Superluminary

by perpetrator

  SUPERLUMINARY

  or

  The Last Days of the Lords of Creation

  by

  John C Wright

  Copyright

  Superluminary or The Last Days of the Lords of Creation

  by John C. Wright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by John C. Wright

  All rights reserved

  Version 1.0

  Contents

  Episode 01 - Assassin in Everest

  Episode 02 - World of Death

  Episode 03 - The Dark Tower

  Episode 04 - The Technology of Tyranny

  Episode 05 - The Many Murders of the Mad Emperor

  Episode 06 - Deathstorm

  Episode 07 - Moon of Murder

  Episode 08 - Mistress of Dreams and Delirium

  Episode 09 - The Battle in the Garden of Worlds

  Episode 10 - The Madness of Tellus

  Episode 11 - The Abomination of Desolation

  Episode 12 - Defusing the Supernova

  Episode 13 - Ripping the Fabric of Reality

  Episode 14 - Strange Fires of Strange Suns

  Episode 15 - Blind Jump

  Episode 16 - The Great Eye of Zeta Herculis

  Episode 17 - Graveyard World

  Episode 18 - The Deadly Light of a Living Star

  Episode 19 - The Surrender of Saturn

  Episode 20 - The Feast of Vampires

  Episode 21 - The Black Ship

  Episode 22 - Teradeath

  Episode 23 - Hatred for All Life

  Episode 24 - The Three Headed Throne

  Episode 25 - The Lady of Love

  Episode 26 - The Extinction of Sol

  Episode 27 - The Overlord of Unlife

  Episode 28 - The Unholy Light of Ara A

  Episode 29 - War Dysons

  Episode 30 - Down A Dragon Throat

  Episode 31 - Event Horizon

  Episode 32 - Matter of War

  Episode 33 - Obliteration of Man

  Episode 34 - Second Earth

  Episode 35 - The Great Void

  Episode 36 - Outside of Time

  Episode 37 - Uneasy Lies the Head

  Episode 38 - War Plans

  Episode 39 - Star Pirates of Canopus

  Episode 40 - Line of Battleworlds

  Episode 41 - Escape to Sagittarius

  Episode 42 - The Deadly Double Star

  Episode 43 - Sakurai’s Object

  Episode 44 - The World-Wreckers of KW Sagittarii

  Episode 45 - The Archvampires of Space

  Episode 46 - The Absolute Weapon

  Episode 47 - Extinction of the X-Ray Star

  Episode 48 - Attack at the Master Armature

  Episode 49 - The Battle of the Blue Hypergiant

  Episode 50 - My Lord and Monster

  Episode 51 - The Betrayer Unmasked

  Episode 52 - First Lord of Creation

  Episode 53 - Death of the Undead

  Episode 54 - Necropolis of Stars

  Episode 55 - The Republic of Creation

  1. Assassin in Everest

  Aeneas Tell of House of Tell, youngest of the Lords of Creation, was twenty-one when he was assassinated for the first time.

  His secondary brain came awake while his primary brain was still foggy with strange dreams. Alert to danger, the secondary brain stopped the nerve pulses from the primary brain which otherwise would have let him groan and open his eyes, which would have precipitated the nervous killer's attack.

  But his primary brain had been in the delta brainwave stage of sleep, a deep and dreamless slumber. There was no sound, no light, no disturbance. What had broken his sleep? A memory, like an echo, of terrible multiple toothaches left a metallic taste in his mouth.

  He had been dreaming about his insane grandfather, the Emperor. The old man had been telling him about the secrets of the universe... then a stinging pain in his teeth had jarred him awake. But how could Aeneas remember a dream when he had not been in the desynchronous brainwave state in which dreaming was possible?

  Aeneas, eyes still closed, not daring to move, increased the firing rate of his auditory nerves. He was laying on the nongravity cushion of his opulent four-poster bed. The neverending whisper of the high-altitude winds of Mount Everest beyond the bubble of weather-controlled air was now loud to him.

  On these upper peaks his family had erected the proud imperial palace-city of Ultrapolis, whose towers and domes were impregnable behind concentric force-shells and thought-screens. None of the artificial or bio-modified races of the nine worlds, fifty worldlets, and one hundred eighty moons of the Solar System could bring any realistic threat to bear on these defenses, not while the twelve ranking members of the House of Tell, the so-called Lords of Creation, retained control of the stratonic supertechnology known only to them.

  But betrayal from within was another matter.

  The quiet hiss of the protective screen the bedposts projected around the bed was gone. He could not hear the heartbeats of his two bodyguards posted in the anteroom of his apartments. Instead he heard one heartbeat, louder and faster than was possible for an unmodified human being, of the assassin.

  As the youngest member of the Family, he had been stuffed into the oldest wing of the oldest palace, and no other guards were within shouting distance.

  There was no sound of footsteps on the nightingale wood floor of his bedchamber, and so for a moment Aeneas had a false sense of hope. But the sound of the racing heart was close at hand.

  The killer was in the room with him.

  Then he felt a waft of intense cold radiating from the cells of the man's body. The assassin was near the bed, coming closer, bending over him.

  Aeneas reflexively focused a thought to his signet ring, asking alarms silently to ring and the armaments hidden in the walls to slay the intruder. But there was no response. The electrotelepathic circuit was blocked.

  The nanoscopic thought-broadcast cells his mother had implanted in the bones of his skull likewise were blocked when he tried to send needle-thin neuropsionic signals to receivers hidden in the ceiling.

  A sharp, stabbing pain reappeared in his lower left molar, and then vanished. And then an upper incisor throbbed with a pain that vanished, and then a bicuspid. It was a basic proprioception code. It read: Intruder in disinertia armor ... negative-vitality field integument ... contortion node detected ...

  Of course. The killer was wearing armor that contorted the fabric of space a few inches in each direction around himself and lowered his inertia. It would prevent ordinary weapons, bullets or monomolecular blades, from imparting kinetic energy to him to do damage. Hence he could glide across the floor without imparting any pressure to the special floorboards biogineered to sound off when they felt an unfamiliar footstep.

  The contortion node was a teleportation path for the assassin's escape.

  Modified electroneural ganglia beneath the killer's skin — impossible for normal antiweapon sensors to detect — had erected a life-energy absorption cocoon. Hence the killer had silently drained Aeneas' two bodyguards of their life and added it to his own, increasing his neural speed and muscle pressure. It was a vampire field, a modification illegal to all but the highest ranking and most trusted servants of the Lords. And a normal man would be killed at a touch.

  Aeneas was no normal man. From hidden retaining-cells in his body he released stored life-energy charges into body, increasing his nerve-muscle potential beyond what a vampire energized with only two men's vitality could match.

  Faster than a
striking snake and stronger than a rhino, Aeneas flung up the bedsheet and drove his fist into the man's chest. It was a blow that would have cracked metal and broken ribs had it landed.

  But the disinertia armor granted the man's body no tendency, when at rest, to stay at rest. The force of the blow touched him, and his velocity instantaneously equaled that of the moving fist. Aeneas threw a punch twice as hard as that of a prizefighter. The inertia-free man was flung at one hundred miles an hour into the corner of the ceiling on the far side of the chamber. But, upon striking the wall, the attacker came to an instantaneous halt, without any deceleration or hurt.

  Aeneas, on the other hand, still had the inertia of any ordinary body, and while he had, for one moment, the strength of a rhinoceros, he lacked the mass. The recoil of the punch flung him off the bed. He fell between the mahogany bed and the golden wall. He came to his knees. The floorboards sang with his every motion.

  The other man fell, inertialess but not weightless. Gravity yanked: but the moment his toe touched the rug near the fireplace, his downward motion ceased instantly, and his feet did not bend the fibers.

  Aeneas adjusted his eyes to night-vision. The man had face and hands white as marble and cold as ice, a side-effect of the vampire field. He was not wearing his helmet or gauntlets. This allowed the death energies to emerge from his palms and fingers, mouth and eyes. The hair of his head had grown and was growing under the impact of the absorbed vital essence, and was standing and swaying as if under variable electrostatic charges.

  "It's you!" Aeneas shouted.

  It was Thoon, the bold and charismatic leader of the Antimonarchy resistance.

  Aeneas laughed in relief.

  The toothache being produced by an induction beam his signet ring was shining like an invisible searchlight of nerve-exasperating energy was not done spelling out its initial message.

  Neuropsionic interference field epicenter aerodrome ... waveform type ...

  Aeneas gritted his teeth, halting their painful vibration. He knew the waveform of the interference transmitter he had smuggled into the mountaintop airfield in his private aerospace limousine, and covertly connected to the air traffic systems. He had built the thing himself through his ring, using plans gleaned from his mother's extensive and secret library of neuropsionic techniques and mechanisms.

  "What are you doing here?" Aeneas said. "That was not the plan."

  Thoon said, "Your plan was to jam all the neural frequencies so that your Uncles and Aunts, the so-called Lord of Creation, could not mindspeak to their signet rings or other thought-receivers. I am sure you are wishing, about now, your precious rings could hear and react to voice command? For this one hour, the mighty lords are helpless! Robbed of their weapons and servants, they could be caught and killed!"

  Aeneas said, "Arrested and tried, not killed."

  "Tried by whom? The world who worships them? A foolish plan! But my plan was to sabotage the thought-screen around this mountain, so that, as soon as I have on my finger that library of secrets you carry on yours, I can transmit it to my waiting compatriots, Otus and Agrios."

  Aeneas said, "And our agreement?"

  "You control a technology so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic. I am merely a human. When I was a child, only Earth was habitable, or inhabited. Your family re-engineered planets and moons from Mercury to Neptune, and you each have a different personal species of synthetic men to serve you! How can a bargain between a man and a god be valid?"

  "I am no god. And you are no man. Real men keep their oaths! The only way to overthrow the dominion of the Lord of Creation over the solar system was to destroy their monopoly on the supertechnology! Destroy, not steal!"

  Thoon said, "Fool! Otus, Agrios and I will join the Lords of Creation! Who burns down a palace he can live in? Who frees slaves he can make his own?"

  With superhuman strength, Thoon jumped up and kicked off the fireplace mantle behind him. He soared across the room. It took no energy to accelerate his mass immediately to top speed.

  Thoon's outstretched hand reached for Aeneas. Aeneas, puzzled, punched Thoon. Aeneas felt no impact on his knuckles, but the body of Thoon had no tendency to stay in motion, and so he soared to the far side of the room again.

  A sensation of cold stabbed Aeneas's hand. The skin of his knuckles was black as if with frostbite. Now he understood. Thoon was not trying to punch, merely to get near. Aeneas closed tightly the pangolin scales of his subcutaneous living armor. The scales were leaves of a symbiotic life made of bioadmantium, a life-form based on a superdense alloy rather than on hydrogen and carbon. Bioadmantium-based life occupied a different band of the life energy spectrum than carbon-based life, and so acted as an insulation against the vampire field. It was not life-tight, however. The pliant metal scales had tiny ports or gaps to interconnect his inner and outer circulatory and nervous systems.

  Thoon gaped in surprise. "How are you still alive? I touched you! You should be dead!"

  Aeneas threw back his head and roared with pride, "I am a Lord of Creation! All the techniques of the biotechnology are mine! My grandfather made clouds rain manna, made wastelands bloom as gardens, created mermaids and dinosaurs! Those are as nothing! You could not have entered this palace without my help. How do you plan to escape?"

  Thoon laughed. "Me? I am carrying a contortion pearl. When it ignites the space-contortion to carry me out of here, the blast will randomize every atom in this room! No one will know I took your signet from your dead body, with all its wondrous secrets! Oh, I know it is attuned to your brain. So I will take that as well. Then, once you are undead, a necrorobotic zombie...?" He laughed again. "So, how do you plan to escape?"

  "Where did you get a contortion pearl? No one outside the family uses our method of teleporting by Schrodinger quantum-entangled wave. Who is helping you?"

  Thoon said, "Stavros and Dmitripolous! They are helping me! Come in, boys!"

  Aeneas scowled. Those were the names of bodyguards. It was sad, but he could not recall if these men had been married, or had families. A twinge of guilt stabbed him. Aeneas wondered if he were just as corrupted by power as his uncles.

  At that moment, the dead bodies of Stavros and Dmitripolous, pale-faced and empty-eyed, bloodless as marble statues, came walking through the door. Their motions were fluid and not stiff. It was eerie to see how smooth and graceful they were, now that they were no longer alive. There was no mark on them, no wound, for they had been killed by life absorption. Hence their brains and nervous systems were intact, and could move muscles, albeit not feel pain. The echoes and residue of their thoughts and memories were in them. Each one still knew how to activate, and raise and aim his many-barreled sidearm.

  Thoon said, "Kill him! But don't hit him in the head! I want his brain!"

  2. World of Death

  As the undead guards opened fire, Aeneas reached down and upended the massive mahogany bed.

  The thousand-pound, twelve foot long oblong of wood and metal fell on its side with a boom, blocking the view of the undead guards. Bullets and beams sliced and blasted and burned through the bottom of the bed. Aeneas hugged the floor. Fire passed over his head.

  Toothpain flickered through the mouth of Aeneas: Second contortion node detected ... location is ...

  It was on Thoon’s person. Aeneas was thunderstruck. Second node? If his signet only now penetrated the vampire field to detect the space contortion pearl Thoon carried, that meant the first pearl detected was not Thoon’s. It must be elsewhere in the chamber. Perhaps it had been hidden in here when his grandfather had first built this wing, years before ...

  Aeneas knew from the chiming of the nightingale floor where the walking corpses were. He flooded his muscles with a second stored charge of life-energy. In the resulting burst of hysterical strength, he threw the huge bed across the chamber.

  One undead guard was crushed like a bug between bed and wall. His broken limbs writhed weakly. His eyes were dead, but continued to glar
e.

  Aeneas had echolocation receptors in his skull which could act, on a small scale, much like a geophone. Hence, the vibrations from the impact showed him where a cavity behind the wall was hidden. There was no time to puzzle out whatever secret switch his grandfather had designed to open the hidden strongbox. Aeneas plunged his hand through the ornate metal of the wall and ripped it aside.

  The second guard had dodged the thrown bed. He now fired. His weapon roared and blazed, burning the human skin from the pangolin scales of living metal Aeneas wore beneath.

  There! Sitting in the empty strongbox, glowing like a luminous gem of pure night, was the black pearl of an unstable space contortion node. A black node was one-use, and very dangerous. It would destroy any material object caught at the edge of its radius of action.

  Aeneas lunged for it.

  Thoon saw the black and deadly little sphere, and cried out. “Kill him!”

  The second undead guard focused his fire against Aeneas’ neck. Aeneas’ armor was thinnest here: his skull exploded. Blood and brain matter splashed into the air, burning.

  But his fingers closed on the pearl and his thumbnail broke the surface field, activating it. His hand and then his arm turned red, shrank to wire thinness, and passed into and beneath the pearl’s surface. The unstable surface ballooned outward, filled the chamber.

  Spacetime contorted, and Aeneas vanished. The atoms of his body were translated perfectly into virtual particles with no defined location.

  The other atoms, farther from the contortion, were not so fortunate, and were translated imperfectly. Atoms in every molecule for two yards in each direction were dislodge from their chemical bonds, and electrons from their atoms, releasing heat, radiation, ionic discharges, and high energy particles. The room was like the inside of a kiln and like the inside of a supercollider.

  A ball of hellish fire exploded outward through the armored walls of the palace, and the screaming, thin winds and high-altitude snow swirled into the blasted, hollow sphere of baked ash that had been the rich apartments of Aeneas.