by perpetrator
Aeneas said, “You have the floor, my lady.”
She said, “The neutron storm effect is amplified the larger the mass of the target. If we used the megascale pearl to collapse whatever nullspace was keeping those super-large ringworld armatures intact around those stars, not only would the ringworld matter dissolve, but the stellar cores would go nova. The whole star system is a deadman switch. It dissolves anyone who enters via warpchannel; and it blows the whole nebula to smithereens if they resist dissolving.”
Aeneas said, “Who would engineer such a system?”
Lord Mars answered, “The old owners. Those ringworlds were not full warp armatures, but they held off the vampires, no doubt for a long time. Geologic ages, maybe. The enemy could not enter the nebula through a warpchannel, not without what just happened to us happening to them. They must have floated in at sublight speed.”
Aeneas said, “Why are they still manning the ringworlds? Why still do this?”
Lord Mars said, “They are all automatons. Why stop?”
No one knew whether Lord Pluto had been wounded in the attack or not. His voice emerged from his helm, “That was why Sol was attacked at sublight speed, back in the Paleolithic, first by Baptistina, later by my old planet. The automatons followed their last standing orders from billions of years ago. The space vampires must think us the Forerunners.”
Aeneas said, “To graver matters now: this star, Sakurai’s Object, is large but rarefied, six-tenths of one solar mass, which is insufficient to carry us more than seven hundred lightyears. Fortunately, a protostar called HH 80-81 is within that range. By astronomical standards, it is recently-formed, preplanetary, and thus may be as free of vampire infestation as Sakurai’s Object. It is ten solar masses. Enough to carry us to KW Sagittarii, our next target.
“I leave to you, lords and ladies, to debate the best approach. We can land at the barycenter of the system, as we did at Canopus and at 9 Sagittarii, or we can land offcenter.
“The advantages of landing at the barycenter are plain. The advantage of an offcenter landing should be clear from our last debacle.”
Lord Mars said, “Forgive me, sire, if I talk out of turn. You cannot let a few deaths shake you. Caution in combat is worse than recklessness because it heartens the enemy and make you predictable. Put the emergence point of the warpchannel in the center of the system! Crush the star first and let the enemy do his worst!”
Lord Jupiter said, “Sire, our only hope rests in stealth and caution. Emerge ten lightyears from the system, or more, and approach at sublight speeds.”
Lord Mercury said, “For once, I concur with Lord Jupiter. Only a fool leaps into a window without peering through first. With the planetary disinertial engines, we could bring our worlds to ninety-nine percent of lightspeed, and arrive in the same hour as any light reflection or radar beam betraying our position. To us, ten years would pass in an hour.”
Aeneas put it to a vote. The younger lords sided with Mars, trusting in power; and the older with Mercury, trusting in speed. Brother Beast, Lady Vesta, and Lord Pluto abstained. The vote ended in a tie, eight to eight.
Aeneas broke the tie and made the decision. The Dyson emerged at the center of the HH 80-81 system. As hoped, there were no vampires in the system, which was fortunate. As should have been foreseen, however, when the Dyson enveloped the protostar, the twin collimate radio jets emerging from the protostar’s axis of rotation cut through the Dyson hull, destroying many square light minutes of inner surface, where the gravitational and magnetic fields firing mechanisms rested. Radio waves, like electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength, in sufficient force will have the power to heat matter to the fission point, and ignite it.
Hence, as the protostar was seized in an ever shrinking globular web of forces, the globe was frayed and broken at these two points: under unimaginable pressure of the stellar collapse, like gas spurting from a punctured balloon, the jets of emitted particles grew bright and hot and thickened into a beam of nova proportions.
By sheer mischance, the terrestrial-sized battleworld Ouroboros, in what should have been a safe orbit outside the Dyson hull, was struck by the beam puncturing the hull.
The antiphotonic planet-wide force fields and defensive screens were overloaded and obliterated in a microsecond. The planet was disinert, and should have simply been carried before the beam like a feather carried along in the wash from a firehose, unhurt, but the protostar was surrounded by a nebula dense enough to offer resistance to the passage of the planet. The density was very nearly a hard vacuum, but not very nearly enough. Without inertia, the planet halted its motion away from the beam when it struck even a few particles per billions of cubic miles of space, and was slowed, and overtaken, and burned to nothing.
It was instantaneous. Lord Hydra and all the soldiers, servicemen and servants manning the captured engines and weapons of Ouroboros were dead before they knew what struck them. The warpcore at the center of the planet swelled as the mass of the beam passed into it, increased its event horizon radius to consume its surrounding equipment. Having eaten its own moorings, the hollow singularity failed, collapsed, and vanished from timespace, never to be recovered.
Nothing showed on the face of Aeneas when next the Lords met, but there was a strange light in his eye, and three thrones now draped in black. “Fate has slain one of us for my presumption! A cautious approach is needed.
“We will take the time to patch the puncture holes in the Dyson. We will have to make other preparations, re-engineering each warp armature under our command. This will take time, but we must hope the small, local jump here has passed unnoticed by the hunters. Lady Io, daughter of Jupiter, has been selected to receive the warpcore imprint and to helm Second Jupiter, and guard the populations there.
“The populations will need to be distributed more evenly among the World Armada, and some terraforming must be done. Then, on to KW Sagittarii.”
The Armada emerged half a lightyear off from the target system.
KW Sagittarii was a supergiant star some thirteen thousand lightyears from Canopus, which shed three hundred thousand times of light than Sol. Even at half a lightyear away, it was blindingly bright, and overwhelmed astronomical instruments.
Within the same minute of their arrival, which obviously had been detected instantly by every warpcore array at or near KW Sagittarii, a dozen copper-colored spherical vessels one light minute in radius emerged from warpchannels, like miniature Dyson spheres.
Each one materialized and caught a human superjovian, jovian or subjovian perfectly in its center. At the same time, the other three opened fire on the smaller worlds. Black pearls of twisted, tightly-knotted and unstable space were shot in streams by the hundreds from tractor presser beams sweeping like searchlights from the outer hulls of these coppery mini-Dysons. The clouds of black pearls shot toward the moons, worldlets and terrestrials of the Tellurian World Armada.
The black, three-headed throne were Aeneas sat was smothered in alarms, and his ring and his eyes grew hot as fire from the overload of information pouring into his brain and orders pouring out. And perhaps there were tears as well pouring out of his damaged eyes.
But if so, he noticed neither the tears nor the damage, but barked out the battle orders as fast as tachyons could carry them.
44. The World-Wreckers of KW Sagittarii
Nine miniature Dyson spheres, one lightminute in radius, instantly englobed the nine capital worlds of the Armada of Man: St. Michael’s World, Niflheim, Inferno, Pallas, Second Jupiter, Second Neptune, Second Saturn, Second Uranus and the subjovian world called George. Most of the moons and asteroids near the giants were caught. The other three enemy miniature Dysons gave chase and opened fire on the smaller, rocky planets sailing disinert far from the gas giants. These Dysons employed a strange weapon: they were throwing black pearls in numberless clouds outward at near-lightspeed.
These pearls, when they struck atmosphere, or ring system, or outer moon, not only gave off
a small explosion which would only have flattened a city, but they erupted with masses of plasma energy taken from the core of KW Sagittarii which should have burned whole hemispheres. It was an ironic reverse of the humans’ own successful tactic at Canopus.
Forty worldlets and moons in the human armada died, and so did Second Pluto. What saved Second Earth and Second Venus was the fact that the vampires had not expected the worlds to have atmospheres, so the pearls ignited prematurely, miles above the surface, and below the innermost of energy fields and defensive screens swaddling the small worlds. The shields of Second Earth held; those of Second Venus failed. All life on the surface of Second Venus was destroyed, and the oceans evaporated, but the cities deep beneath the mantle near the planetary cores were safe.
The nine capturing mini-Dysons spun their armatures, flattening space, and preventing the escape of the worlds caught in their dead centers. But not all warp effects were jammed: the enemy allowed hyperspatial periscopes and tachyon radio to operate, in order to let themselves see and coordinate events instantly across the relativistic distances.
Lady Pallas sat alone on her empty world. Her hollow asteroid, filled entirely with artificial brains, floated serenely in the chemical seas of her jovian warworld. Lady Pallas had had the forethought to erect many hundreds of hyperspatial periscopes with viewpoints scattered evenly in concentric globes around the armada. Hence, during the thirty seconds before any light images could reach from the newly arrived inner hulls to the eyes and instruments on the surface, she saw the threat of the mini-Dysons entirely englobing each world. This alone saved them.
The human warplanets were coordinated by a brain-to-brain tachyonic mindlink, and reacted instantly. Lord Deimos, in the control fortress of the Tellurian Dyson, used some of the remaining fuel from the corpse of HH 80-81 to create a nova beam. He forced it though a warp channel so that it would arrive instantly at its destination, and cut the mini-Dyson surrounding St. Michael’s World, the superjovian where Brother Beast was stationed, neatly in half.
Of course, the spherical compression fields which had been fired moved at the speed of light. It took a half minute to cross the distance between the inner mini-Dyson hull and the globe called St. Michael’s World, but the warp field flattening space and preventing any escape did not. It was an instantaneous effect. So in the same moment, from the frame of reference of the command thrones of the attacking mini-Dyson, that the mini-Dyson was severed into two hemispheres, the armatures parted and the warp field vanished, in that same moment from the frame of reference of the superjovian planet, it, too, was released. Many seconds before the compression fields reached any planet to crush, not only was St. Michael’s World vanished from its former location, it had re-emerged into timespace in close orbit to the second of the attacking mini-Dysons.
Too close an orbit, in fact: the supergiant planet smashed through the one-atom thick hull substance like an elephant through gossamer. Fortunately, St. Michael’s World was mostly uninhabited. No one was slain in the titanic super-earthquakes and supersonic hemisphere-to-hemisphere typhoons released when cubic miles of ocean and atmosphere were flung into space by the impact, or countless kilograms of matter, superheated to beyond the fission point, evaporated explosively into x-rays and high energy particles.
By some miracle, Brother Beast broke none of his warp armatures by this crazed maneuver. Lord Neptune, who had been trapped at the center of this mini-Dyson, found his Ice Giant world Niflheim surrounded not by a closing globe of force, but by a globe with a hole in it, because the emitters dotting the mini-Dyson hullplates Brother Beast had just smashed were gone. Lord Neptune rendered his world disinert, and used his gravity engines to fling the whole globe out through the hull breach.
St. Michael’s World and Niflheim now warped to close orbit about the mini-Dyson englobing Second Saturn, the planet helmed by Lady Eunomia. It was the only gas giant not armed with a warp core. It was also the world with the highest civilian population. Immense interplanetary tractor beams and destructive rays poured out from Niflheim, ripping up and destroying tens of thousands of square miles of hull plate, and meanwhile Brother Beast like a lunatic hurled his battered, cracked and burning superjovian world again and again through the hull plates, hoping to hit some essential city, engine, emitter, or node.
Meanwhile, on the smaller worlds, the Ladies Luna and Venus, and Lords Dionysus, Kerberus, and Anubis, also reacted instantly. They spun their armatures up to speed. Their small planets vanished into red pinpoints, and reappeared out of blue pinpoints in close orbit around the enemy mini-Dysons trapping the giant planets Inferno, Pallas, George, Second Jupiter and Second Neptune.
The small planets linked their warpcores to the giant planets, and used the tactic learned at 9 Sagittarii to erect overlapping spacewarps, out of phase and mutually destructive.
The engineering done at HH 80-81 was now put to use: Lord Mars and Lord Mercury had cooperated to place the essential engineering components in nullspace, turn them into antimatter, and create an endless sequence of positive matter replacement parts out of them, using the matter orientation technique of Lord Mars. Not the whole world, but just the armatures circling the equators and poles of the small worlds began to glow, burn and dissolve, but then to reconstitute themselves.
Meanwhile the large armature of the copper mini-Dysons also began to glow, burn and dissolve. They, however, did not reconstitute themselves.
More amazing were the events on Second Jupiter, where Lady Io was at the helm. Her warp core was jammed by the more massive warp of the englobing mini-Dyson, and without a second core working in concert, she could not create a neutron storm as had the small worlds of 9 Sagittarii. However, on this world were the militia, over which Lord Jupiter had been placed unexpectedly in command.
Aeneas had commanded that only those men who had been willing, back in the days when Lord Tellus was Emperor, to step into one of his deadly voting booths and risk death to cast a ballot had earned the right to bear arms. Since most of them, in later years, cast their ballots by marksmanship at the shooting range, they were also practiced shots. Thanks to the ready availability of pantropic techniques to halt or reverse aging, these patriarchs could be returned to the neural and glandular age of eighteen-year-olds, with strength and reflexes to match. (Women were forbidden from service, unless they had their neurochemistry altered to force their brains to operate like the brains of males.)
Aeneas did not know if he were also going insane, or if his grandfather’s strange thought processes were becoming clear, or both. But it now seemed clear that peoples gifted with eternal youth and endless leisure, but with little or no liberty hence no self reliance, could not help but be slavish, selfish and cowardly. But any man willing to face death to join in the civic duty of voting for Parliament clearly had overcome the selfishness endemic to an age of history suffering the corruption of luxury.
Perhaps this logic was sound. Perhaps it was insane. Whatever the case, the vast populations of Jupiter, the largest planet, and one of the last terraformed and colonized, retained the rough frontiersmen ethics needed when the place was first settled. These were, after all, the same individuals who faced so deadly an environment. During the reign of Lord Tellus, they had been the source of tumult and discontent, and even treason, yet Lord Tellus seemed to nurture rather than discourage their anarchist spirit.
That spirit saved them now. While other men cowered and fled, or tried in vain to work their contortion pearls the space vampires were jamming, the militia men in their private houses, islands, and continents floated ever upward in the vast atmosphere of Second Jupiter, and raised their pistols overhead.
These pistols, after all, were built by the same gunsmiths as had equipped Lord Mars, and their range and variety of destructive outputs was limited only by the mile-wide broadcast energy dynamos roaring at the core of Second Jupiter, and by the imagination of the wielder.
A disinert pellet accelerated instantly to nearlightspeed in the bar
rel was shot up the axis of a frictionless and airless tubular force field and was returned to normal mass and inertia just before it struck its target. Likewise, coherent energy of any wavelength or combination of high energy particles could be emitted, or neuropsionic forces, or more. The Imperial Family would never have allowed mere commoners and underlings such unparalleled power. Aeneas had left them no choice.
It might have seemed futile for citizen soldiers to open fire on the surface of an inner hull not yet visible to their eyes, some one hundred thirty-four million square miles in area. But these pistols could puncture a planet from pole to pole.
And the militiamen were cunning enough to concentrate their fire. The local commanders were cunning enough to use the still-working hyperspatial periscopes to find the source of the command signals controlling the miniature Dyson, and to find other essential target spots: engines, power couplings, force emission stations, the nerves and sinews of the attacking Dyson, the brain and heart.
The compression fields were able to grasp, over square lightminutes of area, the surfaces of stars and force them through utter atomic collapse into a plasma and then into hyperneutronium, and then into a singularity. But no one spot of the field was equipped to deflect the concentrated fire of an entire gas giant’s hemisphere. When multiple trillions of beam weapons and relativistic mass shots flying outward at lightspeed encountered the palpable walls of kinetic and magneto-gravitic force, even the tiny and imponderable energy particles of which these walls were woven were disintegrated and scattered.
The compression fields hence only struck one side of the gas giant, and threw it. The countless contortion pearls each man, woman and child carried were activated at once when the force walls struck, and each person was rendered inertialess, and surrounded by force shells. The damage from flying landmasses capsizing and shattering continents brushed the people aside, imparted velocity to them, but passed no kinetic energy.