“What is the, ah, more efficient strategy you advocate for Hyades cooperation?”
The centaur said in a voice like a hunting horn: “Fight to the last man, and die in the breach.”
Montrose did not bother to hide his expression of shocked stupidity. His eyes did not bulge out only because they were so deep set, but he stared, speechless.
The centaur held up its gauntlets and said, “We are come to plead: Lead us. Inspire us, advise us!”
The biped added coolly, “We know, beyond doubt, that you can be trusted to fight and to defy the Hyades. Our own master, Del Azarchel, whose echoes linger in the Jupiter Brain, we do not know beyond doubt.”
Montrose said, “But you think the Jupiter Brain will permit opposition?”
The serpent spoke, “Despite being incomprehensible, Jupiter is rational, surely. The Cold Equations determine what they determine. If it is more efficient to resist than to submit, then that efficiency will prevail even in the multidimensional labyrinths of nested mental ecologies forming the intellect of Jupiter.”
“You hope so,” said Montrose sardonically.
The wheel, in a voice as mechanical and emotionless as it had used before, said, “We cannot live without hope. Are we not men?”
Montrose began slowing down the rate of rotation of the carousel on whose walls this chamber and all the curving corridor before it and behind it rested. The joke of maintaining an Earth-like environment had palled on him. He saw now that his next few centuries would be spent in space.
When the centrifugal force had dropped to half Earth’s gravity, he stood, letting tentacles and bars of the logic crystal (which was, after all, just as much a part of him as his own brain) haul him upright.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have more resources to sustain a siege than ever mankind controlled during the First Sweep. This time, we do not pack everyone in the core of the Earth, and wait for the Hyades agent to blot out the sunlight. We use your asteroid homes. We make them all into ships, or warships, or sailing vessels able to maneuver through the interplanetary battle-volume. We fill them with your people, which y’all can multiply like the ants you are named for. Every asteroid with a nickel-iron core, we turn not into a logic diamond, but into solid murk logic, which is more compact. So instead of one White Ship, we will have a ten-thousand-ship Black Fleet, a glorious fleet! We get more minor planets from the Kuiper Belt, and look around for moons any Gas Giants ain’t using.”
He drew a deep breath, eyes no longer looking at them. He was spellbound with a vision of an entire solar system armed and armored, fortresses larger than worlds, and all the moons and asteroids and meteors streaming like black battlewagons and superdreadnoughts toward the roaring inferno of war.
“I accept the commission and the challenge. I will advise you in an unofficial capacity. I will fight. I’ll do it for her. It will be a fine thing to be alive again.”
Montrose laughed, and it was the laugh of a titan. “By all the pestilence of hell! It will be a damn fine thing to be alive again!”
2
The War of Sol and Ain
1. The Cloud
A.D. 24087
Thousands of years ago, the cloud humans had dubbed Cahetel had been traveling so near to the speed of light that it seemed to earthbound observers to be a disk flattened in the direction of motion, blue-shifted into the cosmic ray band of the spectrum, and so massive that its gravity distorted the image of the star Epsilon Tauri, also called Ain, lying directly behind it.
The exact nature of the beam from Ain, which was pointed directly at Sol, occluded and filtered by passing through the cloud, proved impossible to analyze.
After the cloud passed the halfway mark at seventy-five lightyears, the beam of energy issuing from Epsilon Tauri changed in character, and the cloud began losing mass.
Earthly astronomers were not certain how a starbeam overtaking the Cahetel cloud from astern could be decelerating the cloud. There were many theories, from the sensible to the absurd. One of the more sensible was that the Ain beam was exciting certain volatile particles set aside for that purpose into jets facing forward into the bowshock wave of the cloud. These jets acted as rockets to brake the payload mass of the cloud, and at the same time the payload was polarized to not be affected by the beam, not accelerated further.
One of the more absurd was that that starbeam from Ain was magnetic, and retarding the progress of the cloud, or was made of antigravitons, or some other exotic particle, to act as drag-chute or sea anchor or tractor beam.
No one knew. But the loss of cloud mass as the centuries turned into millennia was more consistent with the absurd tractor beam theory than the sensible polarized beam theory.
The cloud was now slowing for a rendezvous for the Solar System, and had matched Sol’s lateral motion through the interstellar medium in Sol’s long, slow orbit around the galactic core. It was one lightyear away.
Montrose had parked his body somewhere, so that technicians could work on increasing his brain capacity, while his mind roamed the libraries of the Noösphere. From the many instruments of many astronomical satellites and observatories, he could see two sources of energy in and near the cloud. Something was boiling at the center of the cloud, giving off vents of X-ray and infrared radiation. There were also smaller flicks or blurs of light streaking the astronomical image, looking almost like a meteor shower.
Hundreds of pellets, from the size of baseballs to the size of aircraft carriers had been placed in the oncoming path of the Cahetel cloud, surfaces inscribed over with the lines and curves and hieroglyphs both of Monument notation and of the later Cenotaph notation left on the moon by Asmodel.
It was a contact message, explaining in the awkward pantomime language of the Monument and the Cenotaph, that mankind intended to defy Cahetel, to render the prospect of forced deracination to far colonies economically unfeasible according to the Hyades’ own cold equations of interstellar power.
“Well, well,” said Montrose to himself, “our modest message in a bottle. Our own little UNWELCOME mat.” Then, remembering his old facility at Fancy Gap, Virginia, he added,
SOL, HAPPY HOME OF THE HUMAN RACE
—M.I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—
THIS PLACE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE BADDEST
BOLDEST WOLF-HEARTED EAR-BITING SUMBITCH
ON WHICH THE SUN HAS EVER SHONE:
TRESPASSERS KILLED ON SIGHT. NO KIDDING.
NO SOLICITING.
He looked again, through many instruments, at the brightness in the core of the cloud. Every thinking processes causes entropy and sheds heat of some sort, no matter how near-perfect the engineering. The activity in the core may have been Cahetel warming up their judgment engines or thawing out their expert brains to think about the messages Earth had left in the path.
“Actually,” said Montrose to himself, “it is a Little Billy Goats Gruff message, ain’t it? Don’t pick on me. Eat my little brother instead.”
Over Montrose’s objection, the Myrmidon High Commands, many years ago when the capsules had been launched, had insisted on including a star map showing the distance and direction to the surviving colonies at Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis. Montrose had argued, but the amassed minds of the Myrmidons had spread out before him the cliometric codes showing that if Tellus were deracinated, neither she nor Nocturne nor Splendor would survive, whereas if Nocturne or Splendor were looted of their populations, Tellus might survive, therefore the human race. Montrose did not know how to argue against the sharp and clear conclusion of the mathematics.