Lord Deimos said, “We made a warpchannel almost two thousand light years beyond our safe range, by anchoring it to the Peony Star. The quakes in timespace must have been correspondingly immense. One of those thousand battle planets in the distance surely detected us with hyperspatial periscopes.”
Aeneas said, “You are deceived by an image many months old. Look with your own periscope.”
Deimos looked, or, rather, his ring gathered instrument observations from throughout the Armada, and formed a picture in his cortex.
Not long ago, when an unstable warp had struck its center of gravity of Ara A, and changed the fundamental constants erratically, distorting the flow of time and warping the distances between points in space, the resulting starquake had merely thrown immense masses of plasma from the deep layers of that large and stable sun into space.
But the Peony Star was a Wolf-Rayet star, erratic and volatile, poised on the brink of a supernova. In this case, placing the anchor of an unstable warpchannel at its gravitational center had triggered a runaway reaction: a supernova had destroyed the concentric Dysons around the star, all the ringworlds, all the gas giants, and everything made of matter.
The orb of electromagnetic hellfire was expanding outward at the speed of light, followed by a slower, heavier, and no less hellish orb of charged particles, ions, and plasma.
Aeneas said, “As the sphere of ejecta expands, it grows less able to heat up from energy deposited on its interior surface. Take your readings. How long before the star will be cool enough to allow us safely to surround it, and take up the remnant? Is there enough remaining to reach our next destination?”
Deimos consulted through his ring with his instruments and servants. “We will get less fuel from this star than expected, since so much mass was blown out into space. On the other hand, half the work of collapsing it into a black hole is done for us, so it should be enough. But, sire, we need wait no time before embracing the star. My people redesigned and rerouted the shielding of the inner hull and the compacting fields to catch and singularize the hottest star in the galaxy. We can handle even these temperatures here.”
“Very good! Announce to the Armada that we shall make sail for V4641 Sagittarii immediately, telling them we will take the exact same precautions and use the exact same maneuver, of triggering a nova in the target star! Meanwhile, we shall be emerging a few light years away, around the star OGLE-TR-10, well out of harm’s way. We will add that small star to our fuel, and only then making the short jump to consume the V4641 Sagittarii and refuel. Make sure all the Lords of Creation hear the plan. Prepare for, but do not make the jump. In the meanwhile, flatten space, and allow no one at any nearby star to observe us, or to warp here.”
Repairs were made in a short time. Lord Deimos drew all the worlds of the Armada into the protective zone within the inner hull of the Dyson but above and between the cones of force that initiated the collapse mechanism.
The worlds assumed battle stations, and the order to prepare to sail was given.
At the last moment, Aeneas stepped through a pearl and into Lord Deimos’ conning station, calling, “Halt!”
The hideous control arena of the polar fortress city of the vampires had not been changed, except for some tents and temporary energy houses, a medical coffin and an anything-maker, a chair and a coffee pot. Energy beings from Jupiter stood in the acres-wide control cups previously occupied by semi-liquid archvampires more massive than hills. Towers and stacks holding servominds had been erected reaching up to the stalagmites like upside-down skyscrapers that depended from a dome like an iron sky above. A canopy holding an earthlike atmosphere had been erected over those few square miles in the immense chamber where Deimos and his Martian servants dwelled, Monotremes and Thitherfolk.
Before the curule chair where Deimos sat was a large spherical area in which a three-dimensional image of nearby space was displayed. Smaller illusions to either side gave views, glyphs, and readings of the status of the Dyson and its warpcore.
Deimos rose from his chair and bowed.
Aeneas handed him a piece of paper. Lord Deimos stared at it blankly for a moment, and raised his ring to have his servomind read it to him.
Aeneas put his hand between the ring and the paper, blocking the servomind’s view. “I am trying to prevent anyone from knowing this. It is our true warpcore destination. I worked out all the math myself.”
“Without having a servomind double-check? I was not aware that humans could do math. Surely it is dangerous? Humans make mistakes.”
“So do human-built machines, especially the mistake of sharing the information with a traitor. You have emergency controls, do you not? To enter armature spin vectors manually, just in case an enemy again shuts off our neuropsionic links?”
Deimos pointed to the nearest nine Ifrit, the living lightning bolts crouching above and connected to the archvampire hemispheres. “I have Ifrit servants to whom the commands can be given audibly. They have a physical connection to the Tipler acceleration arrays and power houses.”
“Send all others hence, and establish a zone to quell any signals.” And, when this was done, Aeneas read the sailing orders to the Ifrit, who manually enter them into the acceleration arrays. Lord Deimos then reopened his tachyon radio mindlink to the World Armada, and gave the order to form and enter the warpchannel.
The stars seemed to turn red and rush away into a dark sky as the warp was formed. No light from the outside universe could reach them. Entering the warpchannel, the Tellurian Dyson was now in an enclosed, bent space. Light rays leaving any one point of the Dyson circled the miniature universe and then fell onto the eyes and instruments of the opposite point, so that the whole Dyson seemed to be surrounded by a mirror-reversed and inside-out image of itself.
The sphere of the Dyson hung in the center of the miniature universe, surrounded as if by a reversed globe of itself, with the orbiting world between two metal walls. Because the universe was only slightly wider in radius than the Dyson, travelers found the route was shorter to fly directly north from the north pole, and land at the south pole hanging overhead like Polaris.
Some subjective days later, when it came time to exit the warpchannel, the metal walls of the universe expanded outward into nothingness, and then the nothingness closed suddenly in, blue sparks collapsing and colliding together, growing dim, and forming the night sky near the Galactic Core.
Stars were thick here, and a great globe of crowded stars filled half the sky. Dust and nebulae were thick, visible to the naked eye against the blazing carpet of stars as thick as snowflakes in a blizzard.
They had not emerged at OGLE-TR-10 as announced, nor emerged one lightyear away as announced. Directly in the center of the Tellurian Dyson was V4641 Sagittarii. The announcement that the Tellurian warpchannel would destabilize V4641 Sagittarii was also false: This was a binary star system of one bright and one dark star, merrily orbiting each other. Hard x-rays issued from the pair as material pulled out of the surface of the bright star circled twice and thrice in a vast curving spiral of fire before plunging into the dark star, to be eaten by the black hole there. Superluminal jets issued from the north and south pole of the system.
At first it seemed as if the star system were entirely empty. An anchipalaeoscope array showed that an immense fleet of worlds had been stationed here only two decades ago, not the pathetic four gas giants found in the old solar system, but four thousand giant worlds formed out of the thick debris and ejecta of this violent system, or towed here from nearby stars. Perhaps the fleet had been here more recently, but the anchipalaeoscope could not resolve nearer images in time.
But it was not entirely empty. The whole system was surrounded by a Tipler armature, which was now trapped within by the Tellurian Dyson. This armature was about four lightminutes in radius, half the radius of the Tellurian Dyson sphere. The armature began to spin as soon as the Tellurian Dyson emerged, four minutes before light from the Dyson inner hull could have reached any
observer. At the same time, Schroedinger alarms went off, detecting that observers had seen them.
Other detectors noted the presences of hyperspatial periscopes issuing from two points: the first was from the crew of vampires left behind at the V4641 Sagittarii double star armature. The second was a few light years hence, at OGLE-TR-10, the very spot Lord Deimos had announced to the World Armada to be their destination.
Deimos saw through his periscopes the four thousand world Black Fleet orbiting the small yellow variable star OGLE-TR-10, gathered in overwhelming strength.
Lord Deimos reacted by spinning his armatures and flattening space, and at the same time triggering the firing sequence. The compression fields fell inward at the speed of light; all faster than light phenomena were quelled. All periscopes went blind.
But the armature surrounding the double star at V4641 outmassed the nearly exhausted Tellurian Dyson, and so, slowly but inexorably, started to pry spacetime into a curve that would allow warpchannels to form. Channels from OGLE-TR-10, many hundreds of them, like ghosts, began to flicker partly into existence.
Autolycos Lord Anubis, acting without orders, was the first to react. He and Lord Kerberos accelerated their corvette battleworlds, Bald Spot and Garm, at the nearlightspeed velocities planetary-disinertia engines allowed toward the armature inside the collapsing compression fields. Lady Luna followed them in her superterrestrial destroyer world, Chariot-of-Madness, which she had adorned with moons, orbital weapons, and ring systems of glittering crystal and diamond.
Their smaller armatures could not overpower the supergiant armature of the double star system, but they could begin to spin out of phase with it to disintegrate it, and disintegrating their own armatures at the same time, but also instantly repairing them from stored duplicates in nullspace. Lord Anubis, through the mindlink, reported that a nullspace pocket of the size needed to repair an armature circling an entire double star system was not present. The local defenders would not be able to copy the trick the humans had copied from the mad creatures of 9 Sagittarii.
Lord Deimos said to Aeneas, “If the enemy is wise, the crew manning the system armature will sacrifice itself to maintain the curve of space, and allow the reinforcements to come.”
Aeneas said, “They are vampires. They eat their own. Watch.”
Sure enough, the crew at the system armature, thinking only of themselves, changed the armature pitch, and began to flatten space and shut down all nullspace pockets: but this prevented the thousand battleworlds of the Black Fleet from OGLE-TR-10 from forming a successful warpchannel.
Some sixty or seventy worlds of the thousand attempted to make the jump nonetheless. No doubt these slaves were compelled by lordly archvampiric masters left safely behind. The three score gas giants emerged as brilliant spheres of white-hot plasma and radiant neutrons. The burning spheres, their gravity and timespace askew, turned into ovals, and unwound into fiery clouds of asteroids, pebbles, dust, gas, and gamma rays.
Their nullspace pockets cut off and unavailable, the armatures of the smaller worlds disintegrated first: Bald Spot and Garm went dead in space, orbiting between the double star and the collapsing concentric bubble of forces of the Dyson compression field. The larger world of Chariot-of-Madness issued planetary tractor pressure beams, caught the two wounded worlds in mid-flight, and began to tow them to safety. But the crew of vampires at the double star now bent the immense x-ray jet of their black hole toward Chariot-of-Madness. Lady Luna’s defenses deflected nearly all the blow, but the tiny part that escaped was enough to annihilate all the seas, cities, and surface features of the superterrestrial world, including the towers controlling the pitch and motion of the armature rings. The diamond moons were scattered like pearls from a snapped necklace.
However, the Tellurian Dyson had not ceased to spin its armature rings, also pitched to be out of phase. Although the Tellurian mass was less, the damage taken by the double star armature proved too great: the magnificent structure broke into pieces. Huge segments of the armature, countless thousands of miles long, now were falling into ever higher orbits, and the hollow singularity at the core of the double star system was no longer under control.
Lord Deimos formed the small channel needed to pluck the wounded worlds of Chariot-of-Madness, its flying moons, and also Garm and Bald Spot, neatly back into the dock yards set aside for the repair of damaged worlds. By a miracle, the loss of life was minimal. The people and militia of the wounded worlds had been yanked by safety mechanisms through their personal pearls into timeless nullspace just as the deadly blow fell. The enemy had trapped them there when space was flattened, but it had not harmed them. The armatures of Garm and Bald Spot repaired themselves from material in their nullspace pockets as soon as the curvature of space allowed those pockets once more to be reached.
Both stars of V4641 Sagittarii, all the remnants of the broken armature, and the countless millions of surviving vampire crewmen or commanders of the double star were swept into a singularity, obliterated by tidal forces, and dissolved in a burst of x-rays.
And the Tellurian Dyson dwindled to a reddish pinpoint and vanished, leaving behind the planet Pallas, empty and unmanned, its armature spinning merrily, preventing any outside fleet from seeing the events at V4641, or emerging here.
The news of their departure would not be known for some time.
Episode 15 Attack at the Master Armature
Second Earth was being terraformed to erase the damage Lord Mars had done to it. It was a world of rain. From small gaps in the endless cloud cover, rain could be seen falling into the dry sea beds, the dead cities, the crumpled fields of lava, and the ceaseless chains of smoldering volcanoes. On a transparent platform atop these clouds, Aeneas gathered the Lords of Creation once more, seated in a circle of their decorated thrones.
Six thrones were draped in black.
In the middle of the circle of thrones, a spherical illusion displayed the remaining battleworlds of the line like so many Christmas tree balls striped and swirled with stormclouds of white, blue, gold, dun, cerise and gamboge: the superjovian Saint Michael’s World, helmed by Brother Beast; the jovians Niflheim and Inferno, helmed by Lords Neptune and Jupiter; Second Jupiter, helmed by Jupiter’s daughter Lady Io; the subjovian George, helmed by Lord Uranus; the terrestrial Hesperus, helmed by Lady Venus.
The son of Mars, Lord Deimos, commanded the Tellurian Dyson. In the image, this was a carnival balloon among soap bubbles. The steel-hued sphere was pierced, patched, scalded, battered, and mended, and still was able to sail and fight.
Lord Uranus spoke first. “Sire, Lady Luna and I have cleansed the captured miniature Dysons of KW Sagittarii. No trace of any cellular life existing in the shadow condition remains. Once the militia quells the various robots, automatons, and booby-traps, these warpcores and weaponries will be available to the fleet.”
Lord Mercury, squinting, said, “How did you manage to wipe out a quadrillion space vampires occupying over twelve square lightminutes of surface area?”
Lord Uranus tuned his flesh mask to an impassive setting. “Trade secret.”
Three coppery spheres, belted by warp armatures along their meridians and equators, joined the image, one sixth the size of the steely Dyson.
Aeneas said, “We hereby commission the Lords Anubis and Kerberos, as well as the Lady Pallas, to assume command of these dreadnoughts. Let them be readied and christened before we emerge from warpspace. Let Lady Luna assist Lord Uranus on the cruiser battleworld George.”
Lord Mercury said, “Sire, where can we find the personnel to crew such immense vessels? Automatons lack flexibility and initiative. Consider, please, the wisdom of reviving some of the countless dead we have gathered during these battles. In the shadow-condition called undeath, the skills and memories remain intact. Naturally, we wish not to dishonor the bodies of the dead, but their patriotism would urge them, if they were still alive, to volunteer their remains for this useful task. Surely they have the right to avenge
their own deaths? Order the graves dug up!”
The eyes of Aeneas narrowed, and his face grew hard as flint, but he said nothing.
Lord Mercury spoke more urgently, “Consider the wisdom of it, sire! No one possessed of eternal youth should be risked on the battlefield! Is not life precious? Let the dead protect the living!”
Aeneas said, “The militia can reduplicate themselves to fill our numbers. Lord Mars, what are the limits on your technique?”
Lord Mars said, “Sire, physically, our limit is merely a matter of living energy. The vampires cannot reduplicate themselves as our militia does because their life energy is external. They are limited by their carrying capacity. Psychologically, our limits are that the newly made men, after a time, they become their own individuals, and refuse to reintegrate. This leads to endless legal difficulties, not to mention bigamy.”
Aeneas said, “Even in these desperate straits, I call only for volunteers. Let them reduplicate with their families, and set up separate lives in their new stations. We will soon have room enough for each man to have worlds of his own.”
Lord Mercury said, “And if too few volunteer?”
“If sufficient true men cannot be found among us to volunteer to defend their beloved homes, it is better we all die!” Aeneas stood. “This is not the last war, but it will prove to be the last battle of this war. For now we escape the galaxy altogether, or perish here as one, with none to mourn us, and no future archeologists to dig up our monuments. Our lives, lore, religion, laws, and all the accomplishments of man, all our crimes and all our glories, come to nothing if we fail now.
“My Lords and Ladies of Creation! With the loss of one hundred thirty subspecies of man, nearly half of the human races, we have suffered a woe that will never be healed. The beast-headed Georgians of Uranus are no more. The long-tressed Nichnytsia are extinct. The spirit of mankind will bear this scar forever.