There was an oddity at Ara A no earthly astronomer had suspected: a disk of fiery plasma circling the equator of the hypergiant sun. It was a ring of burning fission. The inner bands orbited faster than the outer, and the swirled turbulence caused massive lumps to form, like miniature suns. One was nearby: this was the source of the heat.
The fugitive worlds of man had appeared in a gap between these rings of fiery plasma. The momentary blister of antigravity that intruded the World Armada back into normal spacetime had, by unforeseen luck, pushed back the nearest streamers of burning material.
Aeneas, staring at the hellish rivers of fire circling the monster star, shivered and ground his teeth. He had landed the armada as close to the star as he dared, to let the vast mass block the warp-detectors of the enemy. He had not imagined this possibility: he had almost destroyed everyone, everything.
Alarms yet rang. Hammering and scraping came from the ceiling overhead. Aeneas rubbed his finger and thumbs into his burning eyes and had them repair themselves. “What the devil is that noise? Whose alarm is that?”
Brother Beast stood nearby, barefoot. “It is not a military alarm. It is the palace servomind. Storm warning.”
During the four years of continual emergency and battle, Brother Beast had ordered the upper atmosphere of Earth frozen. A solid sheet of ice coated the globe from pole to pole, resting on many mile-high columns of antigravity or artificial mountains raised for that purpose. The air at sea level was kept at its wanted warmth. It was a defensive measure, but it also prevented vertigo in the skyward-looking multitudes on Earth as their world was spun through multiple jumps from point to point in space during combat maneuvers.
Everest itself extended above the ice layer into naked outer space. It should have been silent as a tomb.
Brother Beast said, “The ionized nebula here, and the atmospheres surrounding the disk, is dense enough hereabouts to carry soundwaves, Sire. That rattling noise is the collision of micrometeorites and particle winds against the Ultrapolis force shells. Not an attack.”
The final alarm vanished.
Aeneas said, “Then where is the enemy?”
Lord Saturn said, “I have something. Four million years ago, there were megastructures here, hundreds of them, orbiting the star. As this sun aged and expanded, some of the structures fell below the surface, apparently unharmed. There is no evidence of debris. I assume they survived, somewhere down inside Ara A.”
“Dyson Spheres?”
“Each is a spherical shell six lightminutes in radius. As wide as the orbit of Venus once was. Inside the volume of Ara A, Sire, and surrounding no star, I would not call them Dyson Spheres, despite their size. Here, I would call them submersibles, lost in a sea of fire.”
Aeneas said, “Inside the sun?”
“This is not a dense, small sun like ours. It is a vast cloud that happens to be burning.”
“Were they warships?”
“Yes. The equators and meridians had the contours of a Tipler Ring armature.”
Aeneas said, “Is there any more recent enemy activity?”
“Near-past probes show nothing within my range.” Aeneas had modified Lord Saturn’s probes to see events as recent as twenty years ago.
Aeneas said, “Lord Mercury? Have you any more recent news for me?”
The way around the twenty-year blind spot in Lord Saturn’s probes was one Aeneas and Lord Mercury had found. A series of ultra-longrange orbital telescopes, connected to base by contortion links, had been dropped out of the warpchannel twenty lightyears away, then ten, five, two, and so on, with the nearest tailgating merely a few lighthours behind. The light passing through these points in space carrying images of events at Ara A from years ago could be intercepted now.
Aeneas could adjust the contortion entanglement to introduce a tachyon stream so that the information gathered by the scopes could be transmitted instantly across the lightyears. They were called tachyscopes.
“My people report nothing odd, Sire.” Said the dwarf-sized, child-faced man, grinning. “There is no evidence of communication or energy use, not that this absurdly oversized sun does not blot out, that is, at any point in the past twenty years. No fleets arrived.”
“What of other sensors?”
“If the enemy are here, Sire,” Lord Mercury smirked, “They are not using any zero-point inertial energy. We detect no contortion stress, no disinertia fields, no ships, no planets, no asteroids. The whole solar system is empty.” He scowled. “Except for this ring around the sun. What is that?”
Lord Jupiter said heavily, “An impossibility. A ring of material this dense should have fallen back down to the sun here long ago. The solar magnetosphere would degrade the orbit of any particles in a few thousand years.”
Lord Saturn said, “It was not here twenty years ago. It is recent.”
Aeneas said, “How is that possible? What could cause such a…”
Sig, the signet ring of Aeneas, was trying to calculate for him how much energy it would take for a star of this mass to throw so many solar masses worth of material into orbit, and was getting numbers that perturbed even its wonted calm. Aeneas shushed it.
Lord Pluto said, “It may only be a few days old, Sire. When you formed the warpchannel here, it was your first attempt at using the Alpha Centauri armature rings at beyond their operational range.”
Aeneas nodded. He has selected a hypergiant star because he knew that if the enemy searched within the normal range of the Alpha Centauri rings, no one would look so far away. He said, “Shame we could not figure a way to bring that armature with us.”
Lord Pluto said, “Forming the warpchannel may have temporarily altered local gravity conditions, and disturbed the starcore. This disk of fire may be very recent ejected material, thrown into space during the days while we passed through the warpfissure.”
Lord Mars said, “Good to know. We can use warpfissures as weapons, then.”
Lord Pluto turned the lens of his helmet toward Lord Mars, “As can they, and no doubt have for countless years.”
Mars turned to Aeneas, “Sire! I trust the hunches of the battle-pattern computer. The enemy is here. If, as Lord Pluto says, this disk of plasma was thrown up from the hypergiant when you anchored a warp here, that may have forced them back, or forced them to regroup.”
Aeneas said, “Lord Mars, suppose you were the fleet commander stationed here, preparing to ambush us, and you knew such a long warpfissure would produce a catastrophe. Where would you position your forces?”
Lord Mars said, “If they are not in the unholy light of Ara A, and if there are no worlds in this star system, then they are in the only place light does not reach: Inside Ara A. Star interiors are opaque.”
Lord Neptune said, “Opaque to light, but not to gravity. I will have my people search for any density variations inside the volume of the sphere. But this volume is immense! Over eighteen hundred cubic lighthours! It may be weeks, or months. I–” He interrupted himself with a fervid oath, leaping to his feet.
Lord Pluto said in a calm, disinterested tone, “They used a Schroedinger technique to detect being seen. They felt Neptune’s gaze. Our position is betrayed. I sense we have just been seen.”
Aeneas ordered the warpcores in the three gas giants to fling the World Armada into evasive faster-than-light maneuvers. There was no response. He tried to reopen his hyperspatial periscopes, and gain a realtime view of the battlespace. He was blind. Some power immensely greater than his was flattening space in a wide volume all around, preventing any warps from forming.
“We’re trapped!” Aeneas shouted.
Lord Neptune shouted, “I see gravity point sources being formed! From gigantic structures, larger than worlds, buried in the star plasma! They are crushing solar volumes of star matter to form nova beams!”
Lord Jupiter said, “Don’t panic, dear brother! The sun is three lightminutes away! We have time to…”
But there was no time. The gravity waves L
ord Neptune received traveled at lightspeed. This meant the image seen of the enemy firing and the fire itself arrived simultaneously.
Of million-year-old War Dysons, forty were still operational, and hanging just below the tumultuous surface of Ara A. Blisters of reddish solar material lifted and exploded outward into space as the beams erupted. Each War Dyson had swallowed and collapsed a vast volume of star-plasma into a gravitic singularity, and focused the supernova force thus released into a lased beam of death-energy heterodyned on an electromagnetic carrier wave.
The monster star was so great that thousands Sol-sized volumes of substance could have been scooped out of the middle of Ara A without noticeable loss.
Thousands were not needed. Forty nova-beams projected from below the stormy surface of Ara A, transfixed their target, and obliterated all matter utterly.
Episode 16: War Dysons
The violence was unspeakable. Each War Dyson of Ara A gathered the semisolid plasma of the star inside it, a sphere the radius of Venus’ orbit. Potent fields crushed the substance into a point source, and the resulting energy was polarized and released through a surface emitter as a solid beam with the power of a nova. So vast was Ara A that thousands of such bites could have been chewed out of its interior without noticeable change to the star. The Black Fleet took but two score.
Each beam carried the energy equal to the nova of a large star across the three lightminute gap separating the Tellurian World Armada from the buried Dysons. This was roughly the distance that of old separated Sol from Mercury. As interstellar ranges went, it was point blank.
Missing a target at that distance was unimaginable.
As for the violence of each shot, by way of comparison, it must be noted that a fifty megaton hydrogen bomb yields hundreds of quadrillions of joules, that is, a digit followed by seventeen zeros. A solar flare yields a destructive force equal to a billion such bombs. The total yearly energy output of a small star like Sol is equal to a billion such flares. A nova releases in one moment a yield equal to ten thousand times that yearly amount. A nova eruption is one duodecillion joules of energy altogether; a digit followed by thirty-nine zeros.
The whole barrage was forty times again that. In no war in man’s history had there ever been such extravagant overkill.
Even gas giant sized bodies caught in the beam were not large enough to burn from surface to core. Instead they winked out. Everything made of matter caught in that beam was reduced to its constituent subatomic particles instantly. Each electron of each atom jumped to its highest energy state, and then jumped free, and the ionized protons left behind were reduced into pions, leptons, mesons. These leaped outward, destroying any additional sub-particles of matter they encountered.
And here was something that could not exist in nature: energy conditions so ferocious that even electrically neutral photons, particles incapable of decay, broke down into constituent neutrino-antineutrino particle pairs. The propagation of light ceased in the center of the primordial effect: the explosion was a swelling axis of darkness, neither energy nor matter, surrounded by concentric cylindrical shockwaves of ultra-solid stratonic condensate, surrounded in turn by a mere hellfire of radiation, gamma ray bursts, and electrostatic discharges.
Explosion? The word is inadequate. This was annihilation.
Surviving even one such a shot was beyond impossible: it was unthinkable.
The Lords and Ladies of Creation sat motionless on their thrones in the great council chamber, watching through their signet rings the vision of the forty rays of infinitely destructive enemy fire in the heavens above toward the World Armada.
But the rays were not straight. They curved.
The Lords of Creation were on their feet, silent with shock to find themselves alive, staring, startled, open-mouthed at the vision, the glorious, impossible vision of the nova-fire going wide of the target and missing the World Armada entirely.
They were more shocked when Aeneas, who had grown quite grim and sober despite his young age in the last four years, was pounding the arms of the three-headed throne, and laughing like a madman.
The bend was slight but visible at two lightminutes away. The bend became more pronounced as each beam elongated. Each beam was like a white-hot rainbow, bending further the farther it reached. The beams at their point of origin were white hot, but with the bending, each bream spread, and separated into a spectrum. The lower energy reddish light bent the most: blue the least.
Aeneas laughed. Tears streamed from his eyes.
For the beams were not passing through empty space. The ionized nebula cloud that thickly swaddled the sun was a medium dense enough to carry sound. The disk of burning nuclear plasma was in the way of the shots. The space vampire commander had directed the fire directly toward visual image. Lightwaves, however, even the unimaginably ultrapowerful lightwaves of a nova-strength interplanetary-range beam, do not travel in straight lines when passing from denser to rarer mediums, but suffer refraction.
Over such distances as this, small as they were, shoving a beam through a disk shaped cloud of plasma bent it, in the same way and for the same reason that the rays of the sun bend at the sunset horizon, turn red, and rob the sinking sun of its power to dazzle the eye.
The nova-beams bent, each one passing tens of thousands of miles to one side of the Armada, ignited a cylinder-shaped shockwave of expanding primordial annihilation through the substance of the plasma disk where it punctured it, and sped away out across from Ara A into deep space.
They missed.
And Aeneas lost all dignity and laughed, lolling this way and that beneath the three menacing wolf-skulls of his dark throne, unable to catch his breath. He did not wait for his body to recover its composure. While still breathless, he sent thoughts through his ring.
“Lord Mercury, render the World Armada disinert. We are about to be hit with a shockwave. All stations, prepare planetary drives! Lord Neptune, I need your every gravitational engine at full power, and Lord Jupiter, I need you to give him more power. Instruct the self-aware factories to begin turning the matter of one of the captured gas giants into power cells and gravitic engines and put them in orbit as tugs. We only have a few minutes, and we will need roughly two hundred billion more ships in the navy in the next fifty seconds.”
Lady Luna said, “I hope, cousin, you will have a moment to explain why we are not all dead.”
Aeneas said, “Give me a moment. The enemy has flattened the contour of spacetime, so I am limited to lightspeed or slower. So are they. The closest Dyson, very near the surface of the sun, will not see the light image of us still alive for at least three minutes. If Lord Mercury has rendered all the worlds free of inertia?”
The childlike Mercury said, “The contortion engines controlling moons and worlds at the lee edge of the Armada have not yet reported in. Lightspeed limits, sire. But so far, my sons tell me any inert worlds are being rammed by disinert worlds, to bring them inside the shadow of their inertia-nullifying fields.”
Without inertia, of course, no kinetic energy of any kind passed from body to body, so one moon rushing toward another would come to an instant halt, without jar or deceleration, upon touching the rarest outermost molecules of the atmosphere of the body with which it collided.
Mercury said, “Less than three percent failure rate so far. Also, the self-aware factories are creating new disinertia engines by the dozens per second wherever there is a failure. What are we expecting, sire?”
Aeneas said, “A near miss by forty nova’s worth of energy just turned all matter in the area into an explosion of the same kind, albeit smaller, as was last seen during the Big Bang. I assume they will maintain flatspace, because I have the warpcore on the trips, and it will carry us away at superluminary speed as soon as it is allowed. But flatspace means no hyperspatial periscopes. We have to be gone before they see us going. But where? Where, damn it? There is nothing to hide behind! Space is so stupidly empty! Who designed it?”
At that
point, the shockwave of the explosion passed through the area. The gas giants, planets and green moons and asteroids of the World Armada were not weightless, but they were inertialess: when the lightest brush of the smallest, fastest moving cosmic ray particles exploding outward from the nova beam brushed against the frailest and outermost layer of a planetary force shell or natural atmosphere, the world was immediately, with no acceleration, moving at the velocity equal to the particle.
Nor did those particles, or lightwaves, rebound from the worlds, because that also requires inertia. So the whole World Armada went utterly black.
There was no physical sensation of vertigo, but the images in their mind which observatories and surface cameras showed them made the Lords of Creation sway in their seats and clutch the arms of their thrones. The supergiant sun, and all the crowded stars of the cluster behind it, rose and fell across every horizon of every moon and planet twice a second as the World Armada pirouetted.
“Where do we go?” shouted Aeneas, all trace of his mad laughter gone.
Lord Neptune said, “I know where. I can save us. Save us all. You doubted my loyalty once. Trust me now.”
Mercury said, “Well, I do not trust him!”
Lord Neptune leaned back and crossed his boots on the round table. “Or die, little man. I don’t care which.”
“Silence your bickering, my lords!” Aeneas snapped, “Where to?”
“Down the barrel of the cannon,” Lord Neptune grinned half a grin on his blue, sardonic face. “Along the firing path of the nova beam is the only place where there are no molecules, no atoms, no particles.”
Aeneas understood. A disinert body can only move as quickly as the lack of surrounding resistance allows. There would be no resistance along one of those lines: the speed could approach lightspeed.
Lady Venus said, “We’ll hit Ara A!”
Lord Neptune smirked. “You should look at the universe using gravity waves sometime. You see things others miss.” He sent an image from his ring to theirs. They saw the strange, black-and-white scene of gravitons in space all about them: the vast hypergiant star was shadowy dark gray; their own gas giants were pigeon gray; the smaller worlds an off-white; the pinpoint black holes created at the core of the forty war Dysons were utterly black.