Superluminary

by perpetrator

  Lady Venus said, “Sire, the vampire lords who came here to consult with Urvasthrang were lobotomized of their free will, and placed under our control. Two of them have reported back by contortion thought-broadcast. The signs indicate none of the vampires commanders suspect that we had three megascale pearls, not two.”

  When the thirty-nine War Dysons formed a rough globe about the captured Dyson where the Tellurians were thought to be trapped, their Tipler ring armatures spun to prevent any warp fissures from forming. The armature on the captured Dyson was much larger and more potent than any of the three warpcores of the human race, but it could not out-wrestle thirty-nine.

  But this did not stop the Schroedinger particles of space contortion.

  Lord Mercury smirked. “The second megascale pearl was disinertialized, then accelerated out of the Ara A system at lightspeed, sire, last seen headed toward Coma Berenices. Once out of visible range (and none of the vampires could use hyperspatial periscopes while they were flattening space) the pearl cloaked itself in an antiphotonic field, and was recovered. I can do that trick with a burst of Sol’s holy light two more times and only two. Then the nullspace store is exhausted.”

  Aeneas said, “None of them suspect we departed the damaged Dyson, leaving our worlds behind? They thought we hid in the fleeing pearl’s nullspace?”

  Lord Pluto said in his cold, slow voice, “Sire, we should assume the idea has at least been contemplated by the enemy, but, without confirmatory evidence, it would remain just that, a suspicion.”

  Aeneas said to Lord Mars, “Suppose you were the enemy commander. Would you have seen through this trick?”

  Lord Mars said, “Let me remind you of the facts of recent history. Ara A is a globe one light hour in diameter. The dense, hot plasma prevents the propagation of light. The Dysons, once they flatten space, are like submarines with sonar. Gravitons cannot detect Schroedinger waves.

  “During the first phase of the battle, the enemy formation was over twenty light minutes in radius. Close coordination was impossible. They did not see our first move, which was to rush — well, to lumber slowly through the dense plasma — to the nearest Dyson. When it opened fire, its nova-beam punctured right through us and out the other side. A beam forty-two lightseconds in radius, can made a pretty hole in a sphere six lightminutes in radius, but not enough to take us out.”

  Lady Venus said, “We recall all this, Brother. It was only a few months ago!”

  Aeneas said, “Let him speak. He is getting at a point.”

  Lord Mars said, “Thank you, sire. My point is that each phase of the battle had its own intelligence risks. The beam that struck us cleared a channel that Lord Jupiter held open. We sent back along it the megascale contortion pearl Lord Mercury had readied. I do not see how any outside observer could have seen it.”

  Everyone smiled at the memory. The pearl had entered the vast volume of the enemy Dyson, too small to be noticed. Then it unfolded.

  For space contortion had two functions: first, was matter broadcast. A pearl could draw a physical body into a condition called nullspace, which created a cloud of Schroedinger waves in its place to bookmark its possible locations in the universe, and when those waves reached the receiving pearl, the waveform collapsed, and the body emerged from nullspace.

  But the second use was to draw a physical body into nullspace and store it there.

  During the four years of guerrilla war the World Armada had suffered during its long retreat from the expanding supernova of Sol, Aeneas had thought it prudent to return in certain robot-crewed ships insulated by slow-light spacewarp to the site of Sol’s ongoing fiery death, and catch some five hundred earth-masses of solar plasma into nullspace. This was less than a thousandth of Sol’s whole mass, but it was the largest Lord Mercury’s engineers could store.

  There, in a timeless node of nonbeing, the mass waited.

  This bit of Sol the size of Jupiter, was still as hot as nova-hot Sol itself, and as bright. The outward pressure of the agitated plasma was the same.

  Out it went. In six minutes, the expanding shockwave reached the inner hull of the Dyson. All the fortress-cities of the vampires in their millions and myriads were bathed in the holy radiance. All died before they knew themselves slain. The mass dissipated into an expanding cloud under its own force, cooled, and precipitated into hydrogen.

  The single survivor was the lord high commander of the attacking Dyson, named Urvasthrang the Annihilator. He had been found by Lord Uranus, kidnapped via space-contortion by Lord Mercury, paralyzed by Lord Mars, brain-raped by Lady Venus, and deposited in a blind vault, out of harm’s way, by Lord Pluto, all in the one well-coordinated second before the wave of light from Sol had struck his empty throne.

  Lord Uranus said, “Sire, I agree with Lord Mars. While the opaque hull kept all the visible light of Sol within the Dyson, matter does not halt neuropsionic waves. The property that makes Sol deadly to vampires passed through the hull. The neuropsionic effect was stopped by the unholy properties of Ara A, just beyond our hull. Had we dared do the same trick in open space, rather than inside a star, the enemy would have seen.”

  Lord Mercury had then used that same megascale pearl again to bring vampire automatons by the millions across from the damaged to the undamaged but now-empty Dyson. Urvasthrang, or his remnant, had been poured back into the cup-shaped throne orb in his master city, and all his staff and his hierarchies replaced, taking up duties of the slain vampires without missing a beat.

  Lord Mars said, “From the standpoint of what the enemy could see, the Xormxragon Dyson was struck and holed. The second phase of the battle was a circumvallation. The flotilla of Dysons surrounded us. Pentagonal force fields were projected between twenty vertices where one or two Dysons were stationed, to create a dodecahedron, with the damaged Xormxragon Dyson caught at the center. The energy planes were kinetic and disinertial force sufficient to prevent the escape of anything made of matter, and also opaque to Schroedinger waves, blocking any space contortion into or out of the dodecahedron. But the two Dysons at the center, both of them under our control, exchanged fire, and this would have masked the space contortion exchanges then underway. Lord Mercury moved us here, and left our deserted worlds back into the damaged Xormxragon Dyson.”

  It had been a tremendous manufacturing effort to equip each man, woman, and child of the three hundred human races on the many planets and myriad moons of the World Armada with space contortion pearls to carry themselves and a remnant of their belongings, herds and houses, into exile. Even so, without the megascale pearl at the core of planet Mercury, and without the unpredictable genius of Lord Mercury himself to solve the myriad technical and logistical problems, it could not have been done.

  “And we said farewell to First Earth,” muttered Lord Saturn, sadly. There had been riots among his antiquarians at the loss, and many had been returned to nullspace as punishment.

  Nonetheless, certain cities, monuments, and mountains having sentimental value were brought along to Second Earth, their places taken by imitations precise down to the molecular level.

  On Second Earth alone the migration faltered. The new populations immediately began to squabble and quarrel, in any places where old disputes still lingered. Aeneas in wrath sent his most terrible servants among them, monstrous things his mad grandfather made: heartless and cyclopean cyborgs with whips of fire and wings of steel, or three headed dogs with tails of cobras and teeth of iron. The ringleaders were plucked from burning ruins, tortured, and forced each to work to raise new lands from the sea to give to the opposing party as many identical copies to any land in dispute as they wished.

  Second Earth had twelve continents, four Jerusalems, three Romes, a New York not far from New Amsterdam, a version of Salem were only witches dwelt, a North America set aside for Sioux, and a Constantinople across the sea from Istanbul.

  Aeneas was fearfully severe with the rioters, and executed many, for he held mind-alteration to be abominable. Earthmen
baffled him. Venus was a world of sea-nomads in floating cities, where war was unknown, whose histories were lists of festivals and love affairs. Born there, he could not understand longstanding hatreds over landownership. Nor did he tolerate tumult and murder, not when countless enemies surrounded them.

  Lord Mars said, “As before, no foe was in position to detect the space contortion. Then this Dyson, with us hidden inside, took our position, as ordered, at one vertex of the dodecahedron, and erected the proper energy planes. And we are just lucky.”

  Aeneas said, “Lucky? Howso?”

  “They want us alive. If they have been fighting to kill, they would have moved faster and struck harder.” He shrugged. “The undead crew we left behind in the damaged Dyson, as programmed, spun up its armatures, lowered lightspeed, nullified gravity-waves. This blinded the enemy, and prevented their nova-beams from entering the frame of reference of their target. Like raising a drawbridge. And so the third and final phase, a board and storm operation, began.”

  They remembered those days. Long ago it seemed. The enemy had brought twelve Dysons close enough for hulls to touch, and hundreds of trillions of the undead soldiers began the slow process of migrating into the damaged Dyson, seeking the hidden humans in control of it. The machines and undead automaton crew left behind fought them with suicidal ferocity. On such a scale, what Lord Mars called a board and storm operation was a matter of months, not minutes.

  Meanwhile, the abandoned worlds of man and their puppet populations had fought back. The puppets were vat-grown creatures, undead, but disguised with layers of living cells to be able to pass for living creatures. Whenever one came near a vampire, it released a man-volume of stored life-energy into special still-living cells set aside for just that purpose, for the victorious vampires to feed upon, and be sated. Upon capture the puppets committed suicide, or seemed to. They had been dead all along, of course, but after death were indistinguishable from any other corpse.

  Lord Mars said, “During the board and storm, the puppets we left behind fought with the same level of skill as the person the puppet was based on. Do you remember Father’s insane rules about solving math equations and sharpshooting at ballots in order to vote? This was a lucky break for us. All the puppets based on men old enough to have voted under the First Emperor were crack shots. And, as it turns out, those equations are useful for suborbital ballistics. So if real people, ones not programmed to lose the battle, are ever attacked, they can outmatch the zombies of the enemy by ten to one. The casualties were remarkably one-sided. The enemy kept closing to hand-to-hand range. They want to be as close as possible to drain life.”

  During these months, the humans in the Urvasthrang Dyson began to investigate their new home. Began, but never continued. The size defeated them. But there was space enough to hide all the populations of man and all their cities (which they towed after them) interplanetary distances away from the nearest slumbering corpse-piles of undead.

  In most places, the Dyson hull was a solid force field, atom-thin, but wherever the neutronium support beams intersected, clouds of gas or crowds of asteroids had gathered, collected by irregularities in the hull gravity or the eddies in solar wind from the core accretion disk. Some ancient peoples had also built habitats, ranging between the size of a closet to the size of a gas giant, tethered to such intersections like grapeclusters.

  Lord Saturn spoke next. “This shipyard — if that is the word for a bay five light-seconds in radius — was abandoned a million years ago. It was not built by the vampires, but by some race that eliminated record of their appearances from the memory layer of the universe. I assume this was the Forerunners. The Great Eye we found half carved out of a neutron star had never been activated. No one knows we are here.”

  The unfinished eye had been shattered into nine worlds, large and small, and fifty worldlets, by Lord Neptune. Miniature suns were orbited among the moons and asteroids. Terraformers set to work rendering the surfaces habitable, or habitats far below the surface, larger than continents.

  Lord Mercury’s people deposited trillions of pearls across all the lands and seas and clouds of the new worlds, large and small. The exiled human races emerged from nullspace, and, not without considerable squabbling and confusion, took possession of the newborn planets.

  Meanwhile, the puppets in the damaged Dyson, dwelling in the human worlds, in time had been duly overwhelmed and consumed. The battle was over, the human race apparently wiped out, but no new orders came for Urvasthrang.

  More time passed. The Dysons stayed in formation, and spacewarps continued to be blockaded.

  Lord Mars said, “During all three phases of the action, my battle-pattern computer confidence amounting to certainty is that we have not been spotted. For one thing, we are not dead.”

  Aeneas clapped his hands together. “Very good! With the advice and consent of the Lords of Creation, I officially call the battle ended. Let all worlds stand down from battle stations. Let the wartime protocols be ended and civilian government resume. The Parliament of Man at its pleasure may sit. The Church of the Holy Roman Empire of Brazil may offer masses of thanksgiving in all worlds, and the Crime Religion of the Syndicates of America may offer bribes to the Crooked Cosmic Cop they worship. Let all my subjects render thankful prayers for our salvation. Any questions before we move on to our main order of business?”

  Lady Luna sneezed, and said, “Yes. What was your second reason for having us meet out in the rain?”

  Aeneas said, “When we made Second Earth, New Luna, Second Mars, Second Venus and all these new worlds and moons, I was shocked at how many populations wanted to huddle far underground, leaving these new seas and continents empty. Placing my throne on the surface will show the common people not to fear the open sky.”

  Lord Mars said, “The foe’s weapons would not be stopped by crust or mantle. Putting your head under the blanket will not stop the bear.”

  Lady Luna tossed her red hair, saying, “It is not fear. It is to get away from the sight of the endless metal heavens! We are trapped inside a Dyson sphere inside the black interior of a hypergiant star. I, for one, am famished for the sight of stars.”

  Aeneas said, “That time is upon us, cousin!”

  He stood. He raised his hand. The clouds parted. The rain stopped. The miniature sun had set. Above were stars, shining bright. They glinted like gems.

  He smiled. “Urvasthrang, along with all the other Dyson commanders, were ordered by Rhazakhang to leave Ara A and fly toward Coma Berenices, to search for us. It happened as we sat here.”

  Lady Luna said, “We are outside the Dyson?”

  “We are orbiting it, but still within the warp zone, and are carried along. Our Dyson is currently below our horizon at this latitude.” Aeneas sat again. “Now, my Lords, my Ladies, in celebration of our successful escape, of my fifth year as imperial monarch, and, yes, in celebration of the first moment in five years we have not been under a deadly threat of instant death ....”

  He raised his hand again. The light touching his throne grew dim as warp field of unknown import surrounded the seated figure, then utterly black, black as onyx.

  It was as menacing as if he had suddenly flourished an energy pistol, or commanded a firing squad to surround them. The Lords of Creation, stone-faced and not showing their alarm, touched their signet rings, readying their many weapons, visible and invisible.

  The voice of Aeneas came out of the jet-black shadow.

  “... let us discuss the fate of mankind. The floor is open.”

  35. The Great Void

  The Lords of Creation summoned their weapons to their hands, and sat in silence, tense and waiting.

  In the hands of Lord Jupiter, his lightning bolt crackled and shined, too bright to look upon. Lord Neptune held his trident, and the eddies of gravity around him made the earth below his throne tremble. Lord Saturn held his sickle. Lord Uranus held his lantern in which was what seemed a star burning. Lord Mercury raised his caduceus.
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br />   Lady Luna stood and readied her silvery recurve bow, drawing an arrow of insanity from her quiver. Lady Venus remained seated, but now her mirror was in her hands, in which any thought-rays present could be caught. Lady Pallas, in her plumed helm and man’s armor, held an energy javelin in one hand. In her other was her invulnerable shield upon which none dared gaze, for the neuropsionic labyrinth pattern scrambled the visual centers of the brain. Lady Ceres drew no weapon, but the grass around her rustled, changed, and formed bio-weapon spores that rose up and hung in dangerous clouds around her.

  Brother Beast, looking calm, folded his hands, because he had no weapons, and Lord Mars, looking bored, folded his hands, because his weapons were irresistible.

  As for Aeneas, his throne put forth an antiphotonic shadow to envelop him, black as ink, opaque as obsidian. Reddish distortions from Doppler shift clung to the edges of the shadow, betraying the presence of a spacewarp, a spot where the laws of nature were changed.

  Brother Beast said, “Over the last five years, we have all gotten out of the habit of threatening our blood relations with weapons originally meant to destroy planets. Is there no way to retain the civility and goodwill we have enjoyed?”

  Lord Mars said, “I notice the kid has not told us to put our weapons away.”

  The voice of Aeneas spoke from the darkness. “A wise leader does not give orders he knows will not be obeyed.”

  The rain was no longer falling, but the grass blades were wet. The circle of trees surrounding dripped drops from drooping leaves. The sky overhead showed the stars above the Dyson Sphere, and the other recently-made planets and moons of the World Armada gleaming in the light of their miniature suns.

  The stars turned red, went dim, and rushed away as the Dyson entered the closed timelike curve segment of a warp channel; during their passage through the channel, they saw overhead what seemed to be their own Dyson Sphere, turned inside-out and englobing them, growing larger and rushing away into darkness; and a moment later, the hemisphere of the sky turned white, contracted, dulled, the scattered stars reappeared, growing blue as they returned to the normal hues, and hurried together like an explosion of sparks in reverse, reestablishing the normal vision of universe above once more.