Demiurge

The Demiurge is more than a hundred miles from stem to stern, nigh ten times the length of the mightiest Imperial dreadnought, large enough to fit every person on Gododdin aboard and capable of destroying suns. Its exterior is like a spike of adamant and obsidian edged in red fire, with terraces, buttressed nacelles, a cyclopean hull, mighty windows of alumglass, statued terraces, and machicolations. Huge sculptures of men and gods serve as buttresses and pylons. The hull is adamant, with a Boschian design of blackened statuary, gargoyles, and gargantuan sculptural forms. Lesser towers connect by arched bridges and flying buttresses. Its unique geometries render it nearly invisible from the space beyond time, giving off very little heat and reflecting almost no light.

Built at Red Star Foundries, Lasaia, over long millennia. Its outer corridors spiral in a corkscrew pattern, making the ship effectively transparent to Watcher sight. The superstructure functions as a Faraday shield.

A vast arsenal runs for miles along its meridian, housing more than a hundred weapons including the Bleteira, a gamma-laser projector, Albedo, the Astrophage, the Voidmaker, the Darklight, the Archon Sica, and Artemision. Additional armaments include the Crucible Beam, gun turrets, magnetic acceleration weapons, laser cannons, maser beams, missile batteries, drone craft, and photonic mines. The ship bristles with turrets and guns.

Three antimatter fuel reservoirs power the ship. Shields can hold against a star's corona. Plasma intake collectors at the rear, each more than a mile wide, flood fuel tanks with stellar plasma for antimatter production.

An interior garden with a faceted glass roof (perhaps the greatest single sheet of alumglass in existence), a reflecting pool, purple lilies, cherry trees, statues, caryatids, telamons, Gothic black walls, and a barrow containing graves for Valka, Orphan, Kharn Sagara, and Ramanthanu runs along the middle. The bridge features towering windows, a holography well at floor level, a dais with a captain's seat, an iron pilot's throne, a great rear frieze described as an obscene sculpture, a forward window, and pale lamps lighting colonnades. Seven spin sections run along its length. Greenhouses run for miles. Tram tracks and lifts thread throughout.

The ship has a vast spherical machine core containing more than forty thousand square cubits of neural membrane in living curtains -- the ship's brain. Self-replicating uthras defend and maintain the ship. Hundreds of shuttles with living wills are housed aboard (dispatched to safety before the ship's destruction). The ship is large enough to carry an Imperial battle fleet in its holds. A sub-intellect speaks with Kharn Sagara's machine voice; the ship's daimon also has a coolly feminine voice. The brig cells are Faraday cages. The ship travels faster than any Imperial vessel or Cielcin worldship.

A medical surgery, a medica ward, cubicula capable of holding millions in fugue, a carillon, a holography suite, a chapterhouse, a gallery, and a docking bay with doors engraved with a scene of a dragon writhing amid a city of square towers are aboard. One spin section roughly ten miles across houses a Danuan village with an artificial lake and a false sun. The ship contains watery depths in which the Danuans have made their home. Fuel cells are mighty as ships.

A tower extends perpendicular to the axis of thrust more than two miles above the outer hull. The ship uses internal telegraph communications and is hollow, with Voidmaker stored within. Hull defense weapons are aboard.

The Demiurge is described as a glorious, beautiful, terrible, and sublime creation -- the culmination of all man's striving, a Babel built by machines of Babel themselves, an empire in motion, with tower upon tower, battlement upon battlement, battery upon battery.

The Demiurge was designed by Kharn Sagara and built over long millennia at Red Star Foundries, Lasaia, possibly as a replacement for Vorgossos.

The ship first appears when Hadrian Marlowe encounters it en route to the Obdurate, serving as a diplomatic summit venue. When Kharn Sagara is killed, the ship's systems cease; when Kharn is reborn, the Demiurge wakes and departs. During the assault on Vorgossos, the Demiurge enters the orbital battle and scatters the Latarran fleet. Hadrian claims the vessel with Orphan as pilot. Docking bay C-31 is destroyed in a shuttle-bomb attack.

Hadrian conceals the Demiurge near Forum, then reveals it at Tenba. On emerging from warp above Danu, Orphan fires the Darklight cannons and destroys three Cielcin worldships in the first five seconds. The ship orbits Gododdin with three thousand Danuan refugees.

The organic computer membranes are slashed by the Chantry's daimon, leaving the ship unable to jump to warp. At the onset of a Cielcin assault on Gododdin, Orphan carries the Demiurge clear with a short warp jump. The ship fires Darklight, deploys Albedo and photonic mines, and burns clear as Gododdin is destroyed. The Demiurge warps to Cynon.

The Demiurge hangs in the dark between Cynon and the ruin of Gododdin. It sustains two hits from Ararat's weapons -- one to helium tank Beta-Two and one to a rear fuel cell -- before destroying Ararat with Darklight. Its hull defense weapons fire into Aurora's hold on Hadrian's command.

With Orphan dead, no one else can fly the Demiurge. Hadrian Marlowe orders its destruction to prevent the Archontic weapons from falling into enemy hands. A Darklight cannon mounted to the Tempest's outer hull and patched into Tempest's systems fires a beam through the Demiurge's hull, bulkheads, and the Dewar bottle housing the antimatter drive, triggering total annihilation. Only one Darklight cannon is retained, mounted on the Tempest. The ship's black shuttle craft are dispatched to safety before the destruction.

Hadrian Marlowe commanded the Demiurge. Orphan served as pilot until its death. Edouard and Cassandra held command when Hadrian was absent. Ramanthanu guarded the computer core until his death and is buried in the ship's garden. Three thousand Danuan refugees and a Cielcin family were housed aboard. Valka, Orphan, and Kharn Sagara are buried in the garden.