The Lords of Creation
Aeneas guided the course. Straight toward the deadly black hole they raced.
Lord Jupiter dropped his wine goblet and came to his feet, roaring with questions; Lord Mercury leaped to his feet, also shouting in his high, thin voice; Lord Mars, bright red and nude save for his baldric, scabbards and holsters also came to his feet, his eyes narrowed in shock.
The mask of Lord Uranus matched his own features beneath, but showed no expressions except what it was programmed. Yet his voice was also querulous with fear.
Lord Pluto wore a helmet, kept his seat, and kept his silence.
Brother Beast was already on his feet, as he had no seat at the table, but he crossed himself, dropped to his knees, and clasped his hands in prayer.
The Ladies Ceres, Luna and Venus were too well bred to jump up or shout, but looked terrified, annoyed or bewildered, each according to her nature.
Gray-eyed Lady Pallas altered her expression by not even an iota, but, like Aeneas, was narrowly studying the faces of her relatives at the table.
Only Lord Neptune seemed unperturbed. His narrow, sardonic and sapphire face was grinning a small grin.
The mingled voices drowned individual words, but the tone of panic made the message clear: the worlds of man were in the middle of a firing chamber of a star killing weapon as it was firing. Why had Aeneas ordered the Armada into a black hole, into certain death?
Aeneas leaned back in the three-wolf-headed throne, and heaved a sigh. “A narrow escape, my lords and ladies! I was not sure if the dark stars would ignite into a sufficient number of photons to give us acceleration. Lord Mercury, your engines will continue to remove the inertia from every ship, moon, asteroid, and planet in the World Armada? Even a split second failure would be fatal.”
Several of his uncles were shouting questions at him, but rather than raise his voice, Aeneas used the imperial override circuit in his throne to put these words directly into their minds. Being Emperor, after all, allowed him certain privileges.
Aeneas raised his hand. The Lords fell silent, faced red with anger or pale with fear. “We have roughly six minutes, traveling a fraction below lightspeed, before we reach the center of the Dyson, where the black hole is. Shall we take a short break? The store of spirits and liquor for anyone who needs a drink to steady his nerves. Some of us seem jumpy of late. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”
Along with eternal youth, the biotechnology bestowed on mankind allowed all old vices to be indulged without physical harm, and new ones to be invented.
With horror the Lords examined the information from the World Armada observatories. Behind them, Doppler shifted into extremely low frequency radio waves only, came the images of exploding dark stars and the oncoming wave of the compression fields. Ahead, the images were as gamma rays. Only the equator of their motion showed an undistorted picture of the blazing Dyson interior as the firing sequence continued. Because of the distortion, the Dyson was seemed immensely flattened in their direction of motion, not a sphere but a hollow discuss.
Lord Jupiter said, “Lad, I mean, Your Imperial Majesty, the Twelve would be gratified by the answer of how we are expected to survive falling into a black hole?”
Lord Mercury said, “Retreat is possible! I have had my people drop a planetary-mass pearl behind us we fled. We can contort the whole Armada back to our previous location…”
Lady Luna said sarcastically, “To the spot where the nova beams are aiming?”
A spasm of anger passed across the boylike features of Lord Mercury, and he clenched his little fists.
Aeneas leaned back, folded his arms behind his head, and crossed his legs at the knees. A stared idly at the dark, high ceiling of the chamber. “This Dyson is the size of Venus’s old orbit: the diameter of Deneb. Call it two hundred solar masses. The black hole is formed by the implosion when the outer layers explode outward into a nova. So we are not dealing with anything larger than twenty solar masses. I estimate the Schwarzschild radius of a non-rotating, uncharged black hole of that mass is a tenth of a meter. About the size of a baseball, over a thousand times the mass of all our worlds together.”
Lord Mercury said tensely, “The x-rays from the accretion disk will fry us if I release the planetary disinertia engines, and will repel us if I do not.”
Lady Ceres said, “And we will be crushed by the gravity!”
Lady Venus cooed, “How are four gas giants all going to fit into a baseball?”
Lady Luna scowled. “Look at him! Aeneas is enjoying watching us guess and squirm! The jackass!”
Aeneas wagged a finger. “Tut, fair cousin! Remember the proper forms of address!”
She rose from her seat, curtseyed, and seated herself again, saying, “Look at His Imperial Majesty! His Majesty is enjoying watching us guess and squirm! The imperial jackass!”
Aeneas rolled his eyes. “Much better. Lord Mercury, please sent a second planetary pearl through the first, and have it move at contortion speed to just inside the Dyson firing aperture.”
The boy frowned in puzzlement, but saluted. “As you command, sire.”
Aeneas sat back erect. “Lord Neptune! You seem placid. You not fret that the black hole gravity will crush us. Why not?”
Lord Neptune said, “Because we are in free fall, sire. The only thing we have to worry about is tidal effects. When the gravity pulling on the nearside of a heavenly body is greater than the farside, the difference elongates the body. We will be ripped into angstrom-thin spaghetti strands as we approach the singularity. But, hey! No worry about being crushed by gravity.”
Aeneas said, “The prospect alarms you not, my lord?”
Lord Neptune said, “You ordered an entire captured gas giant dismantled and reassembled into gravitic control engines. Which were not needed to prop open the plasma tube. By now, I know you plan things.”
Aeneas said, “A ring of gravity pulling outward at the equator of any body would distribute the tidal pull evenly, would it not? No matter how massive, the tidal effect is zero if all points on the body are equally accelerated. Do you have enough gravity generators?”
Lord Neptune said, “More than enough.”
Aeneas said, “Some of the ladies still seem worried. What happened when we smash into the event horizon?”
Neptune laughed. “The same thing that happens when a sailboat gets her anchor chain snagged on the equator. The event horizon is an imaginary line demarking the point above the singularity at which the escape velocity equals the speed of light. Nothing happens to you when you cross it. Except that the velocity needed to accelerate into a higher orbit happens to exceed lightspeed.”
Lord Jupiter uttered a hoarse call.
The view from all the observatories now showed what seemed to be a mirrored sphere hanging directly before them, growing and growing. The mirrored sides reflected distorted images of the metallic skies all around them, the hexagon crossbracing of the endless square lightseconds of the inner Dyson.
It grew. In the middle was a circle of darkness like the pupil of an eye, swelling.
The Lords stirred uneasily. It looked like the oncoming headlamp of an express train in a mirrored tunnel.
Lady Venus asked, “Why can we see it? I thought black holes were, well, black?”
Lord Saturn answered, “We are seeing light left over from the moment when the singularity was formed, I assume when the nova weapon was last fired. Each layer of photons near the event horizon as it formed departed ever more slowly, and the one we see are still departing. It is a time distortion effect.”
Lord Mercury said, “But pursuit will follow us into the event horizon!”
Lord Saturn smiled in his beard, and said, “And never reach us. Our one second headstart will be expanded to infinity.”
Aeneas turned to Lord Jupiter. “Lord Mercury expresses concern about the halo of x-rays surrounding the black hole.”
Lord Jupiter, with ponderous dignity, cleared his throat and took his seat. “X-rays are electromagnetic. Me
rely another form of lightning. I speak, and it obeys. The effort is so slight compared to what I just did to create a magnetic tubule protecting us from the plasma of Ara A, I should be affronted. I will have engines constructed to gather, convert and store it, just because I can.”
In their view, the mirrored sphere rushing toward them grew, became dark, then darker, became a convex plane surface, a flat plane, and then became concave. Behind, as if seen through a smoky tunnel, came the attacking wave of energy, reddened and darkened and slowed. As they watched it grew slower and slower. The light image dimmed as photons grew scarce. Then, darkness.
Lady Venus said, “Sire, not just the ladies are wondering how will escape from this time warp. Are we not trapped forever?”
Aeneas said, “Unless I miss my guess, we will be trapped for twelve minutes exactly. Lady Venus, if you will, coordinate with Lord Uranus to track and locate where all their control thoughts come from. Their set up does not allow for decentralized command. Pass the information to Lord Mars.”
Aeneas turned to Lord Mars, “My lord. Are you ready?”
As predicted, the enemy released the flatspace suppressor. Perhaps they wished to bring information out from the event horizon, or shoot weapons in. Only the Dyson interior itself was free: spacewarps could not be formed outside the hull.
Aeneas was amazed to see the black hole unfold. It happened faster than light, depositing the World Armada in one second several light minutes from its prior position.
No matter. Aeneas had long ago issued the orders. His servominds, the moment their tachyon circuits could operate freely, reacted faster than lightspeed. The World Armada formed a warpchannel to the interplanetary pearl positioned at the mouth of the firing aperture, safely behind the kinetic compression wave, and was there. The gas giants and lesser worlds of man were now in the firing aperture. The fire of the interior of Ara A was before them; the blazing fields of destructive energy of the Dyson interior were behind.
Lord Mars had vanished.
Lord Mercury shouted, “Mars! Where is he?”
Aeneas smiled thinly, “At war.”
Episode 19: Matter of War
Thucydides Tell, the Lord of Mars, vanished from the presence chamber of the Lords of Creation.
At the same moment when the flatspace suppression was released, and warp transmission again became possible, Lord Mars was sent through a smaller warpchannel to the location Lady Venus had detected: the hub of all the enemy command lines.
Lord Mars appeared in the authority arena of the alien headquarters. It was vast, dark and cold, an orbicular fortress larger than an asteroid, held in its place in the Dyson hull by the lightest of artificial gravities. Countless other orbs, equal in volume, formed a cityscape larger than earth, shaped like a cluster of grapes bisected by the Dyson hull. Lord Mars stood on a black floor. He was surrounded by concentric ranks of mountain-sized vampire masses. Some were larger than the plutonian world-vampire had been. This was the first of a thousand fortresses embedded in polar intersection of the armatures of the War Dyson.
The chamber was a mile high and many miles wide. Black stalactites of thinking material, larger than skyscrapers, reached down from the pitted and corroded dome above toward the tiers of the arena below. The mountain-sized vampire masses were huddled like egg clusters beneath each stalactite. Each was half buried into a bowl thousands of feet in radius. The bowl interior was coated with control ports into which they extruded nerves. Each vampire was surrounded by concentric stains of debris and bones, the remnants of feasts consumed geological ages ago.
The monstrosities, at first, had no shape. Some of the nearer ones began to form eyeballs, infrared pits, or microwave horns along their closer slopes of gelid fleshto observe the intruder, or to create trumpets, tubes, and yammering mouths for uttering cries of alarm and anger into the plutonian air. The atmosphere here was helium, thin and barely warm enough to remain as a gas, evidently only a convenience for sonic communication.
The nude and brightly scarlet man, with no word, no change of expression, raised his hand, and all atoms of matter within a two hundred thousand mile radius reversed their orientation in one of the basic matter-energy command layers of the universe Lord Tellus had revealed to him. This was the range of the sensors in his signet ring, one lightsecond and a half.
In the base matter-energy layer, particle polarity was symmetrical. Positive and negative were nothing more than up spin or down spin. Like flipping a gyroscope on its head, these values could be reversed with no change to the form or momentum of the particles in the extensional layer called timespace.
Electrons became positrons, protons became antiprotons. The atoms and molecules all kept their shape: the electrochemical bonds hence chemical reactions of all the molecules in the affected area continued as normal, including those within the undead brains of the vampire beings and their thinking machines, save that they were now antimatter.
Only where this negative matter touched positive was there change. Both suffered total conversion.
The explosions where this negative matter of the fortress-city of the Dyson hull met the positive matter hull began in a doughnut shaped ring four hundred thousand miles in diameter, and expanded both inward and outward. The energy liberated by the total conversion of matter traveled faster than the electronic, gravity-wave, or space-contortion alarms registering the damage: no slave of the vampires had warning, no thinking machine could react in time.
Because the volume affected, compared to the size of this headquarters, was so large, the quivering vampire lords here beheld the coming destruction via hyperspatial periscope. There was no way to flee: any attempt to contort or warp to a positive matter area anywhere in the immensity of the Dyson surface would have obliterated them. Finding themselves and all their gear now being antimaterial in nature, the monsters did have time to recognize what was happening and send signals to the next in the chain of command, turning over their authority and yowling for revenge to be done in their memory.
These signals were allowed to escape by Lady Venus and traced. Meanwhile Lord Mars turned every other cubic inch of matter within the effected volume back to positive matter, like a chessboard of black and white, in order to speed the destruction. And again he vanished.
The first fortress-city was gone. A circular breach was punched clean through the hull of the Dyson. The burning edges of this breach were not protected by the disinertia and magnetic force fields used to preserve the Dyson hull against the interior environment of Ara A, and so the plasma began melting the neutronium struts and artificial sheets of energy-gathering and energy-projecting material that formed the hull surface.
Compared to the whole volume of the Dyson, however, this damage was simply nothing. Solar plasma began pouring into the breach in the hull, but it was a pinprick in a canvass larger than the Atlantic, with a match held to the pinhole.
In the same moment when a new fortress-city received the death signal of the first, and realized it held supreme command of the Dyson, Lord Mars was there, and again the entire volume of the second-in-command fortress-city was reversed and became antimatter. This city sent out dying cries to many locations, not just one.
The ability of Lord Mars to reverse matter polarity had strange side effects. One side effect was that by means of a double reversal, he could make a duplicate of himself, exact down to every atomic particle. These he could multiply geometrically. These he linked through mind circuits using a technique developed by Lady Venus and Aeneas. Aeneas had given the mindlinks tachyon channels, so that the thoughts between all the twin brains of all the bodies of Lord Mars, despite any distance, acted as one.
Led by Lady Venus, Lord Mars followed the command chains of thought. He kept expecting to encounter a false lead running to a trap, but it never happened. Ten thousand of Lord Mars slew one million cities of the vampires in an instant of total conversion; then one hundred thousand slew one hundred million; then ten million slew a billion.
&nbs
p; He did this all in a space of seconds, spreading far more damage than all the wars of history combined, and never once did he smile.
At the speed of light, the explosions would not be seen until, seconds, minutes or a quarter hour later, at any point further along the vast curve of the Dyson. On the other hand, the explosions would been seen by any slave city that just so happened to have hyperspatial periscope focused on a master city above it in the hierarchy, had any slave dared to spy on its superior.
However, even this damage was as nothing, compared to unthinkable immensity. It was as if one aggressive virus had killed off one billion of the neurons in a man’s body, leaving ninety billion untouched.
As planned, at this point, the ten million copies of Lord Mars, acting as one, changed tactics. Now he oriented the atoms of his body neither to the positive or negative, but to a neutral orientation, so that his protons became neutrons, and electrons neutrinos. By what manipulation of the strong nuclear force he could keep the neutrinos flying in the same shape as an electron cloud, and interact with other atoms, was a mystery beyond human science.
But his red body turned jet black, and became as hard as neutronium, invulnerable to any known form of kinetic, physical or electromagnetic damage. Even death energy was slowed and confused by the neutronium based life. (Aeneas, looking on from afar via hypaerspatial periscope, flexed the scales of his subcutaneous armor open and shut, feeling paltry and ridiculous.)
When Lord Mars next appeared in a mile-high command arena, he did not obliterate it instantly.
The mountains of undead flesh grew organs and reared up. They were not amoeboid except by choice: each grew limbs, tendrils, claws, manipulator hooks as needed from any convenient surface of its colorless flesh.
Lord Mars signaled to the Emperor Aeneas. Lord Mars saw the distant edges of the chamber suddenly turn red. Aeneas had surrounded this spot, and the ten million like it where any copy of Lord Mars stood, in a warp field lowering the speed of light to just above the speed of sound. Beams and bullets were now useless. Anything traveling above Mach One would find itself outside his frame of reference. And the vampires were trapped with him in the slow-light zone. No signals could escape this event horizon.