserpina rasped in her ear, demanding answers.
The cold… A pouch near her mouth held medication designed for just such a terminal emergency. No pain, the briefers had told her; a bland taste, drowsiness, and then—nothing.
She had told them back Earthside to take it out, but after launch she found that it was still there.
No, damn it. With blunt fingers she punched in the suit command to call Proserpina on the hailing frequency. “We’re down, hull breach, trying to—” Her throat rasped, and her voice shut down. The cold was tightening arou
nd her. Her arms and legs moved sluggishly as she got up, turned to the dead command board, then looked at the few screens still live.
Movement. A square, bulky object, outlined in cold blue light, lurched past the outside view screen.
Noise. Clanking, cutting rasps, thumping.
Sudden terror—real, little-child fright at monsters in the dark-—clutched at Shanna’s heart. The Darksiders were here.
The creeping, aching cold fogged her mind. Some small corner of it still knew nonetheless what it was doing. “Wiseguy! Wiseguy!”
Dazed, she got the translator up and running, a hiss in her ears. Outside-direct interface. “Wiseguy…talk to them,” she hoarsely whispered. “Explain…”
Talk to them how? Even with the simpler zand it had taken hours of eavesdropping…
A section of bulkhead wrenched away. Pale blue light. In through the ragged hole came a many-jointed, metallic limb ending in a…lobster claw. It groped along the control board.
“No—don’t break anything!” she cried wildly. As if having heard, the claw stopped. Extended. It jerked forward. The arm swung, extended across the cabin, and touched her faceplate with a sharp click.
She blinked. Fast-growing frost crystals framed the claw in an ivory glow.
Tired…cold…no…mustn’t—not yet. Poking blindly with her stiffening hands, she pawed at the claw. “Wiseguy…tell them… Warm…” Shanna slumped. Her icy armor stung her flesh through her padded jumpsuit.
Then she was falling through space, into an endless nighted gulf. The ultimate outrage was that a last lucid spark of awareness was able to watch it happening.
Down…down…down.
9.
REBIRTHING
LONG, SLANTING AFTERNOON RAYS stained the cliffs of Rendezvous in soft turquoise and pale gold. The thin air rang to the cracking and clanging of round, dark shells as they opened like great eggs.
Old One hovered over the placid sea just offshore, drifting lazily on the welling heat from below. It came alertly out of its meditations and deftly moved toward a stretch of barren rock shingle. There its particular young friend and mate in Self-merge drew apart like giant, slick amoebas. And there, glistening on the sand between them, feebly stirred seventeen splendid zand.
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