[MV] The Super Wizard From Space #66: Demolio, part 6

[wilalambre at gmail.com]

# THE SUPER WIZARD FROM SPACE, #66

## DEMOLIO, part 6

Genovefa Buzz scuttles on the wounded world, balancing on a egg while
waiting for it to burst underneath her. Each step of her soaring legs carve
ragged canyons along the equator. Each beat of her vast glacial wings throw
the atmosphere out into empty space. The shifting of her behemoth mass
rolls the planet off its axis. Landmasses burn, oceans boils, all
unprotected from the sun's deadly radiation and fiery temperatures.

On the dying planet's surface, the Wizard scrambles to stay in the shadow
of the celestial bee. He can't stay here; this world can't long suffer
Genovefa's presence. He has to think offensively.

Asteroids and satellites still litter the alien sky. The stolen moons of
Genovefa's earlier victims, along with the smashed remnants of their
corpses, all swinging in erratic orbits. The Wizard focuses on the largest
he can see, on the amount of moonlight dancing on its tumbling face, on all
that potential energy, all out in the open. He reaches up, grabbing at the
moonlight's slippery silver edges, and _yanks_ it down.

The sudden intensity draws Genovefa's attention just as the weaponized
moonlight _slams_ into her in wide flat waves. Compound eyes a hundred
miles in diameter are instantly blinded. She falls over with a vivid cry of
surprise.

There's grotesque lurch of gravity as the two planetary masses collide.
Crust and mantle and primeval mountain ranges _shatter_ into cyclopean
shards along the impact, flung out into space.

The Wizard is thrown up into orbit, up amongst the encircling debris. He
makes a quick survey of his surroundings, while she's disoriented, while
there's an opportunity. Choosing the asteroid nearest to him, he slices
open the space-field around it, then he makes a similar incision directly
atop Genovefa. A warp-tunnel forms between the two points, swallowing the
aberrant rock and _firing it_ over three hundred thousand kilometres, at
just under the speed of light.

The projectile punches into Genovefa's side with a blinding explosion. Her
atmosphere ignites, and she's engulfed in fire.

The Wizard doesn't pause. He immediately opens another warp-tunnel and
launches another asteroid. And then another.

Rock _explodes_ against rock. The firestorm is blown clear by shockwaves of
cinder and debris. Primordial lightening arcs outward from the impact
sites, like curled hands slashing  out at the depths of space.

Genovefa screams out in visible spectrums. Pain and _beastly_ fury. She
lurches over the side of the planet, taking cover from the bombardment.
Gravity lurches over with her. Reality distends in her wake. The remaining
satellites are torn in the distortion, creating a spinning, mangled rubble
that chaotically pin-balls off itself.

Caught within the whirlpool of boulders, the Wizard is helpless to act when
Genovefa rears up on the mutilated planet and stabs at its ruined surface
with her monstrous stinger.

The victimize planet contracts for a moment, like it might collapse into
itself. Its lava takes a sickly, black pallor as Genovefa's toxin spreads
throughout its lithosphere. Then, with an animalistic roar, the planet
_explodes_ open, unfurling into its new bestial shape that crudely mirrors
Genovefa's own. Its frayed crust stretches out as vast beating wings,
leaving the new drone's body a flayed mess of exposed mantle and bleeding
magma.

Genovefa lovingly strokes its head despite its horrific appearance, and the
drone instinctively submits to its maternal queen. "Poor thing, poor thing,
liszten to _Usz_," her tone mournful and patient. "I know, I know. It won't
hurt for long. Too drasZztic a transZzformation  over _too much masZzz_.
Without _cosZzmic_ power, your life will be _brief_... but it will be
 _blazZzing and pasZzzionate_, I promisZze you."

Then they turn on the Wizard. The two monsters layer warped alien gravities
atop warped alien gravities, multiplying the distortion of local spacetime.
Reality stretches like canvas pulled taut. Pinpoint stars elongate away as
twisting wet swirls. Time stutters and scratches and skips, between moments
and months. Its everything the Wizard can do to stay free of the
dimensional perversion. Working together, the gigantic beasts herd him
deeper into the system centre, closer and closer to the poisoned sun.

He takes refuge within the umbra of the system's innermost planet, a small
burned thing that still carries scars of earlier assaults. No atmosphere,
no magnetic field to speak of, nothing to provide cover. Its little more
than a corner to be backed into.

Too new and too eager, Genovefa's drone leaps forward, hurling gravity at
its prey. An invisible pressure _bashes_ down the Wizard, snaring him
within the planetoid's tattered orbit. The drone twists it abdomen to bring
its stinger to bear, a rocky spear the size of a comet, and _charges_ at
the Wizard.

The Wizard rends open a warp-tunnel. The hole _tears open_ along the
drone's back and _snaps_ closed again. The beast's tegula is torn away with
a wrenching shriek. Its wings break free.

The wounded beast _screams_, twisting and thrashing in shock and in pain.
It loses control of its trajectory. Its unable to slow its gigantic speeds.
It cannot avoid crashing into the smaller planetoid.

Misshapen and wounded, neither survive the collision. The celestial forces
split each apart with explosions of rock and bursts of liquid cores. The
savage gravities of their death throes rip them both apart, creating a new
asteroid belt ringing the system's sun.

Caught in tumbling tidal forces, the Wizard pinballs amongst boulders and
asteroids, clawing at rocky surfaces as he smashes against them. And
between each collision, slashing agony as the sun's unimpeded light bites
into him. When his ragged grip finally holds, he crawls along its rolling
surface, desperately keeping to the shadows.

Genovefa approaches, hovering near the shattered remains. If she is
distraught over the drone's destruction, she doesn't express it. Instead,
she uses her mass to keep the asteroid field together, preventing any
individual piece from drifting too far afield, like a mother cat rounding
up curious kittens.

Its when the rock under him shifts that he understands. The venom, still
potent in the surrounding rubble, force new shapes on it all. The smaller
asteroids are the first to wrench into their new alien lives, opening into
new wings and new eyes and new legs, swimming in an overwhelming sea of
genetic memories and antediluvian instincts, sharing a mind with their
monstrous queen mother.

Genovefa's affectionate cooing... falters. A silent moment is shared
between her and her new swarm. Then she turns to whispered pleading as the
new bees begin _abandoning_ her. They work to break free from her orbit, to
escape her influence into open space. She stretches out her legs and her
wings, trying to hold onto them. "No, no, no, pleasZzse. I can _do_ thizz.
I _CAN_ do thizZz..."

It doesn't matter if she can convince them or not. Without cover, he won't
survive the poisoned sunlight for long. Only one desperate play. With the
asteroid writhing under him, he crawls until has a clear line of sight to
the sun. This close, the light hits him like a sandblast. His uniform tears
away. His skin turns a dangerous red. Blisters widen and burst as his cells
desperately try to expel the contaminant. His eyesight blurs as his blood
boils around his sockets.

He reaches a shivering hand out. Feeling for the sun's burning centre, an
ancient fusion fire buried deep within its convection. He finds it, shaking
and fluttering, unstable due to tampering, erratic due to Genovefa's
strange gravitational distortions. The Wizard calls up everything left of
the Schrivener's folded power, of the Stringer's nuclear conclusion, as
much of the poison sunlight as he can bear to hold... and _injects_ it as
deep as he can. An overdose of adrenaline straight into a heart attack.

The sun flits a hellish crimson before crumpling into a blue-white pinprick.

Genovefa screams in ultraviolet, desperately wrapping herself in magnetics.

There's a moment when the pinprick disappears.

Then it _flares_! Five billion times brighter! Tossing aside the blackness
of space! Its entirety explodes outwards, a wrathful wall of force and
heat, _bulldozing_ the void surrounding it.

The floundering asteroid field _vaporizes_. The shockwave flattens rock and
drone alike, grinding down molecules under its heel before thundering on.

The few remaining planets _burst_. The supernova _slamming_ each like an
egg, and then _slamming_ into the scattered shells. Anything not crushed in
the onslaught _burns_ in atomic fire.

Initially, Genovefa _withstands_, a cliff face against a furious,
conflagrant ocean. The shockwave breaks against her gravities, nuclear fire
sloughs off her magnetics... then the cliff face _collapses_... the
impossible heats, the immense forces, it bowls over her defences. Her grand
wings _disintegrate_. Her long stinger is _ripped_ off. Curled-in legs are
_pulverized_. The wave _peels_ away her tectonic plates, then flays _layer
after layer_ of living mantle, flinging it all into cold space. Genovefa's
scream intermingles with the devastating wave, a cry of unimaginable agony
that carries with the dead star's own roar.

The collapse of its core unravels whatever sabotage the sun suffered. The
initial flare hits the Wizard like a flood of ice water. A shocking wash of
illumination, _clean_ and _pure_ and _cold_, tearing his grip and carrying
him in its wake. Its all he can do to stay in the shockwave's crest,
_tossed_ through the heliosphere like flotsam on the tide. Only when the
force of the supernova finally spreads thin is he capable of kicking-out
safely.

He drifts in blackness, letting his aching muscles drink in the echoes of
distant constellations. A spreading waft of ash sticks to him as it passes.
Grimy. Grey. Lifeless. The cremated remains of half a dozen worlds.

He can't afford to wait. He refines what starlight he's collected. He dives
back into the corpse of the system. He goes straight at Genovefa.

Genovefa's mutilated form falls away from space-time, away from everything,
retreating down a self-created gravity well. The Wizard chases down after
her. Time shreds in their backwash. Light dilates into hellish crimsons.

She senses him. She curls up, trying to shield her beating core. Faster and
faster, falling into extended nothingness. Landmasses shed off her, leaving
her exposed and liquid.

The Wizard pushes at her faster. Wrapping speed around him, his shield
rifles and reddens.

She punches down and _farther_ down. Into impossible amounts of gravity.
Super-compressed reality hugs her tightly.

The Wizard opens a warp-tunnel and pushes in. It opens where _all_
direction ends up in this plunging pit; he bursts within her spinning core.
A crushing, beating ball of fluid nickel.

Embedded in the centre, tangled in flowing veins of naked gold, his Cosmic
Crown. He grasps hold of it.

The fluid nickel pulses once. Then it relaxes. And stops.

Gravity deflates. Weight falls away, and the pit starts to lazily float
upward, back toward normal space. Genovefa's liquid shape shudders, and
goes cold. Reality unknots, her magma cools and quickly hardens. She
crumbles apart as blackened charcoal.

He uses the Crown to call its now-freed twin. Out of the carbon blackness,
a sliver of white light slips toward him. Like an arrow, blooming into a
soft blanket barbules. With his free hand, he _takes_ it.

The last of seven. _Finally_.

## NEXT ISSUE

The secret origin of space-greed!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.eyrie.org/pipermail/racc/attachments/20170805/e2834647/attachment.html>