by perpetrator
Lord Neptune said, “You ordered an entire captured gas giant dismantled and reassembled into gravitic control engines. Which were not needed to prop open the plasma tube. By now, I know you plan things.”
Aeneas said, “A ring of gravity pulling outward at the equator of any body would distribute the tidal pull evenly, would it not? No matter how massive, the tidal effect is zero if all points on the body are equally accelerated. Do you have enough gravity generators?”
Lord Neptune said, “More than enough.”
Aeneas said, “Some of the ladies still seem worried. What happened when we smash into the event horizon?”
Neptune laughed. “The same thing that happens when a sailboat gets her anchor chain snagged on the equator. The event horizon is an imaginary line demarking the point above the singularity at which the escape velocity equals the speed of light. Nothing happens to you when you cross it. Except that the velocity needed to accelerate into a higher orbit happens to exceed lightspeed.”
Lord Jupiter uttered a hoarse call.
The view from all the observatories now showed what seemed to be a mirrored sphere hanging directly before them, growing and growing. The mirrored sides reflected distorted images of the metallic skies all around them, the hexagon crossbracing of the endless square lightseconds of the inner Dyson.
It grew. In the middle was a circle of darkness like the pupil of an eye, swelling.
The Lords stirred uneasily. It looked like the oncoming headlamp of an express train in a mirrored tunnel.
Lady Venus asked, “Why can we see it? I thought black holes were, well, black?”
Lord Saturn answered, “We are seeing light left over from the moment when the singularity was formed, I assume when the nova weapon was last fired. Each layer of photons near the event horizon as it formed departed ever more slowly, and the one we see are still departing. It is a time distortion effect.”
Lord Mercury said, “But pursuit will follow us into the event horizon!”
Lord Saturn smiled in his beard, and said, “And never reach us. Our one second headstart will be expanded to infinity.”
Aeneas turned to Lord Jupiter. “Lord Mercury expresses concern about the halo of x-rays surrounding the black hole.”
Lord Jupiter, with ponderous dignity, cleared his throat and took his seat. “X-rays are electromagnetic. Merely another form of lightning. I speak, and it obeys. The effort is so slight compared to what I just did to create a magnetic tubule protecting us from the plasma of Ara A, I should be affronted. I will have engines constructed to gather, convert and store it, just because I can.”
In their view, the mirrored sphere rushing toward them grew, became dark, then darker, became a convex plane surface, a flat plane, and then became concave. Behind, as if seen through a smoky tunnel, came the attacking wave of energy, reddened and darkened and slowed. As they watched it grew slower and slower. The light image dimmed as photons grew scarce. Then, darkness.
Lady Venus said, “Sire, not just the ladies are wondering how we will escape from this time warp. Are we not trapped forever?”
Aeneas said, “Unless I miss my guess, we will be trapped for twelve minutes exactly. Lady Venus, if you will, coordinate with Lord Uranus to track and locate where all their control thoughts come from. Their set up does not allow for decentralized command. Pass the information to Lord Mars.”
Aeneas turned to Lord Mars, “My lord. Are you ready?”
As predicted, the enemy released the flatspace suppressor. Perhaps they wished to bring information out from the event horizon, or shoot weapons in. Only the Dyson interior itself was free: spacewarps could not be formed outside the hull.
Aeneas was amazed to see the black hole unfold. It happened faster than light, depositing the World Armada in one second several light minutes from its prior position.
No matter. Aeneas had long ago issued the orders. His servominds, the moment their tachyon circuits could operate freely, reacted faster than lightspeed. The World Armada formed a warpchannel to the interplanetary pearl positioned at the mouth of the firing aperture, safely behind the kinetic compression wave, and was there. The gas giants and lesser worlds of man were now in the firing aperture. The fire of the interior of Ara A was before them; the blazing fields of destructive energy of the Dyson interior were behind.
Lord Mars had vanished.
Lord Mercury shouted, “Mars! Where is he?”
Aeneas smiled thinly, “At war.”
32. Matter of War
Thucydides Tell, the Lord of Mars, vanished from the presence chamber of the Lords of Creation.
At the same moment when the flatspace suppression was released, and warp transmission again became possible, Lord Mars was sent through a smaller warpchannel to the location Lady Venus had detected: the hub of all the enemy command lines.
Lord Mars appeared in the authority arena of the alien headquarters. It was vast, dark and cold, an orbicular fortress larger than an asteroid, held in its place in the Dyson hull by the lightest of artificial gravities. Countless other orbs, equal in volume, formed a cityscape larger than earth, shaped like a cluster of grapes bisected by the Dyson hull. Lord Mars stood on a black floor. He was surrounded by concentric ranks of mountain-sized vampire masses. Some were larger than the plutonian world-vampire had been. This was the first of a thousand fortresses embedded in polar intersection of the armatures of the War Dyson.
The chamber was a mile high and many miles wide. Black stalactites of thinking material, larger than skyscrapers, reached down from the pitted and corroded dome above toward the tiers of the arena below. The mountain-sized vampire masses were huddled like egg clusters beneath each stalactite. Each was half buried into a bowl thousands of feet in radius. The bowl interior was coated with control ports into which they extruded nerves. Each vampire was surrounded by concentric stains of debris and bones, the remnants of feasts consumed geological ages ago.
The monstrosities, at first, had no shape. Some of the nearer ones began to form eyeballs, infrared pits, or microwave horns along their closer slopes of gelid flesh to observe the intruder, or to create trumpets, tubes, and yammering mouths for uttering cries of alarm and anger into the plutonian air. The atmosphere here was helium, thin and barely warm enough to remain as a gas, evidently only a convenience for sonic communication.
The nude and brightly scarlet man, with no word, no change of expression, raised his hand, and all atoms of matter within a two hundred thousand mile radius reversed their orientation in one of the basic matter-energy command layers of the universe Lord Tellus had revealed to him. This was the range of the sensors in his signet ring, one lightsecond and a half.
In the base matter-energy layer, particle polarity was symmetrical. Positive and negative were nothing more than up spin or down spin. Like flipping a gyroscope on its head, these values could be reversed with no change to the form or momentum of the particles in the extensional layer called timespace.
Electrons became positrons, protons became antiprotons. The atoms and molecules all kept their shape: the electrochemical bonds hence chemical reactions of all the molecules in the affected area continued as normal, including those within the undead brains of the vampire beings and their thinking machines, save that they were now antimatter.
Only where this negative matter touched positive was there change. Both suffered total conversion.
The explosions where this negative matter of the fortress-city of the Dyson hull met the positive matter hull began in a doughnut shaped ring four hundred thousand miles in diameter, and expanded both inward and outward. The energy liberated by the total conversion of matter traveled faster than the electronic, gravity-wave, or space-contortion alarms registering the damage: no slave of the vampires had warning, no thinking machine could react in time.
Because the volume affected, compared to the size of this headquarters, was so large, the quivering vampire lords here beheld the coming destruction via hyperspatial periscope. There w
as no way to flee: any attempt to contort or warp to a positive matter area anywhere in the immensity of the Dyson surface would have obliterated them. Finding themselves and all their gear now being antimaterial in nature, the monsters did have time to recognize what was happening and send signals to the next in the chain of command, turning over their authority and yowling for revenge to be done in their memory.
These signals were allowed to escape by Lady Venus and traced. Meanwhile Lord Mars turned every other cubic inch of matter within the effected volume back to positive matter, like a chessboard of black and white, in order to speed the destruction. And again he vanished.
The first fortress-city was gone. A circular breach was punched clean through the hull of the Dyson. The burning edges of this breach were not protected by the disinertia and magnetic force fields used to preserve the Dyson hull against the interior environment of Ara A, and so the plasma began melting the neutronium struts and artificial sheets of energy-gathering and energy-projecting material that formed the hull surface.
Compared to the whole volume of the Dyson, however, this damage was simply nothing. Solar plasma began pouring into the breach in the hull, but it was a pinprick in a canvass larger than the Atlantic, with a match held to the pinhole.
In the same moment when a new fortress-city received the death signal of the first, and realized it held supreme command of the Dyson, Lord Mars was there, and again the entire volume of the second-in-command fortress-city was reversed and became antimatter. This city sent out dying cries to many locations, not just one.
The ability of Lord Mars to reverse matter polarity had strange side effects. One side effect was that by means of a double reversal, he could make a duplicate of himself, exact down to every atomic particle. These he could multiply geometrically. These he linked through mind circuits using a technique developed by Lady Venus and Aeneas. Aeneas had given the mindlinks tachyon channels, so that the thoughts between all the twin brains of all the bodies of Lord Mars, despite any distance, acted as one.
Led by Lady Venus, Lord Mars followed the command chains of thought. He kept expecting to encounter a false lead running to a trap, but it never happened. Ten thousand of Lord Mars slew one million cities of the vampires in an instant of total conversion; then one hundred thousand slew one hundred million; then ten million slew a billion.
He did this all in a space of seconds, spreading far more damage than all the wars of history combined, and never once did he smile.
At the speed of light, the explosions would not be seen until, seconds, minutes or a quarter hour later, at any point further along the vast curve of the Dyson. On the other hand, the explosions would have been seen by any slave city that just so happened to have hyperspatial periscope focused on a master city above it in the hierarchy, had any slave dared to spy on its superior.
However, even this damage was as nothing, compared to unthinkable immensity. It was as if one aggressive virus had killed off one billion of the neurons in a man’s body, leaving ninety billion untouched.
As planned, at this point, the ten million copies of Lord Mars, acting as one, changed tactics. Now he oriented the atoms of his body neither to the positive or negative, but to a neutral orientation, so that his protons became neutrons, and electrons neutrinos. By what manipulation of the strong nuclear force he could keep the neutrinos flying in the same shape as an electron cloud, and interact with other atoms, was a mystery beyond human science.
But his red body turned jet black, and became as hard as neutronium, invulnerable to any known form of kinetic, physical or electromagnetic damage. Even death energy was slowed and confused by the neutronium based life. (Aeneas, looking on from afar via hypaerspatial periscope, flexed the scales of his subcutaneous armor open and shut, feeling paltry and ridiculous.)
When Lord Mars next appeared in a mile-high command arena, he did not obliterate it instantly.
The mountains of undead flesh grew organs and reared up. They were not amoeboid except by choice: each grew limbs, tendrils, claws, manipulator hooks as needed from any convenient surface of its colorless flesh.
Lord Mars signaled to the Emperor Aeneas. Lord Mars saw the distant edges of the chamber suddenly turn red. Aeneas had surrounded this spot, and the ten million like it where any copy of Lord Mars stood, in a warp field lowering the speed of light to just above the speed of sound. Beams and bullets were now useless. Anything traveling above Mach One would find itself outside his frame of reference. And the vampires were trapped with him in the slow-light zone. No signals could escape this event horizon.
The vampire lords formed mouths and roared. Lord Mars drew his longsword in one hand and his pistol in the other. For the first time he smiled.
Then he made a squad of himself, then a company, then a battalion.
As he ran forward he saw all the objects around him flattening slightly in the direction of his motion, slow down like a visual recording played at low speed, and the redness grow darker as its mass increased. The huge hills of undead flesh turned their bellies to a fluid substance that they shed as they heaved themselves out of their bowl-shaped thrones and wallowed forward riding vast slime trails. Towering thousands of feet, the mountains rushed toward him, bellowing, emitting death-energy from their crags and peaks and newly-formed eyes.
Lord Mars slew and slew, wading through undead flesh to slay again.
His pistol was little more than a barrel holding a servomind and a multi-channel reception pearl. Stations on the planet Mars, powerhouses, atomic piles, accelerators, and arsenals were positioned to fire any type of vibration, energy, or solid destruction his gun crews could feed into their transmitting pearls.
This time, what he shot into the lacerated vampire masses heaving and roaring about him were burrowing, nerve-seeking darts designed by Lady Venus, containing thought-reading and infiltration mechanisms.
Some few he spared for a fate worse than death, cutting their brains away from nerve channels. He thrust into the disgusting nerve-mass appliances that prevented the shadow-condition cellular transformations. No cut nerves regrew.
The vampires had all the technologies of the Lords of Creation at their command. When Lord Mars could take them by surprise, he prevailed. In thousands and tens of thousands of battles where they were ready, he died, overcome by energies and forces he could not see or understand.
There were two things that gave him a fighting chance.
The first was that the enemy reacted unimaginatively to the current battle environment. They reached out with death-energy beams or destructive rays or forces which simply could not propagate when the speed of light was so slow. On the other hand, a neutronium sword tip moving at the speed of sound, when that was nine-tenths of the current speed of light, would create a megaton kinetic explosion in any target he struck, or, if he put his back into it, a thermonuclear reaction.
The second was that the enemy reacted unimaginatively to everything. Each underling sent messages during combat to remote higher-ups, but followed unsuccessful tactics until countermanded. Meanwhile, the armies of Lord Mars had no leaders but himself. There was no center, no line of communication to trace or cut. It was all him. Any of him was in command.
After the battle, he reversed the duplication process and gathered himself back into one. That one sat panting atop an undead mountain of pale flesh, teeth clenched, but smiling. As he regrouped, he noticed how many of his selves had committed suicide via total conversion to avoid capture. His smile faltered. The enemy had been fighting to gather captives, not to win. That was not a good sign.
Despite what Brother Beast always said about the damage to his soul, Lord Mars regretted none of his many suicides. Or so he ordered himself to think.
Avoiding capture was necessary. The command-monster on which he sat was proof of that. The vampire mountain had been lobotomized of all trace of free will by the Venus weapons. It was merely the puppet of Lord Mars. All voluntary nerve links were cut. It identified itself, in its ow
n nonverbal language, as Xormxragon, which meant, the Deceiver.
That name was also a bad sign.
Dimly, over the mental links, he could see Lady Venus and Lady Luna downloading volumes of memory from the creature’s undead brain cells. Lord Mars himself was busy giving counterfeit commands through the brain of Xormxragon. The monster’s underlings were prevented from remembering or questioning recent events.
The vast majority was unaware of anything untoward. It was as if Lord Mars had appeared in a throneroom, killed one despot while leaving the empire unaware of the coup.
Lady Venus gave a small scream of surprise and fear. “There is no evidence in any of the surviving brains of any higher officers! There is no galactic empire, no galaxy. In fact, they have no knowledge that any universe exists above the surface of Ara A. They think this red hell is all there is.”
Aeneas said, “They shot at us! We were above the surface! They knew we existed!”
Lady Venus said, “Not these. Someone else, by remote control, working through the Dyson-dwelling vampire lords, and made them perform actions meaningless to them.”
Aeneas said, “What does it mean?”
Through the brain of Xormxragon, Lord Mars was connected to the control mechanisms of the War Dyson. Through their astroseismic sensors, he now saw the solar temblors heralding the approach of thirty nine Dysons. The vast spheres came wallowing slowly through the plasma of Ara A. They formed a narrowing globe all around.
Frame-dragging detectors sensed that the warpcore armatures girdling the enemy Dyson equators were spinning rapidly, preventing any spacewarp, preventing any escape. Gravity readings showed the Dysons were forming black holes at their cores, preparing to fire.
Because space outside the Dyson where he now stood was flat, Lord Mars realized that there could have been no FTL signals sent to these Dysons. The more distant ones could not have yet seen the fact that the first nova beam fusillade had missed. The englobement was prearranged.