Now, of course, it all belonged to Darius.
The new palace had been built of limestone and white Carrara marble to Darius’s exacting specifications. The towers and domes of stone shone a brilliant pink as he emerged into the daylight, hurtling across a vast walled plaza dotted with gardens, Renaissance Italian sculpture, and fountains. The various structures, laboratories, domed residences, and minarets surrounding the plaza were just now catching the first rays of the sun rising above the mountains to the east.
Atop the highest point within his compound stood one of the world’s ten most powerful telescopes. It was called a Large Binocular Telescope, and, to use the language of astronomy, it had “seen first light” in October 2005. The LBT’s two twenty-eight-foot mirrors worked together to provide as much resolution as would be derived from a single thirty-foot mirror, and they were ten times more powerful than Hubble’s. Darius had traveled to places in the universe where no man had been before.
And, he chortled, he had the pictures to prove it.
Darius’s home base was a mighty fortress, but Darius, being deliberately quaint as was his wont, always referred to the huge, fortified complex as his “little cottage by the sea.” There were large block dormitories for scientists, guards, a massive bioengineering laboratory and servants, and a massive power plant to supply the unusually high-energy requirements of Darius’s latest creation, Lord Perseus.
Few “cottages” in the world were as highly secure, in terms of radar-guided antiaircraft systems, armed guards, dogs, sonic sensors, and sophisticated radar and sonar installations. The Ram Citadel was known to the mullahs in Tehran only as “the Rocks.” Darius was a secretive man. And few places had hidden within them so many secrets, so many, as it would turn out, dark and potentially catastrophic secrets.
At the sight of his rapid approach, guards manning the massive steel gates adjacent to the marina quickly opened them. He zoomed right through them, a wide smile on his cherubic face. He was happy.
He was going to see his best friend, Perseus!
Darius, a quadriplegic since birth, sped out along the great steel pier that jutted into the pale blue waters of the harbor. At the end of the pier, a gleaming white yacht was moored. It was large, nearly a hundred meters in length overall, three hundred feet, and had formerly belonged to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last ruler of the Persian Empire.
After the Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini had bestowed it upon Darius in honor of his scientific achievements in nuclear physics on his twentieth birthday. This was for public consumption. The truth was, he’d discovered a new star in the Alpha Centauri system and named it after the nation’s religious leader. Darius was not a religious man (he was secretly an atheist), but he was not stupid, either. Khomeini and the mullahs who succeeded him had ruled Iran since the 1980s, and therefore, to some extent, they ruled him.
But no longer. No one ruled him. Not anymore.
Not since Perseus.
Darius was excited about this morning’s meeting with his closest friend and companion. He had lain awake all night, restive, tossing and turning, his mind roiling with troubling questions for Perseus. He’d been thinking about the origins of the universe, too. And about the wondrous possibilities of exceeding the speed of light, about parallel universes, about Damnable companion, his mind.
Had been all his life, since boyhood. Questions, questions, questions: What makes that clock tick? How did the music get inside the radio? Why, when I drop my ball, does it fall straight to the ground? And what about all those billions of stars out there in the night sky above the vast deserts of his forefathers? How did they get there? Who made them? How?
Now, of course, the questions were much more specific. They came from the government of Iran. Tehran’s secret demands had military implications. Worldwide military implications. His crowning achievement, Perseus, had been working literally twenty-four hours a day on some of the questions put to Darius by Abu Assiz, an old classmate now grown very powerful in the government. Abu had some notion of what Darius was up to, but his knowledge of the progress already accomplished was severely limited in scope.
The plain fact was, no one in Tehran or even on earth had the faintest notion as to what Darius and Perseus had achieved, nor would they ever, until it was too late for anyone to do anything about it.
The unceasing and sheer number of questions from his government and a secret cadre of mullahs were far beyond Darius’s mental capacity to absorb. But no question on heaven or earth was beyond his creation, Lord Perseus the Magnificent.
Many times in his long life he’d felt like putting a bullet through the damn thing (his mind), just put it out of its misery. But then the questions: What happened to his soul, his animus, then? Where did it go? Would he go with it? Would his bullet have been wasted? Would his “soul,” God forbid, prove his eternal undoing, condemn him to the cacophonous prison dwelling inside his head?
These, of course, were questions he could only discuss with his friend. But first, they’d have to deal with the latest military demands made on him and his team of AI scientists.
And thus this visit at the glorious crack of dawn. A spirited discourse with the only intellect he had recourse to that was superior to his own. That august entity whose existence was known only to him and who was known only as Perseus.
H e gently reversed the thrusters when he reached the end of the steel-decked dock, coming to a gentle stop two feet short of the water. There was no boarding ladder up to the yacht’s deck, nor was there need of one. No one save Darius was allowed to board this vessel, and the guards who kept watch over it had orders to shoot to kill any intruder.
He touched a remote switch on his armrest keypad and a large section of the yacht’s white hull slid back hydraulically. It revealed a stainless-steel room about the size of a large elevator. In fact, that is just what it was. He nudged the joysticks forward and whooshed inside. Then he pulled back on the left control and rotated 180 degrees, so that he was now facing the door, hovering about three feet off the polished steel floor.
This once luxurious yacht, which he’d renamed Cygnus, was not at all what it appeared to be. A decade earlier Darius and a team of naval engineers had totally gutted the vessel, removing the engines, fuel tanks, interior bulwarks, mahogany furnishings, everything, thus turning it into an empty shell. Working underwater to avoid the prying eyes of American satellites, divers had then sliced Cygnus ’s keel open from stem to stern with acetylene torches and winches.
The new “mother ship” was opened just wide enough to accept a new “baby” vessel inside its belly.
The Koi class sub was a Chinese-built two-man submarine. Sixty feet in length, she had been offloaded under cover of darkness from a Russian freighter in the port of Akatu and had arrived off the Ram Citadel days earlier. Powered by a completely silent proto-lithium battery engine, the sub was capable of surprising speeds. After careful maneuvering, the little sub had surfaced inside the yacht’s empty hull. The hull, now fitted with hydraulic hinges, had been reclosed, the water pumped out.
Cygnus was no longer a wealthy gentleman’s yacht. She was simply a brilliant disguise for the fully functioning submarine in her belly, with an underwater speed of thirty knots. Darius thought that should be sufficient should the time ever come when he needed to make a speedy escape from his compound.
He knew, deep in his gut, that that day would surely come.
Cygnus, his bizarre “yacht,” was moored to the pier, the end of which projected some ten feet beyond a precipitous underwater shelf extending for miles in either direction along this coast. The depth suddenly dropped from thirty feet to a thousand, down a sheer wall of crustacean-encrusted rock. It was there, deep in the murky depths of the ocean floor, that seven monolithic titanium structures had been built to house his friend Perseus.