“We who live, in their memory, and in their name, rededicate ourselves to the survival of our species, the revenge and retaliation of our wounds, and the utter annihilation of these undead abominations. Whether this task takes long eons to do is immaterial. Against such insanity of malice, no peace, no coexistence, no mutual armed truce is possible or desirable.
“At LBV 1806-20 we meet our fate. We go to the Luminous Blue Variable which is the greatest star in the Milky Way, to seize control of the Master Armature there. Let every warrior make ready. Let every civilian pray. Let none be idle now, in this final hour, ere we charge the open gates of hell.”
Aeneas now removed a ring from his finger. It was a lesser ring, not his signet, but which contained a major servomind linked to various levels of the military hierarchy. He ceremoniously proffered the ring to Lord Jupiter. “My Lord, you asked for this terrible burden. I put the sword of war into your hand. You are now the commander in chief of all the militia and naval forces of the Empire of Man. Do you swear faithfully to execute these duties, to defend the crown, the church, the concord and the commons against all enemies, nor to allow the colors of the Imperium to be dishonored?”
“I swear,” said Lord Jupiter majestically.
The dreadnaught miniature Dyson Spheres were coppery colored macroscales only one lightminute in radius. In frantic haste, robotic tools, automatons and huge populations of engineers and officers prepared them for battle. Anubis christened his larger-than-worlds dreadnaught Jackal. Kerberos called his Hound. Lady Pallas called hers Owl.
Amyclas Lord Pan, son of Jupiter, who had been discovered living in secret on a farm, after at first refusing, was given command of the gas giant Inferno and imprinted with the secrets of the warpcore science.
Lord Jupiter, as a commodore, joined Lord Deimos in the fortress city at the pole of the Tellurian Dyson. Jupiter asked Aeneas and the other Lords of Creation to join him there, since warp interference might halt tachyonic, neuropsionic, neutrino or radio communication during the battle.
The circle of thrones was moved to the vast, metal chambers of the alien command arena, beneath a canopy of air. Those Lord of Creation posted to commands in the World Armada left remotely controlled images of themselves in their empty thrones to speak and answer for them. Lords Mars and Mercury were physically present, the Ladies Ceres and Vesta, and perhaps Lord Pluto.
LBV 1806-20 was a star vast in all ways, mightier even than Ara A. It was one hundred thirty times as massive as Sol, and two million time brighter. It was the product of some ancient engineering efforts of the Forerunners, for surely no natural star could be this titanic without collapsing under its own mass.
The World Armada emerged into sublight timespace eighty lightminutes from the gravitational center of center of the star, but the surface of the star was seventy-three. Circling the star were three monstrous ringworlds, each at right angles to the other. Their radius was the same as the planet Saturn once held around Sol, but the inner bands of the silvery-white ring armature were a mere sixty million miles above the chromosphere.
Schroedinger detectors sensed outside observers had seen them. Lady Luna confirmed that the gaze was hostile, hungry, insane with malice.
Lord Jupiter said to Deimos, “Flatten space.”
“How flat, sir?” Because, of course, it was possible to halt macroscopic spacewarp effects, such as forming warpchannels, while allowing contortion effects to continue, or other stratonic effects.
“Prevent any warps from forming. Halt all space contortion, but allow disinertia.”
“Aye, aye. Anything else?” They both knew that as long as electromagnetic or gravitic energy was allowed to propagate through space, even if it crawled along at lightspeed, beam weapons from LBV 1806-20 could annihilate the World Armada. Such beams would take a minute or two to reach the distance from the giant star’s surface, but without their tachyonic periscopes working, the humans could not see any beam attack coming.
“Nothing else,” said Lord Jupiter.
“Sir, mass estimates show that the Master Armature can overpower anything our Dyson can do. Easily.”
“Thank you, Lord Deimos. Carry on,” said Lord Jupiter.
Jupiter glanced sidelong at Aeneas, but the young emperor issued no orders and gave no advice. His face was impassive.
Lord Jupiter called to Lord Uranus. “Report!”
Lord Uranus said, “Our hyperspatial periscopes were in operation for 0.1 second, and gravitic images are still coming in. The enemy has a fleet in nullspace roughly ten times the mass of ours. Call that Black Fleet Alpha. It will be summoned into normal space wherever the enemy wishes if we allow the enemy to form a warpchannel.
“There is a second fleet, four hundred times the mass, of black suns and dark jovians within the Blue Star system englobing the star at one hundred twenty AU, or twenty-four light-hour radius. Call this Black Fleet Baker. Each ship is projecting a segment of a forcefield surface surrounding the entire star system. They have detected our warpchannel emergence, and are sailing hence at lightspeed under disinertia drive, shrinking the radius of the force bubble as they come. At current rate of speed, this second fleet should arrive in a day.
“At the moment, no warpchannels can emerge anywhere within a spherical volume sixty light years in radius. Fifty one stars just beyond that range, between sixty and one hundred light years, have opened fire, and are directing their total energy output toward us via hyperspatial periscope. However, this fire cannot emerge into normal space within the flattened radius, so they have place their emergence apertures beyond that. It will take sixty years to reach us. Therefore the obvious maneuver on part of the enemy….”
In the illusion hanging above the curule chair of Deimos, all could see the Master Armature, immense, unimaginably great in power, was beginning to spin.
“…is to flatten space, cut off our spy-rays and weapons, and pin us here.”
Lord Jupiter looked at the tactical display. The four Dysons of the Tellurian World Armada were arranged in a tetrahedron. In the vanguard were the smaller planets, Hesperus and George. Midmost were three jovian gas giants in a Klemperer triangle protecting the towed terrestrials and moons. The fourth superterrestrial, Saint Michael’s World, hung in the rearguard as a reserve. The vanguard of the Armada was thirty five million miles from the surface of the hypergiant blue star. The rear was one hundred million.
Jupiter said to Venus, “Report.”
She said, “The thought information in the imperative occupies a different part of the psychic spectrum from the declarative, interrogative or exclamatory. The source of all the local commands is there, the complex of cities dotting the surface of that cubical object where those two armatures intersect.”
She pointed to a rectilinear macroscale object only slightly larger than a planet, half-hidden in the flames near the scalding surface of the hellish sun, which formed the joint where two bands of the vast armature crossed.
Lady Luna said, “The murmur of their nightmares is muted. Like someone waiting in an ambush, holding his breath. These are the thoughts that were passing through the area when we arrived, before they saw us. It is a trap.”
Lord Jupiter said, “Can they tell what we are planning?”
Lady Luna said, “That is not the type of information I can glean from these wavelengths of mental activity.”
Lady Venus said, “They are carrying out a prearranged plan. They were not surprised to see us appear at this time, in this area.”
Jupiter scowled. “There is no help for it: our current plan is still our best. Lord Deimos, order the fleet to engage planetary disinertia engines, and proceed at nearlightspeed to the command cities. George and Hesperus grapple the cubical object! Militia to boarding stations!”
Through his ring, Jupiter summoned into view visions of the worlds of Hesperus and George unlimbering and erecting their many space elevators, cables of ultra-tensile nanodiamond fiber. At the base of each cable, countless militiamen
in their shining environ robes thrown over their paragravitic neutronium armor stood with impossibly deadly weapons ready.
Lord Jupiter gave the signal for the attack.
Episode 16 The Battle of the Blue Hypergiant
Lord Jupiter, Aeneas, the Lords Mars and Mercury, the Ladies Ceres and Vesta, and Lord Pluto in his blank one-lensed helm and dark mantle were present in the command arena of the Tellurian Dyson, along with Lord Deimos. Scarlet-skinned Monotremes, four-armed Quadramanes, and lordly Thitherfolk were manning the watch stations to work human-shaped controls, and the energy-beings called Ifrit, living lightning bolts from Jupiter, stood in the acre-wide bowls which once had been the thrones of the amoeboid archvampires, to work the myriad and tiny nerve-jack controls dotting the inner surfaces.
Lady Venus uttered a warning, “Evil thoughts have overwhelmed several of our smaller moons, driving all the populations mad. Medical robots have taken control there. The thought screens on the larger planets are buckling.”
Jupiter said to Deimos, “Increase the spin rate to insulate the mental layer of the universe. This should prevent neuropsionic propagation. Announce it fleetwide and have all signet rings switched over to direct neural interface.”
Without inertia, the whole fleet moved with the speed of a ray of light toward the city group which was their target. Two minutes passed. Two and a half. Three. More.
The distance to LBV 1806-20 diminished. Planetary shields labored to deflect the incalculable heat. The moon Second Phobos suffered shield failure and was burned to a cinder. The other moons and smaller worlds were gathered into the shadow cones of the gas giants.
The target cities of the foe grew close. They were visible to the naked eye, clusters of egg-shape habitats, each larger than a moon, like bunches of fungi clinging to the all six side of the immense armature joint.
The joint was a cube larger than a world, holding a synchronous orbit, hence motionless relative to the slowly-turning equator stream of the hypergiant star. The two armatures, each at right angles to the next, one above the other, were moving at nearlightspeed through tunnels piecing the cube at right angles. The armatures, like metal rainbows, were red in the direction of one horizon of the sun and blue in the other, and the mass created by their relativistic speed was causing sunspots. Coronal loops of disturbed star matter made lovely, fiery arches of immense diameter above and around the moving armatures.
The planet Hesperus was already reaching for the joint with many space elevators. The diamond cables elongated and flexed, so the attacking planet looked like a malproportioned squid. The outer atmosphere of the planet was already rocking towers and edifices with friction of the collision, and the outer forcesheilds were flattening flimsy structures as if by an impalpable wind.
Swarms of militiamen in free fall now were crossing the gap on the wings of their personal gravity fields, while endless hosts waited along the space elevator cables for the far each of his cable to snag a projection. Their cloaks were blazing like stars, laboring to repel the deadly heat of the hypergiant star whose surface was so close below.
Ten million windows and portals opened in the endless surface of the alien structure. Like termites from a disturbed nest, countless humanoid shapes boiled forth, indifferent to hellish temperature or hard vacuum.
The Lords of Creation heard Lord Neptune on the planet Niflheim mutter. “This is insane. Any one of those ringworlds could contain several orders of magnitudes more vampires than we have militia. We cannot beat them in hand-to-hand combat!” Of course, he had spoken this before the World Armada had begun its maneuver, and the words were reaching the ears of his brothers and sisters now.
Lord Mercury answered the moment he heard the word, so that, a few minutes later the words reached Neptune: “Have faith, blue brother! We still have a trick up our sleeve!”
Lord Jupiter stared at the image hanging above, showing the progress of the militia crossing from the planet George, flying like shining hailstones or streaming like jeweled ants across space elevator cables, into the Armature joint area. It was disturbing to contemplate that all this had happened minutes ago, and only now was the light image reaching him.
At that moment, the Master Armature encircling LBV1806-20 increased its spin. All the stars in the skies around them winked out, and the immense glare from the blue hypergiant went dark. Not just space was utterly black, but the chamber they were in. Through his ring, Lord Jupiter could reach no open radio channels, no radar, no microwave communication. Nothing.
“We’re blind!” gasped Lord Jupiter.
He heard a motion next to him, a footstep, and felt a hand on his shoulder. Because of its strength and the strange texture of the armor skin, he knew it was Aeneas. The young emperor merely squeezed his shoulder silently, as if to reassure him that all was not lost, and as if to remind him the command was still his.
The image above the curule chair stitched over automatically to the white, the gray and dark gray monochromatic shadows of graviton sensors.
Aeneas was standing next to Lord Jupiter, visible to him, now, as a black-and-gray gravity image. Jupiter wondered at the cold, watchful look in his eye. Aeneas was paying no attention the battle. Instead, he was watching his relatives on their thrones warily.
Deimos said tensely, “The enemy has flexed space to halt electromagnetic propagation. Switching from photonic to neutronic radio. And now they are flexing the space further! Sir, we simply do not have the mass to counteract this.”
“Do they have enough flex to open long-range warpchannels?”
“No. But with a shortrange convexity, it is enough to contort mass out of nullspace… The Black Fleet is here!”
The smaller of the two enemy fleets had been stored in nullspace. That fleet now materialized in a globe around them: ten black suns, thirty superjovians, and scores of smaller world, moons, and armored asteroids. The human fleet was outnumbered and outmassed, and the primary nova-beam from the Tellurian Dyson was useless, since space was not carrying any lightwaves at the moment.
Enemy planets now swarmed the human worlds and spheres, flashing up to them instantly, moving with no inertia, suddenly coming to a gentle halt when outermost worldwide kinetic defense shield touched outermost shield.
Like the militia swarming from George and Hesperus onto the cities of the Armature cube, vampires in human shape now swarmed up and down ratlines leading from one world to another, and icebergs, lake and oceans of liquid amoeboid forms poured themselves after as vast interplanetary rivers. The human worlds were hemmed in on each side, surrounded and enclosed, so that awed and terrified civilians standing on the surface, if they had graviton-sensitive eyes equipped to see the view, would have beheld dozens of vast orbs from horizon to horizon, filling the dome of the sky overhead.
The three smaller Dysons in the human fleet, Wolf and Hound and Owl, now threw out countless clouds of black pearls. They were moving at disinertial speed, which was the same speed as the gravity waves being used to sense them, and so the enemy did not see the first rank of them until they fell among the enemy worlds. These pearls contorted fragments of superdense singularity substance out of nullspace, and these microscopic black holes issued tidal forces that began to tear up anything made of matter.
The militia on every world raised their pistols and fired gravity beams to crush and rip asunder anything caught in the path. These energies were gravitic, not electromagnetic, and hence could still operate.
The coppery Dyson spheres began pulling black suns into their firing apertures. The kinetic and gravitic fields which formed the interior firing mechanism still worked, even if the beam could not propagate. The Dysons began chewing up the black suns. In a moment, there were only seven of them.
Lord Deimos said, “Sir, the Master Armature is overpowering us. Soon, light will flow again, and then neuropsionic waves. When that happens, the black suns will overwhelm our thought shields, and mindwipe us.”
Lord Jupiter said, “Make it look good. S
truggle, but not hard enough to damage our Dyson armature. Order all armatures to out of phase spin.”
Light returned, and neuropsionic radiation.
Alarms showing the immanent failure of the planetary thought screens now rang. The beam weapons of the enemy returned as well, and these began lancing out in all directions from all parts of the enemy worlds, sweeping away vast volumes of the deadly black pearls. The nova beam of the Tellurian Dyson struck two of the black suns, which were instantly obliterated.
Space elevators rose from the surface of the Armature cube and reached to the two attacking worlds of George and Hesperus. An ocean of vampire liquid, so great as to make the archvampire coating Pluto to seem less than a raindrop in the sea, an extent greater in volume than a gas giant, now rose like living towers out from the shattered domes of the command cities peering from the Armature joint. Space elevators reached out like so many numberless blades of grass and snared the superterrestrial and the subjovian. The undead liquid crawled up the lines of the space elevators. The militia, outnumbered by hundreds to one, rushed in to engage them, duplicating themselves as they came.
The master armature surrounding the supergiant sun was beginning to grow discolored as the armatures of the miniature Dysons Hound and Owl were rotating in destructive interference to it. The vampire lords manning the Master Armature of LBV-1806-20 no doubt laughed at this futile gesture. Theirs was the most powerful armature imaginable, circling the largest star! They knew this trick: but a smaller armature could not dissolve a larger via neutron storm unless it had a store of neutrons standing by in nullspace.
Aeneas said, “Where is Jackal?” He jerked his hand upward as if stung, and stared at this signet ring.
The vampires of LBV 1806-20 made a slight adjustment of their spin vector. The Master Armature warped space further. All materials in nullspace were forced into normal space.