Superluminary_The World Armada Page 6

  Lady Venus imprinted the knowledge taken from an otherwise empty third brain of Aeneas into them. Aeneas did not know just how Lord Tellus had folded and compacted the information layers and neuron connections beforehand. He had only the finished product in his own mind, which Lady Venus had to extrapolate backward. There was some guesswork involved, hence some error.

  When the imprint was made, it did not come smoothly into their brains as it had with Aeneas. Some of the Lords of Creation reeled in their chairs, or drooled, or twitched, or convulsed. Others stood, amazement in their eyes, open mouthed, stunned by the wonders of the secret laws of nature now unfolding in their memory.

  There was no time for terraforming nor pantropy. All dispatched to the captured worlds were garbed in the living robes manufactured by the Graces of Pallas. These were shining garments made partly of matter and partly of force-field, who outer fabric adjusted temperature, pressure, and gravity to the wearer, and whose inner side intermingled with flesh and bone and nerve-cell to adapt the wearer seamlessly to the environs.

  Deimos, along with the four-armed Quadramanes of Mars, copper-skinned Monotremes, blood-drinking Ghouls, fair Hitherfolk and brutal Thitherfolk, took the helm of the Dyson. Aeneas took the Dyson as his flagship, and he and Lord Mars accompanied Deimos.

  Brother Beast took command and possession of the superjovian. The single monster that once dwelled here was done. Nothing stirred. There was no opposition.

  He insisted on christening the planet, and called it Saint Michael’s World.

  Lord Jupiter with fifty of his daughters, along with the gigantic and cyclopean races that served him, descended on the warmer jovian, the Fire-Giant. Here were machines left by the vampires, some intelligent and still active. The fight with these machines was ferocious but brief, as Jupiter slowed the speed of light to allow ionized electrons to flow, but not lasers or energy weapons. The daughters of Jupiter in their shining blue robes riding their cloud-chariots called down lightning of modest size to destroy man-sized targets, and larger bolts to incinerate walking tanks, leviathanic swimming machines, or dark, domed cities that crawled on many legs like monstrous crabs.

  He called the planet Inferno.

  Lord Neptune, nine natural daughters, and Galatea, his artificial daughter, transited to the colder of the two jovian worlds, the ice giant, along with countless servant-minds and living automata. The method used by the Daughters of Neptune was less precise than that used by the Daughters of Jupiter. Cities and fortresses hidden in the glacier canyons, or wherever else still active robots offered resistance, were flattened under hundredfold weight of multiplied gravity, or shattered with earthquakes and swallowed into crevasses. Few of the needed machines were captured intact.

  He dubbed the planet Niflheim.

  The third jovian, this one from the water ring of Canopus, therefore called a water giant, was given to Lady Pallas. She merely dropped her asteroid from which she took her name whole into the superdense, ultracold methane atmosphere. The whole interior of the asteroid had been hollowed out and replaced with a crystal rod-logic brain, designed to operate on the levels-of-logic principles known only to her.

  The giant brain, capable of up to ten thousand simultaneous tasks, created an army of telemechanical remote manipulators to cover the immense globe, locate, study, and coordinate control of the alien weaponry and machinery. There was no fighting with native machines; Lady Pallas merely suborned them with her levels-of-logic techniques. Her technique was as effective as Lady Luna’s rule over the dreaming frequency of the thought spectrum, but was aimed at a higher energy state in the conceptual layer of the universe.

  When the robots found their basic abstract concepts revealed to them by this sudden perception of the formal layer of the universe, their own logic forced them to cooperate with the usurpers. This method would not have worked on any beings, living or undead, capable of deliberate immoral action. Nor could it work on animals, in whose simpler minds abstractions had no place.

  She called the planet Pallas, saying that it was, in effect, the same place as her old worldlet, merely extended.

  The subjovian was given to Lord Uranus and his Georgian-Sidereals, commonly called Pooks. These Georgians were races uplifted from a plethora of earthly birds and beasts, a grave and solemn race of men with the same stiff dignity as the ancient Egyptian statues they resembled. These carefully located the robots by spy ray, and offered then override codes gleamed from the memory of Urvasthrang. Lord Uranus accomplished by deception what Lady Pallas had accomplished by truth.

  He called it George.

  Lady Luna and her fierce nymphs helmed the superterrestrial, a body three times the size of Earth, a world of flattened mountains and shallow, turgid oceans. Her maidens rode naked on the backs of giant moon-hounds to hunt down the fleeing insectoid robots with lance and dart, and made a sport of what should have been a military operation.

  She christened her world Chariot-of-Madness.

  The Lords Triton, Prospero and Ganymede were given command of Second Neptune, Second Uranus and Second Jupiter.

  The megascale pearl carrying the last remaining charge of Sol’s light was placed inside Second Saturn. This globe lacked a warpcore, but the pearl could remove inertia and move the world and its rings and moons at just below lightspeed. Lady Eunomia, daughter of Lord Saturn, was given command.

  The captured terrestrial and subterrestrial warpcore worlds were distributed to the grim sons of Lord Pluto, Kerberos and Hydra, to the maniacal but brilliant Lord Dionysus; and to the grinning and wolfish Autolycos Lord Anubis, son of Mercury.

  The sons of Pluto walked unseen among the mazes and cityscapes of the warren-riddled labyrinth worlds they were given, and with invisible fingers and tools, disarmed or deactivated all enemy automatons they found.

  They called their worlds Garm and Ouroboros.

  Lord Dionysus landed alone on a small, fiery world, accompanied only by a host of panthers, dolphins and wolves, who spread seeds and spores where they went. He played his flute as he danced, and grape vines grew up instantly from the revivified soil to strangle any struggling enemy machines.

  He dubbed the globe King-of-the-Wood.

  Lady Venus encountered no opposition. She called her planet Hesperus.

  Anubis found a world utterly flat and featureless save for strange and ungainly seven-sided towers rising from prairies of black salt. Some robots were still active, bounding like nightmarish grasshoppers in the low gravity. He waited for an enemy to open fire, and then skipped from bullet to bullets up their stream of fire to step atop these robotic weapons, which he folded into nullspace.

  He called the little world Bald Spot.

  In reckless haste, the captured worlds were prepared. But tachyonic rays carrying a neuropsionic message echoed from their signet rings into the mind of the Lords of Creation before all was ready.

  Dozens of white-hot pinpoints of light surrounded the wide Canopus system, and expanded into a hundred battleworlds, their cities and surface fortifications blazing, mountainpeak batteries and space elevators already firing as they materialized, lancing out with laser bolt and lightning ray, gravityfields and timewarps and thought-destruction waves. The huge globes were shining like coals from hell beneath their concentric atmospheres of defensive screen and forcefield.

  The enemy was here, and in overwhelming force.

  Episode 08 Escape to Sagittarius

  The space vampire fleet invading Canopus was taken by surprise.

  Of the hundred enemy battleworlds that entered the sublight continuum in a hollow sphere formation centered on the Canopus system, only a score were superjovians. These were worlds twice to thrice the size of Jupiter, with miles of thin atmosphere held down by immense gravity above endless seas of liquid nitrogen and methane. Ninety-mile tall ziggurats and towers of adamantine, built of artificially strengthened molecules, loomed above the turgid, heavy atmospheres.

  Up from the dead seabed, glacierscapes and mountains
of the vampire worlds, interplanetary-strength high-energy beam weapons flew like lances of fire, like rivers of flame. The dark worlds sent forth their various agencies of death: electromagnetics of many wavelengths, coherent rays of neutrons or gravitons, timewarp fields or neuropsionic blasts of planet-destroying intensity.

  They spun their equatorial armatures up to nearlightspeed as soon as they emerged into the subluminary continuum, and attempted to flatten space, but, for once, the advantage was with the Tellurians.

  It was true that the newly commissioned world-fleet of was unready, but it was also true that the Tellurian Dyson, under command of Lord Deimos, son of Mars, and the newly made gas giants under command of Lords Ganymede, Prospero and Triton were ready. Their armatures and equipment were manned and battle-tested. These four were enough.

  The Dyson crushed Canopus into a pinpoint size just as the black fleet materialized in a globe around them. Five solar masses collapsed into the singularity and formed a black hole. The unstable accretion disk formed from the outer layers of murdered Canopus expanded outward and filled the Dyson interior. Thrice the mass of Sol was totally converted to energy, and issued from the firing aperture in a coherent beam.

  Ganymede, Prospero, and Triton had their three gas giants hovering in a Klemperer triangle off the bow of the Dyson firing aperture. Lord Prospero was able to detect the beam approaching before the first lightwaves it shed arrived, and to select the locations of the enemy targets.

  The incoming fire of the Black Fleet, moving at lightspeed, was still eleven hours away. They had emerged from their warpchannels roughly twice as far from Canopus as the planet Pluto once had orbited around Sol. As the enemy planets materialized, images of them taken through hyperspatial periscopes went blind when space was flattened, but not before Lord Prospero, using his father’s spy ray mechanisms, detected the dark neuropsionic residue the undead planets gave off, noting their declination and right ascension.

  The Lords Ganymede and Triton, using the massive electrokinesis and gravitokinesis engines of Jupiter and Neptune, deflected the nova-beam roaring from the firing aperture and directed it first at one altitude and azimuth, then at another, then another. Then they deflected the beam into a vast semicircle to strike targets in the hemisphere opposite the firing aperture.

  Unlike ground combat with its complexities of terrain and season and weather, and unlike sea combat with its winds and tides, superluminary combat was a matter of simple and terrible mathematics: the Tellurian Dyson, armed with the eight solar masses of Canopus, had more mass, hence more ability to bend space, than the enemy superjovians, even had there been a thousand of them.

  The vampires evidently had stripped all the stars within two hundred fifty light years of every planet with a working warpcore, to send it to Canopus as quickly as possible. Larger warworlds and warstars could have come from further away, but these no doubt were scouring the regions in the direction of Coma Berenices, where vampires had been deceived to concentrate their search.

  So the mighty Tellurian Dyson shrugged aside the Lilliputian efforts of the twenty enemy superjovians to flatten space, and formed a warp. Lord Deimos could have pulled the Dyson out of timespace at that moment, but instead, smiling, he waited.

  The commanders of the vampire worlds could have broken off their attempts to flatten space, and used their warpcores to lower the speed of light and render themselves immune to lightspeed weapons they surely knew must be coming. They did not. Stubbornly, foolishly, mulishly, mechanically, the commanders of the vampire worlds continued the vain attempt to restrain the escaping Dyson.

  Perhaps some of them erected planetwide antiphotonic screens, or rendered their globes disinert, to fend off the coming beam weapon. But then, at the tenth hour, the Dyson altered the gravitational constant and the neutrino rest mass so as to restore their inertia just as the beam struck. The planetary bodies were pinned in place.

  Thus, instead of being lightly wafted away from the destruction as the nova beam, like a searchlight, skipped from world to world, the vast globes were incinerated, bisected and shattered. Mountains were thrown into the gaping void where the beams passed through the world, oceans, atmospheres, and molten crust and mantle. Atmosphere, hydrosphere, surface features were boiled in less than a second, continents evaporated, and their superheated steam propelled into space.

  And those were the worlds were the beam struck glancingly.

  Where it struck head-on, all matter was converted to energy, and the fundamental particles at the center of the explosion were converted into more fundamental particles existing in ultrahighenergy states which had only occurred naturally in the first three seconds after the Big Bang.

  Perhaps there were moons and ships orbiting these worlds. If so, they were overwhelmed by the shockwave.

  The vampire commanders vainly but fanatically, their batteries of engines straining and overheating, continued to attempt to flatten space up until the very end, trying to snare the Dyson. Because of this, no neighboring worlds outran the attacking beam. No faster than light message escaped. Whatever supreme commanders sent those hundred worlds to their annihilation surely received no rumor of their fate.

  Meanwhile, the various exotic energies the vampire worlds had shot passed through the space the Dyson once had occupied. The humans had vanished.

  The Tellurian Dyson reentered the sublight spacetime metric six thousand seven hundred light years away.

  This was the 9 Sagittarii system: two massive O-type stars, each ten times the radius of Sol, and hundreds of thousands of times the luminosity, circled at each other in an eccentric orbit between eleven and twenty-seven times the distance that one separated Earth from the Sun. The Tellurian Dyson, carrying the World Armada around it, emerged into the continuum in the gravitational center of the system.

  In this form of interstellar combat, the intruder always had one advantage: when he landed in a target star system (provided he did not land on a spot where a hyperspatial periscope aperture rested) the lightwaves that had left the inner and outer planets minutes or hours before would strike his eyes and telescopes as soon as he emerged into real space. He could see their position and numbers. However, no image of the intruder could reach any eyes and telescopes on those planets until those minutes and hours passed. So the intruder always had minutes or hours before the earliest alarm could be raised during which he could study the last seen position of the enemy defenses.

  It was this advantage that saved the humans.

  Lord Deimos, wrapped in his shining environmental robes, stood in the middle of the main fortress city of the Dyson, surrounded by miles of empty and gigantic bowls which once served the mountain-sized vampire lords as thrones.

  Every square inch of the inner surface of these ten-acre-wide hemispheres was coated with control points into which the vampires had grown their nerve endings. No native Martian race could have operated such controls. The Ifrits created by Lord Jupiter were a numerous race and many had sworn fealty to Lord Mars, and to his sons, and submitted themselves to the harsh disciplines of the Red Planet. The Ifrit were energy beings, woven of self-sustaining force fields. Each stood atop its hemispherical throne like a column of living fire with long angular limbs of lightning bolts plugged into each of the ten thousand nerve points.

  Layers of servominds looming like the eggs of giant birds from myth were gathered in a semicircle around where Lord Deimos sat crosslegged on a carpet woven of thought-focusing fibers. His face and hands were red as blood. The environmental robes glittered and moved like rippling quicksilver.

  At his right hand was a carafe of wine. At his right was a prayer book. His ceremonial sword was lying on the carpet before him. It was well known that Deimos, in his youth, had been an apprentice of Lord Pluto. Something of the spartan simplicity of Pluto was present.

  The ring on the finger of Lord Deimos was tied in parallel to similar but larger rings encircling his wrist. All were blazing white.

  Aeneas was seated to
one side of him on his black, three headed throne. He sat when it was necessary to project an image of himself to give orders to underlings. Otherwise, he stood, or paced, or let his internal organs move themselves beneath his skin first to one position, then to another, nervously, as if trying to find a comfortable way to pack them into his skeleton and frame.

  To the other side, Lord Mars sat on a similar carpet, surrounded by a ring of contortion pearls, so that he might be transmitted to the several other planets in the World Armada. He was polishing and cleaning his longsword with slow, methodical motions of rag and whetstone.

  The other Lords of Creation, helming their various worlds, were communicating instantly through their signet rings, and most of them broadcast their face and form, so that expression and gesture could be seen. Ghostly images of them, each in his own control chamber or astronomical tower, appeared in each other’s visual cortex.

  Also present was the initial image of the star system. Circling the gigantic star 9 Sagittarii A was a ringworld of silvery material, some form of alloy, half matter, and half solidified energy. This was no humble ringworld with a merely earth-orbit radius. The radius of Saturn’s old orbit would have fit inside the megascale structure with room to spare.

  Orbiting outside the ring were rotating cylinders, large as gas giants, made of unknown and impossible material, white as platinum. Any object of any shape of that mass should have been pulled into a sphere long ago. A band of atmosphere was gathered at the equator of each small cylinder. The ringworld was spinning, as were the cylinders, giving the whole star system the aspect of a cosmic clockwork.

  Circling the other star, 9 Sagittarii B, was a smaller ringworld, only the diameter of Jupiter’s old orbit, rotating in the opposite direction.

  Scattered seemingly at random through the system, no two of them sharing the same orbital ecliptic, were four hundred small worlds, all exactly the same size. The Doppler shift readings showed the worlds were accelerating and decelerating in no pattern. This was a star system where the planets did not orbit their suns, but swam like ships wherever they would.