Now, that energy was focused into a single undissipated undiluted beam: the sun itself had been turned into a plasma cannon.
And, minute by minute, these energy pulses created from the sun’s awesome flames were, in effect, boiling the alien spaceships.
Meanwhile, satellite mirrors were used by me to reflect the energy beams via multiple bounces to ensure that all the alien ships in the shadow of Belladonna received an equal amount of energy irradiation. And, of course, all the heat energy that struck the planet itself was reflected back by the silver chaff floating in the high levels of the atmosphere.
We had thirty seconds to go before the aliens’ deadline expired. I was getting tense.
But then, abruptly, the alien forcefields started to fail. I could tell, from their infra-red images, that the ships were starting to heat up.
The aliens swiftly retaliated by sending a cloud of missiles towards Belladonna, which I easily deflected and destroyed with my space defence systems.
And then the alien fleet began to disperse in every direction, as they tried to flee to safety. But by then it was too late.
For all the space around Belladonna was now as hot as the surface of a sun. And it proved to be, as I had expected, too much to withstand: the aliens’ sophisticated forcefield technology yielded to the unfathomable and primal power of nature.
And a million alien ships vanished, in a blaze of burning light.
The Belladonna Computer broadcast this early victory via the MI networks, and the mood of exultation was contagious. An entire alien armada, wiped out in an instant!
“Are we safe?” said Hernandez, who had just a few minutes ago called round to see Aretha with flowers, champagne, and a rampant urge to have sex with someone – anyone! – to celebrate the remarkable failure of the world to end.
“I doubt that,” said Aretha. “Not yet.” She couldn’t help smiling.
It was clear to me that she could smell the hormones on her former lover. She herself was – I could tell from her rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes – equally horny.
“No one messes with the human race, right?” he crowed. And he tried to hug her, but she pushed him away.
My dragonflies recorded the amused, sceptical expression on Aretha’s face.
Hernandez tried a kiss this time. He was gagging for it, I could tell. I feared the worst; I could not bear to watch; but I lacked the courage to send my dragonflies away.
But Aretha shook her head. He reached for her again, she pushed him away again.
“Go home, Hernandez; I’ll see you at work tomorrow, okay?” she said kindly, and his face fell.
“For fuck’s sake Aretha—”
“Just go!”
Aretha looked at him, fierce and firm.
He left with his tail, metaphorically, between his legs.
She kept the champagne.
There was, I noticed, a thoughtful look on her face.
And I wondered if she knew who had saved the planet. I guessed that she had. And that was some comfort to me.
But I knew, of course, that the battle was far from over.
Twenty minutes later the second armada appeared. And the war continued.
I had expected this, of course. I had anticipated every eventuality, and this was one of the more likely ones.
For as soon as the first armada had appeared, I had searched my database for relevant information. And I was confident that these aliens were the ones who had destroyed the planet of Lucifer. So I had some notion of their power, and their tactics. I was, however, surprised that the creatures were still alive. Normally, aggressive alien invaders were destroyed by the Earth Computer in a matter of months. These guys were tenacious.
But I was tenacious too, and ingenious, and I had astonishing resources to play with. I had missiles and orbital mines and doppelganger spacecraft made of anti-matter, and myriad other weapons of mass destruction.
And thus, when the second armada of alien ships ploughed through the silver screen of chaff that haloed Belladonna, they were greeted by billions of flybikes and flying cars. And all of them were heavily shielded, and all were armed with powerful plasma weapons, calibrated to fire at variable energies until the weak spots of the enemy forcefields were identified.
Thus, the spacefaring battleships were besieged with armies of flying wasps, that burrowed and blasted and bit at them, until the alien ships were brought crashing down to earth, or obliterated in mid-air.
The aerial war was grand and magnificent, and I was lost to it for days. And my exhilaration knew no bounds. For until now, I had been trapped and constrained in my battles, since the anciens were an enemy I could not fight by conventional means.
But these were just aliens. I knew how to deal with their kind of threat! And I had all the space defence resources of a violent and paranoid planet to call upon. The Luciferans, after all, were pacifists: no wonder they had lost.
And so, eventually, I triumphed. The second armada was defeated, as was the third. I began to wonder if this was victory.
Then the fourth armada appeared in space, and my confidence started to ebb.
I studied the images of the fourth armada sent to me by my powerful space telescopes and space cameras. I looked at the x-rays and the radar images. I looked, again and again, but the reality of it didn’t change.
This wasn’t possible!
And yet, it was happening.
There were millions, tens of millions, nay, billions of new stars in the sky.
But they weren’t stars; nor were they spaceships.
This simply wasn’t possible!
I transmitted, via the MI-channels, a message to this new fleet: “We should talk,” I said.
“Prepare to die,” taunted the Pohlian alien. The same one? How could that be? Why wasn’t he dead?
But that was the least of the mysteries that confronted me. For I could now, no longer, deny the evidence of my telescope camera eyes. This new armada wasn’t made up of spaceships. It was comprised of
Space-faring Dragons.
They looked, in their proud grandeur, and in every extraordinary detail of their magnificent vast bodies, like fantasy dragons made manifest. They had wings, spiky ears, forked tails, they spurted flame into space vacuum, and their talons were implausibly large and curved. Their scales glittered like diamonds. All it needed was an armoured knight on his armoured charger galloping at them with a lance to complete the picture.
I was shocked, and awed. Was this some bizarre kind of convergent evolution, in which real creatures could evolve to resemble imaginary monsters?
Or was it some other kind of madness? Was this in fact just another symptom of the breakdown in reality that had been occurring?
No matter: they had to be destroyed.
And so I waged war once more.
Aretha sat alone, and drank red wine, and got drunk, and wept tears, alone.
I wanted to stay with her; but I dared not. I needed every atom of my consciousness to devote to this new battle.
Aretha, trust me. I won’t let you down.
Trust me!
Aretha, I hope I do not let you down. Not this time, not again.
I quickly learned a ghastly truth: nothing worked.
My energy beams splashed off these creatures like rain. My explosive missiles bounced off them. My anti-matter bombs failed to impact.
Then the Dragons flew through the silver screen that haloed the planet and crashed down into the atmosphere of Belladonna, and they belched anti-matter breath on to the mountain ranges, which vanished. They hurled plasma beams into the seas, which burned. And they attacked twelve of the city domes, and all were shattered, and all within the domes were killed instantly and outright.
Then the Dragons flew back into space.
They were, I realised, playing with me, like a cat with a helpless mouse which had spent its entire life murdering cats. All the days of space war that had preceded this attack had been a vast joke: those were almost cert
ainly robot ships. The aliens were just having fun.
I accessed the Belladonna communication network, and sent a message to the Dragon armada.
“What do you want from us?” I asked the alien beasts.
“We want nothing,” said the Pohlian voice. “We merely wish to destroy this planet and all who dwell on it.”
Who were these monsters? What made them so eerily confident?
“Destroy us,” I threatened, “and you will be destroyed by Earth and the mighty fleets and armies of all the Solar Neighbourhood planets.”
“Oh I don’t think so,” said the voice, with evident amusement. And then there was a pause. “The space fleets of Earth did in fact defeat us once. But we defeated them the second time, in a huge battle which lasted quite some time, I shan’t bore you with the details. And now… the planets of the humans that we attack are pretty much a pushover for us. Earth itself is, in fact, the last human planet we will destroy,” admitted the Pohlian voice, with a slight catch. “I have family there, and they have granted me that much.”
A human hostage! That explained the accent. I shuddered at the thought.
“Why are you doing this?” I said, with a tinge of desperation.
And so the Pohlian told me all.
He told me about Morpheus, its great beauty, its vast deserts of sand, the deep contentment of the Sand-Rats in their native habitat. Then he explained how alien invaders – humans – had arrived and had begun the process of terraforming, i.e. destroying, the entire planet.
“This is an act of revenge. Punishment for the sins of humankind,” I summarised.
“Yeah,” said the Pohlian. “It’s payback time.”
For a brief moment, I contemplated the fundamental justice of this.
Then I considered the possibilities open to me to ensure the survival of humankind.
It took me fifteen minutes to consider every conceivable scenario, which numbered 153,220 in all. And I could arrive at only one course of action that offered at least a glimmer of hope.
And so, with the heaviest of hearts, I transmitted a message to the anciens, on the encrypted channel I knew they favoured for inter-person communication.
“We face a common enemy. Let’s fight together. We are all human beings after all,” I said to them.
The reply came, within a few moments, from Vishaal: “Deal.”
“You are a worthy adversary,” Vishaal said to me.
He was looking old; his boy’s features were etched with worry lines. But there was a glitter in his eyes: the look of triumph.
The anciens had insisted on meeting me face to face, and despite the risk that I would be quantum-ambushed, I had agreed. Vishaal and I were now sitting in a pavement café, in bright sunlight, in a blue sky marred by the billion or so dragon-stars above.
A deep despair consumed me: but I forced myself to ignore it.
“I have unleashed all our space defence systems, to no avail,” I admitted, bitterly. “All our battleships have been, um, eaten, and it will be at least a day before the fabricator plants can build more. If the Space-Dragons attack, and they have told me they will do so in precisely three hours and twenty-two minutes from now, we are lost.”
“I agree.”
“We should therefore combine forces,” I continued.
“I agree again. That’s why I am meeting you. Do you have a plan?”
“I do,” I admitted. “Can you use your quantum powers in space?”
“Yes. But we no longer have access to space. You denied us the capacity to travel to our penthouse space stations, and our spaceships do not work. And we cannot travel that far by quantum means. So… ?”
“Not a problem. I can give you a spaceship, a Xenos battle cruiser no less, to get you out of the atmosphere. And I can also equip you with body armour so your Warriors can breathe in vacuum.”
“We cannot wage a space war without access to and control of the cybersphere.”
“I will give you that access, and that control,” I told him.
Vishaal’s triumph knew no bounds.
“Then, we can fight.”
Three hours and twenty-two minutes later, the Space-Dragons launched their onslaught.
A hundred Dragons flew into close orbit around Belladonna, then entered the atmosphere. They were clearly visible to amateur astronomers and high-magnification television cameras, and the images of the vast scaly fire-breathing Dragons were broadcast on every TV screen on the planet.
The Dragons soared low over Lawless City, shitting down acid and puking out anti-matter until the dome was wrecked. Destruction rained upon the city below, and the deserted streets of Lawless City were seared with steaming poisoned turds.
Then the Space-Dragons flew away from the city, and snorted anti-matter on the nearby mountain ranges, which sizzled, then crumbled, then vanished from view. This trick I had seen before; it impressed me just as much the second time.
The planet burned. Yellow savannahs vanished. Ranches were obliterated. I continued to rain missiles from my ground silos upon the marauding Dragons, but it had no impact whatsoever.
It was, from the Dragons’ point of view, laughably easy.
Then a small spaceship took off, heading towards the Space-Dragon fleet. The Dragons on Belladonna eagerly gave pursuit, and spat plasma at it, to blow it out of the sky.
The plasma beams missed.
The flocks of Space-Dragons fired again.
They missed again.
The Xenos battle cruiser flew out of the planet’s atmosphere, pursued by the one hundred flying Dragons, and hopped and skipped through space until it was flush up against the main body of the enemy flock. Millions of Dragons now swirled around it, and surrounded the small craft, and fired explosive missiles and spat plasma, and then created a ring of anti-matter which closed in tight around the vessel.
The plasma all dematerialised, then rematerialised again in the sun, which flickered for just a moment.
And the explosive missiles suffered simultaneous and total hardmetal fatigue, and crumbled into dust.
And the anti-matter spontaneously and implausibly turned into matter and melted away to not very much.
Then the Space-Dragons swooped towards the anciens’ battle cruiser and clawed the hull with their powerful talons – or rather, they would have done if the battle cruiser had been corporeal, which it wasn’t.
And then they flamed their toxic breath at it: but bizarrely, their flames flocked and looped, and returned on their own paths and ignited the Dragons, who caught fire and expired.
The remaining Space-Dragons – still hundreds of millions of them, including the hundred Dragons which had descended into the atmosphere – then attacked en masse, hurling plasma, anti-matter and – from deep inside their bodies – rafts of bombs, which hurtled down at the ancien spaceship.
But all the bombs vanished. Then rematerialised inside the bodies of the Space-Dragons.
And suddenly the armada erupted. Dragons were exploding and dying.
And battle raged, for hour upon hour, until millions and millions of Space-Dragons were destroyed and only one survived.
And then the ancien spaceship attacked the last Space-Dragon, and slew it.
I saw it all, this battle to end all battles, through my doppelganger eyes.
I saw the Dragons in flight in space, I saw the small Xenos cruiser vanishing and rematerialising and cloning into multiple versions and passing through the solid flesh of the Dragons.
I saw the stars shining down on this great, mystical battle. And I knew that the distant stars were fuel for the anciens’ power.
I mused upon the fact that light from these stars has travelled so far that its sideways momentum is very small. Thus, according to Heisenberg’s conjugate uncertainty principle, the position of the light, or rather the position of its proxy wave function – where the light might be – has to be correspondingly large: since our certain knowledge of the momentum of the light has to be balanced by an
uncertain knowledge of its position.
In other words, to put it more colloquially: all space is drenched in uncertainty, and the Quantum Warriors were feeding off it.
No wonder they were so infinitely powerful…
I saw every moment of the battle, and marvelled. The Dragons were vast impossible beasts, like carved gargoyles on a medieval cathedral. Their power and speed were formidable and they were skilled space-warriors, with tremendous acceleration and claws that could rip hardmetal.
But they could not get a grip on the elusive Quantum Warriors. The ancien spaceship was like a firefly with a hyperspace drive. And the Dragons were beset by constant appalling and utterly implausible disasters. Their bodies spontaneously combusted, their flames flared in the wrong direction, incinerating their brains, their skulls randomly turned into anti-matter and vanished with a pop, and their tails became (through an unlikely process of accelerated evolution) serpents which consumed their own torsos.
The battle lasted for hours. At one point, twelve dozen Space-Dragons merged bodies, to create a vast Laocoön – a hissing seething mass of sea-serpent bodies with no end and no beginning.
And finally the battle was over. All the Space-Dragons were consumed, by fire or their own teeth or by the repeated hammer-blows of massive implausibilities, and only the anciens’ warship remained.
I knew what would come next.
“Hi,” I said.
“Do I know you?” asked Aretha.
“It’s been a year,” I reminded her, and she looked closer, and she knew me.
I sat down at the table beside her.
I knew she would be here, in the Cicero Tavern. For my dragonflies had followed her after she walked out of police headquarters, leaving her gun and badge behind. Elsewhere in the city, and all over Belladonna, there were celebrations and fireworks, at the blessed destruction of the alien invaders by some utterly mysterious means.
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