Welcome back to our Serial Sunday, featuring Superluminary, a wonderful science fiction tale by John C. Wright that we’re pleased to present as a serial each Sunday here on Fandom Pulse.
Episode 07: Moon of Murder
The moon had been a barren and airless silver sphere fifty years ago: Lady Luna, the daughter of Lord Jupiter, had re-engineered the surface, amplified the surface-gravity, cloaked the hills with forests, flooded the seas with water.
A stream of coherent high-energy particles half a mile in diameter and two hundred thousand miles long reached from the blue waters of the Sea of Tranquility to the half-paralyzed Aeneas.
The beam came from a hollow cylindrical array of fortresses imperial engineers had placed along a bore running through the axis of the cone of Mount Vitruvius and reaching to the core of the moon. The waters around this island-mountain were boiling, and the clouds above formed concentric bull’s-eyes as shockwaves raced through the superheated lunar atmosphere.
It was an interplanetary-strength beam, designed to bombard fortresses and cities on the surfaces of worlds and moons of the inner system.
Sheer, random, dumb luck saved Aeneas. The dish was between the moon and Aeneas’ body, or most of it: the beam sheared off his foot. In the second it took for the dish to go from solid to plasma and disintegrate, the streaming blood from his stump gushed out forcefully enough, and in the right direction, to push his body into the shadow of the main mass of the satellite.
His veins and arteries pinched themselves shut. He anchored himself to the lee of the satellite with a shortrange magnetic beam. Then he spent several minutes heating, pounding, and cooling his leg stump to squeeze the metal of is skin into an airtight lump.
Despite the incredible violence of the impact, there was no sound in the vacuum, except the tickling patter, like hailstones, which his Geiger counter sensors gave off, telling him the count of hard radiation passing through the metal satellite and his metal-skinned body. He had not taken a sufficient dose to kill him. Not yet.
The far side of the satellite was glowing like the sun and emitting a spherical cloud of ionized metallic vapor.
Well, sir. Someone seems to have figured out you are here.
“Any idea in which direction the nearest edge of the beam cone is?”
None.
“There is maneuvering fuel in the satellite used for orbital correction. I can keep the satellite between me and the moon and maneuver it to the edge of the beam.”
The gunner will merely correct when he sees the motion.
“See how?”
Radar in the one meter band.
The emitter for the antennae was still intact. Aeneas ordered the traces of his blood still inside the satellite to mesh with the satellite brain and usurp its functions.
The radio transmitter was powerful enough to send a beam of energy all the way to Pluto. He turned the stub of this emitter toward the radar sources aimed at him, tuned it to the one meter band, and cranked up the output to its maximum.
“If they can see anything through that…”
And what if they can, sir?
He had the satellite show him its blueprints on a neuropsionic channel. The alloy shielding around the power core was a clamshell type that could be opened and closed by a magnetic hinge. Aeneas cut power to the hinge, so that the two halves of the clamshell shield were no longer connected. He rotated the satellite, and let the forward edge of the beam from the moon melt part of the superstructure.
When the power housing was burned open, the clamshell shield broke into two sections. He hid behind one, and ordered the surviving retrorockets to fire, and carry the two sections in opposite directions.
The gunner on the moon played the weapon beam first against one of the clamshell segments, then the other. Inch by inch the slabs of white-hot metal melted, but slowly.
There was a self-repair unit amid the wreckage clinging to his half of the severed satellite. He had it cobble a metal dummy of his dimensions, which Aeneas covered with his reserves of totipotent cells. He then ordered the cells to form a convincing skin layer.
He kicked the dummy out into the beam path, and screamed a dying scream on every channel his ring and his internal electromagnetic control cells could reach.
Sir, do you really think anyone in your family will be fooled by that?
“One never knows. Some of my cousins are dumb.”
Is Lady Luna?
“No, she is wickedly smart. Maybe too smart. Look at that!”
Because the other segment of the satellite suddenly blazed under the impact of the exo-atmospheric weapon beam. Unlike before, the beam concentrated only on that segment, and did not return to continue burning the one Aeneas hid behind.
“She just outsmarted herself by overestimating me.”
How so, sir?
“She assumed I would not be stupid enough to throw out a dummy of myself from behind a spot where I actually was and give my position away, and so decided I must be behind the other!”
Possibly, sir. Or she may have seen that this segment is now on a rapidly degrading orbit, and will soon strike the upper atmosphere.
“Re-entry heat won’t kill me.”
Perhaps not, sir, but the weapon beam will, once the re-entry heat evaporates the shield segment, and exposes you.
“How deep into the atmosphere will I need to be for that beam not to be able to penetrate?”
Twelve feet of bedrock or forty feet of seawater should dissipate the beam concentration sufficiently to lower the radiation level back into non-lethal doses. Assuming a short exposure period, of course.
“Meaning that the beam can follow me all the way to the surface.”
Yes, sir.
The blue and white moon was nearly touching the vast blue curve of the Earth, for it was only risen four or five minutes ago. “But not the surface of the other hemisphere.”
I cannot calculate an entry path that would land you in the other hemisphere given the limited time and fuel available, without exposing yourself to the beam.
“What about a skip reentry? I hit the upper atmosphere at a shallow enough angle to bounce back into space like a stone skipping on a lake, do a little ballistic coasting, and then do a re-entry glide as many degrees beyond moonrise as I can get? As for fuel, you forget that fuel is just one form of energy. That beam is producing absurd amounts of energy, if only it can be harnessed. It is fortunate my legs are numb.”
A simple command to the nanomachines in his blood began to strip off bioadmantium leg armor. He jettisoned the flesh and bone of his legs and had them grown into the circuits of the radar emitter, which, after he grew vegetable cells properly adapted, could to absorb the high-energy particles of the beam and convert them to chemical energy. Although lower in frequency, a radiowave laser could carry just as much energy as any other form of laser. He grew wings for himself out of bioadmantium, very thin and as large as a parachute canopy. Into the surface of the canopy he absorbed very thin layers of all the propellant he could salvage from the wreckage of the satellite.
Now he looked like a weird mix of man and space-jellyfish. He kicked off from the satellite wreck, careful to keep in the path of the radio laser, and even more careful to stay in the shadow of the satellite.
As he hoped, when the lunar beam was done grinding the other half of the satellite into molten droplets, it turned toward this one. As he hoped, the thick alloy power core shield resisted the beam, the photosynthetic cells powered the chemical laser. The resulting radio beam with hot enough and tight enough to light up the inside surface of his metal canopy. The heat released a controlled amount of propellant, which ignited, driving against the canopy and licking harmlessly against Aeneas’ metal skin.
He had encountered the upper atmosphere, and the rosy-red glow of reentry heat was beginning to flicker like the breath of a dragon over his body. The high, thin wail of air molecules rebounding from him solidified into a continuous sound, a shriek like a teakettle.
His signet ring reported success. Assuming the weapon beam continues to fire at the same rate, your current trajectory should carry you beyond the visible curve of the horizon before the satellite plate melts through.
But that assumption was false.
Perhaps the leader of the gunnery team on the lunar surface was growing impatient. Perhaps suspicious. The beam from the moon redoubled in output. The clamshell shield burned faster, and began to warp and fray.
Hair thin rays of the beam passed through the cracking satellite, and pierced the canopy of Aeneas like white-hot needles in two places, then in three. Another ray of the energy beam pierced the shrinking metal parasol which was the satellite, and struck Aeneas through the abdomen. Another passed through his shoulder, narrowly missing his secondary brain in his chest cavity.
“Suggestions?”
Sir, I cannot imagine how you will escape this situation.
“But you have faith that I will?”
Certainly, sir.
“Your faith in me is touching.”
I have no faith in you, sir, but in your patron.
He understood. The space contortion pearl that had allowed him to escape to Pluto had been placed in his bedchamber deliberately. A complete knowledge of warptech was placed in his head just as deliberately.
A crack formed in the satellite shield, and one of the needle-thin beams turned into a plane of energy like a guillotine, and sheared off over of third of his canopy surface.
Sir!
“What is it?”
A space vessel is approaching.
“It is peon-tech?” Chemical rockets would arrive here long after he was dead.
No, sir. An imperial superdreadnought, moving disinertially, launched from the floor of the sea.
Without inertia, the vessel’s speed would immediately become equal to the acceleration of her drives less the resistance of any medium.
The machine was a golden torpedo-shape six kilometers long and a kilometer in diameter. Her batteries were all firing, annihilating the atoms of the atmosphere just before her immense prow, creating several feet of vacuum, and lowering the air resistance to zero. She rode a solid column of fire reaching down to a temporary crater of boiling water formed by the force of the lift off in the liquid of the Indian Ocean.
The air around her was a hurricane of cloud and screaming wind, pulled along by the disinertia field and the vacuum-pulled air. An unimaginable mass of seawater had been caught in the launch fields as well, and pulled along in the wake of the speeding superdreadnought.
The huge, magnificent ship placed herself between Aeneas and the weapon beam. A purple and blue aura crackled from her hull as her various screens were punctured. The sea water scattered the beam, and turned to steam. Streamers of molten metal half a mile wide began spurting in wide parabolas from every exposed surface as the hull was breached and the internal workings began exploding under impact.
Flame darted from ruptures like miniature volcanoes. Mile upon mile crumpled as the ship’s main keel was severed. From Aeneas’s viewpoint, the dark silhouette of the ship rimmed with the nimbus of blinding destruction was like a total eclipse of the sun.
On the hull of the dying ship was blazoned the three-headed owl-winged wolf clutching a sun in one paw and a sword in the other: the emblem of the Empire. But no personal emblems were displayed.
“Which of my uncles is aboard?”
No life signs.
“Could it be…? Grandfather…?”
Between Aeneas and the golden hull of the dying superdreadnought, he could see a fifty-foot needle-shaped craft darting toward him without inertia.
As the craft nose met and struck him, it came instantly to a halt and did him no hurt. A tractor beam grappled him and yanked him into a hatch. Inertia returned, kinetic drives roared, the needle unfolded into a delta-winged shape, and dove.
The supersonic deltawing sped away, diving rapidly, always keeping the vast, opaque, blazing, blinding, tumbling wreck of the dying imperial dreadnaught between itself and the moon. The falling wreck dwindled with distance.
Down sped the craft, losing altitude and changing to a crescent-shaped lifting wing.
The moon disappeared below the horizon.
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!
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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!