The other planets of the Ruticulus star system were examined. No living things were present anywhere. Beneath their layers of frozen atmosphere, all the unlife was quiet, motionless, torpid. The industrial complexes were still, materials packed, the space vessels grounded and partly dismantled.
Some of the worlds circling the warmer second sun had plantlife, insects, animals. From pole to pole, all were undead.
Through her ring, Lady Luna sent, “I assume the vampires consumed animals, bugs, grass, and viruses. But why did they preserve no food supply? Why not leave a seedcorn-stock of living beings alive to reproduce?”
She had ornamented her quarters with the pools and airborne orchids of her Moon. She luxuriated in a pond of breathable fluid. Around her, the deck was grass. Fawns grazed and puppies sported.
Lord Pluto sat on an iron chair in his unadorned chamber. “The whole star system is in mothballs. The glass spheres hung on every house were feeding troughs. The living were fed to the undead while the undead packed. Then the undead buried the undead.”
Lady Luna said, “The buried populations are in endless pain, hungering and famished. Who would do such a thing?”
Lord Pluto said, “I have necroforms on Pluto. They can be stored in compact spaces, and need no life support. I do not kill them, lest their memories and skills be lost.”
Lady Luna shivered, despite her warm pool.
Aeneas was pacing. Medical apparatus hung from the ceiling of his quarters, and vats and cells containing growths from the walls. His rib cage hung open, and he was idly fiddling and tinkering with his internal organs as he walked, dripping.
“The problem is that I do not know how to power the warpcore in a way Lord Pluto can hide. But what if all the space vampires stay asleep? Are there any overlords in this system at all? Is anyone looking for us?”
Just then, one of the moons of this world eclipsed the distant orange sun. The near one, the yellow subgiant, was below the horizon.
The third sun, a dark body, was visible in the rays of the other two suns. It was an orb of black, larger than a gas giant, a dwarf-sized neutron star that never ignited. It was hanging a degree beyond the yellow subgiant, as the season when this planet was in opposition was ending.
The neutron star object rotated, and brought into view its other hemisphere. Here was a huge eye, immense beyond measure, with iris and pupil. The eyelashes were longer than space elevators. A layer of atmosphere many miles thick was floating above its sclera. The storm systems, larger than the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, were as tiny to this eye as the microscopic flotsam found in the moist surface of a human eye.
Moons and asteroids would have been dust specks in those eyelashes. The lids narrowed as the eye-shaped artifact squinted, peering.
Luna spoke in a hushed, trembling voice. “I can see into its dreams. It is a weapon designed to consume whole star systems across interstellar distances. Its work is done. All worlds in the galaxy are dead. It is looking for life… it hungers… it knows we are here!”
Episode 04: Graveyard World
The neutron star eyeball stared down at the world where the pyramid of Talos had landed. The astronomical observatory went dark, and all communication with the servominds there ceased.
Lord Pluto was sitting on his iron chair in his barren quarters. “It cannot see us.”
Lady Luna was half submerged in a floral pool in her quarters. Over her ring, she answered, “Not us, personally. I can see in its thought that it is aware of life energy present in the liquid mind of this inner planet. You said you could keep us hidden from any observers!”
Lord Pluto said calmly, “Evidently an overestimation. It was more difficult than expected to make thoughts inside a mental network invisible to each other. I am not familiar with the nuances of dream-frequency thought-transfer, as this is your specialty, Lady Luna. Again, we see the disadvantage of the compartmentalization of specialties Lord Tellus imposed on the Imperial Family.”
Aeneas was pacing in his quarters, scowling. “Can you mask the detectable side effects if I erect a gravity differential turbine to power the warpcore?”
Lord Pluto mused, “Assume them familiar with Forerunner technology, Aeneas. From what distance could you detect such a thing?”
“About half a lightyear. Three trillion miles.”
Lord Pluto said, “I can influence a volume of about half a mile diameter.”
Aeneas grunted glumly. “My warpcore is the mass of Haley’s Comet. My ability to warp space is limited by that mass. The longest safe warp I can make is ten to fifteen lightyears, which is nothing on a galactic scale. It is three lightyears from Zeta Herculis to HIP 82003, from there eleven lightyears to GJ 3959, from there sixteen lightyears to Bernard’s Star and then five lightyears to Sol. That includes two tesseract segment warps I cannot promise will be stable or safe. So we are not returning home without native help.”
Lady Luna said, “But you got us here!”
Aeneas said, “It was a blind, uncontrolled jump, and we were lucky. Longer and unsafer jumps I can make. Let’s not.”
Lady Luna said, “Can you add mass to your singularity?” She smiled, and let her ring show the smile to him. “Something as large as a neutron star?”
Aeneas said, “Easily. If a warpcore were built at the center of the neutron star, I need not even erect any armature rings around it to control the warp vectors. I could slave the Great Eye warpcore to mine by a resonance effect. The interior of a rotating Kerr singularity does not know or care where it is in time or space. The hard part is getting that the Great Eye to cooperate—it is only a death-energy powered interstellar range weapon able to destroy all the planets of a star system in one shot, after all. Are you saying you can—without killing us!—mesmerize it? You are a tougher little girl than you look.”
“I am also older than you and outrank you, Annoyance.”
Aeneas said, “Peanut, our uncle Lord Pluto is a cautious man over a century old. Why not convince him it will be safe to do whatever you are planning?”
She said to Lord Pluto, “The Great Eye is controlled through a unified subconscious control network, just as at Alpha Centauri. The overlords did not allow their servants to talk back, suffer doubts, disobey orders, or think for themselves: my instruments show the Great Eye to consist of a completely vacant and unwatched subconsciousness in total control of the conscious but zombiefied mind. I could insert any commands I wished. No passwords. No one is watching. As long as no one attacks it, it will stay half asleep.”
Lord Pluto said, “Absurd. Who leaves a weapon of such power lying about unlocked?”
Aeneas laughed. “A society of necroforms with no free will whose nearest neighbor is the star system LP 275-68, three lightyears away. After all, you did leave your tower unlocked and unwatched…” Aeneas scowled. “Or did you? You allowed me in, didn’t you? And then let me escape? Why?”
Lord Pluto said curtly, “My motives are my own.”
Lady Luna said, “So they are, but, not knowing them, why should we trust you?”
Pluto said, “We are trapped on a necropolis world in an undead star system, and cannot escape unless you two perform works of ultralargescale engineering and subversion. Can either of you perform these feats, and remain undetected, without my help?”
Aeneas had no answer for that.
The three selected one small island in the southern polar ocean of the small world Aeneas now christened Necropolis.
Lord Pluto’s automata surrounded the coastline of the island with units to render the island invisible. A village where undead islanders were stacked like cordwood was flooded with Spaceman’s Fog. The tiny plantlife revived them. The necroform giraffe-men had no power to resist commands from their subconscious mind-network. Lady Luna had them mesmerized in short order.
This workforce was set the task of clearing vampire grass from the soil, and replanting it with earthlife, then filling it with livestock, which they were required to tend and forbidden
from consuming.
Forced-growth techniques allowed farms and ranches to reproduce generations in days rather than years. Once the deer population was above a certain threshold, more native undead were revived, but, again, they were only permitted to consume the life-energy of a specific percentage of the herd, not more.
Every undead man, animal, and leaf in the whole solar system would have consumed this tiny island of living beings in an instant, but it had vanished from all their sense impressions.
The islanders were next given the task of building other tools and instruments, including additional invisibility units for Lord Pluto, dream-transmitters for Lady Luna, and gravitational amplifiers for Aeneas.
The first of several battles for Necropolis took place when the islanders loaded up ships and sailed to a city on a peninsula selected for their next prize. Lord Pluto cut sight of the peninsula off from the remainder of the world.
When the necroforms under Lady Luna’s mesmerism, filled with life energy, descended on the city, the undead there rose up from below the cobblestones and from submerged graveyards in the bay, and assaulted the ships.
Lady Luna inserted instructions into their dreams, but the hunger and frenzy of the starving monsters overcame all restraints. The battle for a while was fought in an organized fashion, until the first few victories of the city dwellers allowed them to drain the stolen life energy from the islanders, and then other city dwellers turned on the successful ones and drained them, and a general melee broke out without plan or purpose. Meanwhile, the islanders who had been drained rammed their ships into the ships to the rear of the flotilla, whose undead crews still were replete with life-force.
Several nightmarish hours later, with most of the city in ruins, enough of the vampires had fed off each other for their ghastly hunger to be slaked. These contented vampires were once again vulnerable to Lady Luna’s commands, and their unconscious minds once more in control of their automaton conscious minds.
That city conquered others. In a short time, the peninsula was under cultivation, and moon-trees and moon-flowers of the type Lady Luna preferred were blooming. The vampire armies of this peninsula attacked other coastal regions, this time in a more controlled fashion, for Lord Pluto kept the fed and the starving mutually invisible to each other.
Inland manufacturing centers were next, and after that, the careful, tedious process of flushing all the waters of the world free of microscopic vampire life, and replacing it with plankton and krill and an extreme archeon called a thermoacidophile.
Weeks turned into months, and more territory was converted, stirred awake, and brought under their control. Eventually the whole planet Necropolis, from pole to pole, was theirs. None of the hibernating vampire life thronging the other worlds of the system was aware of it.
Aeneas and Lady Luna celebrated with a party of special magnificence, decorating the ward room, and having their rings concoct wines and delicacies out of various fruits and livestock of the small planet’s now-living farms. Lord Pluto excused himself curtly, and took no part of the celebration.
Lady Luna held up her wineglass, “Cheers! I must say, stranded with no one but you and he, this has been the most stress-free family outing I’ve ever been on. I look forward to the bugged eyes and gaping mouths when you return home as Emperor!”
Aeneas said, “No eyes will be more agog than mine. I will have myself crowned Emperor Hypocritus the First, the only antimonarchist monarch in history. Maybe I should also run for the office of atheist pope, eh?”
Luna looked at him sidelong. “You won’t do it? Your self-preservation instinct is weaker than I thought.”
Aeneas said, “The whole galaxy is undead. Sol is the sole source of organic life anywhere. Do you think the legal gulf we’ve erected between an omnipotent imperial family and our impotent servile races can stand? Tyranny is a luxury!”
The conversation turned to the pragmatic questions. Luna said, “We are lucky. Some of the vampires we unearthed last week were dream-engineers from a million years ago who worked on the Great Eye. They cannot volunteer any information, but they can construct a program to insert into the Great Eye’s mind. It is chief servant here. Once the Great Eye is ours, the rest of the system will fall with no further fighting, and you can finally have the natives manufacture a large-scale warpcore.”
Finally the day and hour came. All was ready. Aeneas had set a small, artificial sun to orbit the world named Necropolis and to keep the new earthlife flourishing there alive once the Zeta Herculis suns were left far behind. This planet and its tiny pet sun were now in orbit around the Great Eye, which was under Lady Luna’s control. A hollow singularity at its core was slaved to the warpcore aboard Talos, which was in the Lagrange One position between the Great Eye and the planet Necropolis.
Aeneas said, “The mass of a dead star gives us enough range and precision to return to Sol in one jump. The energy supply in the Great Eye is a treasure trove, and we’d be mad not to take it with us. This will be tricky, for I cannot appear anywhere inside the solar system without dying instantly, but with the mass of a neutron star at my command, I can establish a warp to carry us all to just outside the orbit of Pluto, which should be far enough away for me to survive.
“From there, I can establish a warp around the planet Saturn and summon it.
“Also, I can establish a meter-wide warp around my chair to prevent neuropsionic waves from propagating: nearer Sol it would not save me, but at this distance, it just might.”
Lady Luna said, “What if it doesn’t work?”
Aeneas said glumly, “I will be dead before I notice that I died.”
To his surprise, she kissed him, and so he did not notice when it was, exactly, that he gave the execution command.
His next moment of awareness was that he was alive, in the workspace, still seated in his chair on the gravity-opaque catwalk above the humming balefire-red warpcore. The analytical screen showed their current location: about a light-day away from Sol, far beyond Pluto.
With them was the tiny but bright artificial sun. To one side was the planet Necropolis, infested by vampire-life under Lady Luna’s control. To the other side was the neutron star carved into the Great Eye.
“Well done…” said Lady Luna.
The warpcore throbbed and groaned. It was operating at the far edges of its range. Suddenly in the transplutonian space with them, far, far beyond its normal orbit, was the ringed gas giant Saturn, with all his moons and artificial satellites.
Lady Luna looked impressed, and opened her mouth to speak. Instead, she screamed.
The Great Eye blinked. It rolled this way and that, glaring at Necropolis, at Saturn, at the bright and tiny star Sol. It was no longer under control.
Lady Luna and Lord Pluto collapsed, gargling and writhing. Aeneas’ personal warp blocked all mental radiation: that alone saved him. His screen showed how storms of mental energy were exploding from the Great Eye in all directions, immense beyond his instrument’s ability to measure. The whole population of Saturn and all its moons, including every animal, was jerking in epileptic fits.
But this was no weapon.
It was a shout.
It was a white-noise of neuropsionic energies on the dream frequencies, reaching out in all directions, filling the surrounding space.
The star-murdering weapon now squinted at Sol, and began to build up the death energies needed to obliterate the whole solar system, every world, worldlet and moon.
Aeneas could not use his ring unless he stood and put his head outside his personal thoughtproof warp. But if he stood, he would be struck comatose.
He did not stand. He leaped. Pain and darkness crashed into his brain.
Episode 05: The Deadly Light of a Living Star
The headless body of Aeneas fell back onto his chair, so that his secondary brain was safe within the thoughtproof zone of space.
His bioadmantium skull protruding outside the thoughtproof bubble for just a second had protected
his primary brain long enough for him to transmit orders through his signet ring to the control board to the warp core.
Then the cells of every part of his body outside the surface of his protective warp had exploded. Lord Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus had done their work well: even beyond the orbit of Pluto was not safe for him.
Whether what he did was genius or madness, he did not know, then or ever. Aeneas had only two locations in timespace already solved: the location at Zeta Herculis and the location of the planet Saturn. But Zeta Herculis, thirty-five lightyears away, was still within this monster’s firing range.
He chose. He moved the Great Eye to the empty spot where Saturn had been.
The Great Eye, a neutron star whose entire mass outweighed all the planets of Sol, coated and filled with alien weaponry and whose endless capacitors and banks and batteries, countless cubic miles of them, were filled with death energy, now materialized between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. Sol, at this distance, was merely a small star, brighter than others.
But the whole surface of the neutron star grew discolored as some unseen, unknown energy from Sol disrupted the crystalline structure of the neutronium, and turned the whole surface a leprous white. The cubic miles of atmosphere and hydrosphere filling the sclera of the Great Eye now inexplicably erupted into space, climbing against the unimaginably steep gravity well. The amount of energy required to move so huge a liquid mass against so vast a gravity was incalculable, and seemed to be coming from a titanic internal turbulence.
The Great Eye itself turned wildly left and right, then lost all power of motion, went dull and blank, was covered over with the strange white discoloration. The gasses and oceans thrown into orbit formed a ring of steam around the equator of the neutron star, and slowly cooled into icebergs, a glittering rainbow.
There was no sign of who or what had so instantly obliterated such a monstrous sphere. Cracks appeared in the surface, as continent-sized areas subsided, and gamma radiation began escaping from these cracks. Matter was turned to plasma by the immense heat escaping from the interior, so the cracks now had glowing, molten lips. Volcanoes like pock-marks scarred the white surface. Instruments showed the volume of the star was less than it had been a moment before, even though the mass remained the same. Material at the core was being lost into the singularity.