Slowly Kane swung his legs over the side of the bed, his bare feet recoiling briefly from the cold, hard floor. He remembered sitting at Sindri’s table with the dawning realization that the combination of wine and harp song was pushing him into the placid depths of sleep.
He stood up, and the floor heaved beneath him for a moment, then steadied. He took a careful forward step, noting the gravity seemed normal, as did the air. He flexed his leg muscles, lifting and lowering himself on his heels, then he winced at the stinging, slight burning sensation in the vicinity of his groin.
Looking down at himself, Kane gently touched his genitals. His testicles were sore, almost as if they had been roughly squeezed, and his penis felt very sensitive. It was irritated, with reddened marks of chafing on it.
A gauzy scrap of a dream ghosted through his mind, but it was too insubstantial to grasp and it flitted away before he could examine it.
He probed at the knife wound on his ribs, but when his fingers didn’t touch the film of liquid bandage, he uttered a wordless exclamation of surprise. The layer of artificial skin was gone, and of the slash, only a pink line remained, looking like an almost healed scratch. The shallow puncture wound on his right shoulder was merely a pink, irregularly shaped dot.
His knee showed the fading yellow blotch of an old bruise. He worked it back and forth, pleased but disturbed there was no corresponding pain or stiffness. As he had already suspected, the demonstration of the harp’s powers had healed his injuries.
Running a hand over his jawline, he felt a bristly growth. He had shaved just yesterday morning, only an hour before climbing into the Cerberus jump chamber. The hair sprouting from his cheeks and chin felt like two days’ worth of beard.
Kane didn’t devote much thought to it. The longer he stood, the more he experienced hunger pains and a fierce thirst. Taking the environmental suit off the hook, he quickly slipped into it, zipping up the seals and pulling on the boots. He contemplated leaving off the gloves but decided not to risk losing them.
After he dressed, he paced around the small room, seeing no control buttons or knobs on the hatch frame. He yelled, “Hey!”
His voice echoed hollowly. There was no answer.
“Hey! Sindri!”
Again there was no response. For lack of anything else to do, he went to the rectangular shutter, placed his finger on the top button, turned his back, closed his eyes and pressed it. He immediately rested his finger on the second button, ready to push it if undiluted, blinding sunlight cascaded in. He heard the whir of tiny motors as the shutter lifted. What little change he could detect in the light level through his eyelids was minute, so he cautiously slitted them open.
The sunshine shafting through the observation port wasn’t intolerably bright. In fact, it looked diffuse and pale, as if filtered through heavy cloud cover. Kane turned around, hand half-lifted to shield his eyes. It was an unnecessary gesture, but he didn’t lower his arm. He was too busy being alternately stupefied and terrified.
The light of dawn came through the transparent port, the sun just climbing over the rust red horizon, turning the pumpkin-colored sky a deep rose. In the far dis-tance, Kane saw a range of stone shouldering up from rock-strewed and barren ground. Much closer towered a structure, a mountain in the shape of a pyramid.
It loomed frighteningly high, its gigantic red walls climbing sheer toward the sky. Kane had to tilt his head back to glimpse the apex, even though his wheeling thoughts told him the pyramid was at least half a mile away. It was gargantuan, immensely broad at the base and narrow at the top. He calculated that the bottom covered a square mile and a half and the top rose nearly six thousand feet.
The dawn sun glinted faintly from a metal spire stretching from the pyramid’s apex. It looked tiny and threadlike in relation to the structure supporting it, but he figured it had to be a minimum of five hundred feet long.
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