by perpetrator
She called the planet Pallas, saying that it was, in effect, the same place as her old worldlet, merely extended.
The subjovian was given to Lord Uranus and his Georgian-Sidereals, commonly called Pooks. These Georgians were races uplifted from a plethora of earthly birds and beasts, a grave and solemn race of men with the same stiff dignity as the ancient Egyptian statues they resembled. These carefully located the robots by spy ray, and offered them override codes gleaned from the memory of Urvasthrang. Lord Uranus accomplished by deception what Lady Pallas had accomplished by truth.
He called it George.
Lady Luna and her fierce nymphs helmed the superterrestrial, a body three times the size of Earth, a world of flattened mountains and shallow, turgid oceans. Her maidens rode naked on the backs of giant moon-hounds to hunt down the fleeing insectoid robots with lance and dart, and made a sport of what should have been a military operation.
She christened her world Chariot-of-Madness.
The Lords Triton, Prospero and Ganymede were given command of Second Neptune, Second Uranus and Second Jupiter.
The megascale pearl carrying the last remaining charge of Sol’s light was placed inside Second Saturn. This globe lacked a warpcore, but the pearl could remove inertia and move the world and its rings and moons at just below lightspeed. Lady Eunomia, daughter of Lord Saturn, was given command.
The captured terrestrial and subterrestrial warpcore worlds were distributed to the grim sons of Lord Pluto, Kerberos and Hydra, to the maniacal but brilliant Lord Dionysus; and to the grinning and wolfish Autolycos Lord Anubis, son of Mercury.
The sons of Pluto walked unseen among the mazes and cityscapes of the warren-riddled labyrinth worlds they were given, and with invisible fingers and tools, disarmed or deactivated all enemy automatons they found.
They called their worlds Garm and Ouroboros.
Lord Dionysus landed alone on a small, fiery world, accompanied only by a host of panthers, dolphins and wolves, who spread seeds and spores where they went. He played his flute as he danced, and grape vines grew up instantly from the revivified soil to strangle any struggling enemy machines.
He dubbed the globe King-of-the-Wood.
Lady Venus encountered no opposition. She called her planet Hesperus.
Anubis found a world utterly flat and featureless save for strange and ungainly seven-sided towers rising from prairies of black salt. Some robots were still active, bounding like nightmarish grasshoppers in the low gravity. He waited for an enemy to open fire, and then skipped from bullet to bullet up their stream of fire to step atop these robotic weapons, which he folded into nullspace.
He called the little world BaldSpot.
In reckless haste, the captured worlds were prepared. But tachyonic rays carrying a neuropsionic message echoed from their signet rings into the mind of the Lords of Creation before all was ready.
Dozens of white-hot pinpoints of light surrounded the wide Canopus system, and expanded into a hundred battleworlds, their cities and surface fortifications blazing, mountainpeak batteries and space elevators already firing as they materialized, lancing out with laser bolt and lightning ray, gravityfields and timewarps and thought-destruction waves. The huge globes were shining like coals from hell beneath their concentric atmospheres of defensive screen and forcefield.
The enemy was here, and in overwhelming force.
41. Escape to Sagittarius
The space vampire fleet invading Canopus was taken by surprise.
Of the hundred enemy battleworlds that entered the sublight continuum in a hollow sphere formation centered on the Canopus system, only a score were superjovians. These were worlds twice to thrice the size of Jupiter, with miles of thin atmosphere held down by immense gravity above endless seas of liquid nitrogen and methane. Ninety-mile tall ziggurats and towers of adamantine, built of artificially strengthened molecules, loomed above the turgid, heavy atmospheres.
Up from the dead seabed, glacierscapes and mountains of the vampire worlds, interplanetary-strength high-energy beam weapons flew like lances of fire, like rivers of flame. The dark worlds sent forth their various agencies of death: electromagnetics of many wavelengths, coherent rays of neutrons or gravitons, timewarp fields or neuropsionic blasts of planet-destroying intensity.
They spun their equatorial armatures up to nearlightspeed as soon as they emerged into the subluminary continuum, and attempted to flatten space, but, for once, the advantage was with the Tellurians.
It was true that the newly commissioned world-fleet was unready, but it was also true that the Tellurian Dyson, under command of Lord Deimos, son of Mars, and the newly made gas giants under command of Lords Ganymede, Prospero and Triton were ready. Their armatures and equipment were manned and battle-tested. These four were enough.
The Dyson crushed Canopus into a pinpoint size just as the black fleet materialized in a globe around them. Five solar masses collapsed into the singularity and formed a black hole. The unstable accretion disk formed from the outer layers of murdered Canopus expanded outward and filled the Dyson interior. Thrice the mass of Sol was totally converted to energy, and issued from the firing aperture in a coherent beam.
Ganymede, Prospero, and Triton had their three gas giants hovering in a Klemperer triangle off the bow of the Dyson firing aperture. Lord Prospero was able to detect the beam approaching before the first lightwaves it shed arrived, and to select the locations of the enemy targets.
The incoming fire of the Black Fleet, moving at lightspeed, was still eleven hours away. They had emerged from their warpchannels roughly twice as far from Canopus as the planet Pluto once had orbited around Sol. As the enemy planets materialized, images of them taken through hyperspatial periscopes went blind when space was flattened, but not before Lord Prospero, using his father’s spy ray mechanisms, detected the dark neuropsionic residue the undead planets gave off, noting their declination and right ascension.
The Lords Ganymede and Triton, using the massive electrokinesis and gravitokinesis engines of Jupiter and Neptune, deflected the nova-beam roaring from the firing aperture and directed it first at one altitude and azimuth, then at another, then another. Then they deflected the beam into a vast semicircle to strike targets in the hemisphere opposite the firing aperture.
Unlike ground combat with its complexities of terrain and season and weather, and unlike sea combat with its winds and tides, superluminary combat was a matter of simple and terrible mathematics: the Tellurian Dyson, armed with the eight solar masses of Canopus, had more mass, hence more ability to bend space, than the enemy superjovians, even had there been a thousand of them.
The vampires evidently had stripped all the stars within two hundred fifty lightyears of every planet with a working warpcore, to send it to Canopus as quickly as possible. Larger warworlds and warstars could have come from further away, but these no doubt were scouring the regions in the direction of Coma Berenices, where vampires had been deceived to concentrate their search.
So the mighty Tellurian Dyson shrugged aside the Lilliputian efforts of the twenty enemy superjovians to flatten space, and formed a warp. Lord Deimos could have pulled the Dyson out of timespace at that moment, but instead, smiling, he waited.
The commanders of the vampire worlds could have broken off their attempts to flatten space, and used their warpcores to lower the speed of light and render themselves immune to lightspeed weapons they surely knew must be coming. They did not. Stubbornly, foolishly, mulishly, mechanically, the commanders of the vampire worlds continued the vain attempt to restrain the escaping Dyson.
Perhaps some of them erected planetwide antiphotonic screens, or rendered their globes disinert, to fend off the coming beam weapon. But then, at the tenth hour, the Dyson altered the gravitational constant and the neutrino rest mass so as to restore their inertia just as the beam struck. The planetary bodies were pinned in place.
Thus, instead of being lightly wafted away from the destruction as the nova beam, like a
searchlight, skipped from world to world, the vast globes were incinerated, bisected and shattered. Mountains were thrown into the gaping void where the beams passed through the world, oceans, atmospheres, and molten crust and mantle. Atmosphere, hydrosphere, surface features were boiled in less than a second, continents evaporated, and their superheated steam propelled into space.
And those were the worlds were the beam struck glancingly.
Where it struck head-on, all matter was converted to energy, and the fundamental particles at the center of the explosion were converted into more fundamental particles existing in ultrahighenergy states which had only occurred naturally in the first three seconds after the Big Bang.
Perhaps there were moons and ships orbiting these worlds. If so, they were overwhelmed by the shockwave.
The vampire commanders vainly but fanatically, their batteries of engines straining and overheating, continued to attempt to flatten space up until the very end, trying to snare the Dyson. Because of this, no neighboring worlds outran the attacking beam. No faster than light message escaped. Whatever supreme commanders sent those hundred worlds to their annihilation surely received no rumor of their fate.
Meanwhile, the various exotic energies the vampire worlds had shot passed through the space the Dyson once had occupied. The humans had vanished.
The Tellurian Dyson reentered the sublight spacetime metric six thousand seven hundred lightyears away.
This was the 9 Sagittarii system: two massive O-type stars, each ten times the radius of Sol, and hundreds of thousands of times the luminosity, circled at each other in an eccentric orbit between eleven and twenty-seven times the distance that one separated Earth from the Sun. The Tellurian Dyson, carrying the World Armada around it, emerged into the continuum in the gravitational center of the system.
In this form of interstellar combat, the intruder always had one advantage: when he landed in a target star system (provided he did not land on a spot where a hyperspatial periscope aperture rested) the lightwaves that had left the inner and outer planets minutes or hours before would strike his eyes and telescopes as soon as he emerged into real space. He could see their position and numbers. However, no image of the intruder could reach any eyes and telescopes on those planets until those minutes and hours passed. So the intruder always had minutes or hours before the earliest alarm could be raised during which he could study the last seen position of the enemy defenses.
It was this advantage that saved the humans.
Lord Deimos, wrapped in his shining environmental robes, stood in the middle of the main fortress city of the Dyson, surrounded by miles of empty and gigantic bowls which once served the mountain-sized vampire lords as thrones.
Every square inch of the inner surface of these ten-acre-wide hemispheres was coated with control points into which the vampires had grown their nerve endings. No native Martian race could have operated such controls. The Ifrits created by Lord Jupiter were a numerous race and many had sworn fealty to Lord Mars, and to his sons, and submitted themselves to the harsh disciplines of the Red Planet. The Ifrit were energy beings, woven of self-sustaining force fields. Each stood atop its hemispherical throne like a column of living fire with long angular limbs of lightning bolts plugged into each of the ten thousand nerve points.
Layers of servominds looming like the eggs of giant birds from myth were gathered in a semicircle around where Lord Deimos sat crosslegged on a carpet woven of thought-focusing fibers. His face and hands were red as blood. The environmental robes glittered and moved like rippling quicksilver.
At his right hand was a carafe of wine. At his left was a prayer book. His ceremonial sword was lying on the carpet before him. It was well known that Deimos, in his youth, had been an apprentice of Lord Pluto. Something of the spartan simplicity of Pluto was present.
The ring on the finger of Lord Deimos was tied in parallel to similar but larger rings encircling his wrist. All were blazing white.
Aeneas was seated to one side of him on his black, three headed throne. He sat when it was necessary to project an image of himself to give orders to underlings. Otherwise, he stood, or paced, or let his internal organs move themselves beneath his skin first to one position, then to another, nervously, as if trying to find a comfortable way to pack them into his skeleton and frame.
To the other side, Lord Mars sat on a similar carpet, surrounded by a ring of contortion pearls, so that he might be transmitted to the several other planets in the World Armada. He was polishing and cleaning his longsword with slow, methodical motions of rag and whetstone.
The other Lords of Creation, helming their various worlds, were communicating instantly through their signet rings, and most of them broadcast their face and form, so that expression and gesture could be seen. Ghostly images of them, each in his own control chamber or astronomical tower, appeared in each other’s visual cortex.
Also present was the initial image of the star system. Circling the gigantic star 9 Sagittarii A was a ringworld of silvery material, some form of alloy, half matter, and half solidified energy. This was no humble ringworld with a merely earth-orbit radius. The radius of Saturn’s old orbit would have fit inside the megascale structure with room to spare.
Orbiting outside the ring were rotating cylinders, large as gas giants, made of unknown and impossible material, white as platinum. Any object of any shape of that mass should have been pulled into a sphere long ago. A band of atmosphere was gathered at the equator of each small cylinder. The ringworld was spinning, as were the cylinders, giving the whole star system the aspect of a cosmic clockwork.
Circling the other star, 9 Sagittarii B, was a smaller ringworld, only the diameter of Jupiter’s old orbit, rotating in the opposite direction.
Scattered seemingly at random through the system, no two of them sharing the same orbital ecliptic, were four hundred small worlds, all exactly the same size. The Doppler shift readings showed the worlds were accelerating and decelerating in no pattern. This was a star system where the planets did not orbit their suns, but swam like ships wherever they would.
Lady Pallas said, “This is very odd. These are main sequence stars, and should not have any nitrogen and helium in the stellar surface visible in the spectrum. At this distance, the stellar winds colliding do not produce sufficient x-rays to ionize the nebula around us. But 9 Sagittarii is the main source for ionization for most of the visible nebula in this region ... something is wrong with the shape of space and time in this star system...”
Aeneas cut her off. “We can discuss scientific curios later, Aunt Aspasia! Right now there is something wrong with the warpchannel we just left. It has not collapsed behind us!” Aeneas probed with his instruments. “Twenty five of the fleet of worlds that attacked us at Canopus survived and are in pursuit. They are in the warpchannel behind us. Be ready.”
Lord Mars paused in his polishing. “I thought the range of jovian planets was less than three hundred lightyears, even with a massive anchor at the far end. How could they follow us?”
But the signet ring of Lord Mars answered the question silently: the pursuit had made a warpchannel reaching no farther than into the warpchannel formed by the Dyson as it departed, and so the surviving enemy worlds had merely been pulled along in the wake.
Aeneas said, “We must rapidly form a shortrange warpchannel through nullspace to entrap first one of the 9 Sagittarii stars, and then the other, and reduce them to a singularity as fuel for our next longrange jump...” His signet ring was already calculating the four dimensional vectors needed for the tiny interplanetary hop.
The young Lord Deimos said, “Wait, sire! The temple computers of Mars register danger! Their thought processes were formatted by Lord Tellus, and no one can understand them. It is some sort of intuitive calculus: but we are in danger...”
Alarms were already coming in. Aeneas heard the screams from his relatives as their faces started to melt.
42. The Deadly Double Star
Aeneas saw,
through his ring, the face and body of Brother Beast, alone in his control cell at the pole of the weapon-coated Tellurian superjovian. Both the planet and the man were glowing and dissolving. The core of the superjovian was disintegrating into neutrons and neutrinos, and the whole surface was convulsed with earthquakes and collapsing continents.
The Fire Giant, Ice Giant and Water Giant planets controlled by Lords Jupiter, Neptune and Lady Pallas were likewise shrinking and shaking themselves to pieces, while emitting massive neutrino bursts. The neutron radiating from the core through the surface was uneven, concentrated in some places, diffuse in others. Where the neutron storm was dense, the waves were destroying machines and organisms.
The neutral particles were unaffected by positive and negative energy holding atoms and molecules together, and, indeed, passed through such things like ghosts. But these neutrons had a greater rest mass than it was possible, in nature, for neutrons to have, and this increased the range of their strong nuclear force. Any atomic nuclei they passed through reacted like an unstable, radioactive material. Elements profoundly stable, carbon, helium, hydrogen, now dissolved into protons and alpha particles, and the energy of these dissolutions broke up atoms around them in a chain reaction.
The miniature suns orbiting the worlds popped like Roman candles, dissolving instantly, unnoticed in the eye-dazzlingly blaze of the two giant, white suns.
The superterrestrial and terrestrial planets were not as damaged, but cities and parishes were burning in the weird, invisible storm. By a bitter irony, the people living on the surfaces of the world, places thought to be unsafe, survived in greater numbers than the buried cities or the mermaids. The surrounding heavier elements in water and stone ignited more swiftly and in greater numbers than gasses.
And so the worlds were beginning to melt.
Deimos had formed periscopes to bring current images in from the myriad planetoids of this mad, clockwork system. On the worldlets were races of beings dissolving and re-growing continuously, living in towers and domes that also rotted and dissolved in minutes, but continually re-grew into new shapes, glowing and burning.