“But the Forerunner supersciences changed all that. Now only one family has the power: the House of Tell. Our powers are indistinguishable from magic. We are a family of witches and warlocks, of demigods and demigoddesses. It is us you must convince to follow you, if you want to lead mankind to life! Us!
“If you don’t act the part of Emperor, the empire will break and scatter. No one, no one, will trust one of my bastard children, a crazy boy who experiments on his own brains and fills his organs with geegaws, to carry his family and world to safety! They will only trust an Emperor!
“Emperors have dignity. They act with strength. They command.
“You are the one who called the human race chickens: …well, then? If you cannot get the chicks to line up in order and stop the hens from cackling, all the birds will be scared and will scatter, and the farmer will find them one by one. You need the family behind you! Therefore you must be in front. Be Emperor! Otherwise, the worlds will lose hope, and panic.”
Aeneas shook his head. There had to be something wrong with what his mother was saying, but he could not put his finger on the error.
She said, “Did you not demand the family not to be ruled by fear when they were debating whether to kill you? Were you not right to make that demand?”
He said, “And you told them that I did not have the warptech imprint. And then you told them you would make me into a zombie!”
She shrugged. “The first was a lie, the second a half truth. They were trying to kill my son! You might be an idealist who thinks it better to watch one’s child die than to sully one’s tongue to tell a lie, but I am not.”
He said, “But you are the boy who cried wolf. Now that there are real wolves out there, among the stars, thirsty for our blood, who will heed you?”
She smiled and her eyes twinkled. It was a look he recognized, a look of love and romance, and so he groaned. She said brightly, “Lord Mars will hear me! I will call him here to swear to you! He has been neutral until now. But if he hears and believes your word, now that you have killed Lord Jupiter—that is a show of strength from you even I did not expect!—then Lord Neptune will have no choice but to be cowed!”
“He’s not dead.”
“Imprisoned? Even better. You are daring.”
Aeneas rubbed his temples. “Please call Lord Mars. How long will it take?”
“Less than half an hour.”
“Time enough. While we await him, I will move Earth, Venus, Mercury and Mars into orbit around Uranus, Neptune and Jupiter. Call the terraformers on each world stand by to adjust the atmospheric temperature as the distance from the sun changes.”
Episode 13: The Extinction of Sol
Thucydides Tell, Lord Mars, was as naked as a jaybird and as scarlet as cardinal. He wore black sandals and a diamond-studded weapon belt. Pistol and longsword hung at his hip. His torch-red hair was clasped at his neck in a short tail. His eyes were deep-set, unwinking, cold as painted orbs of glass.
He stepped out of a contortion pearl, came into the gold-domed presence chamber Lady Venus had erected. He looked up at Aeneas on his black throne, and his expression did not change or flicker, no more than a face of carven stone would have.
Lady Venus started a flowery and formal greeting, calling him by several titles, but Aeneas interrupted her to speak of the approaching enemy. Lord Mars interrupted him in turn, holding up his thin, red-colored hand.
“For many years, I knew Father had an enemy he feared, and knew it to be extrasolar. I knew using the faster than light drive would trigger a war, because, otherwise, he would have shared the secret with one of us. Majesty, I await your orders.”
He knelt and drew his sword and tossed it to the bright floor, where the blade rang like crystal chimes.
Aeneas said, “Just like that? You just declare me emperor, and vow to serve me? Don’t I get a vote?”
Lord Mars said, “No, Majesty. No vote for you. None for me. I await your orders.”
“And if I order you into jail for having assaulted me, stepped on me, and conspired with others to erase my mind?”
“Then I obey and go while you waste a needed vassal,” said he, still on one knee, speaking without a smile. “Your Majesty.”
Aeneas said, “Very well, but you don’t need to bow and scrape to me.”
“No, Majesty. I do. That should have been explained to you by Nephelethea.” He nodded toward Lady Venus, a fond look in his eye.
Aeneas realized that these two must have long ago planned out what they would say to him when he reappeared.
Aeneas leaned back on the throne, noting how uncomfortable it felt. “You two have some plan to bring the other Lords of Creation to accept my leadership?”
Lady Venus rolled her big, long-lashed eyes toward the golden ceiling overhead, and looked innocent. “No, not really… not a plan plan…. Just some ideas really…”
Lord Mars said, “We have a plan. Did you kill Lords Saturn and Uranus? Both disappeared when you vanished. What about Pluto? And the new kid?”
“No. Saturn and Pluto support me. Lady Luna also.”
“Have them stand to either side of your throne when you summon Lord Mercury to come and bow. He fears Lord Saturn. Pluto, too. Once Mercury swears, Lord Neptune will be alone. Have you killed Lord Jupiter?”
“No.”
“Kill him.”
“No.”
Lord Mars shrugged. “It is your battle. If you want to fight with one arm broken, it is your funeral. And the funeral of everyone who follows you.”
Aeneas templed his fingers. “You have always before stayed aloof from family politics. Why?”
Lord Mars said, “I don’t step into family squabbles for the same reason I don’t step in quicksand.”
“You are aware that Father knows of some terrible outside enemy?”
Lord Mars nodded. “There are no radio signals of intelligent life ever heard from any stars. Something happened to them. Father fears that something.”
Aeneas said, “I have met that enemy. They are vast and terrible, and we have very few ways to fight them, and little time. Do you think mankind has a better chance with Lord Jupiter in the battle, or in the quicksand you mentioned?”
“And if he kills you first?” asked Lord Mars.
Aeneas said, “Then you are free from an inexperienced and reluctant Emperor. I will send Lord Saturn to collect Lord Mercury. You go bring Lord Neptune to me. They may both be willing to answer the summons once they realize their planets are now all gathered into the shadow of the undead neutron star.” And he sent pre-arranged thought signals through his ring to Talos, and the warpcore there. The twin cores inside the neutron star responded.
The silver-white sky of Venus suddenly blazed white, turned red as a coal, and then went black, as it passed through a closed timelike curve and took up a new position. The silvery light of the sun seen through the swaddling cloud layers returned, but much dimmer.
Lady Venus looked startled for a moment, and then smiled a small smile of motherly pride.
Lady Luna next arrived. She apparently intended to make an impressive show of her entrance, for a great escort of moon-maidens, hounds, and antlered stags from the moon, as well as anctitones and acephals, lunarians and selenites and fierce centaurs called Va-gas flanked and followed her, and the music of lute, flute, silver bells, and clashing cymbals preceded her.
Aeneas asked her to stand to his right by the black throne. When he turned to his left, the second place of honor, he saw that Lord Pluto, who had arrived alone and without a sound, was already standing there. A black cloak hid Pluto’s unadorned armor. The single lens in the brow of his unadorned helm glinted.
Lord Saturn, gray and old, garbed in silver, arrived with his surviving children in his entourage: the Lords Janus, Mimas, Encledes, and Iapetus, and the Ladies Tethys, Dione, Rhea and Phoebe.
He escorted a sullen Lord Mercury, chubby and childlike, dressed in lace and livery. With him were officers and dukes of th
e two dominant races of Mercury, the first called demons, for their stubby radio horns they grew from their skulls, the others called witches, for their miter-shaped skulls, hooked noses, pointed chins.
Lady Venus returned in state with all her maidens, doves, and winged children. She brought the news that Lord Neptune would not remove himself from his citadel at Aegei. This was his armored palace resting on the ammonia ice bed of Neptune below the miles of unthinkably cold and unbearably pressurized oceans of liquid helium, water, methane, and ammonia: ocean below ocean, each according to its density and freezing point. However, Amphitrite Lady Naiad, his wife, had come in his stead.
The Neptunian queen was dressed in silver and blue. The bodice and skirts of her garb was liquid water bound with gravitational micro-fields so that it flowed and fell about her shapely limbs like a fabric of silk.
Aeneas said to the court, “I have placed Earth in orbit about the fragment of Saturn, Venus around Uranus, Mercury about Neptune, Mars about Jupiter.”
The courtiers stirred uneasily, albeit some smiled. All in the chamber clearly saw the political overtones to this division of worlds and moons: Brother Beast, Lady Venus, and Lord Mercury were loyal partisan favoring Lord Jupiter, whereas Lord Mars was not. The outer gas giants now each had a hostile moon keeping an eye on it.
Aeneas continued: “All four gas giants are in the umbra of the neutron star, to shield us from the nova long enough to form a warpchannel to our next destination. The three working warpcores, I have placed at the centers of three of the three undamaged gas giants. I would have preferred to ask Lord Neptune for his permission, but if Lord Neptune wishes to perish, such permission is not necessary.”
Aeneas nodded gravely to Amphitrite. “Lady Naiad: please inform your lord husband that both his fealty and the use of the gravitic amplifiers he has thoughtfully placed in orbit around the planets of the Empire of Man are required here.”
She blenched. “Are you saying…”
Lord Mars said, “That is not the proper form of address!”
Lady Naiad curtseyed, gracefully, hands lifting her shining skirts of living waters, one foot behind the other, bending the knees, bowing her head. “Is Your Imperial Majesty saying he is going to destroy the planet Neptune?” She swallowed. “Sire?”
“I suppose I should speak in the plural when I speak on behalf of the empire, shouldn’t I? We will not protect any world which does not need our protection. How does Lord Neptune plan to deal with the nova?”
Lady Naiad said, “How do you have such powers? It is madness!”
Aeneas clutched the black arms of the imperial throne. He grimaced. There was no seat less comfortable in any world. “A madman bestowed the power. We do what must be done to protect the people.”
Lord Pluto raised his gauntlet. “Majesty, look to the skies. Alien forces are materializing.”
The Lords of Creation looked to their signet rings and made mental contact with the various machines that served them. Dukes, counts, and others in the chamber opened bracelets or ornaments which hid phones.
Lady Venus said, “My orbital telescopes detect nothing!”
Aeneas said, “The light will not reach here for four hours. They are in the Oort Cloud, beyond the solar system. I will project the image for you.”
The golden dome above lit up with an image. Here was the stark blackness of the fringe of interstellar space. There were comet heads and icebergs floating in the endless night. The cloud of icebergs formed a rough globe around the sun.
From the nadir to the zenith of that cloud of ice fragments, now appeared objects. First they seemed blue-white dots, but then they faded and swelled up to their real size. Neutron stars were here carved into staring eyeballs, or brown dwarves covered, as with oozing sores, with crevasses and volcano cones leading to interiors of still-active solar plasma. Here were magnetars spinning, with twin x-ray arms like turning scythes or beams from a lighthouse, ready to destroy whatever was in their path. Here were dark and cold gas giants, blue with methane, or ribbed and tiger-striped with storms.
As belts at their equators, many gas giants had a ring of iron moons, armored and roofed with weapons, or the severed heads of undead monsters of prodigious size. Of ringworld armatures coated with quadrillions of corpses, there were only four, equally spaced around the solar system at the points of an imaginary tetrahedron.
The great eye of Zeta Herculis would have been lost in the swarm of dark and mighty planets. Perhaps there were also orbital fortresses, superdreadnaughts, battlewagons, battleships, and war-moons scattered among the suns and gas giants, but, if so, they were like dustmotes lost against a mountain-range of countless peaks.
The signet ring of Aeneas sent: Sir, the enemy is preparing to fire. The death energy build-up in the various neutron stars and brown dwarfs exceeds the total energy output of all planets in the solar system. Once those beams fire, no living thing will be left.
Gasps of horror ran through the chamber as the great and staring eyes of the neutron stars, larger than worlds, larger than suns, opened their massive lids. An inner heat, doubtless caused by internal volcanic processes preliminary to firing, boiled the oceans filling the sclera of those eye-shaped weapons into space. Stream clouds larger than worlds achieved escape velocity, despite the immensity of the gravity of the dead suns. Black gas giants and superjovian bodies with belts of corpses orbiting them spun their armatures up to speed, vanished, and reappeared millions of mile closer. In the image, these faster-than-light motions made a gas giant appear at its destination before the light-image showing it vanishing in the distance reached the viewer, so that, for a moment, the number of space vampire battle worlds seemed to double.
Aeneas raised his hand. “I set off the nova hours ago. I am also flattening space in a fashion around us I hope will prevent the enemy from establishing a faster-than-light periscope of the type I am using. We may depart at our leisure. Lady Naiad, please ask Lord Neptune if he wants his world to accompany us? Lord Mercury, the same question is yours?”
Lord Mercury drew a black dagger and laid it carefully on the shining floor. “I am your vassal, Imperial Majesty.”
Lord Neptune appeared out of a pearl in Lady Naiad’s hand. With no word, but with his eyes blazing and his teeth clenched, the blue man slowly knelt to one knee. He cast his trident angrily to the floor, ringing.
Aeneas said, “Take up your blade in my name and in the name of the law, to preserve life against death.”
The four gas giants with the lesser planets orbiting them vanished, a fact that the black fleet would not see for several hours. When they did, another sight would greet their eyes.
Sol reddened, grew lopsided, and, with the horrific slowness of vast disasters, began to expand, growing ever brighter as it did.
But by the time the light image of the nova was seen, the wavefront of neuropsionic particles deadly to unlife was already passing through space.
And the world fleet of the space vampires in their countless myriads fell silent, and all their dark suns.
Episode 14: The Overlord of Unlife
The heart of the galaxy was dark indeed, and burning with hellish fire.
The supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way galaxy was on the order of a billions times the mass of tiny, tiny Sol. Star systems venturing too near the unimaginably titanic gravity well slowed, reddened, shrank, and vanished from the frame of reference of outside observers, and no light nor radio signal escaped to tell their fate.
Human astronomers named this dark galactic core Sagittarius A. Most black holes are miles wide. This boasted a Schwarzschild radius the size of the orbit of Mercury.
Above the event horizon was the accretion disk, a smeared ring of plasma and shattered atoms. Above this was a globular cloud of rogue planets, giant and dwarf, torn from the grip of shattered solar systems unfortunate enough to have wandered too near the unseen galactic heart.
To behold a waterfall of gas giants toppling slowly into th
e red-burning accretion disk, pulled into the shape of eggs, teardrops, spears, as they fell, was a sight of sublime and awe-inspiring destruction. The stars falling were a vision more terrible, blushing red under the Doppler shift. They grew oval and were torn into thin, fantastic rainbows of nova energy.
High above all this hellish burning were ten million stars of the galactic core. Between the two was a gap not unlike the Cassini division in the rings of Saturn, created by shepherd stars.
This division was occupied by a mighty work of engineering. Here was a spherical latticework two lightyears in diameter, surrounding the supermassive black hole like a cage. Hundreds of ringworlds and Tipler rings formed the cage bars, set apart far enough to allow falling solar systems to pass between.
The interstellar tractor beams which arranged a regular diet of such starfalls had long since gone dark. Lower ringworlds within the structure, long abandoned, were tattered and peeling, slowly being dismantled and fed into the accretion disk underfoot. The black core glowed like a red coal.
Had it been unbroken, the great sphere’s surface area would have more than twelve square lightyears. Nonetheless, the ringworlds from pole to pole comprised one city, an astronomical super-megalopolis. Had the galaxy been filled with life, only such an absurdly vast structure would have been able to house overseers sufficient to bring order to so many stars.
No longer. The great sphere now was dark and cold. The empty apertures, gateways, and portholes of the airless buildings stared hungrily in all directions. The empty space elevators rose like weeds. Carriages and payloads hanging in linear accelerators meant to circle the meridians of the great sphere at near lightspeed were motionless.
No ringworld turned. No trace of air and ocean clinging to their inner faces remained. There was nothing to break the bleak monotony of fastnesses and fortresses, torture pits, feasthalls, slaughterhouses, storerooms, shipyards, workrooms, absorption temples, broadcast towers, powerhouses, observatories, archives, arsenals, energy stations.