Superluminary

by perpetrator

  He suffered his third and greatest shock when he saw that these were dead bodies, countless populations of them, each one inside an oblong of ice. Larger icebergs contained families or clans or multitudes, jammed haphazardly under the surfaces.

  The numbers were incomprehensible. The screen told him there were one hundred quadrillion people encompassed within the arc of his current view alone, and that was not the whole of even one of the three rings.

  They were clearly human bodies, despite being here in a foreign solar system. There were minor variations of facial features, in size, or position or number of limbs. Some had faces more apelike or baboonish, or extra limbs, wings or horns. Here were skins and hair of every color, including some spotted like leopards or striped like zebra. Some were gigantic, others were dwarfish, but all were human. Impossibly, absurdly, inexplicably human.

  “I am not hallucinating, am I?”

  Not that I can see, sir. All your neurological activity is within normal parameters.

  All were nude. A spidery webwork of gossamer fiber radiating from each head had also been embedded in the ice. The most microscopic trickle of death-energy was trickling along each fiber from one skull to its near neighbors. It was only small enough to keep the circuit open. Capillaries, conduits and streams of death-energy were ebbing and flowing slowly up and down the axis of each ring.

  The systemwide warpcore was powered by death energy.

  “Is everyone here dead?” Aeneas said aloud. He brought the aperture closer to the endless river of icebound corpses.

  As if they had heard him, all the eyes of the hundreds of dead embraced within the view snapped open, and turned toward him, staring out of the analytical screen.

  A heavy hand fell upon his shoulder, and a voice behind him spoke. “They are not dead.”

  He jumped out of his chair.

  “They sense your eye on them. Turn it off.”

  Behind Aeneas was Lord Pluto, the one lens glinting on the brow of his dark and featureless helm. His armored body was hidden beneath the folds of his night-dark mantle. His metal boots and were visible below the lower hem.

  Behind him, her head no higher than her uncle’s shoulder, was Lady Luna. She wore a skintight pressure suit of silver, black and green, with gloves of white. Her coppery red hair was braided tight and caught into a snood. Her breathing hood was folded back between her shoulderblades. Her coronet was set with thought projection and thought reception ports tuned to the dream-brainwave band of the mental energy spectrum. She waved her white-gloved hand, smiling shyly.

  The analytical screen overhead went dark.

  Aeneas looked at them both in astonishment. “How long have you been here...?” He realized that they must have been watching when he thought he was unobserved for quite some time. All his preparations to chop dangerous parts of the asteroid away from the main mass had been completed months ago.

  But he looked at Lady Luna with even more astonishment. “Why are you here?” he asked. “You’re the one who did this to me! And no one designs spaceboots with high heels! And is that a bow in your hair?”

  She scowled. But it was Lord Pluto who spoke, “Lady Luna forced me to come.”

  Aeneas was speechless. His capacity for astonishment had been exceeded. “She... forced you? You?”

  “I dreamed something I should not have.” Lord Pluto said dourly.

  Aeneas stared at Lady Luna, who shrugged and looked both flattered and flustered. It was an expression a cute schoolgirl would wear rather than a cold and ruthless sovereign of the highest rank in the Imperial family. But anyone who could coerce Lord Pluto was no one to be trifled with.

  Lord Pluto continued in a dry voice: “It is fortunate for you that she did. I have placed negative information broadcasters on the cardinal surfaces of the asteroid. I had meant to turn the whole asteroid invisible, you, your captors, and all. By good happenstance, this saved you from enemy observation. Heretofore.”

  A gush of questions rushed out of Aeneas. “How can you know what type of sensors these creatures might use? Why do you call them an enemy? An undiscovered race of utterly alien beings could have no quarrel with us! And ... who? Who is the enemy? Everyone here is dead!”

  “To answer your questions in order—” came the voice from Pluto’s helmet. “First, the stratonic superscience father gave me does not block or redirect the waves carrying sense impressions. The visual information is removed from the information stratum of the universe itself, below the level of matter and energy phenomena. It does not matter what form of sensor is used: the information will not be carried. Second, they are enemies of all that lives. We are their natural prey. Third, they are necroforms, existing in the shadow condition. Their cellular motions mock organic life, but are not life. This is an empire of vampires.”

  Aeneas said, “Are you saying you remove the visual information from the cortex of the viewer? Even my mother could not do that, not to a crowd.”

  “Nothing like that,” said Lord Pluto impassively. “There are levels more fundamental than the mental or physical. Human science has barely scratched the surface of the enigma called the universe. The Forerunners penetrated to the core.”

  “Why should I believe you? You want me dead!”

  Lord Pluto said, “My words fit the available evidence. Your trespass onto my world’s secrets is a moot point. Your death now would be counterproductive.”

  Aeneas looked up. “How did you turn off my analytical screen?”

  Forgive the presumption, sir, said his signet ring, speaking aloud through an annunciator. I did that. It seemed wise to assume the danger real until you had time to assess.

  Lady Luna said, “Wise indeed. The necroform horde detected your spy ray.”

  Aeneas said, “Not a spy ray: I was using a gravity lens to feed photons into a topologically linear timelike curve segment....”

  He saw the blank look on her face.

  “... It is a periscope I can place anywhere within a light-hour radius.”

  Lady Luna smiled. “Whatever. The lens of your periscope is beyond the reach of Lord Pluto’s cloak of invisibility. They saw it.”

  Aeneas said, “How do you know?”

  She held up her ring. “Even though they are dead, the subconscious parts of their minds are still active. It seems to be part of a general command and control circuit. The vampires may be unaware of who is commanding them. I can show you, but you would have to trust me, and form a mindlink through our rings.”

  “And why should I trust the girl who sicced the family on me?”

  Her eye flashed like green fire. “I was trying to save your life. If you shared the secret of the Final Science with the family, no one would be in any hurry to kill you.”

  Aeneas said, “Did you hear what Jupiter, Uranus, and Saturn agreed? They would rather nobody have the secret than let any brother have it.”

  She said, “I know that now. I hope you are honest enough to admit that it was worth the risk. Because now there is only plan B.”

  “Easy enough for you to risk my life.” Aeneas said sourly, “What’s plan B?”

  She said, “Crown you Emperor.”

  He said sarcastically, “Time to flatter me and fawn on me, since I am the next rising power, is that it?”

  She sighed a sigh of disgust, and held up her ring. “No, time for you to thank me. This is now the third time I’ve saved you. I can hear the vampire dreams. Take a listen.”

  Aeneas touched his ring to hers. There was a flood of preverbal thought, roaring raw images without words.

  Aeneas saw, and heard, and felt a dark deluge of infinite hunger and endless pain.

  Then, suddenly, a sharp message came through the dream-minds. It was a command voice speaking into an unconscious level where no one could disobey: AN INTRUDER DRAWS POWER FROM THE GRAVITIC GRADIENT. DIRECT ALL AVAILABLE DEATH-ENERGY THROUGH THE SYSTEMWIDE WARPCORE TO THE FOLLOWING LOCATION...

  Since the communication was directly thought-to-tho
ught, Aeneas did not need to puzzle out their map system. It was pointed at him. His gravity-differential turbine, like his aperture lens, had reached beyond what Lord Pluto could protect.

  The solar system sized rings instantaneously, without any acceleration or resistance from inertia, were rotating at lightspeed. The hundreds of other warpcores in the planetary cloud fed the unseen singularity at the core of the star system. From this core, a beam containing the death-energy of quintillions of vampires materialized instantly, faster than lightspeed, and struck with unimaginable, irresistible force.

  15. Blind Jump

  There was power enough for one interstellar spacewarp, but no time perform any navigational polydimensional topology calculations: Asteroid Talos vanished into an arc segment of a closed timelike curve in tesseract space, outside three dimensional timespace.

  The analytical screen was as alarmed as Aeneas to overhear the necroforms issue their execution order. Of its own accord, the screen activated, and recorded the range and vector of the incoming attack.

  The beam was one light-second in radius, so it would have filled the circle described by the Moon’s orbit about the Earth. Moving faster than the speed of light, it reached five light-hours, roughly the distance from Sol to Pluto. Any living thing, including viruses and growing crystals, caught in that beam would have been instantly destroyed.

  So much energy was released that even nonliving matter would have been affected. The beam would have disintegrated a body the size of Earth. A body the size of Jupiter would have had its upper and lower layers of atmosphere and hydrosphere blown away into space, and the remaining core been ionized. It was overkill on a massive scale.

  But, fast as it was, Talos was faster. Aeneas, like all in his family, was a frequent target of assassination, and had artificial intelligences, whose reactions were far faster than any biological reflex, standing by at all times. The signet ring of Aeneas, reading the intent beginning to form in the mind of Aeneas to risk a blind jump through the tesseract, had carried out the order before Aeneas could think it.

  Because the screen was open, Aeneas, Lady Luna, and Lord Pluto saw the actual moment of passage through the spacewarp: the stars and worlds in the view turned red and then black and fled away from each other and from the viewpoint, leaving them alone in a barren universe.

  Then the universe solidified, and a hollow sphere of rock appeared around them. It was not at first clear what this sphere of rock meant, but Lord Pluto pointed at certain metal ports, antennae, and docking rings, and said these were the surface features of Talos. It looked like their own asteroid but turned inside out: its equator was their celestial equator, its north pole was overhead and its south pole underfoot.

  As if they were inside a rubber balloon made of rock that suddenly expanded, the walls of the universe moved away at high speed, turning red, then dark red, and then going invisible when the rate of expansion surpassed lightspeed. For another instant they were in a dark and bare universe, and then all directions were opaque with white energy that rushed toward them, but which turned transparent and resolved itself into scattered bright blue stars. The stars came together and dimmed, and then a normal night sky was around them.

  Aeneas did not recognize any of the constellations. The analytical screen, however, was able to match the spectrographic fingerprints of certain brighter stars in the view: Betelgeuse, Sirius, Vega. The stars Rasalhauge and Kornephoros were brighter than when seen from Earth. The three stars of Orion’s belt, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, were a shallow triangle rather than a line.

  But the spectrograph for double stars of this system was not in any almanac. It should have been a star visible from Earth, with it characteristics known and recorded. It was not.

  “We are within thirty-five to fifty lightyears of Sol,” Aeneas announced after scrutinizing the astronomical data for some time. “The bad news is that I do not have an exact location. This spectrographic fingerprints for these two stars appear in no almanac. The worse news is that I cannot return us to Sol with this equipment. It is roughly three or five times outside my operational range.”

  Lady Luna had prevailed upon servant mechanisms to provide her a chair, not to mention a small luncheon of fruit, salad, venison, and red wine. She sipped the wine from a diamond cup.

  Lord Pluto neither moved nor spoke, and may have turned off his own nervous system, since he stood without fidgeting.

  Luna said, “By ‘this equipment’ you mean the warpcore it took a highly advanced technological civilization inhabiting every world and moon of the Solar System over a year of intense effort to prepare, right? So all we have to is, what? Find a civilization roughly three to five times more advanced than the Empire of Man? What is the good news?”

  Aeneas said, “We are smack in the middle of a binary system whose suns are roughly the same size. A subgiant yellow sun twice as big as and six times brighter than Sol; its companion is an orange-red main sequence star a hair smaller than Sol and half as bright. Because of this, the gravitation barycenter is not underneath the surface of a sun, but nicely placed about seven AU’s from either star.” Seven astronomical units was smaller than Saturn’s distance from Sol, but larger than Jupiter’s. “It might be a trinary system, because that subgiant star is occluding our view of another star-sized gravity source beyond it.”

  “Why is that good news?”

  Aeneas answered, “Because I just found out that this kind of longrange jump lands you in the center of gravity of the target solar system. If this had been a single star system like Sol, we’d have unwarped out of folded space directly into in the middle of a sun. Since about half the star systems in the galaxy are single-star, we just took a fifty-fifty life-or-death gamble without knowing the stakes or the odds. Lucky us. We won the coin toss. Lord Pluto, who the hell were those people, those things, we just ran from?”

  Lord Pluto tilted the lens of his blank helmet toward Aeneas. “I have no idea. How would I know?”

  “You knew they were enemies!”

  Lord Pluto said, “Naturally, we arrived in the Alpha Centauri system with you and knew no more about life outside our solar system than you. The only difference is that my instruments detected the levels of death-energy filling the entire volume of the star system, so I knew no organic life was present, whereas Lady Luna was aware that all the minds of the system were interlinked and formed one uninterrupted mass subconscious mind... the content and character of that mind you saw yourself.”

  Aeneas said, “And you didn’t warn me?”

  “As soon as it became clear your activities might attract their attention, I made myself visible to you. Since we parted on doubtful terms, I thought it best to prove my good intentions by waiting until you found yourself in need.”

  “Your hesitation almost destroyed us.”

  “Because I did not understand the implications of your technology. I did not know your gravity differential turbine could be detected outside my negative information range. Our family system of not sharing the stratonic sciences has proven insufficient.”

  Aeneas said, “And somehow you knew they would attack without warning. How?”

  It was Lady Luna who answered. “Other predator species suffer a die-back if they over-consume their prey, or outgrow their food source. Not vampires. As long as there is any organic life-energy to consume, they have no need not to multiply. The Alpha Centauri system civilization must have consumed all local life millennia ago. And been suffering agonies of starvation since then.”

  “Why did they look like people? Human biology is so exactly adapted to the environment of Earth, we could not possibly have evolved anywhere else.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Lady Luna peopled the Moon with humans and other primates, as well as hounds and harts and various game animals. The relation of species in that case was a product of engineering, not evolution.”

  “Are you saying Earth was created artificially?”

  “Perhaps only the Cenozoic ecology is arti
ficial, once the Cretaceous Extinction cleared dinosaurs out of the way.”

  Luna said, “If earthlife is designed, the Forerunners do not look like us: we look like them.”

  Aeneas said, “Were those the Forerunners?”

  Lady Luna said, “Unlikely. Subconscious minds like those we saw are incapable of speculation or imagination.”

  “They have warptech.”

  Lady Luna said, “And their dreamtech network was bigger than anything I could dream up. But wherever they got it, they did not invent it.”

  Lord Pluto said in his calm, undisturbed voice, “It disturbs me that the Space Vampires have warptech. How far did they spread?”

  Aeneas said, “We had better hope they are not here, because we need native materials and help.”

  He gazed at the screen. “Odd. This star system also has planets in the hundreds, not eight or nine. I wonder if that is a commonplace feature of multiple star systems. We may never know. The trove of Forerunner science Grandfather found did not include the answer to that question. And human science has since lost all curiosity.”

  Nearly all the worlds had some trace of cities or roadways under oceans of liquid or glaciers of solid nitrogen. This system had been civilized when the orange sun had been hotter, geological ages ago.

  Only one small planet was close enough to the subgiant sun to have water. A single ocean formed the southern pole. The rest of the globe was one supercontinent entirely crisscrossed with a web of canals and reservoirs. A single vast mountain rose from the north pole like the horn of a unicorn, reaching above the atmosphere.

  It was surrounded by six large, close moons, whose shadows coated part or all of the small globe every few hours at irregular intervals.

  It would have taken minutes to drop space contortion pearls to the likely locations on the surface and then teleport down. Instead, Aeneas equipped the asteroid with gravity-drivers, disinertia fields, impellers, and all else needed to transform the mountain into an interplanetary vessel able to land. He was unwilling to leave the warpcore too far behind him, and even more unwilling to be left behind while the others explored.