Superluminary_The World Armada

by John C. Wright

  “Lord Saturn,” muttered Aeneas, “Where are you now?”

  Casting his eyesight wide, he saw the Dyson sphere horribly burning, severed hullplates, ultrathin material square lightseconds in area, breaking loose from the mighty hull and being propelled by solar wind outward from the dense, superhot star. It looked like a weird snow of white-hot metal falling upward from a red-hot ground. He also saw the entire system-wide cloud of archvampires descending toward the worlds of men also speeding up. Within their timewarps, they were taking hours or days to cross the interplanetary distances, but to the outside universe, it was done in a heartbeat.

  It was like being struck blind when the myriad eyes and instruments on many wavelengths feeding into his cortex through hyperspatial periscopes shut off, and only the eyes in his head stayed open. It was like having his right hand chopped off suddenly to lose the connection to the various servants and servominds under his command. Even the cheerful voice of his signet ring was silent. The mindlink was severed: all neuropsionic radiation was dampened.

  Somewhere, a warpcore armature was altering the fundamental physical constants to prevent various useful particles and waves from propagating through space.

  Aeneas opened his eyes. Heaven Lake had the iceberg-shaped space vampires floating on the surface, surrounded by dead fish. Limbs and tendrils, like trees on a hillside, were growing on their upper slopes. Eyes and microwave horns now sprouted from their crests and peaks, and many beaks, mouths, and trucks gave forth a dismal, roaring cry of triumph.

  The grass underfoot turned brown and crumbled into dust. The circle of trees shed all their leaves at once, a blizzard of bright autumn colors. Birds fell from the sky. Aeneas tightened his subcutaneous armor, and fought off a wave of dizziness, but the bioadmantium life cells encasing him resisted the vampiric force. He was weakened, but still alive.

  The monsters surged toward his island.

  Episode 13 The Absolute Weapon

  The first of the mountain-sized pyramids of undead flesh came to rest, grounded, not far from shore. It peeled off long strips of its substance, long and flat wormlike segments only the size of freight trains, which then grew centipede legs, and began to swim toward shore. Staring eyes and snarling maws of many sizes sprang up from their carapaces.

  Other icebergs were closing in from the other directions, surrounding the island, and similar monsters of undead flesh, serpentine or molluscoid, were peeling and dripping from their slopes and diving in the water.

  Aeneas stood. With him, seated in their thrones, were the Lords of Creation who had not been assigned to the helm of any battleworlds: Lord Pluto in his helm, Lord Mars unclad save for weapons, Lord Mercury with freckled face and chubby form of a small boy, Lady Vesta in white, Lady Ceres in green.

  Aeneas said, “I am cut off from all my instruments!” But he pointed his finger at the nearest of the giant undead centipedes, ionized the air between, and unloaded energy from his Sach’s organ, and the various biological dynamos hidden in his body. The created was blasted into bits, and the water surface carried the electrostatic charge to the centipedes nearby, who lost control of their limbs, writhed, jumped, and began smoldering.

  The bits, however, where they fell, simply grew legs and began scuttling forward again.

  He increased his muscle pressure and nerve firing rate, stooped, and grasped the dais on which his huge and heavy throne sat, heaved, and upended it. Below it was an empty shaft, straight down.

  “In here!” He shouted. “And how are you still alive?” For the death energy shed by the vampires had killed all the fish in the waters, killed the trees and grass in an instant, and plucked birds out of the sky.

  But now he saw that there was a circle of green grass still around the throne where Lady Ceres stood, with her arms around Lady Vesta. Lady Vesta was looking faint, and leaning on Lady Ceres, but she was not dead.

  By way of answer, Lady Ceres stepped rapidly toward the escape hatch bored in the earth. Where she walked, the green grass sprang up, angle deep in an instant, and hip deep in two, and flowers opened as rapidly as fireworks. “I carry reserves within my aura,” said Lady Ceres, “I can keep Marina alive, but I am rapidly losing the… I…”

  Lord Mars was smiling his terrible smile. As he stood, he lifted his hand to his head and pulled the flesh of his face away. Beneath was not a skull but the iron-black neutronium body he assumed in battle, hidden under a thin layer of human flesh that was flaking, shedding and falling off his body. He drew his sword. “The warp is not jamming my powers, and I do not need my ring to work the basics. I can kill these hills.” Then there were two of him, four, sixteen, ninety-six…

  The first dozen giant centipedes rose form the waves and struck planted their twisting, oozing leg-segments on the shore. Apparently radio waves were being blocked, because the mouths and maws like caves opening in the slopes of the translucent mountains wallowing in the sea roared out orders in a harsh, glottal language.

  The centipede monsters blurred and vanished from sight, as did the icebergs.

  Lord Mars said, “But I cannot kill what I cannot see! Lord Pluto, they know your tricks! Is there any way to cut through your invisibility?”

  Lord Pluto did not answer, except to shake his helmet back and forth.

  Aeneas shrugged the hand of the nearest Lord Mars off his shoulder, opened his mouth, a vomited a stream of oily flame in an arc along the shoreline. Beams of other energies came from his eyes and fingers, slicing left and right. Six of the monsters became visible as they were lacerated and burned. Squads of Lords Mars ran toward them, swords high.

  The Lord Mars next to Aeneas said, “Sire, stop showing off. Your bioweapons are toys. I can handle this.”

  Aeneas turned his head. Lady Ceres and Vesta leaped down the shaft. A Lord Mars was pushing a protesting Lord Mercury into the shaft. With a wail, the childlike figure fell in.

  Aeneas said, “Lord Pluto, can you turn us invisible to them?”

  “If he were here, no doubt he could,” came a voice that was not Lord Pluto’s. The dark figure doffed his helmet. Underneath was a dark haired man, grey at the temples, who looked like Lord Uranus, but without his mask. The flesh around his eyes, on his cheeks and forehead, normally hidden, were winking pinpoints like gems. Aeneas, seeing the neural flows leading to and from them, recognized these pinpoints as some form of sense-impression cybernetics. Here, finally, was the secret spy ray apparatus of Lord Uranus. He carried it on his face.

  “I have the art of seeing the unseen. Any interference with the information layer of the universe agitates the stars, and I developed a method of locating the agitation source. I can paint their locations for you, Lord Mars.”

  He held up his lantern. Where the beam touched, it left behind three-dimensional, vapory shadows of gray and dark gray. These outlines betrayed the shapes of rearing, many-legged centipede monsters. He played the beam across the waters. On the lake, vast pyramids of shade and darkness rose.

  Lord Mars said, “Go! You are sovereign! Your life is not yours to lose!”

  Lord Uranus donned Lord Pluto’s helmet, put his arm up (for Aeneas was much taller than he) to take the elbow of Aeneas, and jump into the shaft with him.

  They fell straight down for an astonishing distance.

  Aeneas called out over the noise of the wind, “Where is Lord Pluto?”

  Lord Uranus said, “Helming my world, George.”

  “He does not have the warp science!”

  Lord Uranus called back, “A duplicate of Lord Deimos, who used his father’s trick to clone himself, is there!”

  “So why are you here? Wearing his helmet?”

  “He insisted. He was aware of our plan to flush out the betrayer! This makes him our prime suspect.”

  Aeneas reflected that Lord Pluto might have been standing in the room with them, himself and Lords Mars and Uranus, when the plan was discussed.

  Aeneas shouted over the wind. “My unfreewill detector remains silent.” />
  “As does mine.”

  Aeneas said, “The Betrayer outsmarted you.”

  “Let us say, sire, that the traitor did not make the move I expected. This was him trying to flush me out.”

  “What? How?”

  Then the shaft infinitesimally slowly began to tilt. The surface was frictionless, and did not scrape them as they bumped against it.

  Lord Uranus said, “The vampires were led directly to the spot where you were. The vampires were told, with Lord Saturn dead, that we do not have timewarps to slow back down anyone sped up by the timewarp.”

  Aeneas said, “Grandfather is still alive. He must be here, among us, or among our servants. I was expecting him to appear and give someone the brain imprint for Lord Saturn’s secrets.”

  “So was the Betrayer,” Lord Uranus said. “Expecting him to appear, I mean. We have to get out of this timewarp we are in without Father’s help, or else he may be forced to show himself.”

  A mile lower down, the shaft was a forty five degree angle.

  “I thought you hated him. Grandfather. When did you start liking him?”

  Another mile passed. Now the shaft was a shallow slide.

  “I did not like nor dislike,” said Lord Uranus, “Passion clouds judgment. But when I found out all the worlds in the galaxy were undead, I finally understood him. I had judged him wrongly, all these years. He kept the secret of faster-than-light drive from mankind in order to protect us. Then he…” Lord Uranus had good reason to hide his face, because his expressions were broad, obvious, and easy to read. Aeneas could see the thunderstruck look on the face of his uncle.

  “What?”

  Now the shaft was flat or seemed to be. Actually, it was following the curvature of the globe. Because the surface was frictionless, their speed did not decrease from terminal velocity. More miles flew by.

  Uranus said, “He could have saved your life and erased your memory. Instead he gave you a power that forced us to make you Emperor. Why? Why now? Why this generation, this century, this decade? What was different?”

  Aeneas said, “The younger generation is grown. Every moon and asteroid in the solar system was terraformed. The Solar System was overcrowded. We were getting impatient for our heritage.”

  Uranus said, “And you were so impatient, sire, that you tried a violent revolution to arrest and overthrow us. Your rebellion against us failed before it started. Our revolution against him, however, succeeded. Or we were allowed to think so. Why? Why now…?” And his eyes grew wide with wonder.

  Aeneas said, “I see you figured it out. Didn’t you? What is it? Where is Lord Tellus? What was his plan?”

  The air in the frictionless shaft was now mingled with a gas that thickened about the them as they passed threw, slowing them. It was a chemical process, designed to operate even under warp conditions when inertialess or gravitational technology could not work.

  Lord Uranus did not answer the question.

  They came to rest in a bubbled of gas so thick it was a fluid, which slowly killed their immense forward motion. The heavy gas could be drawn into the lungs, albeit with discomfort, but the super oxygenated fluid was breathable. They swam to the zenith of the bubble and climbed out.

  Lord Mercury, Lady Ceres and Lady Vesta were in the atrium above, along with a squad of militiamen, armed with pikes and pistols. Emergency supplies, communication gear, a mess hall, and dormitory opened up to one side, and an arsenal stood to the other, as well as a fully automated hospital infirmary. Lord Mars, or one of him, climbed out of the bubble of thick air only a moment later. The trembling of the ground, and the groaning of the earth, told them the news that the escape shaft had collapsed.

  Lord Mars said, “You will have to get a new place.”

  Aeneas said, “You blew up Heaven Lake?”

  “More than that, sire. They left the matter orientation level of the universe open so they could rotate particles into antiparticles also, and make themselves immune to antimatter like I am.”

  “How much did you blow up? Korea? All of China? The whole Pacific?”

  “Everything on the surface. They were in the watertable, and there were a lot of them. I peeled the planet down to the mantle.”

  “There were cities on the surface!”

  Lord Mars shook his head. “Not after the enemy fell like rain. The entire solar system filled with the creatures. Thanks to their timewarp, they had all the time in the world to get here. In numbers enough to coat the planet. I did not have copies on any planet but this one, and even if I did, I have no way to see invisible enemies…”

  Lord Mercury said, “How did you fight them? They were using Lord Pluto’s trick.”

  Lord Mars said, “How are you still alive? How did you resist the death energy?”

  Mercury said, “I can step partly into nullspace, so that I seem to be here, but I am not.”

  Mars said, “Why did the enemy not use their warp to stop that power?”

  Mercury said, “Why didn’t they stop yours?”

  Lord Mars ignored him, and turned to Aeneas. “Sire, we are in desperate straits. We should assume the other worlds have been overrun, and that all that remains of mankind is us, and the people dwelling in underground cities beneath Second Earth. The warp is still blocking all electromagnetic communication, but if the time is passing in the outside universe much faster than in here, enemy reinforcements are arriving in such numbers…”

  The eyes of Aeneas suddenly blazed. He could see views from nearby worlds, including an image of the hideous, featureless, scarlet ball of magma which now was Second Earth. No image came from the surface of Second Earth. None of his instruments there had survived.

  The rings on their fingers suddenly lit up, and the weapons of the militia men chimed and the gunbrains crisply reported that they had re-established space contortion links to the accelerators, cannons, and arsenals.

  Lord Deimos appeared in the chamber, first as a projected image, and, a moment later, in person. “The Dyson is repaired, WR102 has been collapsed into our core singularity, and we are in the warpchannel to the Peony Star. Your planet, which was most thickly covered with vampire masses, was the last to emerge from the time warp when it broke. George was first. We’ve been out for a month.”

  Mercury said, “How did you break the time warp?”

  Deimos said, “Lord Pluto was with me, and he…”

  Aeneas interrupted, “Don’t answer that. Tell me first why we are not dead.”

  Deimos said, “Sire, the enemy saved us. The time warp which slowed us also slowed the rate of the gamma burst of WR102. The burning slowed to a standstill. We had time to make the needed repairs and install shielding before the radiation from the star resumed its normal rate of…”

  “What about the enemy troops?” said Aeneas. “They shut off all our weapons, and had us outnumbered!”

  “No, sire. I shut off everything, theirs and ours, but left stratonics from the matter orientation layer of the universe alone. This allowed the militia to use their weapons, armor, and self duplication. All the foe had was their life-absorption fields, which could not penetrate the neutral-matter armor. The militia multiplied itself until it had the advantage.”

  Aeneas looked at Lord Mars in astonished disbelief. “You trusted the militia with your secrets? Your terrible, absolute, infinite weapons?”

  Lord Deimos stood with head high and his spine stiff. “No, sire. I did. Are they not free men?”

  Episode 14 Extinction of the X-Ray Star

  The Peony Star lies near the Galactic Core, in the midst of the immense nebula from which it took its name and which, by means of fierce stellar winds and miniature supernova eruptions, it created. It was one of the three most luminous stars in the galaxy, over three million times the brightness of Sol. It was also unstable, on the brink of turning into a supernova.

  The Tellurian World Armada emerged into sublight space one lightyear away, and examined the system. It had not one, but several conce
ntric Dyson Spheres, nested one within the other like Russian dolls, and multiple armatures of warpcores surrounding the whole, plus additional ringworlds to act as antennae, emitters, and muzzles for the discharges of the ultrabright star to act as weapons. The number of jovians and superjovians seen in the system, circling the armor-plated star at immense distances, was over a thousand.

  Alarms rang in the ears of Aeneas, brooding darkly on his black throne. The battle world King of the Wood was lost with all hands and civilian passengers. The warpchannel had been strained beyond capacity. As a result, the globe had not emerged properly into normal space, so that it was skew to several frames of reference, and with different fundamental physical constants operating in different hemispheres. The difference between the gravitational stresses, and the difference in the time rate, and the difference between the mass of atomic particles between the various parts of the globe had simply torn the world to bits. Lord Dionysus, son of Vesta, was also dead, killed instantaneously, and his wife and children.

  Other worlds, farther from the spacequake, suffered damage and saw some deaths, but survived.

  The image of Lord Deimos, son of Mars, appeared at the elbow of Aeneas. Aeneas was seated on uppermost brink of the cone of a volcano which rose from the blasted, burned, and radioactive craterscape which had once been the Heaven Lake region of the Korean Peninsula of Second Earth.

  Lord Deimos did not come in person, of course. His body was not bizarrely modified after the fashion of Aeneas, and he could not breathe radioactive air, nor ignore the heat and dust and poisons clogging the thin atmosphere of the newly-oceanless world. The globe was still lopsided from the stresses of its last battle, and was settling back into a spherical shape by means of periodic superquakes. At the moment, the volcano peak was high in the thin atmosphere. Lord Deimos could not see what Aeneas was staring at. He had his ring ask the ring of Aeneas.

  The servant mind politely showed him a picture of what Aeneas saw. Many undertaker machines in the distance were delicately wading through piles of skeletons heaped amid the ruins. The spidery mechanisms were gingerly recovering the bones and skulls one by one for gene-identification. Other machines were gathering remnants of bodies together in coffins for eventual burial.