Copper Swords

Maria

This planet should not have had rings. It was too small, too dense, never had a moon inside the Roche Limit to break up to form a system of rings. The solar system was remarkably free of debris, so no incoming asteroid could have blasted enough ejecta off the planet itself.

Maria regarded the planet with a baleful glare. The rings she had built were pretty enough, sparkling with the light of interactive electrical fields and solar radiation. They glowed bright red, with the yellow of ionized sodium also prominant within the streamers of light.

The system, deep within the Scorpius OB1 region, was somewhat nearby to a local wormhole junction-- and a small cluster of inhabited planets around the junction.

The Tribes of Man. Maria shook her head. In her darker moments she wondered if the Cybrids hadn't been correct: humans were like a plague of vermin, spreading unchecked into whatever space they could occupy until they killed each other or starved off.

Even now, Blood Eagle and Diamond Sword forces were engaged in massive land battles over two local planets. This was a rich sector, and control of the planets nearest the wormhole junction would mean control over two dozen prime planets. The Tribesmen went at it in armored infantry battles, having lost the technology to make Hercs or even decent tanks. Maria smirked. One of these days she would take her small fleet of vehicles into battle, just for old time's sake. It would be entertaining to loom over the Tribesmen and watch them run off screaming as she fired EMP and Shrike bursts into their midst.

Delithita was already mixing it up with the BE, it seemed, on one of the more isolated planets. She seemed to be getting rather bloody-minded lately, slaughtering the BE ruthlessly whenever she encountered them. Despite their heavy-handed and cruel ways, Maria wasn't sure she approved of their outright murder. At least Del was doing it for some reason other than sheer sadistic glee: the BE could not be allowed to expand too much farther to the galactic eastward, else they would happen across Heartworlds in the Carina region. The humans and Cybrids (the latter of which were chiefly occupied displaying their tails to the former) there had prospered over the last couple thousand years, and though things were no less bizarre and complex than they had been, they were doing quite well.

Maria had no interest in blasting Imperial or Tribal fleets out of existance, despite her annoyance with both parties, but if they passed within a thousand lightyears of Centaurus X-1, they would possibly be able to detect the radio emissions of the Heartworlds.

She reached out and plucked the ring out of the planet's orbit, setting it spinning around a small gravitational point nearby. The point became a black hole as its mass reached a level high enough to create an event horizon around itself. The debris spun more quickly, heating by friction until it was glowing white-hot, violet-hot, x-ray-hot. She wasn't quite satisfied with her work, but she took the black hole and tossed it out into space, pulling the glowing ring of debris with it.

She spun in space, gazing at a dim yellow sun nearby. Delta Osirus. In her awareness, the world expanded. Silvery clouds over a dull gray surface. Small oceans. No ice caps, strangely enough.

Perhaps it needed some. Maria closed her eyes and concentrated on the sun's cloud of comets, disturbing orbits, reorganizing. The comets were large, massive, but rather insubstantial. They'd never survive a trip through atmosphere intact. She skewed the orbits so they would strike a glancing blow, aerobraking even as they shredded themselves into vapor.

In a few weeks, it would snow alright. It would snow for months.

But what of Del? She sent a quick question toward the planet, heard the echo but not much else. Del was there, in quite close contact with... someone.

Maria was puzzled, but didn't press for details. Del would explain in time, or wouldn't.

But Maria wondered just what she was doing on that barren little world...

-----

Armor was unnecessary. Discs of plasma shot into her body with no notable effect and she proceeded forward.

The enemy soldiers seemed puzzled. They ceased fire, assuming she was a hologram, as she intended.

This error was good for her: if the entire troop finally focused fire on her, she would not be able to withstand the discharge without damage. While the disc bursts were pinpricks compared to the energies she regularly tinkered with, they were also well-tuned and were able to inject a concentrated blast at a narrow frequency.

She reached the phalanx at last, stood still directly in front of the leader. "And you are?" she said quietly.

"We are--"

She waved her hand dismissively. "Never mind. I don't care."

"Oh is that so?" the man sneered, shifting his disc shooter aside and and playing with the hilt of his sword. "Lotta damned gall for someone who won't even fight face-to-face! Honorless--"

The man jerked back as Maria dealt him a ringing slap. The crack of the blow was audible to all. She stiffened as a group of energy discs struck her. "Ah, fifty on one and you speak of honor?" she said haughtily. She extended a hand, and in a flash of light, a small, gold disc appeared, engraved with small geometric shapes, hearts, and stars. She spun the disc on her finger and a swirl of gold energy pinwheeled outward from it, morphing into a straight yellow beam. The beam thickened, solidified, became a copper-red blade half a meter long.

The Tribesman grunted and pulled his sword, twice as long and thick as Maria's, and made of forged titanium. "I suppose this a challenge?" he said scornfully.

Maria inclined her head. The rest of the Tribesman backed off by a few minutes, snickering. They didn't think much of Maria's chances.

"What the hell, she's a hologram!" one of the closer Tribesmen said angrily. "How can you fight a--" He yelped as Maria lashed out and poked him in the face with a stiffened hand, cutting deep gouges in his cheek.

She faced the leader. "We now fight for possession of the Eighty-nine Herculis sector," she said. "Terms: I kill you, your people leave. You kill me... hmm... you get to add another gem to your collection."

"What kind of challange is that?"

"Not up for it, hmm?" Maria shrugged and flipped her sword end over end, catching the hilt perfectly as it fell.

"Sir--"

"Shut up. No one treats me like this and gets away with it!" He looked ready to leap at her immediately, but he held back.

"You accept my challenge?"

"Yes, I accept your challenge."

"Sir!"

"Shut up or you're next! As for you, young lady, I hope your next of kin own a glue factory so they can make you fit for burial."

"Mmhmm." Maria assumed a bored expression and held her sword horizontally across her chest, in a rather weak novice defense. This served two purposes: to insult him, and to make him wonder if she was weak and foolish or powerful and arrogant. She smirked. She'd been practicing arrogance for millenia.

With a growl of rage the man leapt forward, and Maria blocked the blow and turned it aside with a slight twist. He crashed into her and backed off, slashing his blade inward as he went. Maria dropped her elbow down to meet the blade, shoving precisely downward to force the blow uselessly past as she twirled out of the way.

She struck the man in the face with her other hand, catching his lip against his teeth and slamming his jaw closed painfully.

Angered now, he attacked again, aggressively. She blocked, the shock ringing through her now completely solid arms, and turned the blade downward. The hilt of the sword pressed the larger blade upward, and with a quick, upward yank, turned it around to slice deeply into the man's nose.

Howling with pain he pulled back, lifting his sword to shield himself from Maria's counterstrike. She aborted her move as a meter and a half seperated them, leapt, and kicked the man's sword.

The tip of the titanium blade sank into the man's eye. As she dropped back down, she shoved with her own blade, locking hilt to hilt. The other's sword, fountaining blood from where it protruded from the Tribesman's face, sank deeper.

The man's hands went reflexively to his eye, trying to dislodge the blade, as he collapsed.

The blade made a loud clanging noise as it struck the stone.

Maria bowed her head respectfully to the Tribesman's fallen body, and studied her blade. No blood marred its golden perfection. The only trace of the battle on the blade was a series of small nicks from where it caught on the other's sword.

She tossed the blade into the air, and it turned into a whirlpool of light, then returned to its disc shape just as it landed on the dead man's chest.

"You will honor our terms," Maria said quietly to the new leader, who stepped forward with an angry, frustrated expression.

"We will," he said. "You fight well."

Maria smiled faintly. "All Ghosts do," she said, and vanished in a flash of gold light, leaving the Tribesmen arguing amongst each other, examining their dead leader and the sword she left behind.

-----

From 86 Herculis she traveled to the bright star AX Sagittarii, located near another populated wormhole junction. This one, in between the Sagittarius and Norma arms, was not as much of a threat to the Heartworlds as the others, but it was distant. Distance had a way of expanding rumors, adding to the mystery. She smiled as she regarded the energetic star ten lightyears away from the nearest inhabited world.

The systems around the junction were recently populated, in the last month, in fact, and the construction efforts were not too far along. This area was ruled by the Diamond Sword, and the Eagles in attempting to take control recently had failed miserably. The smoke envelope around the most populated planet had not yet dissipated, and the world's temperature was decreasing slowly but steadily.

Not for long.

-----

AX Sagittarii: an unstable, oversized blue giant on its last legs. Maria watches the complex interplay of gravity versus energy in its core, where the planet had almost expended its last reserves of hydrogen. In a hundred thousand years helium ignition would begin, and the star would swell to red giant.

Or at least that's how normal stellar evolution works.

The core of the star suddenly collapses into a black hole. A massive one.

Maria takes off at the speed of light, heading for the nearest planet. Behind her AX Sagittarii blows apart into a cloud of accelerated gas and a wave of neutrinos, photons, ions, and particles more interesting.

Faster than the shockwave she outdistances it, to land on a hot, desert world. People are here, mostly construction workers and their defenders. A nearby military base, turrets at the ready, sits atop a nearby sand dune, overlooking the growing city. Patrolling guards circle in precise formations.

"Aayyiiaa!" she screams, drawing a sword of copper and waving it around over the heads of the startled workers. They didn't notice her entry, but they certainly notice her cry. And they also notice the spirals of gold light she sends spinning around herself, casting circles of radiance all about and lighting up the dunes, sending sparkles of energy dancing over her black-suited form. "Death awaits you here!" she cries as a group of guards rushes to subdue her.

She throws her sword high in the air and it divides, in two, then four, then eight. These divide eightfold into sixty-four, and like a rain of golden light the cluster of swords falls back down, knifing through the first onrushing wave of soldiers. Unstopped by their thick armor, they come to rest, embedded up to the hilts, in the hearts of the guards.

The next group fans out around her, aiming disc shooters at her, and she raises her hands. The swords pull out from their victims, and form a spinning ring around her, at chest level. Faster and faster they spin, and as one incautious guard approaches too close, the stream of flying swords cuts through him, passing through his body as if it didn't even exist. He falls.

The plasma bolts cut through the air, but strike only the swords. Gold light flashes, and Maria is untouched.

"This world will die. If you value your lives, you will leave."

"What--" someone begins.

She points into the night sky, and a beam of light shoots out of her arm to point at the brightest star in the sky. The blue star is nearly as bright as a full moon, and is surrounded by a haze of red. "That star has supernovaed. The wavefront will arrive in eight years, and with it, death to all who remain here."

With this, the swords turn downward, to stick in the sands, quivering. Maria vanishes along the beam of light, which winks out an instant later.

The swords remain, sticking out of the ground in a perfect circle, each wedged in at a perfect forty-five degree angle. The guards make no move to disturb the ring of swords.

/ < / << /