Superluminary

by perpetrator

  “No.”

  “Kill him.”

  “No.”

  Lord Mars shrugged. “It is your battle. If you want to fight with one arm broken, it is your funeral. And the funeral of everyone who follows you.”

  Aeneas templed his fingers. “You have always before stayed aloof from family politics. Why?”

  Lord Mars said, “I don’t step into family squabbles for the same reason I don’t step in quicksand.”

  “You are aware that Father knows of some terrible outside enemy?”

  Lord Mars nodded. “There are no radio signals of intelligent life ever heard from any stars. Something happened to them. Father fears that something.”

  Aeneas said, “I have met that enemy. They are vast and terrible, and we have very few ways to fight them, and little time. Do you think mankind has a better chance with Lord Jupiter in the battle, or in the quicksand you mentioned?”

  “And if he kills you first?” asked Lord Mars.

  Aeneas said, “Then you are free from an inexperienced and reluctant Emperor. I will send Lord Saturn to collect Lord Mercury. You go bring Lord Neptune to me. They may both be willing to answer the summons once they realize their planets are now all gathered into the shadow of the undead neutron star.” And he sent pre-arranged thought signals through his ring to Talos, and the warpcore there, and the twin cores inside the neutron star, responded.

  The silver-white sky of Venus suddenly blazed white, turned red as a coal, and then went black, as it passed through a closed timelike curve and took up a new position. The silvery light of the sun seen through the swaddling cloud layers returned, but much dimmer.

  Lady Venus looked startled for a moment, and then smiled a small smile of motherly pride.

  Lady Luna next arrived. She apparently intended to make an impressive show of her entrance, for a great escort of moon-maidens, hounds, and antlered stags from the moon, as well as anctitones and acephals, lunarians and selenites and fierce centaurs called Va-gas flanked and followed her, and the music of lute, flute, silver bells, and clashing cymbals preceded her.

  Aeneas asked her to stand to his right by the black throne. When he turned to his left, the second place of honor, he saw Lord Pluto, who had arrived alone and without a sound, was already standing there. A black cloak hid Pluto’s unadorned armor. The single lens in the brow of his unadorned helm glinted.

  Lord Saturn, gray and old, garbed in silver, arrived with his surviving children in his entourage: the Lords Janus, Mimas, Encledes, and Iapetus, and the Ladies Tethys, Dione, Rhea and Phoebe.

  He escorted a sullen Lord Mercury, chubby and childlike, dressed in lace and livery. With him were officers and dukes of the two dominant races of Mercury, the first called demons, for their stubby radio horns they grew from their skulls, the others called witches, for their miter-shaped skulls, hooked noses, pointed chins.

  Lady Venus returned in state with all her maidens, doves, and winged children. She brought the news that Lord Neptune would not remove himself from his citadel at Aegei. This was his armored palace resting on the ammonia ice bed of Neptune below the miles of unthinkably cold and unbearably pressurized oceans of liquid helium, water, methane, and ammonia: ocean below ocean, each according to its density and freezing point. However, Amphitrite Lady Nereid, his wife, had come in his stead.

  The Neptunian queen was dressed in silver and blue. The bodice and skirts of her garb was liquid water bound with gravitational micro-fields so that it flowed and fell about her shapely limbs like a fabric of silk.

  Aeneas said to the court, “I have placed Earth in orbit about the fragment of Saturn, Venus around Uranus, Mercury about Neptune, Mars about Jupiter.”

  The courtiers stirred uneasily, albeit some smiled. All in the chamber clearly saw the political overtones to this division of worlds and moons: Brother Beast, Lady Venus, and Lord Mercury were loyal partisan in favoring Lord Jupiter, whereas Lord Mars was not. The outer gas giants now each had a hostile moon keeping an eye on it.

  Aeneas continued: “All four gas giants are in the umbra of the neutron star, to shield us from the nova long enough to form a warpchannel to our next destination. The three working warpcores, I have placed at the centers of the three undamaged gas giants. I would have preferred to ask Lord Neptune for his permission, but if Lord Neptune wishes to perish, such permission is not necessary.”

  Aeneas nodded gravely to Amphitrite. “Lady Nereid: please inform your lord husband that both his fealty and the use of the gravitic amplifiers he has thoughtfully placed in orbit around the planets of the Empire of Man are required here.”

  She blenched. “Are you saying...”

  Lord Mars said, “That is not the proper form of address!”

  Lady Nereid curtseyed, gracefully, hands lifting her shining skirts of living waters, one foot behind the other, bending the knees, bowing her head. “Is Your Imperial Majesty saying he is going to destroy the planet Neptune?” She swallowed. “Sire?”

  “I suppose I should speak in the plural when I speak on behalf of the empire, shouldn’t I? We will not protect any world which does not need our protection. How does Lord Neptune plan to deal with the nova?”

  Lady Nereid said, “How do you have such powers? It is madness!”

  Aeneas clutched the black arms of the imperial throne. He grimaced. There was no seat less comfortable in any world. “A madman bestowed the power. We do what must be done to protect the people.”

  Lord Pluto raised his gauntlet. “Majesty, look to the skies. Alien forces are materializing.”

  The Lords of Creation looked to their signal rings and made mental contact with the various machines that served them. Dukes, counts, and others in the chamber opened bracelets or ornaments which hid phones.

  Lady Venus said, “My orbital telescopes detect nothing!”

  Aeneas said, “The light will not reach here for four hours. They are in the Oort Cloud, beyond the solar system. I will project the image for you.”

  The golden dome above lit up with an image. Here was the stark blackness of the fringe of interstellar space. There were comet heads and icebergs floating in the endless night. The cloud of icebergs formed a rough globe around the sun.

  From the nadir to the zenith of that cloud of ice fragments, now appeared objects. First they seemed blue-white dots, but then they faded and swelled up to their real size. Neutron stars were here carved into staring eyeballs, or brown dwarves covered, as with oozing sores, with crevasses and volcano cones leading to interiors of still-active solar plasma. Here were magnetars spinning, with twin x-ray arms like turning scythes or beams from a lighthouse, ready to destroy whatever was in their path. Here were dark and cold gas giants, blue with methane, or ribbed and tiger-striped with storms.

  As belts at their equators, many gas giants had a ring of iron moons, armored and roofed with weapons, or the severed heads of undead monsters of prodigious size. Of ringworld armatures coated with quadrillions of corpses, there were only four, equally spaced around the solar system at the points of an imaginary tetrahedron.

  The great eye of Zeta Herculis would have been lost in the swarm of dark and mighty planets. Perhaps there were also orbital fortresses, superdreadnaughts, battlewagons, battleships, and war-moons scattered among the suns and gas giants, but, if so, they were like dustmotes lost against a mountain-range of countless peaks.

  The signet ring of Aeneas sent: Sir, the enemy is preparing to fire. The death energy build-up in the various neutron stars and brown dwarfs exceeds the total energy output of all planets in the solar system. Once those beams fire, no living thing will be left.

  Gasps of horror ran through the chamber as the great and staring eyes, larger than worlds, larger than suns, opened their massive lids. An inner heat, doubtless caused by internal volcanic processes preliminary to firing, boiled the oceans filling the sclera of those eye-shaped weapons into space. Stream clouds larger than worlds achieved escape velocity, despite the immensity of the gravity of the dea
d suns. Black gas giants and superjovian bodies with belts of corpses orbiting them spun their armatures up to speed, vanished, and reappeared millions of miles closer. In the image, these faster-than-light motions made a gas giant appear at its destination before the light-image showing it vanishing in the distance reached the viewer, so that, for a moment, the number of space vampire battle worlds seemed to double.

  Aeneas raised his hand. “I set off the nova hours ago. I am also flattening space in a fashion around us I hope will prevent the enemy from establishing a faster-than-light periscope of the type I am using. We may depart at our leisure. Lady Nereid, please ask Lord Neptune if he wants his world to accompany us? Lord Mercury, the same question is yours?”

  Lord Mercury drew a black dagger and laid it carefully on the shining floor. “I am your vassal, Imperial Majesty.”

  Lord Neptune appeared out of a pearl in Lady Nereid’s hand. With no word, but with his eyes blazing and his teeth clenched, the blue man slowly knelt to one knee. He cast his trident angrily to the floor, ringing.

  Aeneas said, “Take up your blade in my name and in the name of the law, to preserve life against death.”

  The four gas giants with the lesser planets orbiting them vanished, a fact that the black fleet would not see for several hours. When they did, another sight would greet their eyes.

  Sol reddened, grew lopsided, and, with the horrific slowness of vast disasters, began to expand, growing ever brighter as it did.

  But by the time the light image of the nova was seen, the wavefront of neuropsionic particles deadly to unlife was already passing through space.

  And the world fleet of the space vampires in their countless myriads fell silent, and all their dark suns.

  27. The Overlord of Unlife

  The heart of the galaxy was dark indeed, and burning with hellish fire.

  The supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way galaxy was on the order of a billions times the mass of tiny, tiny Sol. Star systems venturing too near the unimaginably titanic gravity well slowed, reddened, shrank, and vanished from the frame of reference of outside observers, and nor light nor radio signal escaped to tell their fate.

  Human astronomers named this dark galactic core Sagittarius A. Most black holes are miles wide. This boasted a Schwarzschild radius the size of the orbit of Mercury.

  Above the event horizon was the accretion disk, smeared ring of plasma and shattered atoms. Above this was a globular cloud of rogue planets, giant and dwarf, torn from the grip of shattered solar systems unfortunate enough to have wandered too near the unseen galactic heart.

  To behold a waterfall of gas giants toppling slowly into the red-burning accretion disk, pulled into the shape of eggs, teardrops, spears, as they fell, was a sight of sublime and awe-inspiring destruction. The stars falling were a vision more terrible, blushing red under the Doppler shift. They grew oval and were torn into thin, fantastic rainbows of nova energy.

  High above all this hellish burning were ten million stars of the galactic core. Between the two was a gap not unlike the Cassini division in the rings of Saturn, created by shepherd stars.

  This division was occupied by a mighty work of engineering. Here was a spherical latticework two lightyears in diameter, surrounding the supermassive black hole like a cage. Hundreds of ringworlds and Tipler rings formed the cage bars, set apart far enough to allow falling solar systems to pass between.

  The interstellar tractor beams which arranged a regular diet of such starfalls had long since gone dark. Lower ringworlds within the structure, long abandoned, were tattered and peeling, slowly being dismantled and fed into the accretion disk underfoot. The black core glowed like a red coal.

  Had it been unbroken, the great sphere’s surface area would have more than twelve square lightyears. Nonetheless, the ringworlds from pole to pole comprised one city, an astronomical super-megalopolis. Had the galaxy been filled with life, only such an absurdly vast structure would have been able to house overseers sufficient to bring order to so many stars.

  No longer. The great sphere now was dark and cold. The empty apertures, gateways, and portholes of the airless buildings stared hungrily in all directions. The empty space elevators rose like weeds. Carriages and payloads hanging in linear accelerators meant to circle the meridians of the great sphere at near lightspeed were motionless.

  No ringworld turned. No trace of air and ocean clinging to their inner faces remained. There was nothing to break the bleak monotony of fastnesses and fortresses, torture pits, feasthalls, slaughterhouses, storerooms, shipyards, workrooms, absorption temples, broadcast towers, powerhouses, observatories, archives, arsenals, energy stations.

  At the north pole, a thicket of space elevators rose up in a tangle like thorny vines. At the peak, where all the conduits and paths converged, was a tower with a window. Here was the sole inhabitant of the dead astromegalopolis. Here a lamp burned. What it shed was not light.

  The window was so large that visiting worlds, all gravity absolved, in times long past, once passed into the audience chamber without their rings and moons brushing the lintels. Now, crater impacts and radiation damage marred and discolored the frame.

  In this window hung a servant in the shape of a mirrored sphere: Spherical, to conserve radiant heat loss; and mirrored, to reflect back to his master’s eye only his master’s own visage. No servant would boast he displayed his countenance to the Uttermost Overlord.

  A beam of death energy from the interior of the chamber was shining on the sphere like a spotlight, pinning it in place.

  The Overlord spoke not. Vampiric energy entered and extracted any desired information directly from the underling’s brain, not without pain.

  Had the communion been in words, it might have run like this:

  “Your manservant makes obeisance, Uttermost Overlord. All souls are thine to consume.”

  “Let Warlord Rhazakhang, called the Initiator of Obliteration, be recognized. Let the matter of the star-system of Sol be discussed. Biological life was detected there. The planet Pluto was dispatched from Gamma Crucis ten million years ago to put an end to the matter.”

  “Overlord, Sol emits neuropsionics incompatible with anti-life. It is a holy star.”

  “How? All such stars were destroyed long since.”

  “Two possibilities, Overlord: a rebel element among us created Sol as an act of defiance, to secure to himself a food source for his gluttony; or else some lingering weapon of the ancients, forgotten in an ancient crypt in some dead star, stirred to life after eons, and created Sol as a sign of the downfall of us all.”

  “The name Evripades Zenon Telthexorthopolis, who styles himself Lord Tellus, intrudes itself into contemplation. There are one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Of those, how many do not serve, do not offer the tribute of souls? How many claim a lord of their own?”

  “Only one, Overlord.”

  “As of last report, Lord Tellus had eliminated all life in the Solar System and reseeded and restocked it with creatures of his own devising, whom he told were his children. But his own origin is unclear.”

  “No new information presents itself on that matter, Overlord.”

  “The worlds of Sol are filled with life. Yet my feast table is empty.”

  “Vsasrhazing the Exsanguinator and Dzazanang the Ineluctable, whom my Overlord pleased to place within his manservant’s larder and chain of command, carry the Uttermost Overlord’s image and likeness of thy Malefic Visage against the prey animals of Sol.”

  “Why? What became of Ksthathranang, called the Expunger, and Gorgorthrog, called the Gnawer of Souls, who commanded the expedition? Where is Ylrm Ylrng the Mighty?”

  “Lord Tellus, or one of his creatures, ignited Sol to a nova, while flattening space to prevent any faster than light readings from forewarning the vanguard of the Black Fleet. Ylrwm Ylrmng, mistrusting his fighting slaves, was in the vanguard, and destroyed.”

  “Was any of his store of life energy recove
red?”

  “No, Overlord.”

  “The loss is mourned.”

  “Yes, Overlord.”

  “Such energy is irreplaceable.”

  “Indeed, Overlord.”

  “What of Ksthathranang?”

  “He was more cautious, and hid from his slaves, that he might better detect and consume any who housed untoward thoughts against him. When the forward elements of the fleet were wiped out, however, his underlings in the rearguard discovered his hiding place and consumed him.”

  “Did you consume them in turn? Where is their energy?”

  “Lost. Lord Tellus, or one of his creatures, rather cunningly erected a set of closed timelike curves around the expanding wavefront of the Sol nova, so that parts of the deadly light were teleported to points in space faster than light can naturally propagate. The underlings of Ksthathranang were taken unawares.”

  “And Gorgorthrog?”

  “He was clever enough to send automatons into the light-sphere of Sol, hunting for the gas giants. Due to the space-flattening interference, no faster than light observation and communication near Sol is possible, and the flying gas giants must be found by sight.”

  “And the result?”

  “The machine-life reported success and rendezvoused with Gorgorthrog’s fleet, which then immediately vanished. He has not reported back. Fearing that he had betrayed me, and was hoarding and feasting, I signaled the loyalty-worms implanted in his brain to slay and drain him.”

  “Was any of his energy recovered?”

  “A moiety. It was placed into my Overlord’s storehouses.”

  “It is well. For that, you will not be slain at this time.”

  “My Overlord is indulgent.”

  “Is that why you allow factionalism among your ranks?”

  “Yes, Overlord. Since my slaves know the least among them will be consumed by the foremost, all yearn with eagerness to be foremost.”

  “Allowing your slaves free will interferes with efficiency.”

  “This was an unexpected occasion. Coming so nigh to the living beings of Sol, my slaves grew gluttonous, and gave into the starvation madness. Precautions have been taken to prevent recurrence.”