by perpetrator
“I am also older than you and outrank you, Annoyance.”
Aeneas said, “Peanut, our uncle Lord Pluto is a cautious man over a century old. Why not convince him it will be safe to do whatever you are planning?”
She said to Lord Pluto, “The Great Eye is controlled through a unified subconscious control network, just as at Alpha Centauri. The overlords did not allow their servants to talk back, suffer doubts, disobey orders, or think for themselves: my instruments show the Great Eye to consist of a completely vacant and unwatched subconsciousness in total control of the conscious but zombiefied mind. I could insert any commands I wished. No passwords. No one is watching. As long as no one attacks it, it will stay half asleep.”
Lord Pluto said, “Absurd. Who leaves a weapon of such power lying about unlocked?”
Aeneas laughed. “A society of necroforms with no free will whose nearest neighbor is the star system LP 275-68, three lightyears away. After all, you did leave your tower unlocked and unwatched...” Aeneas scowled. “Or did you? You allowed me in, didn’t you? And then let me escape? Why?”
Lord Pluto said curtly, “My motives are my own.”
Lady Luna said, “So they are, but, not knowing them, why should we trust you?”
Pluto said, “We are trapped on a necropolis world in an undead star system, and cannot escape unless you two perform works of ultralargescale engineering and subversion. Can either of you perform these feats, and remain undetected, without my help?”
Aeneas had no answer for that.
The three selected one small island in the southern polar ocean of the small world Aeneas now christened Necropolis.
Lord Pluto’s automata surrounded the coastline of the island with units to render the island invisible. A village where undead islanders were stacked like cordwood was flooded with Spaceman’s Fog. The tiny plantlife revived them. The necroform giraffe-men had no power to resist commands from their subconscious mind-network. Lady Luna had them mesmerized in short order.
This workforce was set the task of clearing vampire grass from the soil, and replanting it with earthlife, then filling it with livestock, which they were required to tend and forbidden from consuming.
Forced-growth techniques allowed farms and ranches to reproduce generations in days rather than years. Once the deer population was above a certain threshold, more native undead were revived, but, again, they were only permitted to consume the life-energy of a specific percentage of the herd, not more.
Every undead man, animal, and leaf in the whole solar system would have consumed this tiny island of living beings in an instant, but it had vanished from all their sense impressions.
The islanders were next given the task of building other tools and instruments, including additional invisibility units for Lord Pluto, dream-transmitters for Lady Luna, and gravitational amplifiers for Aeneas.
The first of several battles for Necropolis took place when the islanders loaded up ships and sailed to a city on a peninsula selected for their next prize. Lord Pluto cut sight of the peninsula off from the remainder of the world.
When the necroforms under Lady Luna’s mesmerism, filled with life energy, descended on the city, the undead there rose up from below the cobblestones and from submerged graveyards in the bay, and assaulted the ships.
Lady Luna inserted instructions into their dreams, but the hunger and frenzy of the starving monsters overcame all restraints. The battle for a while was fought in an organized fashion, until the first few victories of the city dwellers allowed them to drain the stolen life energy from the islanders, and then other city dwellers turned on the successful ones and drained them, and a general melee broke out without plan or purpose. Meanwhile, the islanders who had been drained rammed their ships into the ships to the rear of the flotilla, whose undead crews still were replete with life-force.
Several nightmarish hours later, with most of the city in ruins, enough of the vampires had fed off each other for their ghastly hunger to be slaked. These contented vampires were once again vulnerable to Lady Luna’s commands, and their unconscious minds once more in control of their automaton conscious minds.
That city conquered others. In a short time, the peninsula was under cultivation, and moon-trees and moon-flowers of the type Lady Luna preferred were blooming. The vampire armies of this peninsula attacked other coastal regions, this time in a more controlled fashion, for Lord Pluto kept the fed and the starving mutually invisible to each other.
Inland manufacturing centers were next, and after that, the careful, tedious process of flushing all the waters of the world free of microscopic vampire life, and replacing it with plankton and krill and an extreme archeon called a thermoacidophile.
Weeks turned into months, and more territory was converted, stirred awake, and brought under their control. Eventually the whole planet Necropolis, from pole to pole, was theirs. None of the hibernating vampire life thronging the other worlds of the system was aware of it.
Aeneas and Lady Luna celebrated with a party of special magnificence, decorating the ward room, and having their rings concoct wines and delicacies out of various fruits and livestock of the small planet’s now-living farms. Lord Pluto excused himself curtly, and took no part of the celebration.
Lady Luna held up her wineglass, “Cheers! I must say, stranded with no one but you and he, this has been the most stress-free family outing I’ve ever been on. I look forward to the bugged eyes and gaping mouths when you return home as Emperor!”
Aeneas said, “No eyes will be more agog than mine. I will have myself crowned Emperor Hypocritis the First, the only antimonarchist monarch in history. Maybe I should also run for the office of atheist pope, eh?”
Luna looked at him sidelong. “You won’t do it? Your self-preservation instinct is weaker than I thought.”
Aeneas said, “The whole galaxy is undead. Sol is the sole source of organic life anywhere. Do you think the legal gulf we’ve erected between an omnipotent imperial family and our impotent servile races can stand? Tyranny is a luxury!”
The conversation turned to the pragmatic questions. Luna said, “We are lucky. Some of the vampires we unearthed last week were dream-engineers from a million years ago who worked on the Great Eye. They cannot volunteer any information, but they can construct a program to insert into the Great Eye’s mind. It is chief servant here. Once the Great Eye is ours, the rest of the system will fall with no further fighting, and you can finally have the natives manufacture a large-scale warpcore.”
Finally the day and hour came. All was ready. Aeneas had set a small, artificial sun to orbit the world named Necropolis and to keep the new earthlife flourishing there alive once the Zeta Herculis suns were left far behind. This planet and its tiny pet sun were now in orbit around the Great Eye, which was under Lady Luna’s control. A hollow singularity at its core was slaved to the warpcore aboard Talos, which was in the Lagrange One position between the Great Eye and the planet Necropolis.
Aeneas said, “The mass of a dead star gives us enough range and precision to return to Sol in one jump. The energy supply in the Great Eye is a treasure trove, and we’d be mad not to take it with us. This will be tricky, for I cannot appear anywhere inside the solar system without dying instantly, but with the mass of a neutron star at my command, I can establish a warp to carry us all to just outside the orbit of Pluto, which should be far enough away for me to survive.
“From there, I can establish a warp around the planet Saturn and summon it.
“Also, I can establish a meter-wide warp around my chair to prevent neuropsionic waves from propagating: nearer Sol it would not save me, but at this distance, it just might.”
Lady Luna said, “What if it doesn’t work?”
Aeneas said glumly, “I will be dead before I notice that I died.”
To his surprise, she kissed him, and so he did not notice when it was, exactly, that he gave the execution command.
His next moment of awareness was that he was a
live, in the workspace, still seated in his chair on the gravity-opaque catwalk above the humming balefire-red warpcore. The analytical screen showed their current location: about a light-day away from Sol, far beyond Pluto.
With them was the tiny but bright artificial sun. To one side was the planet Necropolis, infested by vampire-life under Lady Luna’s control. To the other side was the neutron star carved into the Great Eye.
“Well done...” said Lady Luna.
The warpcore throbbed and groaned. It was operating at the far edges of its range. Suddenly in the transplutonian space with them, far, far beyond its normal orbit, was the ringed gas giant Saturn, with all his moons and artificial satellites.
Lady Luna looked impressed, and opened her mouth to speak. Instead, she screamed.
The Great Eye blinked. It rolled this way and that, glaring at Necropolis, at Saturn, at the bright and tiny star Sol. It was no longer under control.
Lady Luna and Lord Pluto collapsed, gargling and writhing. Aeneas’ personal warp blocked all mental radiation: that alone saved him. His screen showed how storms of mental energy were exploding from the Great Eye in all directions, immense beyond his instrument’s ability to measure. The whole population of Saturn and all its moons, including every animal, was jerking in epileptic fits.
But this was no weapon.
It was a shout.
It was a white-noise of neuropsionic energies on the dream frequencies, reaching out in all directions, filling the surrounding space.
The star-murdering weapon now squinted at Sol, and began to build up the death energies needed to obliterate the whole solar system, every world, worldlet and moon.
Aeneas could not use his ring unless he stood and put his head outside his personal thoughtproof warp. But if he stood, he would be struck comatose.
He did not stand. He leaped. Pain and darkness crashed into his brain.
18. The Deadly Light of a Living Star
The headless body of Aeneas fell back onto his chair, so that his secondary brain was safe within the thoughtproof zone of space.
His bioadmantium skull protruding outside the thoughtproof bubble for just a second had protected his primary brain long enough for him to transmit orders through his signet ring to the control board to the warp core.
Then the cells of every part of his body outside the surface of his protective warp had exploded. Lord Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus had done their work well: even beyond the orbit of Pluto was not safe for him.
Whether what he did was genius or madness, he did not know, then or ever. Aeneas had only two locations in timespace already solved: the location at Zeta Herculis and the location of the planet Saturn. But Zeta Herculis, thirty-five lightyears away, was still within this monster’s firing range.
He chose. He moved the Great Eye to the empty spot where Saturn had been.
The Great Eye, a neutron star whose entire mass outweighed all the planets of Sol, coated and filled with alien weaponry and whose endless capacitors and banks and batteries, countless cubic miles of them, were filled with death energy, now materialized between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. Sol, at this distance, was merely a small star, brighter than others.
But the whole surface of the neutron star grew discolored as some unseen, unknown energy from Sol disrupted the crystalline structure of the neutronium, and turned the whole surface a leprous white. The cubic miles of atmosphere and hydrosphere filling the sclera of the Great Eye now inexplicably erupted into space, climbing against the unimaginably steep gravity well. The amount of energy required to move so huge a liquid mass against so vast a gravity was incalculable, and seemed to be coming from a titanic internal turbulence.
The Great Eye itself turned wildly left and right, then lost all power of motion, went dull and blank, was covered over with the strange white discoloration. The gasses and oceans thrown into orbit formed a ring of steam around the equator of the neutron star, and slowly cooled into icebergs, a glittering rainbow.
There was no sign of who or what had so instantly obliterated such a monstrous sphere. Cracks appeared in the surface, as continent-sized areas subsided, and gamma radiation began escaping from these cracks. Matter was turned to plasma by the immense heat escaping from the interior, so the cracks now had glowing, molten lips. Volcanoes like pock-marks scarred the white surface. Instruments showed the volume of the star was less than it had been a moment before, even though the mass remained the same. Material at the core was being lost into the singularity.
The neuropsionic energy output dropped to zero. The great shout ceased.
Aeneas recovered before Lady Luna or Lord Pluto. His instruments showed the populations of Saturn and its moons were still stunned. His head and his right hand were missing, and his signet ring had fallen a few inches outside the thoughtproof warp. He gestured in sign language for a robot to pick up the ring and return it to him. He grew a hand, filling it with brain cells, into which he programmed a set of commands. He put the ring on that hand, which he removed from his body, and ordered it to crawl outside the range of the thoughtproof warp. The hand also ignited when it passed beyond the thoughtproof warp, but the faster than light circuits Aeneas had established in the surrounding control boards were able to react even faster: the commands in the hand were sent to the ring and then to the warpcore.
Again came the moment of the passage along the closed timelike curve segment of a tesseract: it looked like a hollow looking glass reflecting the distorted image of Saturn’s clouds expanding outward suddenly to infinity, and then a starry sky collapsing back inward.
With a sense of relief, Aeneas dropped the thoughtproof warp around himself, and reconnected his headless body through his ring to various instruments and sense impressions. He could see through cameras until his head regrew.
He gave orders that Lady Luna also be looked after. She had not yet recovered from the shock of the Great Eye’s mental shout. Aeneas did not bend to pick her up himself for fear of defensive traps or robotic reflexes hidden on her person, or in her accessories. Serving machines carried her gently to her quarters.
Lord Pluto was nowhere to be seen.
The giant planet Saturn, all its ring and moons, the pyramidal asteroid Talos, and the dead planet Necropolis with its bright miniature sun were now in normal timespace. Three bright stars, two yellow and one small and red, shined to one side. These were Alpha, Beta and Proxima Centauri, half a lightyear away.
Aeneas asked the navigation systems to recheck all calculations, and he opened the analytical screen to its full aperture.
The calculations had been precise. Even as he watched, a microscopic red dot appeared in the Alpha Centauri system, swelled up in size, and resolved itself into the asteroid Talos, at that time a smoothly polished sphere of rock with lights shining from gaps in the surface. The light beams were visible because Talos was shedding oxygen snow. A hailstorm of tiny debris was expanding like a soap bubble, being pushed outward by explosive decompression.
The light which had bounced off the asteroid when it first arrived half a year ago at Alpha Centauri was even now reaching Aeneas’ receivers half a lightyear away. Lord Pluto’s invisibility field took a moment or two before it cloaked the asteroid. These were the images that escaped before that moment.
He saw the flicker of energy as the shattered asteroid surrounded itself in a forcefield to prevent the escape of air. He saw the crawling black ooze of nanomachinery appear at the edges of each brightly-lit hole or break in the hull begin to paste the breaks shut.
There was a twitch in his instruments a moment later. A space contortion wave passed through the area. It was a mass of probability waves, lacking any extension or precise location, roughly equal to the volume and particle count of a tall man.
Aeneas could not smile without a head, but he felt a sense of satisfaction. He turned off the miniature sun, knowing that Saturn and all its moons, as well as the dead planet Necropolis, could survive for a few hours without any incoming heat or
light.
And then he had himself carried to his quarters to see about various medical and biotechnical operations to restore himself to fitness.
It was four hours later that the message he had been expecting came. Aeneas went to the wardroom, to find Lady Luna and Lord Pluto already there. Lady Luna had redecorated the room, filling it with slender birch trees, changing the floor to grass, and introducing does and fawns grazing. She sat on a blanket of antigravity half an inch above the grass, with silver bowls of fruits and sweets hovering near to her hand, a decanter of wine and a crystal wine bowl.
Lord Pluto sat at the original wardroom table, except that he had turned the mahogany surface to black iron. There was a pot of hot coffee at his elbow; he had thrown a drinking pearl into the fluid. Presumably the pearl’s mate was in a drinking nipple inside the mouthpiece of his helmet.
Aeneas seated himself at the table. “Why do you never remove your helmet?”
Lord Pluto said, “The human brain has special nerve paths for face recognition, among the first nerve paths children develop. A face is therefore more difficult to remove from visibility than any other visual information.”
Aeneas said, “I still do not know your motive.”
Pluto said, “It is a simple one, therefore I keep it carefully hidden.”
Aeneas turned to Luna. “With what did you blackmail him?”
She smiled and showed her dimples. “A secret that is worthless if not kept secret.”
Lord Pluto said, “I see I must prove myself again. Here.”
There was an old fashioned upright phone in the center of the wardroom table. It rang with the sound of a bell. Aeneas stared at it blankly, wondering how old Lord Pluto really was. Lord Pluto pushed the phone toward Aeneas. “Geras is on the line.”
Geras was Lord Saturn. Aeneas said, “You did not speak to him?”