Superluminary_The World Armada

by John C. Wright

  Aeneas had commanded that only those men who had been willing, back in the days when Lord Tellus was Emperor, to step into one of his deadly voting booths and risk death to cast a ballot, had earned the right to bear arms. Since most of them, in later years, cast their ballots by marksmanship at the shooting range, they were also practiced shots. Thanks to the ready availability of pantropic techniques to halt or reverse aging, these patriarchs could be returned to the neural and glandular age of eighteen years olds, with strength and reflexes to match. (Women were forbidden from service, unless they had their neurochemistry altered to force their brains to operate like the brains of males.)

  Aeneas did not know if he were also going insane, or if his grandfather’s strange thought processes were becoming clear, or both. But it now seemed clear that peoples gifted with eternal youth and endless leisure, but with little or no liberty hence no self reliance, could not help but be slavish, selfish and cowardly. But any man willing to face death to join in the civic duty of voting for Parliament clearly had overcome the selfishness endemic to an age of history suffering the corruption of luxury.

  Perhaps this logic was sound. Perhaps it was insane. Whatever the case, the vast populations of Jupiter, the largest planet, and one of the last terraformed and colonized, retained the rough frontiersmen ethics needed when the place was first settled. These were, after all, the same individuals who had faced so deadly an environment. During the reign of Lord Tellus, they had been the source of tumult and discontent, and even treason, yet Lord Tellus seemed to nurture rather than discourage their anarchist spirit.

  That spirit saved them now. While other men cowered and fled, or tried in vain to work their contortion pearls the space vampires were jamming, the militia men in their private houses, islands, and continents floated ever upward in the vast atmosphere of Second Jupiter, and raised their pistols overhead.

  These pistols, after all, were built by the same gunsmiths as had equipped Lord Mars, and their range and variety of destructive outputs was limited only by the mile-wide broadcast energy dynamos roaring at the core of Second Jupiter, and by the imagination of the wielder.

  A disinert pellet accelerated instantly to nearlightspeed in the barrel was shot up the axis of a frictionless and airless tubular force field and was returned to normal mass and inertia just before it struck its target. Likewise, coherent energy of any wavelength or combination of high energy particles could be emitted, or neuropsionic forces, or more. The Imperial Family would never have allowed mere commoners and underlings such unparalleled power. Aeneas had left them no choice.

  It might have seemed futile for citizen soldiers to open fire on the surface of an inner hull not yet visible to their eyes, some one hundred thirty-four million square miles in area. But these pistols could puncture a planet from pole to pole.

  And the militiamen were cunning enough to concentrate their fire. The local commanders were cunning enough to use the still-working hyperspatial periscopes to find the source of the command signals controlling the miniature Dyson, and to find other essential target spots: engines, power couplings, force emission stations, the nerves and sinews of the attacking Dyson, the brain and heart.

  The compression fields were able to grasp, over square lightminutes of area, the surfaces of stars and force them through utter atomic collapse into a plasma and then into hyperneutronium, and then into a singularity. But no one spot of the field was equipped to deflect the concentrated fire of an entire gas giant’s hemisphere. When multiple trillions of beam weapons and relativistic mass shots flying outward at lightspeed encountered the palpable walls of kinetic and magneto-gravitic force, even the tiny and imponderable energy particles of which these walls were woven were disintegrated and scattered.

  The compression fields hence only struck one side of the gas giant, and threw it. The countless contortion pearls each man, woman and child carried were activated at once when the force walls struck, and each person was rendered inertialess, and surrounded by force shells. The damage from flying landmasses capsizing and shattering continents brushed the people aside, imparted velocity to them, but passed no kinetic energy.

  The massive planetary disinertia fields came into play, and so Second Jupiter, stormy atmosphere unwinding like a torn scarf, plunged across the one light minute radius of the miniature Dyson. This distance was about a third of what Mercury’s orbit had been, or ten million miles.

  It reverted to its full inertia at the last moment before collision. Second Jupiter smashed through the thin hull at the pole where the massive warp armatures overlapped. Gathered here were spots where the main energy converters and warp control mechanisms were thought to be. There may have been cities filled with vampire lords and officers thickly clustered on the endless copper plains of the Dyson surface here, but, if so, they were obliterated by friction from the oncoming gas giant’s atmosphere passing at supersonic speed through the area before even the hydrosphere and lithosphere of the planet rushing into and through the area, leaving a gap eighty-eight thousand miles wide.

  Before and during the collision, the chief officer of the militia, Maliboeus, combined the surviving hyperspatial periscopes into one channel, and ordered all the militia to fire along this channel by space contortion. It acted as a warp channel, faster than light, and allowed an entire planet of gunfire to emerge at the prime spots Maliboeus selected: areas near the new-made hole where the enemy command and control fortress arose.

  Even more daring, Maliboeus ordered his men to project their own escape pearls down the miniature warp channel created by the periscope. It was as reckless as telling sailors to burn their cork life jackets; but the trillions of militiamen, bright in shining environmental cloaks, now poured into the smoldering and ruined fortresses of the vampires and destroyed everything that moved with ever-lengthening lances of irresistible fire.

  The militia on the other worlds did deeds of equal valor whenever space was flattened, warpchannels forbidden, or lightspeed weapons abolished, and only hand-to-hand fighting in the weird, slow, reddish environment of slow-lightspeed was allowed.

  In the end, nine copper Dysons were destroyed. Three were captured intact, along with their precious high-mass warpcores, but still infested with vampires. These three were forced into timeless nullspace to be cannibalized and decontaminated later.

  Lord Triton and Lord Prospero were dead, along with the countless multiple billions of civilians and militia dwelling on their gas giants of Second Neptune and Second Uranus. All were crushed into a microscopic black hole, and the resulting x-ray burst of energy focused as a beam weapon from the two victorious miniature Dysons to cut down further moons and planetoids of man, and scald the near hemisphere of Second Saturn.

  Aeneas sat on his black, three-headed throne, the victory as bitter as ashes in his mouth.

  Episode 12 The Archvampires of Space

  The Lords of Creation were gathered beneath the trees. Two more thrones were draped with black: one for Triton, the slain son of Lord Neptune, the other for Prospero, the slain son of Lord Uranus.

  Aeneas disconnected the nerves and muscles of his face, so that he could show no emotion aside from a stern frown. Which of his relatives was the traitor? For clearly the enemy had known which worlds were the most populated, which the easiest targets, and the evil beings had gone after them.

  Only his eyes moved. His suspicions were strong, but he did not want to condemn without clear proof.

  It was a cloudy night, and so the Dyson could not be seen overhead as it jumped through a small warpchannel of half a lightyear, towing Second Earth along, surrounded and obliterated KW Sagittarii. Any inner planets which may or may not have been present were also destroyed. No astronomer thought to check.

  Outer planets and asteroids in the system where vampires might abide were immediately struck with the nova beam, powered by the bled-off excess, which reduced worlds to rubble and rubble to subatomic particles.

  Aeneas gave the order to sail. The warp wa
s formed. The clouds hid the sight of the night stars turning red, expanding and vanishing.

  Inside the closed timelike curve segment occupied by the remaining one hundred fifty human races, disconnected from the cosmos, days passed. Aeneas convoked no councils, made no speeches, accepted no triumphs, saw no one.

  Alone, in his chamber, beneath the shifting lights of the ceiling aquarium, his thoughts circled each other like the last of the dirty water circling a bathtub drain.

  The enemy had concentrated on the highly-populated worlds, striking at the greatest civilian centers. These were acts of pure savagery, pure malice. Had the enemy here concentrated on military targets instead, they would probably have won the battle.

  The destruction of two gas giants had slain more people in one moment than had died in all the wars fought among all the nations, princes and tribes of history and prehistory combined. War, except for mutinies of comical futility, had been unknown under the reign of iron scepter of Lord Tellus.

  For the first time Aeneas understood the temptation of empire: with all men’s necks chained to one master, there was no freedom, but no war either.

  Except… (now Aeneas punctured a small hole in the transparent ceiling with beams from his scowling, savage eyes, and let the drizzle splash over his head and shoulders, cooling his hot brow)… except that war had come anyway, had it not? War from the stars. The promise of peace was an illusion. The bargain had not been kept. The chains must be shattered!

  The sheer hatred of the undead for the living was impossible to contemplate. Theirs were not merely the acts of a famished wolf loping after the last hare of winter. The staggering resources in ships and worlds, effort and energy spent to hunt down the last surviving organic life in the galaxy was beyond calculation. Surely it was far, far more than any energy a vampire would recover from their living bodies?

  He watched idly as the self repair circuits in the ceiling closed the holes his gaze had made, and now he raised his skin temperature to boil away the puddle in which he sat. Steam rose.

  What was truly behind the vampirism that had eaten a galaxy?

  No answers came.

  Eventually he emerged, donned the crown he had learned to loathe, and convoked the council.

  His relatives had not been idle. Two empty planets had been created out of contributions from the gas giants, small worlds with black seas and dusky atmospheres. These were placed in orbit as mementoes of the two dead worlds lost in combat, with mountains and hills carved like headstones for nations and individuals of whom no remnant remained to be buried.

  Meanwhile, the Dyson had been more thoroughly explored, and compartments and cubbyholes where smaller worlds and moons could be hidden during battle were prepared.

  More engines and weapons were repaired and installed on all planets. The smaller planets had been drilling and practicing sublightspeed maneuvers, training with their planetary disinertia fields and gravity engines.

  Other segments of the Dyson were terraformed, and families and clans and subspecies moved there in case more worlds died. Others were kept on the worlds, in case the Dyson died. Many billions remained in the buried cities far beneath the mantle, having learned to dread the sight of stars.

  The terraforming of the newer battleworlds was rushed to completion.

  Aeneas was impressed. His spirits lifted. For the first time in his life, mankind as a whole had a mission. The artificial races created by his relatives were more than pets, now, more than servants. They had a mission and a rightful place, and a unity of purpose that was thrilling to behold.

  Their destination was WR102, over eighteen thousand light years from Sol.

  This was a rare type called a Wolf-Rayet star, superhot giants on the verge of supernova. The vast sphere rotated at six hundred miles per second. Most of its immense output was in the ultraviolet, invisible to the human eye. It was huge. It was hot.

  WR102 was hot even by the standard of a Wolf-Rayet star. It was of the rare oxygen-sequence type, of which there were only four in Milky Way, five in galaxies beyond. Its stellar wind, streams of charged particles exploding continuously outward at three thousand miles per second, carried away per year three times the mass of the earth. (A small, even-tempered star like Sol lost several hundred million times less than this.) These high-density particle winds issuing from the ultrahot photosphere blew away the outer layers of the star, revealing a bare carbon-oxygen core. The ultraviolet radiation ignited fluorescence in the wind region: not just the star was burning. The space about it seemed to be on fire.

  It was also the hottest known star in space.

  Aeneas gave the order to sail. “The cautious approach has proved disastrous. We will emerge at the barycenter of the system, and destroy the star WR102 as our first act!”

  Those Lords of Creation entrusted to helm the battleworlds saluted him and vanished, each on his throne teleporting by space contortion to his own world or moon. Behind remained the Lords Pluto, Mars, and Mercury, and the Ladies Vesta and Ceres.

  Aeneas commanded the ensigns to sound general quarters throughout the Empire of Man. The militia and civilians of the various worlds assumed their battle-stations. The floating continents of the gas giants were grounded and secured. The planetary shields blazed up; the smaller worlds and moons were shepherded into thickly armored docks spaced along the equator of the Dyson, and the gas giants assumed their positions at the vertices of an imaginary a dodecahedron around it, their warp cores humming.

  Space flowed into existence around them. They emerged into the sublight continuum with the Tellurian Dyson entirely surrounding the star.

  In hindsight, it was perhaps the worst decision Aeneas could have made.

  It was like surrounding a bomb. Alarms screamed as all the four hundred thirty-two square lightminutes of the interior hull began to melt into liquid, sublimate into vapor, ignite into plasma.

  Like fountains spraying upward through rocks, or sunbeams piercing gaps in a cloud, beams from WR102 shot through the breeches in the Dyson hull. The jovian world Pallas was caught in one of these beams. The near hemisphere was scalded and megatons of atmosphere was superheated and flung into space. By good fortune, Lady Pallas, the only inhabitant of the world, was in the far hemisphere, inside her armored and shielded subsea asteroid, and survived the supersonic shockwave of the worldwide hurricanes.

  Smaller worldlets, Phobos, Miranda, Europa, and Titan were in one of the compartments in the Dyson hull, but they were also caught in such beams when the chambers were burned through. Their planetary shields were overloaded, their tiny, artificial atmospheres burned to nothing, their populations died, and their surfaces reduced to lava, and the lava vaporized.

  A near-miss shattered the compartment where Second Earth was closeted. The event was seen by hyperspatial periscope before the lightwave and shockwave struck. Second Earth and Second Mercury reacted by erecting their planetary disinertia fields. They were wafted gently aside rather than be smashed and fried. They fell out.

  Lord Deimos, in the fortress city aboard the Dyson, sent a message by tachyon mindlink: “Sire, the star is hotter than expected: some time in the last eighteen thousand years, it must have started its gamma burst. The shields we prepared are not holding. Do not let any worlds pass across an area where the hull is burned through! I will attempt to…” Then the signal was cut off.

  Aeneas looked up. Second Earth was now outside the Dyson, which cut off all light from the sun, but the fluorescence of expelled particles lit up the night sky like an aurora borealis. Against this backdrop of flame, his eyes could see streaks of light, as of countless meteors burning as they plunged through the upper atmosphere.

  He peered more deeply, bringing ever more instruments online. There were no planets in this system, no solid asteroids, no solid rocks. Instead he saw a cloud of which looked like a swarm of crimson comets, countless tens of thousands.

  It looked like a sea of pink icebergs with plumes reaching directly away from the mighty s
un in each direction. The mountains of scarlet ice were thickly packed, nor were they gathered in the plane of the ecliptic as the asteroid belt of the solar system. The iceberg cloud was evenly distributed in all directions, and the worlds of man, orbiting the Dyson, had already collided with countless numbers of them. Planetary shields repelled the larger comet heads of ice, but the smaller eluded deflection.

  The meteors in the upper atmosphere of Second Earth now winked out. Aeneas, suspicious, turned his powerful gaze there. He did not see tiny rocks being burned by friction into nothing. He saw wide icebergs of material, glowing cherry-red from atmospheric braking, shedding vast amounts of their substance in the form of superheated steam slow their rate of fall, and waft gently to the ground.

  The seas where they splashed down were suddenly filled with countless dead fish rising to the surface, and a third of the waters turned red as blood. If they fell into forest or gardens, it was a sandy desert before they lightly struck ground. If one fell near a village, the men, women and children were corpses even before their houses were flattened beneath the mountain-sized bulk.

  Then the steam in the upper atmosphere cooled, turned to liquid and fell to earth as raindrops. Where it fell, all life died, and the fountains and rivers turned to blood.

  These were not icebergs, but undead creatures like the one which had been so long buried under the glaciers of the planet Pluto. What looked like hills of ice or heads of comets were the frozen form of the liquid blood-mass forming the amoeboid bodies of the archvampires.

  The aurora borealis in the sky above now blazed, grew brighter, and turned blue. It looked, at first, like a Doppler effect, as if Second Earth were rushing into the fluorescent nebula surrounding WR102 at nearlightspeed. But at the same time, Aeneas saw the streaks of light of the countless meteors in the atmosphere accelerate, blurring into speeds too rapid to see. He understood now how the falling icebergs were slowing their fall. It was a timewarp effect.