Superluminary

by perpetrator

  And waiting was the one thing the undead did better than the living.

  There was simply nothing left to try, no clever tricks, no stratagems, no brilliant improvisations. It galled Jupiter that Lady Venus and her dire predictions had been right: the children of Tellus, like Lord Tellus himself had been prone to do, relied too much on a technology that was indistinguishable from magic. It made them lazy, sloppy, reckless, believing there was always a way out.

  And now there was not. Why had he pinned all his hopes on the light of Sol? It had failed them. Darkness conquered.

  Lord Jupiter drew a breath. “Sire, I ... have failed you. I hereby resign my...”

  Lord Jupiter did not alter his own biology as Aeneas did, but his signet ring, called Draupnir, could use echolocation within the atmosphere canopy, and form the resulting picture in his cortex.

  But the echo picture showed that Deimos, Ceres and Vesta were present.

  Everyone else had vanished. Lords Mercury, Mars, and perhaps Pluto were gone. Aeneas was missing.

  50. My Lord and Monster

  Within the command arena of the Tellurian Dyson, with the transmission of light, thought-radiation, and gravity suppressed, Lord Jupiter, through his ring, could detect the shapes of only three other Lords of Creation: Ceres, Vesta, and Deimos.

  “All the attacking worlds were pressed up atmosphere to atmosphere, well within Roche’s limit!” said Lady Ceres. “We should be dead!”

  Lord Deimos said, “There is no gravity, hence no tidal stress, and kinetic fields and tractor-pressers are still working—so our folk on the worlds are not dead yet. I am using low level kinetics to keep us pinned to the floor. With only planetary kinetic-energy drives working, it will take longer for Black Fleet Baker to reach us, perhaps a month. The troops overrunning George and Hesperus can reach us sooner, assuming they can safely pass through the plasma wall. I am not sure why the hollow sun is not collapsing. For that matter, since all my sensors are blind, I am not sure that it has not already collapsed.”

  Lady Vesta said, “And the light of Sol?”

  “It is spreading out even now, Aunt Marina,” said Deimos. “All the vampires within the hollow sphere of this giant sun will die, trapped in here with Sol’s light. It will take an hour, at lightspeed, for the radiance to fill the volume. But it will reach no farther.”

  She said, “But light is not flowing!”

  “It is not light, but astral neuropsionic radiation. Thought screens cannot stop it. They can only stop human-level thoughts. Your orders, Lord Jupiter?”

  What Jupiter wanted to say was this: Say your prayers. I have no orders to give. We are done for.

  But it was not what the insane young whelp who had somehow ended up on the Imperial throne would have done. Jupiter had neither liked nor trusted Aeneas, not at first, but somehow, by some mysterious alchemy, the lad had actually turned into a leader. Bromius Tell, Lord Jupiter, found out to his surprise that he did not want to disappoint Aeneas.

  So what Lord Jupiter actually said was this: “Never give up. If tractor-pressers are working, draw the whole fleet into our interior, including the enemy planets, and move on kinetic-energy drives toward the nearest point of the plasma wall. We will use the plasma-gathering fields to chew through it, one bite at the time. We may be blind and cut off from all communication, but then so is the enemy. Can you estimate our time of arrival?”

  “At this speed, sir? Days. The hollow sun is one hundred forty light minutes in radius, compared to our six. I am not sure how, or even if, this shape can remain stable. Unless an artificial field is stabilizing it, it should be collapsing in on us even now.”

  Lord Jupiter leaned back on his throne, and opened the tiny hatch in one chair arm. In the hollow was a carafe of wine. “In the meanwhile, let’s have a drink. And where in the blue blazes did our crazy boy emperor get to?”

  Had he but known it, Aeneas was thinking the same thing at that same time. Blind, and with no radar, no microwave, and no other electromagnetic senses working, Aeneas found himself falling, even though, somehow, there was a flat surface underfoot. He realized what was happening. He was in free fall, in zero gee, as was every object within lightyears of LBV 1806-20. He was being held to the floor by a mild charge of kinetic field energy. His ears were working, as were dozens of other senses, including smell and other chemical preceptors. He had echolocation, but was unwilling to send out a pulse, and give away his location, until he knew where he was.

  But his other senses told him some details. He sensed Lord Anubis standing just a yard from him, facing away, bent over a control box or console. Presumably this control box was working by neutrino flows or mechanical links.

  By instinct, Aeneas threw a bolt of energy at the man’s back, but the electrons did not flow. He leaped on Anubis’ back. The man moved in an astonishing blur of motion. Aeneas was cut and burned in a dozen places by some sort of acidic blade weapon. Had Aeneas been a normal human with his organs in the accustomed places, he would have been dead a dozen times over. As it was, the blindingly rapid strikes skittered off his subcutaneous bioadmantium armor. A spike from the elbow of Aeneas punctured the back of Lord Anubis, shattered his spine, and speared his lungs and heart. As an added measure, Aeneas pumped a neurotoxin from the spike point into the man’s chest cavity.

  Lord Anubis was not slowed. Instead he ran at beyond the speed of sound, and slammed Aeneas into some hard object. Aeneas heard a muffled scream. It was high-pitched, a woman’s voice.

  Aeneas unlimbered his four bioadmantium metallic tentacles from his back, extended them to full length, reached over, and wrapped one around the throat of Anubis, twisted the other man’s head off, and flung it away. The headless body continued to pummel him. Aeneas plucked the arms out of their sockets, broke both legs, and vomited jellied gasoline over the body, which he then ignited, holding the dead body in place with a tentacle until it stopped moving. He could feel the heat from the flames where it warmed the air, but not see any infrared, or light.

  Again, he heard a noise. It sounded like a woman with her mouth shut, emitting a shriek through her nose. He sniffed. It was Lady Luna.

  Aeneas risked emitting a pulse of highpitched sound. The echoes showed him the surrounding scene: he stood on a wide, low dome or hill. At the crest of the hill was a throne. In a circle around this hill ran a line of posts. To each was chained, suspended in midair, a human figure, and the scent of blood from many wounds issued from each. He sharpened his hearing, and directed his echo pulse in a narrow beam on a higher frequency, trying to get clearer resolution. There was no sound of breathing, of heartbeat, from any of them. From the echoes, he recognized the faces of his uncles and aunts, his mother, and, on the highest post of all, was chained a corpse of a man with his face. All were disfigured with wounds. Whether these were cloned people, human-shaped animals, or duplicates made with a matter orientation technique, this brief glance could not tell.

  He directed his next pulse at the throne. The control box was before it. To either side was a coffin. From hearing and smell he could tell Lord Uranus was in one. From the slow rate of his heartbeat, Aeneas guessed he was unconscious. Lady Luna was in the other, moaning angrily as if gagged, and kicking the sides of the coffin.

  Aeneas stepped first to the control console. As he guessed, it was a molecular mechanical system, which could work even under spacewarp conditions when electrons would not flow. He put his hands and tentacles on the controls, which were meant to be read by touch.

  Sig, his ring, was connected to him by direct nerve link, and spoke directly into his auditory nerve. I recognize this system, sir. The interface is very similar to how I am speaking to your brain now. The controls are set to intercept the Schroedinger waves of the people and militia fleeing from George and Hesperus, abduct them, and land them at various places on this planet.

  “Which planet?” But he already knew.

  Second Mercury.

  An object moving faster than a bullet struck A
eneas. It did not kill him, or even penetrate his armor, but he was flung down the slope of the hill, and fetched up against one of the bloody pillars to which a victim was chained.

  A second blow struck him. He had wrapped two bioladmantium tentacles around the pillar, so he was not sent flying again, and now he began to heat the scales of his armored skin. The scraps of his false human skin burned away. He was struck a third time, but this time he heard a yelp of pain and a tinkle of metal, and smelled charred flesh, as his assailant dropped a knife turned molten. He smelled the scent of hot metal.

  Then he heard nothing.

  He grew more sensitive hearing mechanisms. Some were set to a higher pitch. He was rewarded with the sound like a hummingbird’s heartbeat, remarkably high pitched and fast. It was to his left, then to his right, then before him, flitting from spot to spot.

  Aeneas quietly reached upward with two tentacles, and drew himself up beyond the corpse to place himself atop the pillar. He spread his wings of membrane, took a moment to grow owl’s feathers along their surfaces, and softly glided to the next pillar, and perched there. The hummingbird heartbeat occupied a cloud of locations near the first pillar, darting backward and forward at supersonic speed, perhaps making blind attacks.

  Aeneas thawed and released from his armpit-sack the bees he had prepared. At one time, he had nursed four such swarms, each genetically programmed to seek and kill the four different uncles or aunts he had at the time suspected. Now he had but one.

  The small swarm spread out in a cloud, and, led by the instincts Aeneas had programmed into them, fell toward their target. The stingers were equipped with an absurdly lethal neurotoxin.

  But as each bee landed, and before it could sting, the little man below was too swift to let the stingers penetrate flesh. Aeneas heard rather than saw the blur of motion. He heard the tiny, soft noise as the dead bees fell to the floor.

  Aeneas felt a crushing moment of dread. Even with nearly all their powers and sciences suppressed inside this spacewarp, Uncle Procopius was simply too fast to find, to target, or to hit.

  “Olly olly oxenfree!” called out Lord Mercury. “Where are you hiding?”

  Aeneas pointed his elbow at the sound of the voice, expanded his elbow spike to the size of a javelin, loaded it with a potent static charge, and used a magneto-chemical impulse to shoot it toward the sound of the voice at supersonic speed.

  A strange thing happened. The echo silhouette of the small figure blurred and split in two as the javelin passed through the spot, expending its charge harmlessly on the ground. Aeneas was not sure what he was witnessing: it looked like, on a macroscopic scale, like one of the effects photons passing through a double slit might suffer, where its location became uncertain.

  “It is my Imperial Sovereign and deranged nephew, Any Ass! It is my lord and monster! Come here to play with your ridiculous biological toys?” called out Mercury.

  The dread Aeneas had been feeling lifted. Mercury had not known Aeneas was here. Maybe there was a chance he could survive.

  Lord Mercury said, “Had I been you, I would have sent Thucydides to come deal with me. He could have stood a chance. You? You are just a silly little boy. A dead, silly little boy.”

  There was a muffled and shrill noise from the coffin holding Lady Luna, and some energetic kicks on the sides of the coffin.

  Mercury laughed. “She is no doubt eager to adorn my arm as my Empress and Queen, once I am rid of you, and assume the rightful place father, and my brothers, have for so long denied to me. I cannot marry a commoner, and she is the only niece I know to be yet virginal. We have a disgusting family. I know you agree with me on that point.”

  Aeneas brought out a mass of flesh like an egg from one of his orifices, placed it carefully atop the post where he perched, and silently flew to another, trailing a line of nerve fiber behind him, still connected to the egg.

  Lord Mercury continued, “You see, I believe in the merit system! If I am smart enough to take the throne, it is mine until such time as another candidate, smarter than me, lulls me into trusting him! And since you were lulled into trusting me, well, the universe is a daily intelligence test, or so they say. And today you failed, sire!”

  When he was well away from the egg, via the dangling line of nerve fiber, Aeneas commanded the egg to grow lungs, mouth, tongue, lips all mimicking his, and to speak in his voice.

  The remote mouth spoke: “You are mistaken on all points, Uncle, and careless. I have known you were the betrayer for some time. I was hitherto unwilling to execute you without first hearing whatever you wish to say in your defense of your crimes, or in mitigation of your sentence.

  “You now stand before your sovereign, who judges and weighs your guilt. How do you plead?”

  51. The Betrayer Unmasked

  In the dark, crouching on one of the several pillars where Mercury had chained up and tortured to death identical twins of his family, Aeneas spoke through an egg of flesh, equipped with lungs and lips, he had deposited atop another pillar. “You stand accused of betraying mankind to the space vampires, committing acts of espionage and sabotage, giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war, and the murder of Lord Saturn and Lord Anubis. How do you plead?”

  Mercury threw something with his hand, a bead or trinket from his jacket, but so quickly it had the force of a bullet. The projectile struck the egg. Mercury tilted his head, listening carefully, as the shattered lump fell and struck the floor. He laughed his childish, boyish laugh. “Still playing tricks? Taken to the air? Your delaying tactics are in vain. There is nothing to wait for. No one is coming. No one can save you from me. You see, I knew your offer of sharing the warp science was a trap. You put something into all their minds, did you not? I could not trust my son Anubis after Venus planted whatever filthy virus she had concocted in his brain, could I?”

  Aeneas had planted other mouths atop other pillars, stringing nerve filaments between them. He commanded the several mouths speak at once, from all directions. “Mother implanted nothing but a detector, to warn me when anyone holding the warp science lost his free will. The emergency pearls allowing instant transport in time of danger you provided. All I did was use the Imperial override, and establish a standing order that I was to be teleported instantly to any of my warpcore commanders who lost his free will. As did your son when you killed him, turned him into an undead, and had him place the warpcore of the Jackal Petty-Dyson under your command here, through this box. But the secret of how to work it, you did not know, and so you brought him here, into your secret throneroom, your private chambers. Do you confess to the murder of Autolycos Lord Anubis?”

  The boyish laugh came again. “I confess to executing someone you were trying to use to betray me! My own son! You killed him, not I! I only carried out the sentence!” The boyish voice dropped to a lower note. “His mother was Chione, daughter of Daedalion. A famed beauty! Mine! And I kept her in suspended animation whenever I was too busy for her. It kept her out of trouble. Or should have. She was assassinated by Lady Venus after Chione attempted the assassination of Hermaphrodita, your monstrous sibling. At Chione’s funeral, her father attempted suicide, and so I used pantropy to turn him into a hawk.”

  Aeneas, in bewilderment, said, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “To show you how out of your depth you are. Do you honestly think, foolish young whelp, that with a past like this, all our lives a Gordian knot of bloody hatred, slights, retaliations, unforgivable deeds, that this family can somehow be ruled by you? Your laws, your milksop notions of democracy? Do you think the silly sheep should vote for the shepherd of the flock?

  “Do you want to know which of my brothers killed your father?

  “Yes, I confess to the death of Anubis, and, one by one, all the others of the younger generation on whom you tried to bestow Father’s secret of the warp science. You used the war as an excuse to break the elder generation’s monopoly of power! But I scotched it!

  “Yes, I was in commun
ication with the space vampires, and told them whom to kill, and I was responsible for mechanical failures which killed Lord Hydra at HH 80-81!

  “Yes, I asked the Revenants at 9 Sagittarii to hunt down Ganymede, who once looked at me askance! And the Ice Vampires of KW Sagittarii were told by me, me, to concentrate their fire on Prospero and Triton!

  “Lord Dionysus I liked. That death is on you, you and your reckless risks.

  “Well, my Lord Sovereign Emperor? Well, you bag of mismatched organs and medical wastes, you lump, who cannot even keep a human shape? Well, you little twig trying so hard to fill father’s big boots? I’ve confessed! Come down and execute me! Where are you? Come down!”

  Aeneas was shocked. These murders he had not even suspected were murder, since they took place in war, during battles. He had been played a fool by his cunning uncle! Wrath burned his intestines, as if he had swallowed raw venom.

  Aeneas heard the snap of air as Mercury moved faster than the speed of sound. He did not sense what weapon was used, but suddenly all the pillars holding their tortured corpses toppled and fell. Aeneas spread his owl-feathered wings and glided in a great, slow circle. He could hear the hummingbird heartbeat of the high-speed metabolism of Lord Mercury as the boyish little man moved rapidly from one fallen pillar to another, trying to see where Aeneas had fallen.

  The many mouth eggs had fallen haphazardly here and there. Some were still connected by nerve links. Aeneas again had them speak all at once, so that his voice came from every direction of the compass. “Do you confess to the murder of Geras Lord Saturn?”

  Lord Mercury moved quickly. Again, Aeneas could not sense what weapon was being used, but four of the mouth eggs that spoke exploded.

  “Of course I confess to that! I would claim credit for that even if I had not done it! He was an undead, under my control, when he attacked you: I needed you to destroy him, since he was the only one with the timewarp technology, the only one who could rob the tricks I play with velocity and inertia of their value. He was the only one who could stop me!”