But the path between the Dyson firing apertures, round barrels wider in diameter than gas giants, and the turbulent surface of Ara A was stark white. There were no solid bodies present, not even an atom.
Neptune said, “They will never look for us there.”
Lord Mercury said, “Because we will be dead! The column will collapse—! Or has already! Your image is three minutes old!”
But Aeneas, by mental commands cast through his signet ring, had already directed the gravity engines to sling World Armada around an imaginary gravitational point source and toward the hypergiant sun. The Klemperer Rosette became a line of worlds. The half-sized remnant of Saturn was foremost, with Earth orbiting it; then came Uranus and Neptune, with Jupiter in the rearguard.
Neptune said aloud, “No rush, sire, but why are we not dead now?”
Aeneas said, “You saw them fire. You would not have seen the image of the firing if the fire had been traveling at the same rate. I had erected a slow-light field around the area, remember, as a parasol to block the heat? That is why your gravity image arrived before the visual image, which traveled at the same speed as the barrage. The slow-light zone did not affect gravitons. The foe collapsed my field a moment later by flattening space, but flatspace does not stop Mercury’s tech or yours, so we are getting the heck out of here.
“Oh, and the beams missed because when we formed a warpchannel reaching from Alpha Centauri to Ara A, the space distortion caused a starquake so violent that a hundred solar masses worth of substance was thrown into orbit around the star, thick as an atmosphere. The necroforms do not take new conditions into account unless ordered to. Vacuum that was no longer a vacuum was not in their orders. So they missed. Like stabbing a fishspear at the spot where the light says the fish beneath the surface is. Refraction. They missed.”
In the rear of the column were the three captured gas giants, burning like suns. One was extinguished, and molecular machines were dissembling plasma into crystals and apparatuses to form the gravitic engines previously commanded. The remaining two, Aeneas ordered to become inert, resume their full and terrible momentum, and ram each other. The resulting dwarf star explosion would be as nothing compared to forty novae, but it might confuse enemy sensors and slow pursuit. The solar wind from the explosion would also drive back the dense particles from the ring of fire surrounding Ara A.
They needed no heat from such tiny suns where they were going.
The World Armada sped onward into the vast, sullen, hellish wall of solar fire.
Lady Luna said in a tense voice, “Does His Imperial Majesty have a plan for surviving once we enter one of those tubules to avoid letting Ara A collapse on us? Or how we will jump into a cannon’s mouth and live? Sir? Aeneas? Aeneas!”
Episode 17: Down A Dragon Throat
The four gas giants of the World Armada, with the inner planets and asteroids in tow among their moons and rings, raced at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light directly toward the nearest rapidly closing vent or hole piercing the side of the glowering red hypergiant star Ara A.
Saturn was in the vanguard, Jupiter in the rear.
Above the frozen atmosphere of Earth, within the old throneroom atop Mount Everest, in the Lady Luna said in a tense voice, “Does His Imperial Majesty have a plan for surviving once we enter one of those tubules of superdense plasma, to not have Ara A collapse on us?”
On the black, three-wolf-headed throne, Aeneas seemed not to be listening. He was frowning, studying the faces present one by one.
“We have overestimated ourselves!” Lady Venus wailed. “We think we can do impossible deeds on the fly, by improvisation! It is like Father all over again. The insanity of power!”
Lord Mercury said tensely, “Disinertia will keep radiant heat from affecting us, but not solid plasma. Great as my speed is, contortion cannot move us faster than they can see!”
Lord Saturn, stroked his beard, and said meditatively, “Three minutes for the light to reach the nearest Dyson and let them see they missed, and three minutes for the return fire, now corrected for refraction effect, to strike us at lightspeed. We have that much time to deduce a means of escape. My ability to see the past is worthless.”
Lord Uranus showed no expression on his mask. “My ability to read the psychometry of stars is more worthless. We actually have less time than you said, brother Saturn, for we are moving toward the enemy at near-lightspeed.”
Saturn said, “I can speed up our local perception of timerate, if my lords need more time to think?”
Lord Neptune said, “The number of gravity engines at my command cannot keep open a tunnel in the sun. Plasma is a fluid, but it is denser than iron.”
Each one’s signet ring projected images taken from orbital and groundbased observatories directly into his visual cortex. The Lords of Creation seated at the round table could all see the vast and turbulent face of the red sun, like a toppling wall, rush to envelope them.
The War Dysons were hidden in the convection layer. Each point where the immense weapons had discharged was pierced by a whirlpool, and was now the center of sunspots and eruptions. The side effects of their nova-beam fire had thrown helmet streamers, plumes, and coronal loops countless miles into outer space.
Lord Pluto’s voice was calm and cold and unexpected, “Lord Jupiter has a solution.”
Lord Jupiter had been frowning in his golden beard. He looked up to see the single lens in the featureless helmet of Lord Pluto turned toward him, and started. “Sorry, what? I heard my name come up. Solution, yes, I suppose. My servominds are still combing through the math. Who understands their weird thoughts? But in theory–”
Aeneas said, “Lord Jupiter, no time for theory. I am turning the war department over to you. Call on any resources you need.”
Lord Jupiter laughed a hearty laugh, clearly pleased, as thousands of machines, as well as teams and schools of men in high-speed timewarp chambers and high-speed timewarp moons, all made links with his mind. He imagined what he wanted done, and saw it being done.
He smiled in his golden beard. “I can explain easily enough while doing. See those solar flares? Convection current is what creates the sunspots and coronal loops. It is all done magnetically! I don’t need any resources.”
Lady Venus said, “What do you mean, brother? Our whole civilization cannot possibly have enough energy to erect an energy field to pry open a volume of plasma eight million miles in radius reaching two hundred million miles below the photosphere!”
Jupiter smiled his avuncular smile. “Father never showed me how to reach the information layer or the memory layer of the cosmos, but there is an instruction layer above them which gives the orientation to photons. This layer coordinates the Lorentz contractions between observers and keeps the speed of light constant. How else can a photon passing through one of two slits cooperate with its brother photons to go its right place in an interference pattern? Or get photons to follow Fermat’s path of least time for a medium they only just are entering?”
Aeneas said, “I have not yet ordered all of us to swap our secrets, uncle. You need not explain at length.”
Jupiter, despite his blustery appearance, was a subtle man. He understood the implication. Instead of whatever he had been about to say, he said only, “My science is to counterfeit the instruction layer for photons. The energy required is minimal. Like a judo throw, I use the field’s own strength against itself. The greater the energy field being manipulated, the easier it is to manipulate.”
Lady Luna said, “So, all this time, when you claimed to have one hundred interplanetary strength beam weapons, and we all scrambled to build interplanetary beams of our own—” The young redheaded cousin of Aeneas seemed to have trouble retaining her composure. Her eyes flashed and her bosom heaved with anger.
Jupiter spread his hands, “A trick. I encouraged an arms race. I have the ability to seize control of any electromagnetic beam you might fire, so I wanted you to build a lots. My arsenal consists
of a device small enough to embed in a finger ring, which lets me talk to lighting.”
Lady Venus said, “Have you ever actually done this before, brother? Driven a tube of empty space into the heart of Sol, for example?”
“Of course not!” roared Jupiter in a joyful, if manic, voice. “Why would I ever drive a tunnel into Sol? First time for everything!”
Lady Venus shook her head wearily, and all the thought-ports and mind-energy emitters in her coronet clashed like bangles. “It is the insanity of power. We are all turning into Father.”
Jupiter grinned and winked at Aeneas. “I can hold the tunnel of solid solar fire open while the other worlds pass down the tunnel and ram into the War Dyson’s cannon mouth at the far end. What you plan it after that, you tell me, lad!”
His grin faltered a bit when he saw Aeneas looking stern.
All the Lords of Creation, except, perhaps, for the Lords Pluto and Uranus, flinched when their rings showed them the human occupied gas giants plunge into the eye of the whirlpool of fire. This was the tunnel entrance.
Then they were falling down a well of fire. To either side was plasma, the substance of a sun in flame, a mess of subatomic particles in an environment where the heat and pressure broke and reformed all atoms in a continual storm of nuclear fusion.
The size of the star could not be grasped. Ninety-six billion spheres the size of Sol could have been packed inside this unthinkably huge orb, and forty billion more poured in to fill up the spaces left over between such packed spheres. The gas giants were less than dust specks in comparison.
Even the War Dyson Spheres of the enemy, as wide in radius as the old orbit of Venus, wallowing their titanic bulk through the mudlike opaque fluid of the fiery plasma, were lost in the immensity. Five hundred or more such spheres could have been fitted inside Ara A without crowding. There were only forty.
Yet the interior of the star was opaque. Only at the surface, where the plasma particles, no longer hemmed in, unfolded into photons, was there light.
The channel was a slight curve, reaching from the boiling corona to the inward convection layer. The closest of the forty Dysons was somewhere before them.
Lady Luna said, “You do have a plan, have you not, sire?”
“How long before the Dyson can fire again?” Aeneas asked.
Neptune answered. His signet ring displayed into their brains that images his graviton observatories had gathered of the Dyson down whose firing channel they ran. Gravitons could pass through the dense fluid of the solar interior as no electromagnetic wave could. “The Dysons are six lightminutes in radius. Even using contortion technology to render the surrounding plasma disinert, no material thing can move faster than lightspeed. So six minutes is the fastest theoretical maximum for refilling the firing chamber.”
Aeneas said, “How would it draw the plasma into its interior?”
Lord Jupiter answered, “Magnetic beams. A field of gravitic and kinetic force crushes the solar masses into a black hole to release the nova-amounts of energy.”
Aeneas said to Jupiter, “Can you protect us from such beams when we drive through them?”
“With ease. After preventing the largest star in the galaxy from collapsing on us, you think I cannot hold back a mere Dyson’s scoop engines? I should be insulted!” And Lord Jupiter roared with laughter, slapping himself on the knee, and sending his son, Lord Ganymede, for a wine goblet.
The War Dyson loomed in the views from the observatories orbiting Neptune: a vast gray sphere with a sharply defined black dot at the center, embedded in an endless volume of star-substance. The convection swirls of solar plasma rearing and falling to each side formed endless tornadoes, each rotating oppositely from its neighbors, producing smaller whorls, hurricanes and tornados of fire.
Like the arms of a kraken, scores of tornadoes reaching outward and upward had their feet resting on the surface of the Dyson Sphere. These were currents established by the magnetic aura of the solar-system sized engine drawing solar plasma into itself.
The firing aperture of the War Dyson was simply a ring of magnetic engines, less than eight million miles in radius, or roughly as wide as Saturn’s outermost ring, embedded into the surface. Thus was smaller than a pinprick compared to the vast sphere beyond.
The World Armada, along with torrents and rivers of plasma, were drawn inside by a magnetic force.
Suddenly mankind and all its worlds and moons were inside the sphere. The inner surface was a crosshatching of hexagons and triangles, each one a lightsecond in width.
The firing aperture was behind them, hidden in a spreading pool of plasma that entered with them and was ignited into radiance. The radiant pressure drove the disinert gas giants fleets forward ever nearer to the center of the Dyson.
After a minute or two of travel, the erupting globe of plasma rushing in at the Dyson’s mouth was behind them, as bright and distant as a noonday sun.
At twelve points evenly spaced about the sphere, but orbiting beneath its roof, were dark stars, carved into the shape of staring eyeballs. It would take a moment for light to travel from the World Armada to the nearest and return with an image of the eye stirring itself to wrath. The farthest would not be seen to turn toward them until a quarter an hour had passed.
In the very center of the sphere was a hole in space, shining utter black in gravitic image, a reddish smear erupting with x-rays in electromagnetic images: the black hole left over from the collapse of the whole volume of plasma which once had been here into a nova.
Lady Luna said, “The dreamlands are filled with images of hunger, despair, and hate. Mounds of corpses eating each other, famished. Pyramids of skulls, all screaming.”
Lady Venus said, “Judging from the flow of thought-energy, there are the equivalent of six hundred million civilizations occupying the surface. All automatons. All undead.”
Lord Uranus said, “All six hundred million are controlled by groups of master cities at the pole of the War Dyson. The masters are necroforms, but have free will.”
Lord Neptune said, “The surface itself is an unknown, artificial material, possibly a force field dense enough to reflect light. The hull panels are disinert, and held in a latticework of neutronium.”
Just then, the whole interior of the Dyson sphere lit up, bright with energy both kinetic and gravitic.
Lord Mars said, “We are under attack, my lords. The compression fields lining the inside of the Dyson have been turned on. The Dyson sphere does not need to be filled with plasma for the firing mechanism to fire. All matter caught in the field is compressed to a mathematical point. The World Armada is about to be crushed. Your orders, Sire?”
Aeneas looked from face to face once more, still scowling. He said, “Dive into the black hole.”
The uproar of objections and expressions of shock were drown out by the shrill blast of alarms and sirens.
Episode 18: Event Horizon
Aeneas gave the command. Three gas giants and the remnant of a fourth, with all the lesser planets, worldlets and asteroids orbiting among their moons, leaped toward the black hole at the core of the War Dyson. The countless orbital engines of Lord Mercury removed all inertia from these bodies, so they immediately came to the maximum speed without any intervening moment of acceleration.
At the same time, force fields of combined gravitic and kinetic energy began to radiate from each square AU of the Dyson hull. These fields could seize a sphere of solar plasma six light minutes in radius and compress it to microscopic size, and focus the resulting explosion into a coherent beam. The fields were concentric bubbles of energy, wave upon wave, rushing inward.
The twelve dark stars here to act as gravitational shepherds were obviously not meant to be inside the zone of action when the weapon fired: the kinetic fields overtook them.
One after another, the vast orbs of neutronium were seized. As each dark star was struck by a wall of force, and was accelerated, it lost coherence, became oblate, grew red-hot, then white-h
ot. Anger and terror shined from the sculpted eyes as each dark star mind realized how it had been betrayed by its masters. Cracks into which a thousand earths could have fallen with room to spare now broke open in the surface. Each dark star ignited, not into atomic fusion, as objects of ordinary matter would have done, but into exploding clouds of neutrons.
The heat was superconducted instantly through the entire neutronium volume of each undead star, destroying the unliving servant minds housed in its crystalline core, and obliterating lesser fighting slaves occupying in the cities and emplacements of its surface. Lady Luna winced as the dream-images of their death throes were intercepted by her receivers.
Neutrons broke into protons, electrons, and antineutrinos. The fusions and fissions of this storm of particles became an almost-solid wave of high energy cosmic rays.
These spheres of cosmic rays expanded at the speed of light, which was swifter than the inward collapsing motion of the compression fields. Hence, before the compression field could grapple any world or moon of the human armada, the disinert bodies were instantly accelerated to the speed of the incoming particles. Like a surfer balanced on a tidal wave, the worlds of man were darted at immense velocity toward the core of the War Dyson.
The distance from the hull of the Dyson to the core was sixty-seven million miles, roughly six light minutes.
In this place, the inertia-free World Armada could approach the speed of light, but not exceed it, since the interior of the Dyson, after firing, was a perfect vacuum. The on-coming vast of crushing, destructive kinetic and gravity force would reach the centerpoint a moment after the World Armada, and their inertialess condition would not save them. Photons bounce disinert bodies up to full speed without any sensation of acceleration, but gravitons do not.