Press Any Key To Destroy The Galaxy Read online

he flagship "Don't Make Me Come Over There"

  Jarrl the Conqueror of Galaxies, Emperor of the Seven Nebulas, Master Breeder of the Mighty Jarrlaxian warrior race and renowned Dodecathlete, stepped foot into his ship’s bridge.

  The crew stood up in attention and saluted, limbs and tentacles all firmly in place, hailing the Emperor.

  “At ease,” Jarrl grunted and sat on his commander’s chair. The crew snapped their attention back to their consoles, hard at work.

  The XO hurried to the emperor’s side, presenting his datapad. “Sir, the status reports,” he said.

  “Are we on schedule?” the emperor asked, hinting that any delay would mean someone’s lineage would be culled from the race. The XO had no fear of that, he was the finest officer in the whole fleet, right-hand man to the Emperor, taking care of the flagship’s issues with a spotless record.

  “The supermassive black hole Fornax A is being shipped as we speak, Sir,” the XO replied firmly.

  “Good,” the Emperor said and smiled, with a satisfied crouch in his chair. “Was there any problem convincing the system’s Ruler to part with their black hole?”

  “Only at first. The diplomatic team says they were concerned about environmental issues and some time-dilation problems. But their main issue was losing their radio source, which is the black hole itself.”

  The Emperor spun his eyes at his XO with mild interest. He had a scar over his eye, which could be removed of course with plastic surgery, but the Emperor had decided to keep. He thought it made him look scary. He was right. “How did they handle it then?”

  “Fornax A is the fourth-brightest radio source in the sky. Apparently the civilisations in the galaxy around it have become accustomed to the frequencies. We offered to migrate the entire race of screeching leeches to a planet near the galaxy’s centre, to imitate the effect the black hole had.”

  “Send someone to oversee the project,” the Emperor waved away. “My word is my bond.”

  The XO tapped away and signed the order documents, reassigning an officer to it. He would have to capture all of the screeching leeches, ship them to the galaxy Fornax A, terraform a planet to a nice, warm, filthy bog, and train them to screech at exactly 1400 MHz. It was a fate worse than death.

  He mulled over it for a moment, then remembered an officer that had spilt his drink on him by accident.

  He would do nicely.

  The XO grunted with malice and sent the order away.

  The Emperor leaned forward, overseeing the crew’s consoles.

  “Sir, we are being hailed,” the communications officer said, almost yelling out the words from anxiety.

  “Put it on our screen,” the Emperor ordered and looked up at the big view.

  A serpentine face showed up, dressed in fancy garments and carrying a sceptre.

  “Sarrl,” the Emperor hissed, gritting his teeth at his nemesis. “Do I finally have your surrender?”

  “Jarrl,” the face on the screen hissed back. “How long till the fact of, ‘immovable object’ goes through that thick skull of yours?”

  “There is no such thing in reality. Hide behind that barrier all you like. I will get through.”

  The Sarrlaxian race, the only real opposing force left to the Jarrlaxians, had been forced to retreat to its home galaxy after the horrific losses at the battle of the constellation Aquila, or how it’s most commonly known, the Booze Cloud. Their scientists had managed to erect a seven-dimensional barrier that enveloped their home galaxy in a crystal-like casing. They claimed it was a true immovable object. Jarrl had laid siege to it for a thousand years, bringing his whole armada to blast it out of the sky.

  Up until now, the immovable object stayed true to its name.

  The Emperor gave his nemesis a grim smile and said, “Kiss your loved ones goodbye. Kiss your wives and your daughters, for I will bring the fury of the Cosmos down on your pathetic barrier and kill everything inside it.”

  “You madman! Whatever scheme you have come up with this time, I’m sure it will wipe that smile off your face when it fails again,” Sarrl said and closed the connection, leaving the bridge’s screen black.

  Jarrl rubbed his hands together.

  The XO puffed his chest and announced, “The black hole has arrived.”

  The Emperor pressed a button on his chair and addressed his entire fleet, all 2.3 million ships of them. “This is your Emperor speaking. The pieces are in place. It is time to aim the Gamma-ray at those filthy Sarrlaxians and wipe them out, once and for all. Observe.”

  The bridge was thick with tension and sweat. The officers were passing along orders and taking reports from the science fleet on the project’s progress. The science fleet was itself abuzz with transferring the supermassive black hole Fornax A, to the quasar’s position. They had bred an entire race of genius hyperreal beings from scratch, called Shadows, to move the black hole. The Shadows ferried the black hole near the quasar, by intuitive gentle shoves which only they could possibly comprehend.

  The XO read, “Science fleet says the black hole will be in place in 2 minutes.”

  “Give me a fleet view,” the Emperor said and the officer’s hands blurred on his workspace.

  The screen showed an overhead view of the fleet’s positions, in orbit around the quasar. The quasar itself, brighter than any sun, its redshift giving a pleasing warm colour, was spewing out deadly gamma bursts out of its poles at steady intervals.

  Anything caught in the beam’s path would be simply annihilated. The cosmic forces involved exceeded all known charts and meters. The project was coming to its completion after decades of research and unprecedented calculations and invented math.

  Literally anything that could be found in the Jarrlaxian empire had been flung at the barrier, and it simply took it without a dent on its crystalline surface. But now they had a new plan. Jarrl would use a black hole’s gravitational pull, to aim the quasar at the immovable object.

  The Emperor stood up and bellowed, “Prepare to fire the gamma-ray at those filthy Sarrlaxians!”

  The Shadows moved the black hole Fornax A into position with precise tugs, the approach vector pre-picked to put the two massive celestial objects into orbit around one another, disturbing the cosmic balance and pointing the gamma-ray burst on Sarrl’s home galaxy.

  The quasar shifted slowly, as if its light strands were hair floating in water.

  A terrified science officer brought a device with a big red button to the Emperor and crouched down all the way to the floor. “P-p-push the button mighty Emperor, when the quasar aligns.” He hesitated. “Not a moment earlier.”

  The Emperor smiled at this. Surely the work of his trusty XO. He shot an affirming nod at his aide and hovered his hand over the big red button.

  Everything was calculated down to the last molecule. The black hole would be in place in a few seconds, its pull strong enough to move the quasar at a precise angle to spew matter and gamma-rays at the besieged galaxy.

  A micrometeoroid, nothing more than a pebble, sailed through the stars. Nobody knows where it came from, but it’s just one of the innumerable space debris flying around the universe with immense speeds. The pebble drifted through gases and radiation, defied gravity wells and various obstacles, to randomly reach Jarrl’s armada. More specifically, his flagship. More specifically, his bridge section. More specifically, his chair. Of course, the flagship was protected. A layer of shielding was pocked like our Moon, providing passive protection against the small but very real danger of micrometeoroid collisions, the tiny rocks travelling at hurling speeds through the stars.

  But, the precise point this pebble chose to impact had been already hit before. Times two.
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  The pebble shot through the weakened shielding, pierced the hull leaving a hiss of escaping atmosphere, blasted through a few overhead circuits that sparked to their death and hit Jarrl straight to the heart.

  The Emperor groaned, his leg gave way and as he fell he pressed the big red button prematurely.

  Three seconds before the black hole was in place.

  The balance of the cosmic forces was disturbed, the black hole spun and consumed the Shadows who were right at the tipping point of her inescapable maw. The quasar was jerked away but it pushed back, its axis darting around like a terrified eyeball. It ejected its mass of consumed stars. The beam hit a part of the fleet and annihilated it in an instant, then swiped around spraying the rest with scorching gamma-rays.

  Then it swung around like an unattended firehose, its beam destroying everything in its path. The beam fell upon the immovable object, which lit up in rainbow colours like a diamond and then was burned away, winked out like a candle in the dark.

  The screen showed Sarrl’s terrified face again. “What have you done? You maniac, what have you done?”

  Jarrl was tense. He managed to say, “Immovable object my ass.” Then he gurgled blood through his mouth, looked at his nemesis in a mixed expression of agony and triumph, and collapsed on the floor. The XO wailed over his beloved leader.

  The quasar beam swept the Sarrlaxian galaxy, burning away every trace of atmosphere on their planets, leaving them at the fate of their own suns. Then it shifted slowly to the left, and finally stopped moving, fixed in place.

  Straight at the Jarrlaxian home galaxy.

  And this is how, the Jarrlaxian race, their legacy a billion years old and their rule mostly uncontested over ten thousand galaxies, was wiped out by a space pebble.

  The End

  (for now)

  What is Antigravel?

  Upwards and Onwards

  What did you think was the road stop for man to explore the empty reaches of space? Faster than light travel? Interstellar navigation? Time dilation?

  Puh. We beat all that by sheer force of will.

  No.

  It was micrometeoroids.

  Rocks.

  Fucking space rocks.

  Come explore our brand new world of space opera novels in the Antigravel Universe:

  https://www.mythographystudios.com/antigravel/

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