Superluminary

by perpetrator

  “I suspect,” Saturn said finally, “the black ship does not normally turn off her disinertia field when entering orbit, but simply plunges to the surface without slaking her speed. I am not sure why she stopped that one time, but I was lucky enough to pick up the image.”

  Lord Pluto asked, “What was the date of the first image?”

  Saturn said, “24 December, AD 2474, 2400 Imperial Meridian Time. Christmas Eve.”

  Lord Pluto said, “A day I am called to Everest for celebrations. But that year I had increased my sentry satellites. The black ship paused to take readings and calculate an approach. How long was she motionless?”

  Lord Saturn said, “Six hours.”

  Aeneas saw the slight flicker of neural energy in Lord Pluto’s ring. He was evidently consulting an almanac, for he said, “Interesting. At that date, Uranus was in opposition, hence more than fifty-eight AU from Pluto. Seven and a half light-hours. A signal from the ship, either a Schroedinger wave or electromagnetic, could have reached and returned from any other world or worldlet in that time, but not from a point on Uranus or his moons.”

  Aeneas also saw the flicker in Lady Luna’s signet ring as her servant mind reminded her of something. Luna looked startled. “Wait. What date did you say? Because today is Christmas Eve. Unless we have lost or gained a day somehow during all these spacewarp jumps we’ve made. If the spyship is coming precisely on this date, midnight Imperial Meridian Time, every five years, then she is coming here today!”

  Lord Saturn told his astronomers on various moons and satellites to train their instruments on the Lagrange point on the far side of Charon. They saw nothing. Lady Luna relaxed visibly. “Good! Not here yet. Because if that ship came, and saw all of the remotes Lord Saturn scattered in that area, she’d know we’ve seen her, and...”

  But Aeneas said, “Look!” and sent the image from his analytical screen into all their rings.

  The black vessel hung in space. She had struck one of the swarm of anchipalaeoscope receivers at high speed, but, being without inertia, had come instantly to a halt without jar or harm. The various sensor beams issuing from the moons of Saturn were being quietly absorbed into the black skintight field of anti-photons, and returning no echoes.

  Lady Luna said, “How long has that ship been there, Uncle Saturn?”

  Lord Saturn said bitterly, “My machine cannot see recent events.”

  Aeneas said, “Long enough to radio home for instructions? Or contort the captain and crew with cabins and lifesupport into vacant places inside the hull?”

  Saturn said, “I don’t know. I do know that whoever is aboard knows these probes are mine. Their gross structure is the same as a palaeoscope. He knows we are looking into the remote past of the planet. He may deduce that we know the planetary vampire mass is still alive—if that is the word—under the ice.”

  An open antenna dish appeared amidships on the black vessel, so suddenly that it must have been contorted into place. Powerful signals left the black ship, bent around Charon, and passed across the face of Pluto.

  Lady Luna said, “This is bad. All the nightmare wavelengths of the planet just became full: more signals than my instruments can register. It woke up. The planetary vampire mass is awake!”

  Lord Pluto said, “Necroform science is my particular area of study. There is no way for such a mass to have come awake again: we just saw how, eons ago, it was drained of the death-energy that sustains it in the shadow condition.”

  Aeneas said, “The signals from the spyship are not electromagnetic. It is a laser of death-energy. The ship is feeding the plutonian world-vampire.”

  Lord Pluto raised his ring. “I have sent a signal to my automatic defenses on Pluto. But they were designed to repel warships, not planet-wide undead glaciers.”

  Aeneas focused his analytical screen on the surface. The dark tower faded from view, and a webwork of paralytic and nerve-destroying energies radiated out from the spot. But the whole valley folded inward on itself and was swallowed whole.

  The death-energy readings suddenly spiked. On those wavelengths, the planet glowed like a black gem. Lord Pluto said, “The world-vampire is consuming death-energy from the Cerberus. Alas for Captain Lang! Alas for the crew! He and his deserved a fairer fate!”

  The readings showed the creature was flushed with power from pole to pole. Aeneas said, “The creature captured the death-powered warpcore intact. It is using the three hundred to control the warpcore. I am now reading powerful gravity waves coming from the core of Pluto.”

  Lady Luna said, “It knows all the Forerunner sciences. We’re doomed.”

  Aeneas said, “It is folding space and preparing to form a weaponized spacewarp, an area where the laws of nature are twisted. What or how, I do not know — but the focusing striations are pointing directly at Sol!”

  22. Teradeath

  Aeneas sent signals to his warpcore, attempting to unfold the space the world-vampire was folding, but it was no use. The reach of a warpfield, its mass and degree of deviation depended quite straightforwardly on the mass-energy the warpcore controlled.

  And the world-vampire was more skilled than Aeneas. In the first instant of combat, a field lashed out at the small planet Necropolis. All the vampires, who had been deceived into serving Lady Luna, now received new orders, linked mind to mind through the plutonian creature. They drained the world of life in a moment, and then they were drained in turn. Forests were turned into leafless hulks, and herds of deer to skeletons. Like a candle being snuffed, the whole planet Necropolis fell still, its every erg of vital energy fed into the plutonian world-vampire.

  Aeneas attempted to throw a warp around Pluto and toss it closer to the Sun; but the world-vampire flattened space in each direction around the icy globe, and prevented any warps from forming. Meanwhile, the gravitational energy in the core continued to grow and grow.

  Aeneas said, “It is going to create a zone of space one micron in diameter and six lighthours long and run it through the sun like a spear. It will form instantaneously, traveling faster than lightspeed. Within that zone, the fundamental gravitational relation of mass to acceleration will change, and all the particles inside the sun caught by the field will form a singularity. A very long, thin singularity. If rotated, the warp will also form frame dragging effects, and tilt the lightcone of the sun out of normal timespace and into a closed timelike curve. I have no idea what that would do. Imagine a doughnut shape of nuclear plasma the size of the sun collapsing inward into a wire-thin black hole. The x-ray emissions alone will obliterate the solar system, not to mention the tidal effects of having a Tippler singularity string sweeping through the plane of the ecliptic. To the crows with it! I’m ... lost ... I don’t have enough energy to stop it.”

  Aeneas turned and saw the old and careworn face of Lord Saturn. “Well. I resign as the new Lord Terra. If my terrible superluminary science cannot protect mankind, I have no claim to be its protector, do I?”

  Lord Saturn said, “I know how to stop it.”

  Aeneas looked at him in surprise.

  “Aeneas, do you have enough energy to place Saturn between Pluto and the sun? Preferably with the ring plane normal to an imaginary line connecting Sol and Pluto?”

  “Yes, barely.”

  “Please do so.”

  The gas giant planet turned red, shrank to a point, and vanished in one spot, and in another a blue point appeared, swelled up to jovian size, dimming to its normal hue.

  Lord Saturn held up his ring, “There are six interplanetary-strength temporal distortion stations at Saturn, which I had set aside in case of Civil War: two at the poles, and four equally spaced in the Cassini Division between rings A and B. I am instructing my servants to erect a graduated time-retardation field.”

  Aeneas said, “What in the world will that accomplish?”

  Lord Saturn said, “Do you know why sunsets are red? Or why straight sticks look bent when thrust into a clear pool surface?”

  Aeneas
said, “The light rays bend according to the density of the medium.”

  Lord Saturn said, “Not the density per se. Fermat’s Principle is that light seeks the path of least time between any two points. By manipulating the time flow at the terminator of Saturn, I can bend the light around my globe, bending those farther more than the nearer, and thereby concentrate the rays like a magnifying lens. A lens, if you will, wider than the rings of Saturn!”

  Even as he spoke, the surface of Pluto ignited to dazzling brightness. Sunlight came to the dead world.

  Because each element had a different melting point, during the long plutonian winter, each element would precipitate out of the thin atmosphere as a layer of snow during its part of the season, and hydrogen, whose melting point is lowest, precipitated last and lay on top, above layers of solid oxygen ice, solid nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane.

  So, at first, the layers of plutonian glacier merely melted, and the million year old cryovolcanos merely ignited and slumped over, gushing rivers of liquid oxygen, white with vapor, plunging in elfin slowness over cataracts of melting nitrogen ice.

  But then the solar beams dug deeper, and struck the layer of methane ice. It mingled with the molten oxygen and the blue-burning hydrogen. There was a heat source; there was oxygen, lakes upon lakes of oxygen bubbling with oxygen gas rushing upward in great clouds. And when the methane began to melt, there was fuel.

  The three things needed for combustion were present. The mountains and craters of Pluto ignited with fire. In the low gravity, the tops of the flames reached to the thinnest regions of the humble atmosphere, and the whole canopy of hydrogen gas ignited like the envelope of the Hindenburg.

  It was astonishing to see a planet burn. It was a vision of hell.

  The continent-sized vampire amoeba reared up in agony, with mountain ranges of melting hydrocarbons sliding off its undead half-liquid hide. Glaciers of solid and lakes of liquid material were thrown into space. Temblors shook the miniature world from pole to equator as the monster writhed.

  The sunlight, not the flame, was killing it. The flames merely helped burn whatever semi-solid cubic miles of tissue the sunlight was forcing from the negative-life condition back into being normal, if no longer living, organic matter. Once it was organic, it burned and burned.

  The fire was everywhere. The world-vampire recoiled to the dark side of the world, far from the sun, yanking islands and icebergs and plateaus in its wake, and sending hills into space like meteorites in reverse. However, it was not the electromagnetic property of the lightwaves which harmed it, but the strange neuropsionic waves, which solid matter did not stop. Even at the midnight meridian, the creature disintegrated, and the death-energy dispersed. The fires had started at the noon meridian, but the debris falling back through the burning hydrogen layer of air, the roaring layer of pure oxygen, heated up with friction enough, even in that low gravity, for carbon compounds to ignite.

  Seen from afar, half smothered in its own smoke, the planet Pluto glowed like a golden coal, with rivers and seas of red flame within the yellow flame, black outcroppings of carbonaceous chondrite, peaks of blue ammonia ice sinking in ammonia lakes, a whole world bruised and spotted with ash and flame. The surface glaciers and oceans heaved and writhed in the low gravity as the world-vampire, a living bedrock of undead material, shuddered and perished.

  With one last spasm, the quakes and convulsions ceased. The readings showed the death-energy at zero. The monster was gone. Aeneas saw the stressed spacetime line between Pluto and Sol vanish as the fabric of space returned to normal.

  Lady Luna laughed and clapped her hands in relief, and old Lord Saturn smiled wearily.

  Aeneas said, “We are still in danger!”

  He fed the words his signet ring was sending him to an annunciator: The plutonian warpcore is still active. The world-vampire must have programmed a final action. Tachyon echoes reveal an immense amplification of local gravitational force. It is asymmetrical, and being used to propel Pluto...

  But they saw it happening. The dark sky behind Pluto, from their point of view, reddened and puckered strangely, while Pluto shrank. The flames turned dark red and ceased to move as time slowed. Any remaining glaciers, hills, seas of burning methane or clouds of burning oxygen now flattened into a smooth, mirror-like surface. Pluto turned black, shrank to a tiny sphere, and vanished from sight.

  But as it shrank it darted toward the planet Saturn, accelerating.

  Aeneas raised his ring and issued commands to the Talos warpcore, and uttered a ragged cry of horror. “It’s not working! The plutonian warpcore is still active — the enemy has established a zone of flat space I cannot collapse or manipulate!”

  They watched in helpless horror as the singularity passed into the gas giant and struck the north pole. The singularity itself was invisible, but the point of impact was visible.

  The surface of Saturn puckered and distorted. The cloud bands of Saturn were pulled up as the singularity approached, swirled together in an immense spiral toward a burning point of nothingness.

  Then the floating continents of the struck hemisphere were pulled up and toward the singularity in a vast curving archipelago of destruction.

  The damage came not from the gravity, for the singularity was only the mass of Pluto, nor from the threat of Saturn being consumed, for the surface area of the event horizon was only a few acres. The damage came from the matter of Saturn being disintegrated under tidal stress as it was pulled into the pinpoint of superdense nonbeing, heated to plasma, and released as x-rays and gamma rays and high energy particles: the atmosphere of Saturn was irradiated and superheated.

  Vents of gas erupted in huge arcs up into space and back down again. The hydrogen ignited and burned blue, and then, heated even hotter, began to fuse. An irregular cloud of solar plasma with limbs of fire like a burning kraken erupted into being in the center of the collapsing hemisphere of Saturn.

  All the billions of men living on the flying continents near the point of impact were killed instantly as white-hot x-rays passed through the area, ionizing atoms, breaking chemical bonds, fusing atoms. The heat released simply obliterated anything made of matter, including the containment vessels for powerhouses and space contortion fields that were part of modern, civilized life. The ignition of these captive energies, now freed, added fire to fire. The continent-sized habitats in the southern hemisphere which were farther from the point of impact drifted serenely for the long moment before the supersonic shockwave passed the equator and converged.

  Nothing on Earth had ever been as large as this semisolid wall of winds. A hundred Earths could have wandered, lost, in the immensity of Saturn’s atmosphere, and never been in sight of each other. Flying continents larger than the whole surface area of Earth were upended.

  The continents were overturned by the pressure, crumbled under the stress. Seen from space, the lights of famous cities could be seen to go dark, as swiftly as if a cloak had been thrown across a constellation and smothered it. The smaller lights of floating palaces and pleasure craft drifting in the serene cloud-filled abyss were extinguished without being noticed.

  For a moment, the planet Saturn seemed to be like a fruit with a large bite taken out of it, or like a small, burning star with a hemisphere of gaseous matter poised like a shell over the southern half of it. Then the edges of the globe collapsed inward toward the burning star, pulled by the mass, which, albeit compressed, had not disappeared. Like a cresting wave breaking, the rim of matter overhanging the bottomless bright well of the singularity fell inward. The violence of this fall, the tidal stress, and the agitation from the accretion disk broke the atoms into their subatomic constituents. As the singularity ate further and further into the boiling liquid heart of Saturn, the collapsing rim ignited into atomic fire.

  Aeneas, his face white and sweat-slick with stress, tried again and again to warp the timespace and hinder these disastrous effects. He tried to set warps around the moons and pull them away, or chang
e the rate of propagation of light to preserve them from the gamma ray and x-ray bombardment. Nothing worked. The moons were scalded like cinders, and their artificial atmospheres blown out into space by the sheer radiation pressure issuing from the dying world.

  Each cubic mile of Saturn’s immense ocean of atmosphere could sustain many more people than Earth at her most overcrowded. Aeneas was appalled, for he was unable to imagine, unable to grasp, the numbers who had just died: husbands, wives, children, caught without warning in the midst of work and play.

  23. Hatred for All Life

  Aeneas said, “If I can figure out how the enemy folded the space here, I can undo it, and maybe I can warp some of the flying continents on the farther hemisphere to Uranus or Jupiter ... a chance to live ...”

  But Lord Saturn, his face as motionless as the face of a dead man, said, “Leave them.”

  Aeneas jerked, and stared at him in wordless wonder.

  “Abandon them,” said Lord Saturn. “The singularity was not meant for my world. It was sent toward the Sun, and it is accelerating.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Once it passes lightspeed, you will not be able to see or stop it. You must stop it now.”

  “How?” shouted Aeneas. “A protective zone of flat space prevents me from forming a warp anywhere near!”

  Lord Saturn said, “Then form one far away. Pick up the neutron star called the Great Eye, and place it in the path of the singularity before it strikes our sun, and completes the work of obliterating all my brother’s worlds as it has done with mine.”

  Aeneas said, “But if any of your people are still alive...”

  “The remnant of Saturn will not outlive the death of our star.”

  Aeneas said, “I am drained. I don’t have the power to move the Great Eye.”

  Saturn said, “I am turning over to you control of the remaining energy production stations, space contortion dynamos, and powerhouses through the rings and moons and satellites. They will not last long. Use them wisely, my lord Emperor.” He drew a deep and ragged breath. “Save the people!”