The vampire lords formed mouths and roared. Lord Mars drew his longsword in one hand and his pistol in the other. For the first time he smiled.
Then he made a squad of himself, then a company, then a battalion.
As he ran forward he saw all the objects around him flattening slightly in the direction of his motion, slow down like a visual recording played at low speed, and the redness grow darker as its mass increased. The huge hills of undead flesh turned their bellies to a fluid substance that they shed as they heaved themselves out of their bowl-shaped thrones and wallowed forward riding vast slime trails. Towering thousands of feet, the mountains rushed toward him, bellowing, emitting death-energy from their crags and peaks and newly-formed eyes.
Lord Mars slew and slew, wading through undead flesh to slay again.
His pistol was little more than an barrel holding a servomind and a multi-channel reception pearl. Stations on the planet Mars, powerhouses, atomic piles, accelerators, and arsenals were positioned to fire any type of vibration, energy, or solid destruction his gun crews could feed into their transmitting pearls.
This time, what he shot into the lacerated vampire masses heaving and roaring about him were burrowing, nerve-seeking darts designed by Lady Venus, containing thought-reading and infiltration mechanisms.
Some few he spared for a fate worse than death, cutting their brains away from nerve channels. He thrust into the disgusting nerve-mass appliances that prevented the shadow-condition cellular transformations. No cut nerves regrew.
The vampires had all the technologies of the Lords of Creation at their command. When Lord Mars could take them by surprise, he prevailed. In thousands and tens of thousands of battles where they were ready, he died, overcome by energies and forces he could not see or understand.
There were two thing gave him an fighting chance.
The first was that the enemy reacted unimaginatively to the current battle environment. They reached out with death-energy beams or destructive rays or forces which simply could not propagate when the speed of light was so slow. On the other hand, a neutronium sword tip moving at the speed of sound, when that was nine-tenths of the current speed of light, would create a megaton kinetic explosion in any target he struck, or, if he put his back into it, a thermonuclear reaction.
The second was that the enemy reacted unimaginatively to everything. Each underling sent messages during combat to remote higher-ups, but followed unsuccessful tactics until countermanded. Meanwhile, the armies of Lord Mars had no leaders but himself. There was no center, no line of communication to trace or cut. It was all him. Any of him was in command.
After the battle, he reversed the duplication process and gathered himself back into one. That one sat panting atop an undead mountain of pale flesh, teeth clenched, but smiling. As he regrouped, he noticed how many of his selves had committed suicide via total conversion to avoid capture. His smile faltered. The enemy had been fighting to gather captives, not to win. That was not a good sign.
Despite what Brother Beast always said about the damage to his soul, Lord Mars regretted none of his many suicides. Or so he ordered himself to think.
Avoiding capture was necessary. The command-monster on which he sat was proof of that. The vampire mountain had been lobotomized of all trace of free will by the Venus weapons. It was merely the puppet of Lord Mars. All voluntary nerve links were cut. Its identified itself, in its own nonverbal language, as Xormxragon, which meant, the Deceiver.
That name was also a bad sign.
Dimly, over the mental links, he could see Lady Venus and Lady Luna downloading volumes of memory from the creature’s undead brain cells. Lord Mars himself was busy giving counterfeit commands through the brain of Xormxragon. The monster’s underlings were prevented from remembering or questioning recent events.
The vast majority was unaware of anything untoward. It was as if Lord Mars had appeared in a throneroom, killed one despot while leaving the empire unaware of the coup.
Lady Venus gave a small scream of surprise and fear. “There is no evidence in any of the surviving brains of any higher officers! There is no galactic empire, no galaxy. In fact, they have no knowledge that any universe exists above the surface of Ara A. They think this red hell is all there is.”
Aeneas said, “They shot at us! We were above the surface! They knew we existed!”
Lady Venus said, “Not these. Someone else, by remote control, working through the Dyson-dwelling vampire lords, and made them perform actions meaningless to them.”
Aeneas said, “What does it mean?”
Through the brain of Xormxragon, Lord Mars was connected to the control mechanisms of the War Dyson. Through their astroseismic sensors, he now saw the solar temblors heralding the approach of thirty nine Dysons. The vast spheres came wallowing slowly through the plasma of Ara A. They formed a narrowing globe all around. Frame-dragging detectors sensed that the warpcore armatures girdling the enemy Dyson equators were spinning rapidly, preventing any spacewarp, preventing any escape. Gravity readings showed the Dysons were forming black holes at their cores, preparing to fire.
Because space outside the Dyson where he now stood was flat, Lord Mars realized that there could have been no FTL signals sent to these Dysons. The more distant ones could not have yet seen the fact that the first nova beam fusillade had missed. The englobement was prearranged.
The smile of Lord Mars vanished.
Spacewarps were still possible inside the captive Dyson. Lord Mars called on Aeneas and returned to the round table in one step. He threw his useless sword clattering to the floorstones.
Aeneas asked again, “What does it mean?” But now he was staring at the dropped sword.
Lord Mars spoke with no change of expression. “It means, sire, that this was too easy. I have failed you. It means this was a trap.”
Episode 20: Obliteration of Man
In an immense dead city that formed a hollow sphere of ribs encircling the black heart of the galaxy, only one window was lit. From it a single beam reached. In the ray of that beam Warlord Rhazakhang the Obliterator was hanging, motionless.
To speak, the Ultimate Overlord thrust into the brain of Rhazakhang the ideas he wished him to possess; to listen, he ripped the thought directly out. Both operations left trails of painful damage.
Had words been exchanged, they would have been like this:
“Let Warlord Rhazakhang rejoice! The matter of Sol is concluded. The Living Worlds have been found, and destroyed, and the horde of their living energy been added to our feast coffers.”
“All souls are thine to consume, Overlord!”
“As reward, receive thy portion.”
For the first time in countless centuries, Rhazakhang received a pleasing sensation from his master rather than the normal, endless pain. Life energy, golden, sweet and glorious, filled the cells in his body.
Rhazakhang recovered a level of intelligence, and opened old memory chains, he had not enjoyed in eons.
He remembered the taste of consuming the last survivors of organic life. Their worlds had been found hidden in a nook of this very Great Sphere englobing the galactic core-singularity where the Overlord ruled. He recalled the savor of pain, the smack of fear, the spice of agony and self sacrifice as wives and mothers saw lovers and children shrivel and die in their arms… and this feast had no such scent.
The bliss was interrupted by a lance of pain. As if he had bitten a wasp in the midst of a mouthful, the thoughts of the Overlord stabbed his brain.
“Your doubt is plain. Let Rhazakhang unfold the source of his suspicions.”
“The victory was too easy, Overlord.”
“How so? The humans acted precisely as you predicted.”
“Heretofore, the Tellurians were more erratic. They posses free will.”
“Let Rhazakhang contemplate that his swift destruction would please his master, if you are so insolent as to imply that an underling can penetrate a deception that fools his superior!
”
“That destruction would also please me, if I am proved wrong. Grant me sufficient energy to travel to the battle scene. If some Living Worlds still live, the trove of their life will pay both for the expense of sending your servant, and will placate your wrath.”
The Ultimate Overlord brooded for a time. In some half-buried memory deep in his soullessness, recalled what creatures who possessed free will were like. Having recently fed, his feelings of rage, jealousy, bitterness, and hate were also once more inside him, which he had not for many eons felt.
It was worth any expense to confirm the obliteration of life.
The Ultimate Overlord said, “Go!” The ringworld-sized armatures of the Great Sphere began to spin.
When Rhazakhang arrived at Ara A, some of the other warlords showed signs of insubordination, resistance or self-will. It was a common side effect of feasting. After a series of pitched battles, he killed them and ate their souls. Rhazakhang placed his own trusted servants, Dzazanang the Ineluctable and Vsasrhazing the Exsanguinator, into the places once occupied by the dead warlords. Eventually normal operations resumed.
Dzazanang, his marshal, escorted him to the World Armada of the Tellurians. Neither one, strictly speaking, was in a space vessel. The machinery of propulsion and defense they wore like armor, with lesser servants tucked in convenient pockets in the plates.
Inside Dyson of Xormxragon the Deceiver (a dangerous underling, but one whose involuntary sacrifice brought this victory), were the prey planets. There were punctures from nova-beam fire here and there penetrating the Dyson hull. Some were covered over with force fields. Others simply allowed the plasma of Ara A to flood inside, and spheres of fire were growing there.
The human worlds were orbiting some two light minutes beneath the hull, surrounded by the eyeball-shaped dark stars that had destroyed them, and countless swarms of battlemoons and combat worlds. Once they had been green. Now all life, down to the last microbe, was gone.
Here were the three gas giants, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus, and the shrunken and damaged superterrestrial of Saturn. A crowd of lesser planets, worldlet and moons of mankind orbited them.
Rhazakhang turned upon the worlds lanterns of various colors taken from stars of various psychologies, and examined the neuropsionic echo. He formed a palaeoscope in his outer flesh and observed the ancient aspects of the globes, using a timewarp to bend their world-lines as he did so, so that the past image did not pass outside his vision range.
Only one had been green a million years ago. The larger of the double planet was the original homeworld of man. The smaller partner of the double planet had originally been gray, waterless, airless. This was called the Earth-Moon system. Rhazakhang expended some store of life energy to allow himself to feel curiosity. He sent flakes of himself as probes to the smaller world. It was the source of all the dreamland disturbances in the area. The ruins of some potent sub-consciousness broadcast system still hung about to the mountain peaks, with wisps of dreams still clinging.
Why would the living creatures bothered to terraform the dead globe and seed it with life? The energy costs of such projects were absurdly high. The population pressures on the homeworld could not explain it: Earth had not, even now, taken the form of a single city reaching from pole to pole.
Rhazakhang altered his shape to match the human norm here. He and his servant created a tube of vacuum through the Earthly atmosphere to the surface of the larger planet and plunged down this tube at terminal velocity. At the bottom, they neutralized their inertia, came instantly to rest, and collapsed the vacuum. This created a shockwave and triggered storms. Flinging a series of contortion pearls from his coat to various points throughout the hemisphere, Rhazakhang stepped from one scene of destruction to another, as curiosity took him.
Finally they stood in the throneroom of the Lords of Creation. Here at the round table, each beneath his insignia, were the dead leaders of the Living Worlds. Rhazakhang stood on two feet as a hulking, faceless biped. Had he not tucked his extra mass into nullspace, he would have been too large for the chamber. Dzazanang was shaped like a tripod, his main mass at the ceiling apex, forming sense organs as needed at the crotch of the tripod, staring downward.
Rhazakhang probed the dead bodies with several energies. Dzazanang did not have as much spare energy in his brain as Rhazakhang, so he could only watch his master’s investigations with dull incuriosity.
Rhazakhang eventually stopped moving. “Explain this.”
Dzazanang formed a tendril and pointed. “When defeat was certain, the orders were given from this one, Lady Venus, went to this figurehead, Emperor Hypocritis the First, who was under her mental control. He ordered all his subjects to commit suicide, in order to deny to us the benefits of their living force. We are fortunate that some disobeyed the order, or else we would not have recovered any life energy at all. It is unclear why she permitted her slaves to disobey her figurehead.”
“Did the humans caught alive offer any resistance or defiance?”
“None whatever, master.”
“Did their brains show any signs of tampering?”
“Yes, master. Their memories showed that Lady Venus attempted a mind control to compel them to commit suicide, but the population numbers were greater than her broadcast capacity. They were brain-damaged, and reduced to idiocy, but resisted the compulsion.”
Rhazakhang reached with a force beam through the walls of the palace, and brought forward a corpse that had been buried in another wing. It was a necroform servant. “They had vampirism technology, but did not use it?”
“Only to create servants, or destroy the free will as a penalty for crime. Records show only the outer worlds, gas giants, used such servants in any considerable numbers. Emperor Hypocritis the First ordered them all sealed away or destroyed when he came to power.”
“They had three warpcores of planetary mass and range. Where are they?”
“Lost. The mind records show each was ordered to expel the others from our timspace coordinate system.”
“Hm. Lady Venus was the true leader?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
“This corpse here. Her name was Nephelethea Cimon, daughter of Ranidaayani. This red colored man is Lord Mars. His name was Thucydides Achilles Apollyon Tell, son of Isabella. He slew all the other lords in the chamber, and came and put his arms around her, touching his lips to her lips before impaling both through the heart with a single thrust from his sword. The meaning is obscure.”
“The lip-touch is a sign of affection. Who is this one? Do you know?”
“We know. We captured both thought records and written records intact. That is Lord Mercury. Procopius Tell, son of Filchingmort. Note that he died with hand raised, with only the middle finger extended. Again, the meaning is obscure.”
“It is a sign of disrespect.”
“Directed at his murderer?”
“No. At us. He foresaw we would stand here.”
Rhazakhang now drifted up to perch on the top of the highest of the three heads on the imperial throne. He peered down at the chamber of the dead.
Rhazakhang said, “There is no emotional trace of the agony typically displayed by organics whose loved ones die. They were remarkably placid. Almost bovine. Speculate as to why this should be.”
Dzazanang disliked the order to speculate, but, fearful of pain, he released his precious but shrinking store of life energy into higher brain sections.
This brought old memories, emotions, and creative drives out of hibernation. As always, his first sensation was self-loathing, hatred of what he had become.
He said, “From how well they fought, these were obviously a warlike people. Stoicism is common in such races.”
“Yet here are signs of affection and there signs of defiance, and other highly-charged emotions of which no trace exists in the cellular residue.”
Rhazakhang lashed out with a power ray, cutting the roof of the palace away, reach
ing across interplanetary space, and severing the planet Mercury in half. The surface of the world turned into molten debris, which a wash of kinetic energy tossed into space as a cloud of asteroids. Revealed was a contortion pearl, grown to be as large as the nickel iron core of the planet. “What is this?”
Dzazanang answered: “A contortion node. It has enough size to move all the planets to any mate, or even a small star. But we found the mate: it was seen hanging near the firing aperture.”
“Where is it now?”
“Missing.”
“Did the Living Men fire the Dyson beam?”
“Many times.”
“Was the missing contortion pearl capable of disinertia? If so, it would have been carried along the beam path without harm.”
“Unknown, sir.”
“Was the Dyson beam ever fired outsystem?”
“Only once.”
“Along what vector?”
“Its first discharge was toward Coma Berenices, the star SN2005ap in the Coma Cluster.”
Rhazakhang resumed his full size, spilling out of the broken roof of the throne chamber, coating the city of Ultrapolis, and sending masses of himself, like glacier, creeping down the sides of Mount Everest.
Into each wing of each building of the city, every door and window, vent and chimney, along all plumbing, he protruded substances, leafing through all books, reading all storage crystals, absorbing the brain cell residue from corpses. He prodded and studied.
Rhazakhang said, “In the historical records here, is mention of a law made by Lord Tellus outlawing certain kinds of air vibrations called music, and commanding history to be altered. Let us see the instruments by which this was done.”
Dzazanang used a force beam to drive a distortion pearl beneath the crust of the earth. They both stepped to the spot, changing their bodies to suit the new environment, which was lava. They became streamlined, heavily armored, assuming an aspect of centipedes or sea cucumbers.