#136: Untold Tales of the Dead Galaxy Again: The Celestian Whodunnit

#136: Untold Tales of the Dead Galaxy Again: The Celestian Whodunnit

    At the edge of the starfield, where the furthest suns burned lonely and pale at the edge of a great lifeless void, Volum, third moon of Crystaxia span in an unstable orbit battered by the debris that had once been its parent planet. Normally now it would be passing from Crystaxia’s shadow into lunar day. But today it did not bring in the tides, nor inspire lovers, not cast glimmering colours onto the crystal towers of the planet’s great cities. There were no cities now. No lovers. No seas that had not boiled away. Crystaxia was dead. Crystaxia was rubble.
    Then there was a sound that was literally like the fabric of the universe tearing, a ripple in reality as the continuum adjusted to the event that was happening, and a brief flash of actinic light on the surface of Volum. The last visitors ever to come to Crystaxia had arrived.
Sir Mumphrey Wilton gasped as he caught the backlash of the time/space he’d just opened using the instruments of his office as Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity to take himself and his companions as far as possible into the Dead Galaxy. Mumph, Xander, and the Librarian of Earth’s Lunar Public Library all tumbled into a heap as they appeared.
    “Hmph,” scowled Mumphrey, picking himself up. “Well, any landing you can walk away from…” he checked the aforementioned Chronometer of Infinity, currently disguised as the pocketwatch on his waistcoat. “Well, we got here but we won’t be getting back the same way. That’s used up all the charge I put in here.”
    “But we’re where we need to be,” the Librarian noted, dusting himself off from the debris of the wrecked room. “This is the Interplanetary Library on Volum, third moon of Crystaxia, the nearest outpost the IPS has to the Dead Galaxy.”
    Xander the Improbable straightened his shabby red robe and looked around. “I’d have a word with the maintenance crew about the housekeeping,” he suggested; for the room they were in was totally wrecked. Part of the roof had crumbled down, the floor was cracked, and one wall was blackened by fire. The shelves had once contained elaborate and beautiful data crystals, but now most of them were mere shattered shards.
    “What?” Lee Bookman gasped as he took in his surroundings. “What’s happening here?”
    Just then the door flew off its hinges and an angry seven-foot-tall tripedal crystal charged in carrying a laser rifle.
    “Why not ask her?” Xander suggested, putting his hands up.
    Mumphrey hurled his jacket over what he presumed to be the Crystaxian’s head, slammed the door back at it, and grabbed the creature’s weapon. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to generate the natural pizzo-electric charge required to use it, but on the other hand Selinda wasn’t able to immediately burn him to a crisp with it either.
    The Librarian grabbed up one of the few intact data crystals then leaped forward and touched it to the Crystaxian. Selinda chimed something that sounded confused and desperate before lapsing into unconsciousness. Being a crystalline tripod she still didn’t fall over.
    “Jolly good,” frowned Mumphrey. “Any time either of you chaps want to tell me what just happened do feel free.”
    “Librarians can temporarily absorb data from any book,” Xander explained as he examined the downed Crystaxian. She had some nasty flawing down her left side and a couple of chunks missing out of one leg. “They can pass that knowledge on to other people too. If they do it too quickly it can be rather stunning.”
    “I gave… her? I gave her a crash-course in botanical crystallography,” Lee footnoted. “Fascinating stuff as well. I’m sure she’ll be interested when she wakes up. This whole culture is a silicon-based civilisation, entirely non-humanoid. I’ve never been to this branch before.”
    “Looks like this branch of yours has been in the wars,” Mumphrey pointed out.
    “That wasn’t the local librarian, was it?” Xander wondered, looking at Selinda. “Only I’d have expected her to keep the place more tidy if it was.”
    Lee checked the computer interface. The one in the antechamber was down, but the panel in the corridor beyond seemed operative. “Override Archimedes Alexandria,” he spoke into the screen. “Recognise IOL Keeper Lee Bookman, Sol Earth Luna Branch, authorisation code Dickens Tolstoy Hemingway.”
    There was an uncomfortable pause before the panel chimed back, “Recognised.”
    “I arranged for a lingual interface,” the Librarian explained. “Telepathic translators.” He turned back to the screen. “Where’s the local repository keeper?”
    “Siplex Sarumex is deceased,” answered the computer.
    “Where’s your AI avatar then? Who’s informed the IOL?”
    “AI currently offline. IOL has not been informed due to communications jamming field.”
    “That’s not a good sign,” muttered Mumphrey.
    Xander nodded and absently wandered off down the corridor. He picked his way over the fallen superstructure of the Library.
    “Reboot Library AI,” Lee instructed the computer.
    There was a pause, then the screen fizzed. Finally a crystalline figure appeared on the cracked viewscreen. “Thanks,” it told the Librarian. “Autorepair must be down. I’m G.G.”
    “Lee Bookman, from Lunar. You’d better tell me what’s going on here, G.G.”
    “And fast,” muttered Mumphrey in the Librarian.’s ear, looking back at Selinda. “I think that three legged lady is waking up.”
    “Fast it is,” agreed Lee. He brushed his hand against the data panel and absorbed the information directly. “Uh oh.”
    “Just what I was thinking,” Mumphrey agreed as the Crystalian guardian began to move.
    “Lady Selinda, stop!” G.G. called hastily to the advancing tripod. “These people are on our side. They’re not with the attackers.”
    “They’re humanoid carbon-based four-limbed primates aren’t they?” Selinda demanded, still advancing. “They have to die!”
    “Yes, later on maybe,” said Xander absently, wandering back and ignoring the angry Crystalian. “Right now we have around three thousand of your wounded people here to help, and the baddies are on their way.” He stared at L, Mumphrey, and Selinda. “This way then!”

***

    The ship’s systems failed as soon as it appeared in the Dead Galaxy. All energy was drained from its engines and batteries. Structural force fields, gravity, life support all ceased in a moment.
    “Ouch,” said Amazing Guy as he quickly reinforced the shuttle borrowed from the JBH’s sentient spacecraft Vessel with an energy construct of his own making, “Eggo said our jump might be rough but I didn’t think it would be that rough.”
    “Eggo,” babbled ManMan. “That would be the giant floating dishcloth-thing that just probed me, right?”
    “He was only adjusting your cellular structure, Joe,” ManMan’s sentient weapon Knifey assured him. “Closing the genetic back-door that allows Resolution to control your mind?”
    “Then why do I feel dirty?”
    “Maybe you soiled your Elvis-pants when we spacewarped into the Dead Galaxy?”
    Outside the shuttle’s window there was nothing. No light, no matter; just emptiness. “I don’t like this,” frowned Amazing Guy.
    “He doesn’t like this,” ManMan worried to Knifey. “He’s the go-to guy for cosmic space travel and he’s worried.”
    “You volunteered to come along, remember?” his knife answered him. “You do want to find Dancer, don’t you?”
    “And we will,” AG promised. “Right now though I’m waiting for my cosmic awareness to adjust to this strange new place. And hoping it doesn’t take too long.”
    “We’re on the meter?”
    “Kind of,” admitted Scott Brunsen. “Somehow this place is blocking access to the quantum underlayer of the universe. I can’t contact Eggo and I can’t draw energy to form constructs like I usually do.”
    Joe Pepper frowned. “Er, aren’t you using your energy constructs right now to keep us alive? Please?”
    “Sure. I’m using my stored energies. But when that’s gone, that’s it.”
    “But you have enough power to jump us back out of here, right? AG? Right?”
    Amazing Guy flinched. “Not so much,” he admitted.

***

    A third of the moon Volum’s pitted sphere had been blown away by the blast that had destroyed Crystexia. As the planet split it had hurled its satellite spinning off in an erratic orbit that would take it beyond the ring of the fifth and sixth plants and off into the void of the Dead Galaxy beyond. The fleet that had used the Planetkiller Missiles on the homeworld of the Crystaxians had moved on to eradicate their colonies on other worlds; but they would be back to finish the few meagre refugees that had made it to the Public Library as their world was reduced to rubble.
    “We completely failed,” Lady Selinda confessed brokenly. “We Matrix Guardians. We thought we could stop them with our morphic combat structures but there were too many, too powerful. They had their own agents with genetic powers and technical adaptations…”
    “Superheroes,” translated Xander.
    “They shredded the team,” Selinda continued. She gestured to the broken crystal shell of her own combat exoskeleton. “I was knocked out of the fight and crashed down here. Some of the people of Crystexia, those who had tickets and knew the teleport codes, they’d already fled here before the barrage hit and the transport systems went down. After Sarumex was killed I did my best to keep order, help the fractured…”
    “Don’t fret, m’dear,” Mumphrey said to her, patting her translucent shell comfortingly. “We all have to play the hand we’re dealt. Sounds like you’ve done the right thing under some rotten circumstances, what?”
    “I’m accessing G.G.’s sensor logs of the attack,” Lee. told them. “I don’t understand it. There was a fleet of Skunk saucers, Skree Imperial battleships, Shee-Yar starbirds, Thonnagarian wingcraft, and lots more. It was like an armada of craft from half the known galaxy. Those people would never co-operate together like this. They hate each other.”
    “Not as much as they hate us,” Selinda noted. “You carbon bipeds stick together.”
    “Can’t say I’ve noticed that in carbon bipeds,” Sir Mumphrey admitted. “But there’s more to this than meets the eye, hmm?” he addressed that last question at Xander.
    The master of the mystic crafts nodded resignedly. “I saw some of this in the Chronicler’s scrying pools, but we needed to get some firsthand data too. I think we’re facing the coming of Lord Resolution. Again.”
    “Resolution? Didn’t the Lair Legion just finish spanking him?” Mumph objected.
    “Yes,” answered Xander the Improbable, “And no. Having been prevented from incarnating on Earth it seems as though he’s instead used exactly the same plan elsewhere. And of course he can control all the humanoid species that have been tinkered with using Celestian technology through that handy genetic service back door the Space Robots leave for future maintenance work.”
    “But Resolution can’t control those races that weren’t messed with long ago either by the Celestians or the Second Oldest Race,” the Librarian reasoned, “So he’s having his slave-civilisations destroy them!”
    “Hmph!” Sir Mumphrey Wilton didn’t hold with genocide. “Then we’d best stop the blighter.”
    “How?” demanded Selinda. “I’m too hurt to shift into my exo-armour and none of the others here are trained in it. How can we even defend ourselves when they come for us?”
    “This library is damaged but it’s still got a few defences,” Lee. noted. “I don’t understand how our emergency beacon is being blocked though.”
    “There were Librarians on the moon of Shee-Yar, weren’t there?” Xander suggested. “Librarians with that genetic vulnerability to Resolution’s command?”
    “You’re saying the IOL is penetrated?”
    Xander looked through the broken ceiling to the black void the moon spiralled into. “I’m saying we’re almost entirely on our own,” he warned.

***

    They drifted in the terrible darkness where the Dead Galaxy had been. Once this had been the cradle of galactic civilisation. The Second Oldest Race had received mighty technologies from the Celestian Space Robots set to guard the development of the Parodyverse and they had used it to seed copies of themselves – carbon-based bipeds – on a thousand thousand worlds. But in their hubris they had explored too far, unleashed their own doom. And for millennia beyond count their dead world had remained frozen at the moment of their destruction, until recently entropy had come to claim it.
    “This is very very spooky,” ManMan noted. “And you say this Second Oldest Race was erased from the Parodyverse?”
    “We don’t even know their name,” Amazing Guy explained. “The Hero Feeders devoured even that.”
    “Then why are there still big chunks of debris floating out there?” Joe wondered, pointing.
    AG willed the shuttlecraft towards the torn metal. “That’s not Second Oldest Race junk,” he worried. “That’s…” he paused to focus his cosmic awareness, “That’s Celestian!”
    “The indestructible Space Robots?” ManMan winced. “They got mashed?”
    “There’s something to starboard as well,” Knifey warned. “A residue of something anyway.”
    “This is what Al B. saw through Galactivac’s scanners,” frowned AG. “The remnants of Celestian Space Robots and Constellation energy-beings, both slaughtered by a third, new force that came upon them while they were locked in conflict with each other.”
    “Damn. I was hoping that was a sensor glitch,” muttered Knifey.
    “Can we work out what did it?” ManMan wondered.
    “It’s shielded from my awareness,” Amazing Guy worried. “But… ah yes, that’s what we need.”
    “What is?” ManMan looked blankly out of the window to where AG was pointing.
    “About eighty light minutes that way. An almost intact broken Space Robot. One we can borrow to check its sensor logs about what killed it and maybe repair its propulsion systems to get us out of here.”
    “You want to borrow a Celestian?” swallowed Manny. “Can I get out here?”

***

    The monitor screen flickered then decided to operate. It showed a host of ships bearing down on Crystaxia and literally carving it up.
    “There they are,” Lee told his fellow-travellers. “That’s the enemy.”
    “The Shee-Yar Imperium Guard,” explained Selinda. “Chosen champions of a thousand worlds, the most powerful enhanced warriors of their mighty empire. Led by Gladeater, last survivor of a doomed race, catapulted to Shee-yar in a rocket by his scientist father before the cataclysm struck.”
    Mumphrey made a noise between a grumph and a growl. “And now workin’ for this Resolution blighter, like the Lair Legion did back home before he got beaned on the snoot. Awkward.”
    “That’s not the most worrying thing,” the Librarian warned them. “See that fairly small Black Ship, the completely lightless one there in the middle? Its got power signatures off the register. Watch.”
    Now the viewscreen showed a midnight pulse of power from the Black Ship. It thundered down to Crystaxia, shattered the mantle of the planet, and literally carved it in two. By the time the core exploded the world was already doomed.
    “I didn’t think Resolution was that powerful yet,” frowned Xander, watching intently. He turned Harry his stone hamster over and over in his fingers like a worry bead. “I’m missing something.”
    “I need to try and re-enter my exo-matrix,” Selina decided, pulling herself painfully from her resting position. “Somebody has to stop those Shee-Yar marauders. And that Black Ship.”
    “I don’t recommend it,” the Librarian advised her. He’d absorbed a book on Crystaxian physiology earlier. “You’re in no condition to go matrix-shifting, and your exo-armour’s half wrecked. Even if you were in top condition it would be hard for you to morph it back into working order.”
    “Explain,” demanded Sir Mumphrey.
    “Crystaxian champions, Matrix Guardians are granted morphic crystal exo-skeletons that grown and respond to their mental commands, like living skins. But it requires absolute mental discipline and physical perfection, or the feedback will shatter exo-skeleton and Crystaxian alike.”
    “Still, I have to try,” Selinda determined. “I’m the last one, the last protector.”
    “Not the last,” Lee Bookman promised. “These people are in an IOL Library, under the protection of a designated Librarian. We won’t let any harm come to them while there’s breath in our bodies.”
    “Except for the Librarians working for Resolution,” Xander reminded him sourly. “I suppose you’ve activated the Volum Library’s emergency codes?”
    Lee Bookman scowled at the annoying sorcerer supreme. The emergency codes were supposed to be secret. “I have a duty to the data,” he answered defensively. “So yes, I’ve instructed G.G. to start compressing and packaging the unique volumes in case we have to evacuate or the Library here is destroyed. Unfortunately while we’re in whatever jamming field surrounds us I can’t beam it out to IOL headquarters or even to Luna, but still I have to be responsible for…”
    “You do that then,” Xander interrupted. “I need to go find a piece of chalk.”

***

    The stricken shuttlecraft moved through the eerie void powered only by Amazing Guy’s will. Scott Brunsen and Joe Pepper both struggled with the terror of the sheer nothingness, the knowledge that they could travel at light speed for a thousand years and still not reach the first burning star or the next living being.
    They passed the battlefield where the Celestian Space Robots had confronted the servitors of a conflicting destiny for the Parodyverse, the energy-coils of the Constellation. Even now Amazing Guy could sense the complex residual patterns of the Constellation entities, the energy equivalent of the skeleton left when the human body rots.
    And something more.
    “Over there,” he discerned. “There’s something strange.”
    “Where as the rest of this place is so absolutely normal,” muttered Joe Pepper.
    They picked their way through the rotting debris field. Even Celestian fragments were subject to the entropic imperative that sucked all life from the Dead Galaxy since it was by order of the Celestians themselves that these conditions had come to be.
    AG and ManMan edged their shuttle closer.
    “Well, what is it?” Knifey demanded irritably. Being a sentient knife he couldn’t see very well over anything but throwing range.
    “Oh, it’s just the usual,” ManMan told him casually. “A silver-suited Xnylonian girl on a white winged horse.”
    “Ziles and Pegasus?” AG recognised. “What are they doing here?”
    ManMan looked more closely. “Hitching a lift,” he suggested.

***

    The wounded Crystaxians had been treated as best they could be and were regenerating in their meditation cycles down in the archive stacks, the safest place remaining in the damaged library. Lee Bookman made a last check to make sure they were comfortable and not causing any disorder or excessive noise and returned to the Main Repository for a situation update from G.G.
    The Volum Library was very different from his own. The IOL liked their branches to reflect the primary culture of the nearest planet, so while the Lunar Public Library was a great wood-panelled extravagance of Victorian magnificence, the Volum building was all crystal and light, with high shimmering tines of data nodes and deep display cases containing the story-crystals of the silicone race.
    Of course it has seen better days. The rainbow hemisphere of the Main Repository was shattered, with atmosphere being maintained only by the force fields surrounding the damaged structure. Lee winced to think how much irreplaceable data might have been lost in the barbaric onslaught earlier.
    Selinda was waiting for him in the centre of the Repository. “Thank you,” she said simply.
    “These people needed help, and they came here,” the Librarian answered evasively.
    “But G.G. says that you were under no obligation to give them refuge, and neither was Siplex Sarumex. In fact it may be a breach of your codes to do so.”
    “Not as long as they’re browsing for books,” Lee assured her. “I’ve explained that to them.”
    “It is still both kind and brave of you. I apologise for my prejudices earlier. I was being as bad as those barbarians who destroyed my planet, judging by shape and composition not by character.”
    “Well thank you for taking care of the Library when the automated systems shut down,” Lee responded. “You know, if you ever considered a career as a Librarian I’d be happy to sponsor you to the IOL, maybe even give you an internship if they accept you.”
    Selinda smiled. “That’s an interesting offer. But first I think I’ll keep my people alive while that genocide-fleet hunts us, then find a way to get them all to safety, then help them survive and rebuild. After that, who knows?”
    “Who knows?” agreed the Librarian gently.

***

    “Explain that again, please,” ManMan asked the two newcomers to the crowded shuttlecraft. “Only this time give me an asprin first.”
    “It’s perfectly simple,” Ziles told him. “Pegasus requires communion with the Constellation one hour in every twenty-four to renew her cosmic powers or she dies. Recently this process has become very painful, so we decided to run an experiment to find out why.”
    “You took Ziles with you when you transformed into pure energy,” AG surmised, making sense of the bizarre energy-signatures he was getting off the ladies. “And then Ziles used an energy-mass converter to shift you both back to corporeal form where you found yourselves so you could investigate what was happening.”
    “It seemed like a good idea when Ziles proposed it,” admitted Pegasus. “Of course, I was in quite a lot of pain at the time.
    “And we found ourselves here, amidst murdered Constellation,” Ziles concluded happily. She enjoyed a good mystery, especially if it involved going to places she wasn’t supposed to be; and this was keeping her mind off the doom she saw in her near future. “Now we just have to work out whodunit.”
    “And preferably whether any of the Constellation yet endure,” Pegasus added. “Otherwise my considerably-extended lifespan will be coming to a close.”

***

    “What are you up to?” Mumphrey demanded of Xander the Improbable when he found him in the Forbidden Crystals section of the Volum Library.
    “Oh, looking a few things up, that’s all,” the master of the mystic crafts shrugged casually. “There’s a ritual I need and it’s always better to use the local variants.”
    “So you really are the sorcerer supreme,” the eccentric Englishman surmised. “Even this far from home.”
    “Oh, that’s just an honorary title granted to a prominent mage on whatever planet happens to be the cosmic axis right now,” Xander told him dismissively. “It’s purely PR. There’s no stipend or staff or anything. Not even an expense account.”
    “But you can do magic,” Mumph asked uncertainly.
    “Nobody ‘does’ magic,” the strange little man told him. “Magic just happens. The trick is to be waving your arms about when it does.”
    “Lucius Faust used to make fireballs,” Mumphrey recalled of Xander’s illustrious predecessor.
    “Lucius liked big bangs. Some of us prefer the quiet life.”
    “But you could do big bangs… if you had to?”
    “I could arrange for something I suppose,” Xander said evasively. Then he went back to his studies.

***

    “We are so very, very dead,” ManMan noted as he crawled through the rubble of the great hole in the side of a defunct Celestian Space Robot.
    “So you keep saying,” Knifey noted. “In an increasingly high voice, by the way. But this is really your only chance. AG’s energy construct won’t keep going much longer, and then you’ll be short of things like mobility and atmosphere.”
    “Anyway,” came Amazing Guy’s voice from further inside the quarter-mile long construct, “this is way better than last time I was in one of these. Then they were going to dissect me.”
    “So comforting to know,” sighed Joe Pepper. “Dancer’s going to owe me a really big pizza for this.”
    “So this is the inside of a Space Robot,” breathed Ziles reverently.
    “Don’t steal anything,” Pegasus warned her severely.
    Up ahead Amazing Guy was sweating as he tried to pump out the last dregs of energy stored in his body to keep them alive. He found he couldn’t break open the hatch to the Celestian computer node without letting them all die first.
    “Let me try,” suggested Knifey. ManMan moved up and used the sentient blade to saw through the internal partition.
    “So there are only two known things in the Parodyverse that can damage the Space Robots,” Pegasus observed. “Whatever thingy’s out there killing them, and that knife.”
    “I may be number two,” Knifey admitted, “but I try harder.”
    Scott Brunsen stared into the tangle of futuristic data nodes, a million years beyond the most advanced technology he’d ever worked with. “Okay, I need to concentrate what’s left of my cosmic awareness,” he said. “Without Eggo to filter it it can be a bit difficult.”
    Ziles ran her sensor pad over the technology. The small silver card overloaded and crashed within seconds. “Ooh, I like this stuff,” she cooed enviously.
    Pegasus laid a strong hand on her shoulder. “Don’t. Steal. Anything,” she repeated.
    “Ah,” called AG from halfway inside the dangerous-looking Celestian data-node. “I think the bit we need to operate the Celestian’s propulsion systems is… there!”
    The jolt of sudden motion slammed them all hard into the wall. As they lost consciousness the last flickering energy-sheath protecting them winked out.
    But by then they were nine hundred light years distant, and about to impact with the stray moon of Volum.

***

    “Wake up, your fellow-me-Elvis-impersonator,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton called out jovially as he smacked ManMan around the face. “No time for dawdling now. We’re about to go to war.”
    “Oh,” Joe Pepper groaned as he dragged himself to consciousness. “Good.”
    Across the room Pegasus was waking Ziles in a similar manner. The winged warrioress had survived the high-G transit much better than any of the others.
    “I have got to get more padding in this spacesuit,” Ziles complained, rubbing her backside as she got up.
    “And a zip that stays up?” Pegasus asked slyly.
    “I still don’t understand how you got here,” the Librarian said to Amazing Guy. The two old friends were on the other side of the room working on some piece of advanced technology.
    “I just programmed the Celestian corpse to take us to the nearest place where there was advanced civilization,” AG explained. “I couldn’t do much else. It was so complicated.”
    “It certainly is,” Lee. agreed, running his fingers over the adamantine and crystal data lattice they’d extracted from the broken Space Robot. “I have the gift of understanding written languages and I’m getting maybe ten percent of this programming code. I can barely use it to download the Volum Library’s data core and transmit it back home to D.D.” Celestian technology ignored trivial things like powerful jamming fields.
    “I know you need to save the books, Lee, but really I need to know what happened to get the Space Robot in this condition. Can you access its sensor core?”
    “I’m working on it, but the Library computers here are damaged, the Celestian’s damaged. Even if everything was working well it would be a tricky exchange.”
    “I seem to have missed an episode,” confessed ManMan. “Again.”
    “You’re on a rogue moon toppling into the Dead Galaxy and pursued by an intergalactic extermination fleet working for Resolution to bring about War across the Parodyverse,” Sir Mumphrey told him cheerfully. “The baddies are after us to wipe out the last survivors of the non-humanoid Crystaxian civilisation and clearly we are going to stand up to the confounded bullies and give them a bloody nose.”
    “Even though last time they blew up a planet,” added Knifey less comfortingly.
    ManMan got his next culture shock as Selinda gracefully scuttled into the room. She was carrying thin stands of crystalline chain, which she carefully attached to the extracted Celestian component. “I have no idea what your sorcerer is doing,” she admitted to her strange new allies.
    “Welcome to our club,” Mumph confided in her. “By the looks of it it’s a summoning circle of some kind. I think he’s planning to raise a spirit.”
    “A demon?” ManMan asked nervously. He’d been married to Mefrothto, Prince of Fibs briefly and he hadn’t enjoyed it. His other ex-spouse was Dancer.
    “Certainly not,” chided the master of the mystic crafts himself, stalking in to add the finishing runes to the apparatus. “Just a walk-in intelligence. We need someone to occupy Selinda’s matrix exo-skeleton since she can’t.”
    “Someone we can trust,” Mumphrey emphasised. “According to Selinda that crystal-whatsit’s rather powerful.”
    “Yes,” agreed Xander. “I have just the sentience.”

***

    Gladeater led the Imperium Guard down on a tight fast attack on the damaged Library. At his gesture, Titus, Smusher, and Magica veered off to the west. Qua-Star, GobHoblin, and Nightslide peeled away east. Fangface, Astral, Midmaid, and Orankle dived south. He led the real powerhouses, Temptest and Meantor right for the Main Repository.
    The creature of crystal rocketed up towards them. As it came it unfurled massive transparent wings of razor-sharp silicone. Inside its translucent frame nuclear fire kindled and welled out, hot enough to sear even the near-invulnerable flesh of the attackers. A giant tail swung round and swiped Meantor half a mile deep into the ruptured moon’s crust.
    “Hi there,” said Fin Fang Foom, the disembodied spirit Xander had summoned to operate the matrix. “This is your only warning to stand down and stop being mind-controlled asses.”
    Andrew Dean’s astral self had been wandering lost in the cosmos for weeks after his last psychic battle with Resolution. He had quite a bad mood to work off, so he was glad when Gladeater decided to make a fight of it.

***

    “Come out, Crystaxians!” Titus shouted as his contingent shattered through the walls of the Art and Music section. “Come out and die!”
    The Library’s automatic systems hummed to life and the defences bracketed then invaders with everything from sonics to nerve gas.
    “Sssh!”, said the Librarian severely.

***

    Qua-Star’s party came in via the decimated east wing where the Library defences were already down. They didn’t expect any resistance, so they were quite surprised when the shining floor they were walking over curled round and caught them in a globe of energy.
    “You’re out of your jurisdiction, Imperiums,” Amazing Guy told his struggling captives. “Besides, I’m the protector of the Parodyverse so I outrank you. You’re under arrest.”

***

    Fangface, Astral, and Midmaid burst into the South Wing as soon as Orankle had neutralised the damaged defence grid. “Kill everything and everyone!” Fangface shrieked as they raged forwards.
    “Well, if you insist,” agreed Pegasus, catching him full in the face with a cosmic blast before hurling his body at Astral.
    “The Pegasus!” recognised Orankle. “Keep her busy and I’ll reprogram the Library’s automated defence drones to take her out!”
    “Oops,” Ziles said sweetly from her place at the half-dismantled security console opposite. “Beat you to it. Ouch, that had to hurt!”

***

    Sir Mumphrey Wilton finished setting his temporal pocketwatch so it could draw energies directly from the Celestian’s residual energy store. Although the merest fraction of the force usually motivating the caretakers of the Parodyverse it was sufficient to run a galactic empire for a thousand years. There was power enough there to enable the pocketwatch to open a temporal rift that could get these people to safety anyway.
    “There,” Mumph called to Selinda. “Get your people through. And quickly. Young Finny and the others are doin’ well, but I don’t think we’ll be able to hold ‘em off for long.”
    The last Matrix Guardian hurried to bring the last of her people to safety on a distant world far from Resolution’s march.

***

    “Ready?” Xander the Improbable asked Joe Pepper.
    “No,” admitted the wide-eyed Elvis impersonator.
    “Good. Knifey, are you confident you can do this?”
    “No,” answered the sentient knife. “It’s going to be a really interesting experiment.”
    “Did anyone hear me say ‘no’?” bleated ManMan.
    “Look, Foom and Amazing Guy and the others are doing well against the Imperium Guard out there,” Xander told him, “but all that’s doing is getting that Black Ship into range to deal with us personally. So we need another advantage.”
    “Why me though?”
    “You’re the one with the existing psychic bond with a sentient weapon,” the master of the mystic crafts shrugged. “Plus, you’re expendable.”
    “Wait!” ManMan winced as Xander closed the reversed summoning circle around him.
    But it was too late. When Joe Pepper opened his eyes and lifted his hand it was the Celestian Space Robot that moved.
    The wounded quarter-mile-high machine picked itself from its impact crater and looked up. There in the distance a deadly Black Ship shot forward like an arrow.
    “Right,” said the Celestian Space Robot to itself with an uncharacteristic growl, “Let’s see you pick on somebody your own size.”

***

    The Black Ship was built from the combined technologies of every race that served Lord Resolution, from the resources of nearly every starfaring civilisation in five galaxies. Powered by an infinite energy source and occupied by one sentience only it was the last word in space combat. Its powerful artificial intelligence could calculate strategies and formulate responses in a mere microns and bring planet-shattering firepower to bear on any target.
    It reset all its priorities when the Makluan dragon appeared. Given the computing capacity at its disposal it didn’t even hesitate for a moment to identify its master’s enemy. Clearly the resistants had incorporated the wyrm’s astral consciousness into a Crystaxian matrix exo-skeleton and had empowered it with residual Celestian energies. Given the canny battle-savvy of the Lair Legion’s leader and the resources at his disposal it was no wonder he had cut a swath through the Imperium Guard and was now rending his way through the vanguard of the Resolution Fleet.
    The Black Ship calculated the force required to shatter the exo-skeleton beyond repair, added an ectoplasmic component to rend Fin Fang Foom’s astral sentience, and bracketed the enemy.
    Then the alert overrides cut in as a Celestian Space Robot arose from the moon’s surface.
    Suddenly the dragon became the second priority. The Black Ship sent instructions to the fleet for the Makluan’s destruction, precise calculations of deployment that would accomplish his doom at acceptable cost – few hundred vessels, no more. All the Black Ship’s attention had to focus on the Celestian target that was closing upon it.
    A billion counterstrategies thrummed through the Black Ship’s circuits, anticipating each manoeuvre or strategy the Celestian might elect to use. Each previous encounter had added to it store of knowledge. Each Space Robot previously destroyed had added to the chances of success.
    This Space Robot used the billion-and-oneth strategy, striding straight in through space and hammering his massive fists into the Black Ship, shouting, “Come on then, you great bully! Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!”
    The Black Ship recalculated based on additional data. This wasn’t a Celestian. This was a mortal mind possessing a Celestian body. Impossible! Unheard of! The Black Ship frantically recalculated its strategy and brought its’ weapons to bear.
    But Joe Pepper was operating on pure instinct by now. He reached out and took the Black Ship by its sleek midnight wings and pulled it like a cracker.
    The Black Ship died with an electronic scream of frustration. Beaten… by a dim human. It was not fair….!
    “I did it?” ManMan gasped, staggering back and scratching his massive metallic head. “I beat him?”
    Then the Black Ship cracked open and its only occupant, that which was powering it, stepped outside.
    The Celestian Space Robot was blown apart with a single blast, rendered into shredded metal confetti.
    The Obliterator looked round for another target.

***

    “Damn!” shouted Pegasus, looking up. “Damn, blast, and damn again!”
    Ziles followed her gaze. “Ah,” she winced. “bad news.”
    “Bad news?” Selinda asked, looking at the rusty ancient giant automaton that had just destroyed another Celestian. “What is that?”
    “That? It’s called the Obliterator,” the Librarian told her. “Mysterious, originless, powerful cosmic robot, more or less unstoppable but usually doing its own unfathomable thing. Why is it here?”
    “Don’t you get it?” Pegasus demanded. “Resolution needed a new body. Maybe the body prepared for it all along.”
    “Resolution is in the Obliterator?” Ziles gasped. Suddenly it became clear why the Black Ship had had such power, and what it was that could kill Celestian and Constellation alike. “We’re dead!”
    The Obliterator looked down at the ravaged library and at the fleas that had opposed it and stretched out one massive arm. With the other it swatted Fin Fang Foom away as if he was a flea. “Yes,” it told them, “You are dead.”
    And then the sky lit up with another space-rift, and the great vacuum-ship of Galactivac arrived.

***

Next time: Galactivac vs the Obliterator, three rounds, winner takes all. But before that we find out how Dancer’s been doing as the herald of the Living Death That Sucks, and how things can be even worse than they seem right now. Then we have a bunch of guest stars and guest villains you’re not going to expect… or believe. And another surprise ending. All the usual stuff, coming your way in >#138: Untold Tales of the Heralds of Galactivac: Countdown To Resolution

***

All Your Footnote Belong To Us:

The Dead Galaxy, former home to the Second Oldest Race, was decimated at the height of that civilization’s power when it inadvertently loosed the Hero Feeder parasites from the cosmic vortex. The whole sector of space was interdicted and frozen even from entropy by the power of the Celestial Space Robots, caretakers of the Parodyverse, until Nats’ recent visit broke the equilibrium and allowed the Dead galaxy to crumble to nothingness.

Celestians and Constellation: The Space Robots are quarter-mile long vast spacefaring mechanicals, undertaking unknowable maintenance duties for the mysterious and unrevealed creators of the Parodyverse. It takes an awful lot to break one. The Constellation are sentient energy-spirals personifying an alternate future of the Parodyverse in which the intruding Fairly Great old Ones awaken and restructure reality to their insane visions. And Pegasus works for them.

Eggo, the Living Waffle is one of the cosmic beings of the Parodyverse, who appoints and empowers a champion dubbed the protector of the Parodyverse. Amazing Guy (Scott Brunsen) is the current Protector.

Lord Resolution’s Servitors: All the races mentioned in the armada are established starfaring races of the Parodyverse. The Impetuous Guard are usually the champion heroes of Empress Lie’and’dry of the She-Yar. More detail on them and their previous appearances can be found in the writings of Amazing Guy at Amazing Tales.

The IOL, Interplanetary Order of Libraries (or Librarians): is a long-established organisation dedicated to preserving the literature and data of the Parodyverse. Inheritors of Celestian data-gathering technology, the IOL establishes repositories near most worlds with a written cultural tradition, seeking to preserve works that would otherwise be lost. Any scholar who has the means of discovering and reaching the Libraries may apply for a membership card allowing them access to appropriate materials.

The Obliterator is one of the Lair Legion’s oldest foes, an unstoppable giant alien robot of uncertain motives. His first encounter with the team is recounted in Lair Legion: Year One, part 3 – What happened when Banjooooo declared war on the human race, and why it’s a bad idea to ever go to the lavatory again . Now we know more.

Galactivac, the Living Death That Sucks, Hooverer of Worlds, a planet-devouring cosmic entity, may owe a creative debt to a well known comic-book creation. More of him next time.

The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Where's Where in the Parodyverse

Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2003 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2003 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.