by perpetrator
“What precautions?”
“Vsasrhazing and Dzazanang have had selected portions of their memories excised. They falsely believe that life energy is plentiful, and that this is merely an expedition to punish a minor disturbance.”
“You grow arrogant. Whatever punishment I inflict on you, you will simply pass on to your servants in turn.”
“The life of your servant is food of my Overlord, as are all lives. The arrogance of your servant is unfortunate, but may yet serve my Overlord.”
“Because you will be too proud to allow defeat?”
“Because that arrogance lures your servant to hope that when the life energy of the living creatures of Tellus is divided, my Overlord will be generous to his most efficient servant.”
“Your efficiency is not yet in evidence.”
“The matter is under control, and will soon be concluded.”
“How?”
“Lord Tellus, or one of his creatures, controls three gas giants with anchored warpcores. Whenever one of the Black Fleet approaches, the gas giants retreat behind the shockwave of Sol, which is expanding at the speed of light. However, the volume of space where they are protected is so small, and the speed of light so slow, that they have no chance of escape. They dare not leave the light.”
“A siege.”
“A temporary siege. Their warpcores lack the power to drive their worlds anywhere beyond forty lightyears. Within that volume the Black Fleet can detect any warp fissures as they form. Meanwhile, the neuropsionic radiation from Sol grows less in energy as it expands. Within twenty years, it will be no longer deadly to us.”
“Twenty years?”
“Unliving beings have no need to be impatient. It has been four years since Sol ignited. The Tellurians live as vagabonds on flying worlds. They are alive, and will grow weary.”
“And the nova? It is holy light.”
“It is too small to be of concern. In all that time, only the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, has been exposed to the deadly brightness.”
“Was it evacuated?”
“No, Overlord. Alpha Centauri was drained of all life long since. Nothing of value was there.”
The searchlight beam focused into a tighter, brighter line, and began to burn away the outer shells of Rhazakhang’s substance. “My slave, you are mistaken. Your underling at Alpha Centauri had kept for himself a small horde of life energy. When he detected living beings from Tellus spying on him, he struck, and attempted to absorb them. This hording took place in your jurisdiction.”
The pale sphere hovering in the window, trapped in the beam of light, radiated fear.
“Alpha Centauri will be punished!”
“No need.”
The Overlord now drove thoughts like red hot needles into the brain of Rhazakhang, showing him images from the Alpha Centauri.
In four years, the shockwave of light from Sol crossed the four lightyear gap. In that same hour when Sol blazed bright in the night skies of the worlds of Alpha Centauri, the world armada of Tellus arrived, to find all the vampires dead, all their equipment intact. The Tellurians spun the rings up to speed, and formed a timespace fissure reaching across ten thousand lightyears.
“Fool! In twenty years’ time, while your fleets still searched within forty lightyears of Sol, they would be fled beyond reach.”
Rhazakhang protested. “But—but— The Tellurians have no equipment, no resources! How did they impel the Alpha Centauri rings to motion?”
“The automaton battleworlds sent into the light by Gorgorthrog were compromised. He was lured into a ray from Sol, and the light dissolved him, leaving his worlds and all their cities intact ... and power enough to work the rings of Alpha Centauri.”
Rhazakhang released drops of life into his undead brain to sharpen his wits. “My Overlord has a betrayer among the Tellurians, who has told him all these events. If so, the betrayer surely told my Overlord the direction of the warpfissure! They cannot emerge into truespace save at some point along that line! All dirigible worlds and battle Dysons can scour the path of escape of the Living Creature world armada. Let it be a cylinder forty lightyears radius with the warpfissure as the axis: no farther could the three gas giants depart the line.”
The searchlight softened. “Now the efficiency of my servant is seen! You deduce correctly.”
“What vector?”
The answer described a line reaching from Alpha Centauri and going toward the Ara Cluster, in the Zone of Avoidance.
Rhazakhang was impressed despite himself. The World-Armada of Tellus was heading toward the core, where the power of the space vampires were greatest. It was the last direction any rational leader would have selected.
While it was true that the world armada might drop back into normal spacetime at any point along the ultrathin line of warped space, it was also true that warpchannel reach was increased when a massive star was its endpoint. The Ara Cluster was a super star cluster, an open cluster of young stars, including half a score of yellow hypergiants and red supergiants.
Rhazakhang said, “Westerlund 1 is the destination, called Ara A.” It was a red hypergiant star, one of the largest known, massive enough to quintuple the range of the modest Alpha Centauri rings. “We can arrive first, and trap the prey.”
The searchlight beam displayed the Overlord’s pleasure by feeding life energy into Rhazakhang. New strength poured into him.
And with it, a command: “Go! Display the Malefic Visage. Let all life cease. Let my feasthall again be full.”
“All souls are thine.”
28. The Unholy Light of Ara A
Even among monsters, this star was a monster.
Over eleven thousand lightyears from Sol, Ara, the constellation of the altar, was between Scorpio and the Southern Triangle and held the Westerlund 1 super star cluster. The cluster held a large number of rare, evolved, high-mass stars, including two dozen Wolf-Rayet stars, a luminous blue variable, many O-type supergiants, and at least one symbiotic forbidden-emission B-type shell star.
Here was Ara A, also called Westerlund 1-26, a red hypergiant star.
Ara A was equal in radius to seven AU’s. Had the old solar system been placed in its center, the orbit of Jupiter would have easily fit within. It was hundreds of thousands of times more energetic than the Sol, albeit dimmer in the visible band, and stood at the center of a three lightyear wide nebula of ionized hydrogen.
The hypergiant was writhing with endless dark ripples of sunspots. The corona was erupting with streamers, plumes, flares, and loops so large Sol could have passed beneath them with room to spare.
Here also, appearing as a dot of blue-white light, and swelling suddenly to its full three-dimensional volume, came the World Armada of the Tellurians.
An impossible sound reached the ears of Aeneas Tell. It sounded like a scratching of rats in the roofeaves. He straightened on his throne, and called on all his myriad senses. So many circuits answered and sent so much information into his optic nerve, that the waste heat made his eyes glow and smolder.
“Something is wrong!” he said, even before battle klaxons began to ring.
The four years had drained, grayed, and hardened Aeneas Tell. While the science of the day could erase all physical signs of age and stress from face and hair, the change to the cast of his features, the eagle-harsh look in his eyes, could not be hid.
Aeneas was seated on the black triple-wolfheaded throne of Man. He sat in the long unused throneroom atop Mount Everest, where his grandfather sat of old.
Into the brain cells of Aeneas from a myriad of instruments posted throughout the World Armada came visions and views. Some were sent directly into his cortex, others were first analyzed and simplified by experts, human or artificial.
The star Ara A filled in his view like a vast wall of boiling scarlet and sullen red.
He checked for reentry damage first. Like a miniature solar system, the World Armada consisted of three gas giants set in an equilateral triangle
. Equidistant from them were three captured gas giant planets of the enemy. These had been stripped of useful cities and materials then ignited by to serve as miniature, temporary suns. Together, the six bodies formed the stable hexagon called a Klemperer Rosette. The inner planets had joined the myriad moons of the gas giants.
Timerate, mass, and metric readings for all the worlds and moons of man showed normal. All were correctly oriented into an unwarped frame of reference, congruent with surrounding timespace.
Three battle alarms were ringing, from observers on Mars, Venus, and the Moon. But he saw no sign of the enemy.
“Report!” snapped Aeneas.
Lord Mars was nude and scarlet. He shut off the first alarm. “The old temple battlecomputer father gave me is programmed with pattern-seeking intuitions human reason cannot follow: it reports that the enemy is here.”
Aeneas said, “Sound general quarters. All planets assume battle stations.”
Lord Uranus wore a mask that mimicked the face beneath. “Sire, it may be a false alarm.”
(Aeneas hid a scowl. Even after all this time, the title still grated.) “Speak!”
“My psychastronomers have analyzed Ara A. There is a reciprocal effect that changes the star when its light shines on unliving beings. None is present.”
Lord Mars said, “Sire, the space vampires might be hiding from the light.”
Lord Uranus shook head. “Neuropsionic waves pass through planets without slowing. And this sunlight here is unholy, Sire. Harmless to them.”
Lord Pluto wore a featureless helmet and black mantle. “The mass of the supergiants and hypergiants is an aid to warpcore weapon range. The Ara Cluster would be prime real estate for building fortresses. Best to assume the foe is near, Sire.”
The throneroom was a cone whose sloping walls were cyclopean black blocks, adorned in massive gold. Aeneas had the old table chopped to kindling, and installed a round table, to gave his quarrelsome uncles no excuse to quarrel over who sat above whom.
Whether the Lords of Creation were physically present at the great round table or not was unimportant. The Klemperer Rosette was light-seconds in diameter, so any Lord could use a pearl to send his throne to his world and back in an eyeblink, leaving an image behind to continue the conversation while he consulted his experts. The wing of the palace where the Lords personal servants waited was a longer journey away.
Their twelve insignia hung in a circle from the ceiling above the thrones: the Caduceus, Mirror, Trident, Sickle, and so on. The thrones were adorned in precious stones of their heraldic hues, save for the seat of Darius Lord Pluto, which was gray iron. Anargyros Tell, Brother Beast, who spoke for Earth, had no seat, but his legs could not grow weary.
Lady Luna’s was the first new throne ever carved. It was silver and set with moonstones and agates.
“I do not concur with Lord Uranus,” Lady Luna shut off the second alarm. “My oneiromantic engines of the Moon detect hostility and hatred in the dream-aura surrounding Ara A.”
“Can you pinpoint a location, Cousin?” He asked her.
“Dreams are from nowhere, Sire.”
Aeneas looked again. The remnant of Saturn was half its former diameter, but with rings and moons unharmed. It was no longer a gas giant, but only a superterrestrial. The atmosphere of Saturn was a dusty, mottled amber. In four years the atmosphere had not settled. No lamps shined here except for the running lights of graveyard diving craft, still attempting to recover bodies. The superterrestrial world was used as a scout, and sent in a wide orbit outside the Armada. Earth was its outermost moon. Aeneas noticed that Earth was blazing white, as were all the planets.
His mother, Lady Venus shut off the third alarm. “The Armada is taking on heat, more than our terraformers can deflect, Sire.”
Instantly, Aeneas established a dark zone around the whole armada. Within this globe of warped space half a light-minute in diameter, lightspeed was now measured in miles per hour. Radiation from edge of that diameter would not reach them for nine years or more. To all the eyes limited to lightspeed, the skies went black.
Now Aeneas scowled, puzzled. Ara A, though larger, was half as cool as Sol. At three lightminutes from the surface, the temperature should have still been less than Mercury received. The atmospheric shields there supported earthlife easily.
Information poured into his blazing eyesockets. The heat afflicting the planets was not from Ara A.
There was an oddity at Ara A no earthly astronomer had suspected: a disk of fiery plasma circling the equator of the hypergiant sun. It was a ring of burning fission. The inner bands orbited faster than the outer, and the swirled turbulence caused massive lumps to form, like miniature suns. One was nearby: this was the source of the heat.
The fugitive worlds of man had appeared in a gap between these rings of fiery plasma. The momentary blister of antigravity that intruded the World Armada back into normal spacetime had, by unforeseen luck, pushed back the nearest streamers of burning material.
Aeneas, staring at the hellish rivers of fire circling the monster star, shivered and ground his teeth. He had landed the armada as close to the star as he dared, to let the vast mass block the warp-detectors of the enemy. He had not imagined this possibility: he had almost destroyed everyone, everything.
Alarms yet rang. Hammering and scraping came from the ceiling overhead. Aeneas rubbed his finger and thumbs into his burning eyes and had them repair themselves. “What the devil is that noise? Whose alarm is that?”
Brother Beast stood nearby, barefoot. “It is not a military alarm. It is the palace servomind. Storm warning.”
During the four years of continual emergency and battle, Brother Beast had ordered the upper atmosphere of Earth frozen. A solid sheet of ice coated the globe from pole to pole, resting on many mile-high columns of antigravity or artificial mountains raised for that purpose. The air at sea level was kept at its wanted warmth. It was a defensive measure, but it also prevented vertigo in the skyward-looking multitudes on Earth as their world was spun through multiple jumps from point to point in space during combat maneuvers.
Everest itself extended above the ice layer into naked outer space. It should have been silent as a tomb.
Brother Beast said, “The ionized nebula here, and the atmospheres surrounding the disk, is dense enough hereabouts to carry soundwaves, Sire. That rattling noise is the collision of micrometeorites and particle winds against the Ultrapolis force shells. Not an attack.”
The final alarm vanished.
Aeneas said, “Then where is the enemy?”
Lord Saturn said, “I have something. Four million years ago, there were megastructures here, hundreds of them, orbiting the star. As this sun aged and expanded, some of the structures fell below the surface, apparently unharmed. There is no evidence of debris. I assume they survived, somewhere down inside Ara A.”
“Dyson Spheres?”
“Each is a spherical shell six lightminutes in radius. As wide as the orbit of Venus once was. Inside the volume of Ara A, Sire, and surrounding no star, I would not call them Dyson Spheres, despite their size. Here, I would call them submersibles, lost in a sea of fire.”
Aeneas said, “Inside the sun?”
“This is not a dense, small sun like ours. It is a vast cloud that happens to be burning.”
“Were they warships?”
“Yes. The equators and meridians had the contours of a Tipler Ring armature.”
Aeneas said, “Is there any more recent enemy activity?”
“Near-past probes show nothing within my range.” Aeneas had modified Lord Saturn’s probes to see events as recent as twenty years ago.
Aeneas said, “Lord Mercury? Have you any more recent news for me?”
The way around the twenty-year blind spot in Lord Saturn’s probes was one Aeneas and Lord Mercury had found. A series of ultra-longrange orbital telescopes, connected to base by contortion links, had been dropped out of the warpchannel twenty lightyears away, then ten,
five, two, and so on, with the nearest tailgating merely a few lighthours behind. The light passing through these points in space carrying images of events at Ara A from years ago could be intercepted now.
Aeneas could adjust the contortion entanglement to introduce a tachyon stream so that the information gathered by the scopes could be transmitted instantly across the lightyears. They were called tachyscopes.
“My people report nothing odd, Sire,” said the dwarf-sized, child-faced man, grinning. “There is no evidence of communication or energy use, not that this absurdly oversized sun does not blot out, that is, at any point in the past twenty years. No fleets arrived.”
“What of other sensors?”
“If the enemy are here, Sire,” Lord Mercury smirked, “They are not using any zero-point inertial energy. We detect no contortion stress, no disinertia fields, no ships, no planets, no asteroids. The whole solar system is empty.” He scowled. “Except for this ring around the sun. What is that?”
Lord Jupiter said heavily, “An impossibility. A ring of material this dense should have fallen back down to the sun here long ago. The solar magnetosphere would degrade the orbit of any particles in a few thousand years.”
Lord Saturn said, “It was not here twenty years ago. It is recent.”
Aeneas said, “How is that possible? What could cause such a...”
Sig, the signet ring of Aeneas, was trying to calculate for him how much energy it would take for a star of this mass to throw so many solar masses worth of material into orbit, and was getting numbers that perturbed even its wonted calm. Aeneas shushed it.
Lord Pluto said, “It may only be a few days old, Sire. When you formed the warpchannel here, it was your first attempt at using the Alpha Centauri armature rings at beyond their operational range.”
Aeneas nodded. He has selected a hypergiant star because he knew that if the enemy searched within the normal range of the Alpha Centauri rings, no one would look so far away. He said, “Shame we could not figure a way to bring that armature with us.”