Saturn shook his gray head. “Not so. My machines see things millennia in the past, not hours nor years.”
Pluto said, “However, is the rate at which visual information enters the data layer of the universe dependent on the shape of timespace? Basic relativity suggests it is. Perhaps if young Aeneas searched his implanted knowledge, and the two of you worked together, a solution might suggest itself.”
Among the Lords of Creation, since all the machinery and instruments needed could be assembled instantly through molecular technologies, and any routine mental operations could be performed by automatic highspeed servant-minds (including batteries of extrapolations and experiments of every possible combination), it was a matter of hours of research and study, rather than months or years, to launch a prototype vehicle: it was awkwardly named the anchipalaeoscope.
The first seventeen returned no information from recent layer of time.
But then the eighteenth trial returned an echo. The first images found were of a squat, gray, unadorned ship Lord Pluto said was his private craft. These were dates, many decades ago, when he was arriving or departing using a vehicle rather than a space contortion pearl.
Next, the view found on another shape, slender as a needle, black as jet. The vessel was directly behind Charon, so that the bulk of that barren moon blocked Pluto. The whole vessel was coated in a field that absorbed light, so that neither radio waves, nor infrared, nor any other wavelength rebounded from the hull. It was black with an absolute blackness, and issued no heat, no radiation.
Aeneas looked at the readings. “This image is from twenty years ago.”
Lord Saturn said, “An antiphotonic field. I cannot penetrate it.”
Aeneas said, “I can. Tachyons trump antiphotons. Allow me.”
Aeneas made tiny adjustments to the instruments he and Lord Saturn had made, and the hull of the vessel was visible. It was made of a non-ferrous black ceramic. A ring of space contortion pearls circled the stern of the vessel, and another the bowsprit. A space contortion field transmitted her constantly to the position in front of herself. The inside of the vessel was composed of nothing but engine. Certain parts of the engine, such as fuel cells, blinked into and out of space contortion according to when they were needed. There seemed to be neither crew nor controls. How the vessel was being steered was unclear.
The vessel was moving in a disinertial field. Lord Saturn’s machine could not focus on the black vessel at any point in time before it came to rest behind Charon, because it was moving too swiftly.
Lord Saturn said, “That could be Lord Jupiter’s technology. He is the master of the electromagnetic spectrum.”
Lady Luna said, “Lord Mercury knows the ins and outs of space contortion better than anyone, and I’ve never seen a setup like that: is the vessel transmitting itself from its own stern to its own bow? That is impossible.”
Aeneas said, “It seems to be riding an artificially produced gravity wave, and gravity is Lord Neptune’s area of expertise.”
The vessel corkscrewed in toward the planet. Lord Pluto said emotionlessly, “The captain knows the location and period of my defensive satellites, and the range and location of my ground-based sensor sweeps, because he is always in the area of least overlap. The timing is impeccable. He has also selected an area to splashdown where I post no watchers, because there is nothing there to guard…”
For the black vessel now darted toward the surface. She moved too quickly for Lord Saturn’s machine to track, but he examined the glacier below by tenth-second increments, until he detected a blur of motion, and then he carefully backed the image up by a second. The vessel did not slow as she descended, but instead sent out a fan of heat-rays from her bow. The glacier underneath was turned to liquid. The vessel nosedived into the fluid, but, without inertia, was not hurt. Inertia returned for a moment when the field was shut off. This was the only moment when Lord Saturn’s machine could get a clear view. Then the vessel was under the surface of the lake of liquid oxygen, whose surface formed a frost and thickened rapidly into ice.
Lord Saturn said, “Interference is here: I am not sure what is causing it.”
Lord Pluto said, “Clever. The spyship knows I post no sentries beneath the glacier surface. He could have rested there as long as he liked.”
Aeneas said, “Doing what? What is there to spy on?”
Lord Pluto turned his monocular helmet lens toward Aeneas, “A drill to seek the layer of frozen undead material forming the main body of the world-vampire could be lowered. A neuropsionic broadcaster could make contact with it, and translate its thoughts into words. It is a first contact mission.”
Aeneas said, “There may be earlier or later visits. Search for them, please.”
Lord Saturn gave orders to his navy. Automatic machinery made a plethora of the new shortrange anchipalaeoscope satellites in a matter of minutes. A flotilla of small cylindrical probes, each looking like two cones connected through the apex, now formed a cloud at the Lagrange Two spot, on the far side of Charon. These sensors consisted of two counter-synchronized chronic particle cyclotrons, and were connected through contortion lines to the Anchipalaeoscope machines in the time-observatories at the poles of the planet Saturn. The far side of Charon was the only point in space where a clear near-past image of the black ship had been picked up.
The probes sought until they found a second image from twenty-five years earlier, and a third from thirty years, but both were blurred. Neither was clear enough even to be sure if this was the same vessel, even though she was moving at the same remarkable speeds. And nothing closer than twenty years old was possible.
“I suspect,” Saturn said finally, “the black ship does not normally turn off her disinertia field when entering orbit, but simply plunges to the surface without slaking her speed. I am not sure why she stopped that one time, but I was lucky enough to pick up the image.”
Lord Pluto asked, “What was the date of the first image?”
Saturn said, “24 December, AD 2474, Imperial Meridian Time. Christmas Eve.”
Lord Pluto said, “A day I am called to Everest for celebrations. But that year I had increased my sentry satellites. The black ship paused to take readings and calculate an approach. How long was she motionless?”
Lord Saturn said, “Six hours.”
Aeneas saw the slight flicker of neural energy in Lord Pluto’s ring. He was evidently consulting an almanac, for he said, “Interesting. At that date, Uranus was in opposition, hence more than fifty-eight AU from Pluto. Seven and a half light-hours. A signal from the ship, either a Schroedinger wave or electromagnetic, could have reached and returned from any other world or worldlet in that time, but not from a point on Uranus or his moons.”
Aeneas also saw the flicker in Lady Luna’s signet ring as her servant mind reminded her of something. Luna looked startled. “Wait. What date did you say? Because today is Christmas Eve. Unless we have lost or gained a day somehow during all these spacewarp jumps we’ve made. If the spyship is coming precisely on this date, Imperial Meridian Time, every five years, then she is coming here today!”
Lord Saturn told his astronomers on various moons and satellites to train their instruments on the Lagrange point on the far side of Charon. They saw nothing. Lady Luna relaxed visibly. “Good! Not here yet. Because if that ship came, and saw all of the remotes Lord Saturn scattered in that area, she’d know we’ve seen her, and…”
But Aeneas said, “Look!” and sent the image from his analytical screen into all their rings.
The black vessel hung in space. She had struck one of the swarm of anchipalaeoscope receivers at high speed, but, being without inertia, had come instantly to a halt without jar or harm. The various sensor beams issuing from the moons of Saturn were being quietly absorbed into the black skintight field of anti-photons, and returning no echoes.
Lady Luna said, “How long has that ship been there, Uncle Saturn?”
Lord Saturn said bitterly, “My machine cann
ot see recent events.”
Aeneas said, “Long enough to radio home for instructions? Or contort the captain and crew with cabins and lifesupport into vacant places inside the hull?”
Saturn said, “I don’t know. I do know that whoever is aboard knows these probes are mine. Their gross structure is the same as a palaeoscope. He knows we are looking into the remote past of the planet. He may deduce that we know the planetary vampire mass is still alive—if that is the word—under the ice.”
An open antenna dish appeared amidships on the black vessel, so suddenly that it must have been contorted into place. Powerful signals left the black ship, bent around Charon, and passed across the face of Pluto.
Lady Luna said, “This is bad. All the nightmare wavelengths of the planet just became full: more signals than my instruments can register. It woke up. The planetary vampire mass is awake!”
Lord Pluto said, “Necroform science is my particular area of study. There is no way for such a mass to have come awake again: we just saw how, eons ago, it was drained of the death-energy that sustains it in the shadow condition.”
Aeneas said, “The signals from the spyship are not electromagnetic. It is a laser of death-energy. The ship is feeding the plutonian world-vampire.”
Lord Pluto raised his ring. “I have sent a signal to my automatic defenses on Pluto. But they were designed to repel warships, not planet-wide undead glaciers.”
Aeneas focused his analytical screen on the surface. The dark tower faded from view, and a webwork of paralytic and nerve-destroying energies radiated out from the spot. But the whole valley folded inward on itself and was swallowed whole.
The death-energy readings suddenly spiked. On those wavelengths, the planet glowed like a black gem. Lord Pluto said, “The world-vampire is consuming death-energy from the Cerberus. Alas for Captain Lang! Alas for the crew! He and his deserved a fairer fate!”
The readings showed the creature was flushed with power from pole to pole. Aeneas said, “The creature captured the death-powered warpcore intact. It is using the three hundred to control the warpcore. I am now reading powerful gravity waves coming from the core of Pluto.”
Lady Luna said, “It knows all the Forerunner sciences. We’re doomed.”
Aeneas said, “It is folding space and preparing to form a weaponized spacewarp, an area where the laws of nature are twisted. What or how, I do not know—but the focusing striations are pointing directly at Sol!”
Episode 09: Teradeath
Aeneas sent signals to his warpcore, attempting to unfold the space the world-vampire was folding, but it was no use. The reach of a warpfield, its mass and degree of deviation depended quite straightforwardly on the mass-energy the warpcore controlled.
And the world-vampire was more skilled than Aeneas. In the first instant of combat, a field lashed out at the small planet Necropolis. All the vampires, who had been deceived into serving Lady Luna, now received new orders, linked mind to mind through the plutonian creature. They drained the world of life in a moment, and then they were drained in turn. Forests were turned into leafless hulks, and herds of deer to skeletons. Like a candle being snuffed, the whole planet Necropolis fell still, its every erg of vital energy fed into the plutonian world-vampire.
Aeneas attempted to throw a warp around Pluto and toss it closer to the Sun; but the world-vampire flattened space in each direction around the icy globe, and prevented any warps from forming. Meanwhile, the gravitational energy in the core continued to grow and grow.
Aeneas said, “It is going to create a zone of space one micron in diameter and six lighthours long and run it through the sun like a spear. It will form instantaneously, traveling faster than lightspeed. Within that zone, the fundamental gravitational relation of mass to acceleration will change, and all the particles inside the sun caught by the field will form a singularity. A very long, thin singularity. If rotated, the warp will also form frame dragging effects, and tilt the lightcone of the sun out of normal timespace and into a closed timelike curve. I have no idea what that would do. Image a doughnut shape of nuclear plasma the size of the sun collapsing inward into a wire-thin black hole. The x-ray emissions alone will obliterate the solar system, not to mention the tidal effects of having a Tippler singularity string sweeping through the plane of the ecliptic. To the crows with it! I’m… lost… I don’t have enough energy to stop it.”
Aeneas turned and saw the old and careworn face of Lord Saturn. “Well. I resign as the new Lord Terra. If my terrible superluminary science cannot protect mankind, I have no claim to be its protector, do I?”
Lord Saturn said, “I know how to stop it.”
Aeneas looked at him in surprise.
“Aeneas, do you have enough energy to place Saturn between Pluto and the sun? Preferably with the ring plane normal to an imaginary line connecting Sol and Pluto?”
“Yes, barely.”
“Please do so.”
The gas giant planet turned red, shrank to a point, and vanished in one spot, and in another a blue point appeared, swelled up to jovian size, dimming to its normal hue.
Lord Saturn held up his ring, “There are six interplanetary-strength temporal distortion stations at Saturn, which I had set aside in case of Civil War: two at the poles, and four equally spaced in the Cassini Division between rings A and B. I am instructing my servants to erect a graduated time-retardation field.”
Aeneas said, “What in the world will that accomplish?”
Lord Saturn said, “Do you know why sunsets are red? Or why straight sticks look bent when thrust into a clear pool surface?”
Aeneas said, “The light rays bend according to the density of the medium.”
Lord Saturn said, “Not the density per se. Fermat’s Principle is that light seeks the path of least time between any two points. By manipulating the time flow at the terminator of Saturn, I can bend the light around my globe, bending those farther more than the nearer, and thereby concentrate the rays like a magnifying lens. A lens, if you will, wider than the rings of Saturn!”
Even as he spoke, the surface of Pluto ignited to dazzling brightness. Sunlight came to the dead world.
Because each element had a different melting point, during the long plutonian winter each element would precipitate out of the thin atmosphere as a layer of snow during its part of the season, and hydrogen, whose melting point is lowest, precipitated last and lay on top, above layers of solid oxygen ice, solid nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane.
So, at first, the layers of plutonian glacier merely melted, and the million year old cryovolcanos merely ignited and slumped over, gushing rivers of liquid oxygen, white with vapor, plunging in elfin slowness over cataracts of melting nitrogen ice.
But then the solar beams dug deeper, and struck the layer of methane ice. It mingled with the molten oxygen and the blue-burning hydrogen. There was a heat source; there was oxygen, lakes upon lakes of oxygen bubbling with oxygen gas rushing upward in great clouds. And when the methane began to melt, there was fuel.
The three things needed for combustion were present. The mountains and craters of Pluto ignited with fire. In the low gravity, the tops of the flames reached to the thinnest regions of the humble atmosphere, and the whole canopy of hydrogen gas ignited like the envelope of the Hindenburg.
It was astonishing to see a planet burn. It was a vision of hell.
The continent-sized vampire amoeba reared up in agony, with mountain ranges of melting hydrocarbons sliding off its undead half-liquid hide. Glaciers of solid and lakes of liquid material were thrown into space. Temblors shook the miniature world from pole to equator as the monster writhed.
The sunlight, not the flame, was killing it. The flames merely helped burn whatever semi-solid cubic miles of tissue the sunlight was forcing from the negative-life condition back into being normal, if no longer living, organic matter. Once it was organic, it burned and burned.
The fire was everywhere. The world-vampire recoiled to the dark side o
f the world, far from the sun, yanking islands and icebergs and plateaus in its wake, and sending hills into space like meteorites in reverse. However, it was not the electromagnetic property of the lightwaves which harmed it, but the strange neuropsionic waves, which solid matter did not stop. Even in at the midnight meridian, the creature disintegrated, and the death-energy dispersed. The fires had started at the noon meridian, but the debris falling back through the burning hydrogen layer of air, the roaring layer of pure oxygen, heated up with friction enough, even in that low gravity, for carbon compounds to ignite.
Seen from afar, half smothered in its own smoke, the planet Pluto glowed like a golden coal, with rivers and seas of red flame within the yellow flame, black outcroppings of carbonaceous chondrite, peaks of blue ammonia ice sinking in ammonia lakes, a whole world bruised and spotted with ash and flame. The surface glaciers and oceans heaved and writhed in the low gravity as the world-vampire, a living bedrock of undead material, shuddered and perished.
With one last spasm, the quakes and convulsions ceased. The readings showed the death-energy at zero. The monster was gone. Aeneas saw the stressed spacetime line between Pluto and Sol vanish as the fabric of space returned to normal.
Lady Luna laughed and clapped her hands in relief, and old Lord Saturn smiled wearily.
Aeneas said, “We are still in danger!”
He fed the words his signet ring was sending him to an annunciator: The plutonian warpcore is still active. The world-vampire must have programmed a final action. Tachyon echoes reveal an immense amplification of local gravitational force. It is asymmetrical, and being used to propel Pluto…
But they saw it happening. The dark sky behind Pluto, from their point of view, reddened and puckered strangely, while Pluto shrank. The flames turned dark red and ceased to move as time slowed. Any remaining glaciers, hills, seas of burning methane or clouds of burning oxygen now flattened into a smooth, mirror-like surface. Pluto turned black, shrank to a tiny sphere, and vanished from sight.