Charon: A Dragon at the Gate Read online

  “We have to brief you this way simply because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Oh, don’t worry about it—it’s permanent. But we prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock. Besides, we haven’t the time to allow you to ‘set in’ completely, as it were. So this will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel that you have an exceptionally difficult assignment.”

  I felt the excitement rising within me. The challenge, the challenge …

  “Your objective world is Charon, nearest to the sun of the Diamond colonies,” the Commander’s voice continued. “If there is a single place in the universe that will drive sane people mad and insane people to ecstasy, it is Charon. There is no way to adequately explain the effects of being there. You will have to find that out for yourself, and you will receive a thorough orientation briefing from Charon itself after you land.

  “The imprint ability of this device is limited,” he continued, “but we can send you one basic thing that may or may not be of use to you on Charon. It is a physical-political map of the entire planet, as complete and up-to-date as we could make it.”

  That puzzled me. Why would such a map not be of use? What kind of place was this, anyway? Before I could mull that over further and curse my inability to ask Krega questions, I felt a sharp pain in my back, men a short wave of dizziness and nausea. But when the discomfort cleared, I found the complete map was clearly and indelibly etched in my mind.

  Following this came a stream of facts about the place not likely to be too detailed in any indoctrination lecture.

  The planet was roughly 42,000 kilometers at the equator—or from pole back to pole, allowing for topographic differences. Like all four Diamond worlds, Charon was basically a ball—highly unusual as planets go, even though everybody, including me, thinks of all major planets as round.

  The gravity was roughly 88 norm, so I’d feel a bit lighter and be able to jump further. That would take a slight adjustment in timing, and I made a note to work on that first and foremost Charon was a tad richer in oxygen, not really enough to matter, but it was overloaded with water vapor, which probably accounted for that extra oxygen in the first place.

  The planet had a reasonable axial tilt, which normally would have meant strong seasonal changes, but 158,551,000 kilometers out from an F-type star it was basically a choice of hot, hotter, still hotter, and hotter than hell. There were no polar caps—the circulation of warm ocean water prevented it—but there was sometimes ice in the dead of winter in the arctic or antarctic circle regions, so even on a tremendously tropical world you could freeze, but as both polar regions were entirely water, it wasn’t likely you’d ever get there.

  Equatorial temperatures were almost at the limit of human endurance: temperatures of sixty degrees centigrade or more had been measured there, along with near-lethal radiation levels for brief periods near the time of the sun’s direct rays. There was sufficient land in the more temperate zones for the mere eleven million or so people who inhabited the place. Not that the temperate zones were all that temperate—in the latitudes with the largest populations temperatures still reached above fifty degrees centigrade at midsummer and rarely fell below twenty-five degrees in the dead of winter—but they were better than that equator. The three major continental land masses, however, were spaced above, on, and just below the equator, thus keeping everybody in the hothouse. A day was about twenty-nine standard hours, not enough of a difference from that to which I was accustomed to be a real factor, and a year was a short 282 Charon days.

  Three continents—one not very useful that was mountainous and had large stretches of desert blocked from rain by the landforms; the other two basically tropical rain forests where the rain damn near never stopped. Not a cheery place at all, I reflected, remembering that old Warden had named this his vision of hell Not far off the mark.

  Well, I’d better get used to loving it, I told myself. Short of suicide, I had no way to avoid calling it home.

  “Charon is the only one of the Diamond worlds with a female Lord,” Krega continued. “I would not, however, count on your considerable charm to tame Aeolia Matuze. She is something of a political genius, and as hard and cynical as a human can become. At one time she was actually on the Confederacy Council, and it’s a sure bet that a lot of the aliens’ information on our political and military structure came from her. Her crime might best be called an excess of ambition; she skillfully manipulated whole governmental forces and key individuals in the governments and military and was well on the way to pulling off something of a coup d'état , which would have in effect substituted her for the Council. Don’t laugh—she came very close. Needless to say, she was well enough connected to be sent to the Diamond, where she was fifteen years into the system before taking complete charge only four years ago. It appears that her predecessor actually retired, although we consider this so unlikely that the retirement was almost certainly forced by Matuze. Do not underestimate her! In another age and time we would probably all be worshiping her as a goddess.”

  Aeolia Matuze. I remembered her from the distant past and from some of my history indoctrinations. I also vaguely recall that she had died and there had actually been an official period of mourning back when I was still a kid. So now at last I knew the truth about her, and it was fascinating. A formidable opponent indeed. I had to wonder if the aristocratic beauty my mind recalled was still as stunning after nineteen years on Charon.

  The rest of the briefing was pretty much routine, and after it was over I simply got off the John and pushed it back into the wall. I heard a flushing sound and, the next time I used it, discovered that my waste wasn’t the only thing flushed. The direct neural transmission had taken less than a minute to transfer all the information they could pack into it. Extremely efficient, the security boys, I told myself. Even my ever-vigilant jailers on the other end of those lenses and mikes would have no idea that I was anybody other than who I was supposed to be.

  As to who that was, I’d gotten my first mental picture of myself from the briefing. My impression of myself as small was very true—barely 157 centimeters tall, and a mere 46 kilos. Physically, my mind had to go back to childhood for a really good word—elfin. Small, thin, wiry, with a sharp, stem-looking face set off by ears slightly too large for it and pushed back and a healthy shock of jet-black hair trimmed almost in a pageboy style. I appeared to have little or no body hair and no facial hair beyond the dark, V-shaped eyebrows. The truth was, with some nondescript clothing I would look more like a young girl of eleven or so than the mature twenty-seven-year-old the dossier said I was. Perhaps that had been part of his problem.

  For the body was that of Park Lacoch, the Butcher of Bonhomme. I remembered Park’s case from recent press reports—recent to the old me, anyway. He had a real thing about women, and on the frontier he’d been an insidious terror.

  The odd thing was, he’d been a colonial district administrator—that was the only reason it had taken so long to catch him. One of his duties was heading the local cops who were all-out to capture him, and he had mastery of the computer records and lab facilities of the whole place. He was by all reports a superior administrator: always in under budget, never needing excuses, well-liked by the people under him. A charmer. His big problem was that he liked to play with women in a most unapproved manner. He would abduct them, often from frontier farming areas, take them to his private labs, and systematically mutilate and torture them to death. He had done so seventeen times in one year until finally hard deductive detective work by one of his colleagues, brought in, ironically, at his own request, finally tracked him down and nailed him.

  He was a textbook case for the psychs, of course. Looking like this, he had been the butt of every cruelty while growing up and had had a hard time being taken seriously by anybody. But he had a keen mind and graduated first in administration—no mean feat for a natural-born frontier human, not a ge
netically and culturally generated individual of the civilized worlds—and he made them pay attention by doing everything just right Why he became the Butcher was something the press had a field day with, but the causes were certainly far more complex than pop psych. Still, so revolting had been his crimes, so against all standards of civilized behavior no matter where, that only death or exile to the Warden Diamond would have been politically acceptable. The publicity alone made his face and name notorious throughout the Confederacy, so that even a totally psyched and wiped Park Lacoch could hardly have fitted back in anywhere.

  He was in fact a perfect Diamond candidate for those reasons and for his brilliance. As such, he was a near-perfect cover, but he would also be something of a liability if his notoriety followed him. Hell, I liked women in a more normal way, but it would be damned difficult to make friends with any of them if they knew Lacoch’s criminal history. Well, perhaps I could devise a decent cover story to attain some degree of normalcy if it came up.

  I lay back down on the cot and put myself in a light trance, going over all the briefing information, filing, sorting, thinking it all out. Particularly important were the details, large and small, of Lacoch’s life and work, since I would be most vulnerable to tripping up in those areas. I also studied my host’s mannerisms, nervous habits, and the like, and tried to get myself into the mind-set of a small, effeminate-looking man in a big, rough world.

  By the time I reached Charon, I’d better be perfect for my own sake. Lacoch—me—would have one more lady-killing to his credit before it was all over, but I wasn’t for a minute going to underestimate Aeolia Matuze.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Transportation and Exposure

  Except for the regular meals there was no way to keep track of time, but it was a fairly long trip. They weren’t wasting any money transporting prisoners by the fastest available routes, that was for sure.

  Finally, though, we docked with the base ship a third of a light-year out from the Warden system. I knew it not so much by any sensation inside my cloister but from the lack of it: the vibration that had been my constant companion ceased. The routine still wasn’t varied; I suppose they were waiting for a large enough contingent from around the galaxy to make the landing worthwhile. All I could do was sit and go over my data for the millionth time and occasionally reflect on the fact that I probably wasn’t very far from my old body (that’s how I’d come to think of it). I wondered if perhaps he didn’t even come down and take a peek at me from time to time, at least from idle curiosity—me and the three others who probably were also here.

  I also had time to reflect on what I knew of the Warden situation itself, the reason for its perfection as a prison. I had not, of course, swallowed that line whole—there was no such thing as the perfect prison, but this one had to come close. Shortly after I was landed on Charon and started breathing its air I would be infected with an oddball submicroscopic organism that would set up housekeeping in every cell of my body. There it would live, feeding off me, even earning its keep by keeping disease organisms, infections, and the like in check. The one thing that stuff had was a will to live, and it only lived if you did.

  But it needed something, some trace element or some such that was present only in the Warden system. Nobody knew what and nobody had been able to do the real work to find out, but whatever it needed was found only in the Warden system. Whatever it was wasn’t in the air, because in shuttles run between the worlds of the Diamond you breathed the purified, mechanically produced stuff to no ill effect. Not the food, either. They’d checked that. It was possible for one of the Warden people to live comfortably on synthetics in a totally isolated lab like a planetary space station. But get too far away, even with Warden food and Warden air, and the organism died. Since it had modified your cells to make itself at home, and those cells depended on the organism to keep working properly, you died, too—painfully and slowly, in horrible agony. That distance was roughly a quarter of a light-year from the system’s sun, which explained the location of the base ship.

  All four worlds were more than climatologically different, too. The organism was consistent in how it affected an individual on each planet, but—possibly due to distance from the sun, since that seemed to be the determining factor in its life—it did different things depending on which world an individual was first exposed. Whatever it did stuck in just that fashion even if you later went to a different world of the Diamond.

  The organism seemed to be vaguely telepathic in some way, although nobody could explain how. It certainly wasn’t an intelligent organism; at least it always behaved predictably. Still, most of the changes seemed to involve the colony in one person affecting the colony in another—or others. You provided the conscious control, if you could, and that determined who bossed whom. A pretty simple system, even if nobody had yet been able to explain it.

  As for Charon, all I really knew about it was that it was terribly hot and rainy. I cursed again not having been fed the proper programming to fully prepare me—learning the ropes would cost time, possibly a lot of it.

  Almost three days—eight meals—after I’d arrived at the base ship there was a lurching and a lot of banging around, which forced me to the cot and made me slightly seasick. Still, I wasn’t disappointed. The disruption meant that they were making up the consignments and readying for the in-system drop of these cells. I faced the idea with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I wanted desperately to be out of this boring little box. On the other, when I next got out of the box it would be into a much larger and probably prettier box—Charon itself, no less a cell for being an entire planet And while it would be more diverting, challenging, exciting, or whatever, it would also be, unlike this box, very, very final.

  Shortly after the banging about started, it stopped again and, after a short, expectant pause, I again felt a vibration indicating movement—much more pronounced than before. I was now either on a much smaller vessel or nearer the drives.

  Still, it took another three interminable days—nine meals—to reach our destination. Long, certainly, but also fast for a sublight carrier, probably a modified and totally automated freighter.

  The vibration stopped and I knew we were in orbit Again I had that dual feeling of trapped doom and exhilaration.

  There was a crackling sound and a speaker I’d never even known was there came to life. “Attention all prisoners!” it commanded, its voice a metallic parody of a man’s baritone. “We have achieved orbit around the planet Charon in the Warden system,” it continued, telling me nothing I didn’t already know but probably informing the others, however many there were, for the first time. I could understand what they must be going through, considering my own feelings. A hundred times mine probably, since at least I was going in with my eyes open even if no more voluntarily than they.

  “In a moment,” the voice continued, “the doors to your cells will slide open and you will be able to leave. We strongly recommend you do so, since thirty seconds after the doors open they will close again and a vacuum pump will begin sterilization operations within the cells which would be fatal to anyone who remains.”

  Nice touch, I thought. I couldn’t help wondering whether anybody would choose death.

  “Immediately after you enter the main corridor,” the voice continued, “you will stand in place until the cell doors close once again. Do not attempt to move from in front of your cell door until it closes or automatic security equipment will vaporize you. There will be no talking in the corridor. Anyone breaking silence or failing to obey orders precisely will be dealt with instantly. You will receive further instructions once the doors close. Ready to depart—now!”

  The door slid open and I wasted no time in stepping out. A small white box, complete with marks for feet, showed you where to stand and I did as instructed, galling as all this was. There was something about being totally naked and isolated on a ship controlled only by computer that humbled you more than was right. It produced a sense of total
futility.

  I could still look around and I saw that I’d been right. The ship was basically a long sealed hall along the sides of which little cells had been attached. I looked up and down and counted maybe ten or twelve prisoners, no more. The cream of the crop, I thought sourly. A handful of men and women—mostly men, it seemed—naked and bedraggled, beaten now, about to be dropped off and left. I wondered why they had been chosen rather than wiped, considering the transportation costs alone. What had the computers and psych boys found in these dejected specimens that dictated they should live? They didn’t know, that was for sure. I wondered exactly, who did.

  The doors snapped shut. I waited expectantly, as the air was pumped out, to hear the scream of someone who hadn’t moved fast enough, but there was no hint of melodrama. If anyone had taken that way out, the fact was not evident.

  “At my command,” the voice barked from speakers along the ceiling, “you will turn right and walk slowly in single file, as far forward as you can. There you will find a special shuttle that will take you to the surface. You will take forward seats first, leave no empty seats between you, and immediately strap yourselves in.”

  I heard some muttering from a few of my fellow prisoners, and instantly a brief but very visible spurt of light shot from a side wall. It did not strike anyone but hit with an audible hiss just in front of the offenders’ feet. They jumped slightly at this demonstration of power. All the grumbling and mumbling immediately ceased.

  The voice, which had paused for this digression, now took up its instructions with no reference to what had taken place. None was needed.

  “Right turn—now!” it commanded, and we did as instructed. “Walk slowly forward to the shuttle as instructed.”