Aeneas spoke without preamble. “I have invited the young Lords Anubis, Deimos, Kerberos, Hydra, Dionysus, Triton, and Prospero to hear our deliberations and contribute their wisdom. Since they are equally joined in knowledge of the secrets of the superluminary science, as well as in the dangers of battle, it is only right that they join us. A seat has been set aside to honor the memory of Lord Ganymede, until such time as one is found worthy to replace him.”
He raised his hand. Contortion pearls blazed. Seven young men now stood on the grass, each with a chlamys of imperial purple thrown over his dark dress uniform. Lord Anubis was grinning. Lord Hydra was grave.
Lord Mercury said, “Now, that is rather high-handed of you, sire! You cannot simply‐”
Aeneas by gesture invited the new lords to take their seats. He turned to Lord Mercury. “We have other matters to discuss. You have our gratitude for saving us from the nightmare star of 9 Sagittarii. How did you do it?”
Lord Mercury’s small world had been untouched, and so he had been unburned. He smiled his irksome, childlike smile. “Trade secret!” he chirruped.
Lord Anubis was a dark, thin, tall, sharp-faced man with a sharp smile. The family resemblance was strong, but, next to Mercury, he looked like the father, rather than the son. The subterrestrial under his command, Bald Spot, had also emerged unscathed.
Anubis said, “Let us not be blind and heartless now, Father. The days of intrigue and fratricide are done.” He turned to Aeneas. “There is a strange overlap between space warp science and space contortion science. The dissolving creatures and their buildings and machines were keeping undecayed elements in nullspace and replacing each atom, one by one, as its nucleus was destroyed.”
Lord Deimos, son of Mars, added, “Sire, they used the same technique Lord Mars uses to make duplicates of an ideal version stored in the timelessness of Schroedinger standing waves.”
Lord Anubis nodded. “All my father, Lord Mercury, had to do was to force-collapse the uncertainty clouds with the megascale pearl.”
Aeneas said, “And if the next star system we enter has the same defense?”
Lord Anubis said, “It is not a real defense, sire. It is a trick that can only work if you are caught unprepared. Using a warpcore to dissolve a warpcore can only work if you let your warpcore dissolve also. And you can only do that if you can keep a spare in nullspace, out of harm’s way.”
Lord Mercury said, “We have manufactured more than enough pearls to move whole worlds of people. Anyone trying that trick again will dissolve before we do.”
Lord Mars said, “Sire, we should put the less massive worlds in the vanguard. We now see that even warpcores with far less mass than a jovian can damage an enemy core using this neutron storm method, or at least make the enemy keep his head down. I think I understand the foe’s tactics now.”
Aeneas said, “What do you mean?”
Lord Mars said, “The reason why they close to hand-to-hand range. I thought it was just blind fury, hunger to eat life energy. No. Whoever programmed these undead so long ago knew that the warp science can shut down nearly any other weapon. Board-and-storm is practically the only tactic that can ever work; and that requires numbers more than anything else. And their numbers are numberless, or seem to be.”
Aeneas said, “Tell me honestly: is there any hope of victory?”
Lord Mars said only, “If we have no hope, we must fight without hope.”
Brother Beast said, “Whoso hopes in merely mortal power will find that well shallow, and soon will thirst. There is deeper hope.”
Lord Deimos now stood, evidently displeased with his father’s words. His eyes were as bright as the eyes of a hawk, and he said to Aeneas, “My good sire! Shall we return to 9 Sagittarii and counter attack? Let us exterminate these vermin to the last man! If we now can stop their neutron storm method…”
Lady Pallas had been horrifically mauled, but her brain had been saved and a new and younger body grown for her. She seemed now a maiden of sixteen summers, but her gray eyes were old and cold and wise. She said, “It would be suicide, sire! Both those stars have unstable cores. I started to mention it, but you thought it insignificant. It is significant now.”
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 light years. 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 makes 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 light years 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 forc
es, 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 he had 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 light years 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 where 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.
Episode 11 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.