Serial Sunday: Superluminary: The Lords Of Creation By John C. Wright Episode 1

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John C. Wright is one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of our time, with writing abilities that are of the level of a Grand Master. His Superluminary was designed as a serial, and, with his permission, we will reprinting it here on Sundays as a new feature. Enjoy great science fiction!

Episode 01: Assassin in Everest

Aeneas Tell of House of Tell, the youngest of the Lords of Creation, was twenty-one when he was assassinated for the first time.

His secondary brain came awake while his primary brain was still foggy with strange dreams. Alert to danger, the secondary brain stopped the nerve pulses from the primary brain which otherwise would have let him groan and open his eyes, which would have precipitated the nervous killer’s attack.

But his primary brain had been in the delta brainwave stage of sleep, a deep and dreamless slumber. There was no sound, no light, no disturbance. What had broken his sleep? A memory, like an echo, of terrible multiple toothaches left a metallic taste in his mouth.

He had been dreaming about his insane grandfather, the Emperor. The old man had been telling him about the secrets of the universe… then a stinging pain in his teeth had jarred him awake. But how could Aeneas remember a dream when he had not been in the desynchronous brainwave state in which dreaming was possible?

Aeneas, eyes still closed, not daring to move, increased the firing rate of his auditory nerves. He was laying on the nongravity cushion of his opulent four-poster bed. The neverending whisper of the high-altitude winds of Mount Everest beyond the bubble of weather-controlled air was now loud to him.

On these upper peaks his family had erected the proud imperial palace-city of Ultrapolis, whose towers and domes were impregnable behind concentric force-shells and thought-screens. None of the artificial or bio-modified races of the nine worlds, fifty worldlets, and one hundred eighty moons of the Solar System could bring any realistic threat to bear on these defenses, not while the twelve ranking members of the House of Tell, the so-called Lords of Creation, retained control of the stratonic supertechnology known only to them.

But betrayal from within was another matter.

The quiet hiss of the protective screen that the bedposts projected around the bed was gone. He could not hear the heartbeats of his two bodyguards posted in the anteroom of his apartments. Instead he heard the heartbeat, louder and faster than was possible for an unmodified human being, of the assassin.

As the youngest member of the Family, Aeneas had been stuffed into the oldest wing of the oldest palace, and no other guards were within shouting distance.

There was no sound of footsteps on the nightingale wood floor of his bedchamber, and so for a moment Aeneas had a false sense of hope. But the sound of the racing heart was close at hand.

The killer was in the chamber with him.

Then he felt a waft of intense cold radiating from the cells of the man’s body. The assassin was near the bed, coming closer, bending over him.

Aeneas reflexively focused a thought to his signet ring, asking alarms silently to ring and the armaments hidden in the walls to slay the intruder. But there was no response. The electrotelepathic circuit was blocked.

The nanoscopic thought-broadcast cells his mother had implanted in the bones of his skull likewise were blocked when he tried to send needle-thin neuropsionic signals to receivers hidden in the ceiling.

A sharp, stabbing pain reappeared in his lower left molar, and then vanished. And then an upper incisor throbbed with a pain that vanished, and then a bicuspid. It was an basic proprioception code. It read: Intruder in dis-inertia armor… negative-vitality field integument… contortion node detected…

Of course. The killer was wearing armor that contorted the fabric of space a few inches in each direction around himself and lowered his inertia. It would prevent ordinary weapons, bullets or monomolecular blades, from imparting kinetic energy to him to do damage. Hence he could glide across the floor without imparting any pressure to the special floorboards biogineered to sound off when they felt an unfamiliar footstep.

The contortion node was a teleportation path for the assassin’s escape.

Modified electroneural ganglia beneath the killer’s skin—impossible for normal antiweapon sensors to detect—had erected a life-energy absorption cocoon. Hence the killer had silently drained Aeneas’ two bodyguards of their life and added it to his own, increasing his neural speed and muscle pressure. It was a vampire field, a modification illegal to all but the highest ranking and most trusted servants of the Lords. And a normal man would be killed at a touch.

Aeneas was no normal man. From hidden retaining cells in his bone marrow he released stored life-energy charges into his body, increasing his nerve-muscle potential beyond what a vampire energized with only two men’s vitality could match.

Faster than a striking snake and stronger than a rhino, Aeneas flung up the bedsheet and drove his fist into the man’s chest. It was a blow that would have cracked metal and broken ribs had it landed.

But the disinertia armor granted the man’s body no tendency, when at rest, to stay at rest. The force of the blow touched him, and his velocity instantaneously equaled that of the moving fist. Aeneas threw a punch twice as hard as that of a prizefighter. The inertia-free man was flung at one hundred miles an hour into the corner of the ceiling on the far side of the chamber. But, upon striking the wall, the attacker came to an instantaneous halt, without any deceleration or hurt.

Aeneas, on the other hand, still had the inertia of any ordinary body, and while he had, for one moment, the strength of a rhinoceros, he lacked the mass. The recoil of the punch flung him off back, and he fell between the mahogany bed and the golden wall. He came to his knees. The floorboards sang with his every motion.

The other fell, inertialess but not weightless. Gravity yanked: but the moment his toe touched the rug near the fireplace, his downward motion ceased instantly, and his feet did not bend the fibers.

Aeneas adjusted his eyes to night-vision. The man had face and hands white as marble and cold as ice, a side-effect of the vampire field. He was not wearing his helmet or gauntlets. This allowed the death energies to emerge from his palms and fingers, mouth and eyes. The hair of his head had grown and was growing under the impact of the absorbed vital essence, and was standing and swaying as if under variable electrostatic charges.

“It’s you!” Aeneas shouted.

It was Thoon, the bold and charismatic leader of the Antimonarchy resistance.

Aeneas laughed in relief.

The toothache being produced by an induction beam his signet ring was shining like an invisible searchlight of nerve-exasperating energy was not done spelling out its initial message.

Neuropsionic interference field epicenter aerodrome… waveform type…

Aeneas gritted his teeth, halting their painful vibration. He knew the waveform of the interference transmitter he had smuggled into the mountaintop airfield in his private aerospace limousine, and covertly connected to the air traffic systems. He had built the thing himself through his ring, using plans gleaned from his mother’s extensive and secret library of neuropsionic techniques and mechanisms.

“What are you doing here?” Aeneas said. “That was not the plan.”

Thoon said, “Your plan was to jam all the neural frequencies so that your uncles and aunts could not mindspeak to their signet rings or other thought-receivers. I am sure you are wishing, about now, your precious rings could hear and react to voice command? For this one hour, the mighty lords are helpless! Robbed of their weapons and servants, they could be caught and killed!”

Aeneas said, “Arrested and tried, not killed.”

“Tried by whom? The world that worships them? A foolish plan! But my plan was to sabotage the thought-screen around this mountain, so that, as soon as I have on my finger that library of secrets you carry on yours, I can transmit it to my waiting compatriots, Otus and Agrios.”

Aeneas said, “And our agreement?”

“You control a technology so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic. I am merely a human. When I was a child, only Earth was habitable, or inhabited. Your family re-engineered planets and moons from Mercury to Neptune, and you each have a different personal species of synthetic men to serve you! How can a bargain between a man and a god be valid?”

“I am no god. And you are no man. Real men keep their oaths! The only way to overthrow the dominion of the Lords of Creation over the solar system is to destroy their supertechnology! Destroy, not steal!”

Thoon said, “Fool! Otus, Agrios and I will join the Lords of Creation! Who burns down a palace he can live in? Who frees slaves he can make his own?”

With superhuman strength, Thoon jumped up and kicked off the fireplace mantle behind him. He soared across the room. It took no energy to accelerate his mass immediately to top speed.

Thoon’s outstretched hand reached for Aeneas. Aeneas, puzzled, punched Thoon. Aeneas felt no impact on his knuckles, but the body of Thoon had no tendency to stay in motion, and so he soared to the far side of the room again.

A sensation of cold stabbed Aeneas’ hand. The skin of his knuckles was black as if with frostbite. Now he understood. Thoon was not trying to punch, merely to get near. Aeneas closed tightly the pangolin scales of his subcutaneous living armor. The scales were leaves of a symbiotic life made of bioadmantium, a life-form based on a superdense alloy rather than on hydrogen and carbon. Bioadmantium-based life occupied a different band of the life energy spectrum than carbon-based life, and so acted as an insulation against the vampire field. It was not life-tight, however. The pliant metal scales had tiny ports or gaps to interconnect his inner and outer circulatory and nervous systems.

Thoon gaped in surprise. “How are you still alive? I touched you! You should be dead!”

Aeneas threw back and head and roared with pride, “I am a Lord of Creation! All the techniques of biotechnology are mine! My grandfather made clouds rain manna, made wastelands bloom as gardens, created mermaids and dinosaurs! Those deeds are as nothing! You could not have entered this palace without my help. How do you plan to escape?”

Thoon smirked. “Escape? I am carrying a contortion pearl. When it ignites the space-twist to carry me out of here, the blast will randomize every atom in this room! No one will know I took your signet from your dead body, with all its wondrous secrets! Oh, I know it is attuned to your brain. So I will take that as well. Then, once you are undead, a necrorobotic zombie…?” He laughed. “So, Aeneas, how do you plan to escape me?”

“Where did you get a contortion pearl? No one outside the family can teleport by Schroedinger quantum-entangled wave. Who is helping you?”

Thoon said, “Stavros and Dmitripolous! They are helping me! Come in, boys!”

Aeneas scowled. Those were the names of his bodyguards. It was sad, but he could not recall if these men had been married, or had families. A twinge of guilt stabbed him. Aeneas wondered if he were just as corrupted by power as his uncles.

At that moment, the dead bodies of Stavros and Dmitripolous, pale-faced and empty-eyed, bloodless as marble statues, came walking through the door. Their motions were fluid and not stiff. It was eerie to see how smooth and graceful they were, now that they were no longer alive. There was no mark on them, no wound, for they had been killed by life absorption. Hence their brains and nervous systems were intact, and could move their muscles without feeling pain. The echoes and residue of their thoughts and memories were in them. Both still knew how to activate, and raise and aim their many-barreled sidearms.

Thoon said, “Kill him! But don’t shoot him in the head! I want his brain!”

Support John C. Wright’s current work, Starquest by picking up the first book in his new series, The Space Pirates of Andromeda.

Space Opera must be Great! Gallant! Gigantic! Grandiose!
This tale told by a Grandmaster vows to return the glory that was lost!
Remember the days gone by, when science fiction was fun?
Now new hope is here!
If you are weary of weak, wan, woke and wasted works, your wait is ended!
Here is an epic, as grand as any tale of old -- here you will hear wonders told!

Of course there is a Space Princess, and Space Pirates galore, and an Evil Galactic Empire.

Of course there is a super-weapon known only as the Great Eye of Darkness!
Here meet Athos Lone, Ace of Star Patrol, in his one-man mission of vengeance!
The Ancient Mariner, like an iron ghost, when slain, seems to rise again!
The mysterious spymaster called Nightshadow walks in dark worlds but serves the light!
An Imperial Deathtrooper must reverse his loyalties, and fight his own clone-brothers!

Fate has set these unlikely heroes against the Four Dark Overlords
An utmost evil the unwary galaxy thinks long dead!
Can Darkness fail and Light prevail?
Read On! For All True Tales are but Part of a Greater!