Going Down To Hadez - Updated

GOING DOWN TO HADEZ

Outer Ring Universities

Extract from curriculum notes.

SUBJECT: REMNANT HISTORY

SECTION: FOLK-LORE

Item: Poem/Epic/Song:

‘Going down to Hadez’

‘We’re going down to Hadez, to set those dead folk free.

We’ll blast our way past Charon, and then, by Seth, we’ll see...’

Hadez spun lazily on its axis, looping in an enormous elliptical orbit round a dark yellow sun in the outer periphery of the galaxy. It was a forbidding place of bare rock and permanent sub-zero temperatures. The sickly yellow illumination of the moribund and too-distant sun gave no warmth, only cast demonic shadows upon the bleak, jagged landscape.

Yet even to this unlikely speck in the galaxy they had come, finding a use for this apparently useless, dead world, after the busy manner of their kind.

They dug beneath the surface, hollowing out the interior to form endless passageways and gigantic caverns, then they left, later to return bearing their dead. In this vast refrigerated morgue that they now called Hadez, they stored the empty shells of their forebears, through a time-span of many normal lifetimes. It was the graveyard of a galaxy and, although only the finest specimens of each race merited the costly transfer to Hadez from their home planets, the sheer numbers of dead would have been beyond the unaided intellect of any of them to comprehend.

Still the container ships arrived in a steady stream, bringing to Hadez the selected dead, swelling the stockpile of frozen cadavers. For despite the fact that each ship took away a pre-determined selection from the store of bodies each time they left, always they brought more than they took.

Only the pirates made inroads into this vast store of the dead but their efforts, determined and persistent as they were, did not for one second halt the steady rise in the numbers, and hence the value, of the hoarded bodies. And because they were of such incalculable value, they were guarded.

Charon did not know how he came to be the lone defender of Hadez. He did not know why the bodies were stored there, why they were brought, why they were taken away. Nor did he question the circumstances of his existence for he lacked the capacity to do so. He felt a guilt. In his rare moments of comparative relaxation he was vaguely aware that there was a rightness about his presence on Hadez, a justice in his being the one who guarded the dead. He was paying off a debt.

There were, however, things that Charon did know. He knew that his term as defender of Hadez depended on how successful he was. He knew that it was totally important that at all costs he must repel the invaders who sought to raid his planet, steal his charges and with them his chance of eventual freedom. For he also knew he was a prisoner.

Charon was not without assistance in his fight against the pirates. In his brain were implanted a myriad of minute synapse motivators, by use of which he was able to both receive information from the omnipotent computers that controlled all activity on Hadez, and send out instructions to the enormously powerful defence system. By thought alone he manipulated life and death on Hadez.

Charon hovered some ten feet above floor level in the relatively small cavern that contained all the equipment that controlled the planet. This control centre, which Charon never left, was almost at the heart of Hadez, immune from any attack except one which resulted in the total destruction of the planet. Access to it from the surface was only by one of the fourteen massive and heavily guarded entrance complexes through which the bodies entered and left the underground caverns.

He floated free amongst the endless banks of sophisticated computers that filled the cavern, each in its own way a monument to the ingenuity of his masters. Calmly, and with total assurance he went about his never-ending task of receiving and disseminating, information, checking, quantifying, deciding, ordering.

Charon was informed of the scheduled arrival of a container ship. He thought the computers, which were an extension of himself, into a state of readiness for the arrival. They advised him of the expected load, its final destination amongst the available cavern space, the entrance complex to be used, the estimated time of landing, vector co-ordinators of the approaching ship and a host of related detail.

He activated the second phase scanners, set them to the vector co-ordinates provided, then resumed static monitoring status. Charon waited.

***

Out in the vastness of space the giant container ship dropped down below the speed of light as it prepared to orbit Hades just within scanner range.

The powerful shield that surrounded it shimmered and flickered, a bubble of force within which was total immunity from attack.

The pirates were not strong enough to assault the inhabited planets and well knew that none of their weapons could penetrate the shields of the container ships. Only after they had been delivered to Hadez were the valuable bodies vulnerable to their attentions.

Messages flickered back and forth between Charon and the orbiting ship. After a while a metamorphosis took place, the ungainly, spidery outer appurtenances of the huge vessel split open and a heavily loaded shuttle section emerged like an insect from a chrysalis.

As the shuttle separated from the main shell, the flickering bubble of force also split in two, enclosing the shuttle and shell, separately with no apparent reduction in its potential. Another cargo of dead was eased down to the surface of Hadez on silent photo gyro motors.

Charon guided the shuttle to entrance seven and received confirmation of docking. He monitored the automatic unloading, checked the final total of fifty million bodies against the manifest and notified his acceptance of their charge.

The shuttle loaded itself with those bodies it required to remove as Charon checked them on. It was a lengthy procedure. Nobody ever left Hadez without the most thorough enquiry, except those taken illicitly by the pirates.

Even as Charon worked, he had defence scanners operating and his priority information system would have overridden the unloading schedule at the first sign of an invader.

The partially loaded shuttle secured for flight and sought clearance from Charon, He ran an instant re-check on the loading procedures, then, satisfied that all was in order, cleared the gigantic shuttle for lift off.

Charon monitored the return of the shuttle to its shell and kept the scanners on until the departing container ship disappeared into the vastness of space. Alone again, he programmed the master computer to adjust all records to account for the most recent arrivals and departures. This trip alone had increased the cadaver population by over twenty millions.

When he had completed this task, the priority information selectors drew his attention to necessary repairs to two banks of defence weapons damaged in the last pirate attack and still awaiting final repairs. Charon’s work was never done.

***

The crew of the black painted, heavily armed raider watched the arrival and departure of the container ship with avid interest. Out of respect for the defensive and offensive capability of the government vessel they made no move until it was well clear of the galaxy.

In convoy behind the raider, in its carefully calculated orbit round an inner planet in the same solar system as Hadez, rode an equally heavily armed hulk. This ship, outwardly identical to the raider, was stripped to bare essentials, a useless, worn out vessel dressed up to mimic it’s leader. It carried no crew but housed no less than fifty wedge shaped fighters.

The last vessel in the pirate convoy was a gigantic container ship, a close copy of the government vessels and with an equal, if not greater cargo capacity.

The three pirate ships kicked out of orbit and, led by the raider, streaked towards Hadez.

***

Seth watched the three pirate ships as they flashed across the screens of his powerful scanners. He had considered destroying them but had decided against it. There was a chance they might be successful and that might be to Seth’s advantage. A few more bodies lost might make Charon that much more vulnerable.

There were three of them in the restricted command/living area in the small, silver coloured, viciously armed Astral Dart. Seth had not long ago taken delivery of this ship which had been made to specifications stolen for him from a government shipyard. In all respects it was identical to the government attack vehicles. Only the crew and their intentions made the differences.

Of the three men aboard, only Seth was conscious He needed no help to captain this craft. The neurosurgeon slept soundly, enclosed in a life support couch, dreaming dreams of his choice. It was not necessary for him to know where he was going or upon whom he was to operate. When Seth bought talent, he also bought discretion.

The third man did not dream. He was also enclosed in a life support couch but he was as one dead, and would so remain until the antidote drug was pumped into him or the life support facilities withdrawn He was one of the hirsute humanoids, from the same hairy, highly intelligent, but slow moving race as Charon. He was expendable. His head had been shorn and under the effect of the drug no replacement hair had grown. There was an operation scar, a fine white line dissecting the dome of his skull.

Seth floated at ease in front of the scanner console. By a simple effort of will he blanked his mind, the better to receive the detailed information his sophisticated monitoring system fed him. He had only a mild interest in the outcome of the impending battle.

***

Charon felt a physical shock as the pirate ships smashed through the outer perimeter of his scanners at superlight speed. The sudden screaming of the alarm through the sensors implanted in his brain caused as always, a very real and personal pain. It was momentary, gone in the split second it took him to think the planet’s defences to full system alert.

At the first indication of alarm from the scanners, the priority information computer over-rode all other monitors, concentrating all Charon’s efforts on repelling the invaders, no longer troubling with mundane, routine matters, freeing his remarkable brain to fight.

Charon was instantly fed with information of the vector of the raider’s approach, their speed and, seconds later, a projected specification of the ship including probable defensive and offensive potential. It seemed to be a single pirate raider of the kind most often used against him. It was powerful, but well within the capability of his defences to repulse.

The computers clicked and hummed about him, awaiting the few extra items of information they needed to predict the target the raiders had selected. It was always one of the entrance complexes, heavily defended but once broached, the quickest way into the caverns.

Charon thought all entrance defences onto maximum range and waited for the pirate ship to slow down to sub-light speed. He knew the raider could not be alone, there must at least be a container ship somewhere to remove the bodies.

He thought his observation into the master computer but there were no other traces on the scanners, the other ships, if there were any, had prudently remained out of range. Later, when they closed with the planet, Charon would be fully occupied and the priority system would keep the information from him for vital seconds. By the time he was informed of their presence, it would be too late. No system is perfect.

The glittering black raider became visible as it slowed below the speed of light, a flashing black speck, its shield flicking arrogantly as if to tempt Charon to futile attack. But Charon waited. The computers flashed him the projected target; entrance complex seven, now in the area of dull yellow sunlight. He set the defences guarding that entrance to a cone, aimed the cone at the projected line of the advancing raider and waited for the ship to impale itself on the point of his weapons.

Still far out in space, the raider spewed out the last twenty of the fifty fighters it had held. They splayed out beside their mother ship, viciously armed wedges of destruction. They took up pre-arranged stations and threw a light shield round the raider, which thereupon disposed of its own shield. It was now more vulnerable to the planet’s defences but it was free to fire its own weapons.

It was a standard raiders tactic, one for which Charon was prepared. He activated his secondary weapon bank and began to pick off the fighters one at a time as he waited for the raider to hit his main cone of fire.

Another fighter winked out of existence, caught by the beam of Zeborg atoms from Charon’s weapons. Only the heavy, multiple shields offered any defence against the massive Zeborg guns and the fighters were sitting targets since most of their resources were taken up in providing the protective shield for the raider. The Zeborg atoms, contained in a wide beam, were deficient in negative particles and thus in a highly unstable state. When they struck a molecular structure of any marked density there followed an inevitable exchange of positive and negative particles which resulted in the disintegration of any structure caught in the path of the beam. So rapid was this disintegration that it was as if the structure had disappeared.

Another fighter disappeared. But now the raider was close enough to bring its own weapons into use and cobalt bombs rained down towards the surface of Hadez.

Charon thought into activity the missile net covering the area under attack. The cobalt bombs exploded harmlessly, many miles above the surface, but each one weakened the net that caught them.

The raider impaled itself on the cone of Charon’s main weapons. The shield protecting the invader, although now only maintained by the twelve fighters that had escaped destruction held the Zeborg guns at bay with comparative ease.

Charon programmed the Zeborgs to continuous fire, locking them onto the advancing raider, certain that eventually they would break through the protective shield. Now he turned his attention back to the fighters, blasting them out of existence with increasing speed. As each fighter was destroyed so the others changed station in order to maintain the shield round the raider. Now the remaining fighters were also firing down at the defences, pouring narrow beams of pure light down through the missile net.

The net itself was breaking up under the barrage of cobalt bombs from the raider, now less than a hundred miles from the surface of the planet. A battery of Zeborg guns blew up with a thunderous roar under the impact of the bombs, weakening the defences.

Charon ignored the damage and concentrated on the fighters. When it seemed that the attackers would succeed in getting the raider in beneath the lowest elevation of the defence fire, the tide of the battle swung suddenly and dramatically in favour of the defender. There were now only two fighters left and they could no longer hold a shield round the raider. They peeled away from their parent vessel, momentarily losing the searching defence weapons, and screamed down towards the surface of the planet in a suicide dive. As they did so the raider stopped firing and threw up its own screen, relying on that to see it through to the surface.

Instantly recognising impending victory, Charon took just a split second to eliminate the fighters, then concentrated all his weapons in the sector on the shield of the pirate ship, now less than thirty miles from its objective.

Although the defences had been mutilated by the vicious attack, they were now concentrated on a single object and there was no hope for the raider. The flickering, shimmering bubble which contained the pirate vessel cracked and flared under the strain of repulsing the inexorable fire of the massive Zeborg guns.

The end came suddenly. The shield buckled, then collapsed. In an instant of bright, flashing finality, the attack on Hadez ended as the huge raider was eaten by the Zeborg atoms, digested in a brief moment of searing light. It seemed that Charon had won a complete victory.

There was, however, no respite. Even as the raider disintegrated, the scanners fed him fresh information which told him that he had won the battle only to lose the war. There was an inherent weakness in a defence system which had only one major decision-making element allied to a priority information selector, and the pirates had found it.

As Charon had been engaged in battle, two pirate ships, a raider and a container vessel with an escort of thirty fighters, had landed near entrance complex eleven on the dark side of the planet. They had not approached the defended entrance but had bored down through the crust of Hadez into the caverns beneath and were well advanced with loading the container ship with bodies

Now, and only now, did the priority system allow this information to reach Charon, Now, when it was too late. Charon had been doing battle with unmanned decoys, cheerfully expended by the pirates, a small price to pay for success.

The pirate ships sat on the surface of Hadez protected by a single, gigantic, dome-shaped shield taking their pick of the dead with complete impunity. Charon knew that he had lost. Even should he now be able to destroy the invaders, with them he would destroy the bodies they had stolen. Whatever happened, there was time to be added to his sentence.

In fact, as he was well aware, there was little chance of his being able to destroy the pirates now. He could not use the Zeborg guns at ground level for fear they would destroy the planet and he had no other weapons that would penetrate the pirates' shield. When they lifted off, the pirates would maintain the shield and accelerate to superlight speed within seconds. He would have precious little time to use the Zeborg guns against them, far too little time to hope that the shield would be broached. He faced total failure.

There was a time of waiting as the pirates loaded the container ship to the full, two million dead bodies neatly packed in plasto-metal crates, each with its own gyro-motor to facilitate handling. Charon sent out laser sleds against them, it was a futile gesture. The fighters moved out from behind the main screen and picked them off with contemptuous ease. Charon withdrew and concentrated his banks of Zeborg guns to form multiple cones of fire in the flight path that his computers told him the raiders would select.

The pirate’s next move caught Charon unawares. They dropped their shield for a fraction of a second, just long enough to fire a broadside of cobalt bombs at the nearest banks of Zeborgs.

Not waiting to evaluate the effect of this attack, the pirate ships lifted off and assumed positions in line ahead, first the container ship, then the raider, with the fighters protecting the rear, adding their protection to the powerful shields of the fleeing raiders.

Charon hit them the instant they rose into his angle of fire, the remaining Zeborg beams biting into the shield around the fighters, concentrating on the weaker outside edges of the phalanx they formed. In rapid succession two fighters were disintegrated as the invaders passed through the greatest concentration of fire. But it was all too late. There were still twenty fighters intact when the triumphant raiders achieved superlight speed and disappeared from scanner range in the merest flash of time.

***

Charon began a thorough check of his battered defences. There were six Zeborg batteries completely destroyed and another eight damaged to a greater or lesser degree. There was also the huge tunnel the raiders had bored into the caverns to be repaired and the missile net which had borne the brunt of the cobalt bombs hurled at the planet by the hulk was for the moment only capable of working at twenty percent efficiency. He had, as always, much-to-do.

When the repair work had been put in hand, Charon thought all systems to steady state alert. The priority system now permitted him access to lowest order information. It was as close as he ever came to relaxation,

He felt bitter about the pirate success. How much longer did two million bodies add to his sentence? He wondered who the pirates were. Very few had the success of his recent attacker, he destroyed at least half of them before they laid a hand on a single body. How could a dead body be sufficiently valuable to make a fifty percent chance of destruction worth the gamble? He did not know. There was a great deal he did not know. Increasingly of late Charon had wondered about the huge gaps in his knowledge.

***

Seth had felt some admiration for the manner in which the pirates had conducted the raid. The execution had been neat, well planned, professional. If one had to resort to brute force, then that was the way to do it. Yet this was not his way.

The raid had simply confirmed his belief that short of a massive blasting fleet, Hadez was inviolate. The pirates had achieved total success and yet had been able to escape with only some two million bodies, such a small fraction of the total booty available that it was not worth the while of the government to take further steps to prevent such raids. The cost of so doing would have been greater than the loss at the hands of the raiders over several lifespans.

Seth had long considered the problem of Hadez. He believed he had detected a weakness, a flaw in the system of defence which he could exploit. If he was right he could rape Hadez at will, there would be no limit to his power. He doubted if the government had, of late, calculated accurately the true value in real terms of the contents of this vast morgue, stuffed to overflowing with precious dead. But he had. Hadez was a ripe plum. Seth intended to pick it.

He re-set the controls of the doctor’s life support couch and waited until the flickering eyelids told him that this valuable passenger was on the long march back to consciousness. Then he turned to the other couch, opened it and shot a massive dose of antidote drug into the neck of the shaven humanoid. The drug would be fatal of course, but not until after this appallingly ugly specimen had served its purpose.

Seth spun his craft out of orbit and it flashed like a silver needle across the vastness of space, headed towards Hadez.

He had paid an enormous sum to suborn a top government employee to provide the information he needed about Charon and Hadez. He was about to discover whether or not this sum had been well spent.

His two companions were both conscious by the time he edged his ship into orbit round Hadez, just inside the range of Charon’s scanners, and sent down the coded identification signal.

It was the moment of greatest risk.

***

Charon accepted the signals from the government inspectorate ship, feeding back landing instructions which would set the vessel down at the entrance complex nearest to his dome.

In all his time on Hadez, no inspector had ever visited. As he tracked the ship he wondered if this latest raid had been the last straw. Was he to die for his failures? Worse, was his sentence to last a lifespan? At the Inspectors request, Charon cleared three life-forms to enter the Dome.

Seth was a towering, dominant figure, resplendent in the display dress of officialdom. Beside him the wraith-like form of the surgeon seemed insubstantial, his light green and fawn mantle at once identifying his calling and highlighting his frailty. With the third of his visitors the bulky, slow-moving humanoid, Charon felt a tenuous brotherhood, but for his total baldness he was as Charon remembered the others of his race.

There was a final exchange of identification data following which Charon cut out all but the top priority information channels and gave his full attention to his visitors.

‘Hadez welcomes the inspectorate,’ said Charon.

Seth hovered in front of him, seeming to shimmer in the dull artificial light of the Dome, The other two remained by the entrance, silent, respectful puppets, ‘The Inspectorate acknowledges Charon,’ said Seth.

‘I have a status report on direct link if the Inspector wishes...’

Seth cut him short. ‘My business is with Charon.’

It was what he had been expecting. He had failed and now he was to pay the price. He did not feel fear, he was not capable of emotion. Rather, a chill settled upon him that could only be a psychological manifestation since he did not monitor temperature in the Dome, such data being irrelevant to the function of Hadez. He waited.

Seth said, ‘Compute total losses during your stewardship and express this as a fraction of the average total holding of stock during that period.’

Charon did so. Seth considered the figure he provided.

‘You are within the permitted tolerance of loss,’ he announced.

Charon searched the vast computed memories available to him in the flicker of a thought.

‘I have no records of any rate of loss being permitted,’ he said,

‘You will adjust the main information bank to receive audio instructions,’ Seth ordered.

Charon did as he was bid.

‘The Inspectorate decrees the release of the incumbent Charon. All information sectors will prepare for transfer to alternative decision-making unit,’ Seth intoned, enunciating carefully, ‘main information bank transferred to automatic operation, now.’

For the first time since he had woken to consciousness as sole living defender of Hadez, Charon sensed computers operating outside his control. An emergency unit functioned at his thought, delaying the effect of Seth’s instructions, giving Charon enough time to programme a re-run of the identification codes of his visitors. The re-run gave total clearance.

‘You have completed defence check on my clearances?’ Seth asked.

‘Yes, inspector.’

‘Then I can tell you that by outstanding defence of this storage unit you have earned your freedom. You will now pass final control to the main computer in preparation for release surgery,’

‘Yes, inspector.’ Charon felt no elation. The prospect of personal freedom, always remote, seemed even yet an impossible dream. He simply obeyed instructions, as Seth had known he must.

‘Have you passed control?’ Seth enquired.

‘Yes, Inspector.’

As the main bank computers withdrew, Charon had a feeling of loneliness, sudden and deep-rooted. The minute and sensitive implantations in his brain now seemed heavy and cumbersome. No longer an essential part of him, no longer his link with functional existence outside the Dome, they became alien and undesirable growths.

‘Present yourself for surgery,’ Seth ordered.

Charon received a final thought from the internal system defence unit, the only one he could not think to automatic control.

‘Charon must live. There must be a decision-making unit attached at all times. This is the paramount directive,’ he said.

The surgeon ghosted forward, pushing the bald-headed figure of the humanoid ahead of him.

‘This being will be Charon,’ Seth said, total certainty in his voice.

Charon probed into the mind of the humanoid. It was a brain comparable to his own in size and potential. Indeed, but for the drug-induced fog that clouded the intellect, it was a brain he would have instantly accepted as a suitable decision-making unit.

‘There is a drug-induced deficiency in the capacity of the subject,’ Charon reported.

Seth stirred in annoyance. Such signs of government efficiency irritated him.

‘That factor will be corrected during surgery,’ he snapped, ‘present yourself.’

Charon hovered uncertainly for a moment but, lacking data to the contrary, was obliged to accept that the Inspector was to be obeyed.

‘I so present myself.’ he said.

***

Far out in space Seth jettisoned the dead bodies of the surgeon and the bald humanoid. They were of inferior quality compared to the countless millions of selected cadavers to which he now had unrestricted access. Seth was now rich and, more importantly, powerful beyond his most insane dreams.

In a galaxy where the government had a monopoly on bodies which could provide life extension, and kept this privilege for the chosen few, the black market would always thrive, Now Seth had the future of that government in his hands, holding as he did the key to its purse strings.

It had all been so easy, so very easy. Charon had submitted to anaesthesia and the surgeon had eradicated all memory of the Inspectors’ visit, then re-programmed his brain with a second set of identification data. It would no longer matter that government codes changed, Seth would always be welcome, could plunder Hadez at will, even as the government continued to add to the store. Charon and the slightly altered computers would give false stock figures as required.

Seth aimed the flashing silver needle that was his craft towards the centre of the galaxy. Fierce elation flooded him, a maniac scream of ecstasy filled the silence. He thought of Charon, his servant dutifully guarding the treasure that, even though it was intact and as yet untouched, had already been stolen. Charon, about whom the government had made a basic error, one that Seth had suspected and ultimately exploited. No matter impossibilities, whilst life remains in a living being, so does hope, irrational, divinely inspired hope. On this premise, that such hopeless hope exists, he had built his plan that depended for its success on the unreasonable drive for survival of Charon’s animal instincts.

Seth had gambled and won. Charon’s instincts had blinded his intellect. Offered what he knew was impossible, he had leapt at it, ignoring the screaming warnings of the computers, because he so much wanted that which was offered, because he made himself believe that it was possible.

Yes, Seth thought of Charon, but he felt no pity for one who had tasted freedom only to have the cup dashed from his lips, for one who, faced with the bald humanoid, had coveted his body, seen in that gross and ugly caricature of a life-form the mirror image of himself.

Even had he been capable of remorse, Seth would have found it difficult to apply that emotion to Charon who was, after all, only a disembodied brain floating around the Dome in a diminutive plasto-metal container, a computer part with delusions of grandeur…

……….So ice cold mother Hadez, welcomes raiders to her womb, and Charon, incomplete defender, now guards an empty tomb.’

Anon.

***

TUTORS NOTE:

It has, to date, not proved possible to accurately interpret all of this long and often obscure poem/epic/song. However, it is clearly a eulogy of pirate raids, and one raid in particular, on an ancient body-bank asteroid.

This offering is included in the curriculum only because some authorities maintain that, could we understand it fully, it would throw light on the root cause of the downfall of the Capito-Nono Empire which led directly to the extended period we have entitled ‘The era of Misrule.’

This is at best a speculative theory which presumably relies on the thesis that the Capito-Nono government could be undermined by the theft of a few dead bodies. However, the offering is in our opinion undoubtedly authentic and is an interesting example of the difficulties facing remnant historians in searching for the truth of our very early social history.

Interested students should contact The Humanoid Social Historian, Pectar, Vector Violet Six, Outer Ring, where this poem/epic/song was discovered eleven spans ago in oral circulation amongst a backward nomadic tribe.