“Well,” Montrose concluded glumly, “if the cart is being chased by wolves, sometimes you throw the smallest kid out so the rest can get away. It ain’t pretty, but that’s life.”
But was it the kind of life he wanted to live?
2. No Reply, No Countermand
A.D. 24097
The message pellets remained bright over the next decade. The cloud was bouncing some sort of beam off them, either searchlights to read them by, or analytical torches to volatize fragments for analysis. It clearly was reading and studying them.
No answer ever came from Cahetel.
During that same decade, Montrose found he had to kill three of the Myrmidon High Command who interfered with the war effort, or who crossed him. Myrmidons had neither families to avenge nor formal laws to forbid such murders, provided they were done with the victim armed, awake, forewarned, and facing you. Eventually he had himself declared Nobilissimus, and that brought the number of challenges and duels down to a manageable level.
Each day, every hour, Montrose expected an imperious command to ring out from beneath the cloud layer of Jupiter, instructing Tellus and the other planetary intelligences to prevent the human races from mounting any opposition to Cahetel.
The call never came. Montrose pondered the silence soberly for many years, and wondered what it meant. He also pondered it while drunk.
But he nonetheless continued with the preparations for the Black Fleet.
3. Fifty Worlds
A.D. 24099
When Montrose was born, there had been eight planets in the Solar System. Two hundred years before that, there had been nine; and two hundred years before that, only six; in antique times, there had been seven, counting the sun and the moon as planets, but not Earth.
During that brief golden age when he had ruled, it had offended the majesty of Nobilissimus Del Azarchel that older generations had more worlds in their Solar System than his, and so the Hermetic Order had decreed any object pulled by gravity into a sphere and greater than 250 miles in diameter was a planet.
Hence from those days onward were there fifty planets in the Solar System, including Ceres, Orcus, Pluto, Ixion, Huya, Varuna, Quaoar, Eris, and Sedna, and many other small, cold, outermost worlds named after small, cold, outermost gods: from Apollyon and Ahriman, through Ceto and Chemosh, Eurynomos and Erlig, to Orcus and O-Yama, to Pwcca and Proserpina and Typhon and Tunrida, and onward.
And schoolboys for many centuries after cursed Del Azarchel whenever they had to memorize and rattle off all fifty names, from Abaddon to Zipacna, no doubt wishing that all the hell gods from the various world mythologies whose names they recited would torment him.
Therefore it was upon the fiftieth planet, and the farthest and the coldest, that the admiralty and forward observation post of the Black Fleet of the Myrmidons was stationed, of old called Sedna, after the Eskimo goddess who dwelt in the sunless deeps of the frigid arctic seas.
This outermost world was far beyond the Kuiper belt, her highly elliptical orbit brushing the inner boundary of the protocometary Oort Cloud, ninety times the distance of Earth to sun, or three times the distance of Pluto. Her year was 10500 Earth years, her surface temperature was four hundred degrees below zero. Her face was a cratered mask of rust, an oxidized form of exotic metals, gallium or titanium, beneath a thin veil of silicon oxynitride and frozen ammonia, where no oxygen ever should have existed to combine with them. Sedna was suspected to be the remnant of a perished world from a warmer clime.
It suited Montrose perfectly as the far and final outpost of his long war against the invader from the Domination of the Hyades.
4. Stand off
Montrose, or several of him, was cut off from his central brain as suddenly and completely as if an aneurysm had blinded him, or robbed him of all feeling in his limbs. He sent electronic shouts back toward his central self, not knowing what was happening but fearing the worst.
The calls went nowhere, bouncing off a security wall impervious to password and override alike.
Other twins of his, farther away, replied to the calls, and all spoke at once. “We’re cut off from the gatehouse.” “Is there anything there? Any damn thing? A poxy janitor camera?” “Nothing. Not a plagued thing! Whatever the Myrmidons wanted to speak to big Me about, they didn’t want anyone outside the gatehouse chamber to hear.”
“Do you think they killed Big Me? Are things that bad?”
“Bad? It’s mutiny. What the hell do you think?”
Fortunately, all of them could all talk and listen at once. “Who is closest?” asked more than one of them. “We need to get in and see what is happening. Who is closest?”
“Me!” The nearest version of Montrose to the gatehouse chamber where his huge main body stood was a man-sized semi-independent remote used for astronomy watch. He was already leaping in long loping parabolic arcs down the tall crystal corridors of logic diamond which ran to all points beneath the rusty surface of cold Sedna. The gravity was weak, and the corridors were ten times as high as they were wide.
Taking up that heavy amulet of red metal that contained the launch codes for all the deadliest weapons he commanded, little Montrose sprinted toward the last known position of himself. Montrose could glide for hundreds of yards, kicking off the deck at the end of each leap.
He came suddenly into the central command dome through a hatch somewhere near the height of Big Montrose’s knee. Even when within line-of-eyesight with his larger self, he could not reestablish mind-to-mind electroneural contact. All the communication barriers were up, and all the gems’ bright input ports dotting the gaudy uniform of the huge body were snapped shut.
Little Montrose came through the hatch too suddenly to stop his forward motion. He fell in a long, slow arc, and struck, bounced, and struck the ice-smooth deck. He was in the midst of the no-man’s-land, slipping in microgravity across the floor of logic diamond before he could stop himself. Sliding like a clumsy penguin on his buttocks, he saw above him and behind.
It was a no-man’s-land because he was between the battle lines. Behind him, on a semicircular balcony running halfway around the dome, the dark and streamlined armor of the Myrmidons stood, weapons ready, and motionless as machines on standby. Their iron masks were all carried on the front of their helmets, as if they were humans. Their eye lenses were in their breastplates because their brains were in their chests. The ones who had additional brains in their bodies had additional masks on the back of their helmets, or on their epaulets.
The gold material of their logic-crystal bodies beneath the armor assumed the standardized bipedal humanoid form of the military. Even after all these years, even in space, the gear and weapons of the armed forces followed antique models, as it was easier to command the soldiers to assume identical proportions than it was to change the shapes of triggers and boots and cockpits and the height of doorknobs and control glasses.
That was behind him. Before him, the one-hundred-ninety-ton body of the central version of himself loomed. In the gravity of Sedna, titanic Montrose was only about eight thousand pounds, and with the specially designed muscles and reinforced bones of his larger body, he could stand upright without any exoskeleton, with only a fifty-foot-tall walking stick to lean on.
Except he was not leaning on it. Except it was not a walking stick, not anymore. The sights and trigger had unfolded from the old fashioned smart metal of the wand and the multiple barrels and launchers and emission apertures had opened.
Montrose was resting the fifty-foot-long barrel propped in his one good hand on the apex of the sixty-foot-high launch house directly under the zenith of the dome. This launch house was a metal box holding a wide, squat spool designed to be catapulted into space, unwinding a lifting cable that could reach above the pathetic few hundred yards to Sedna’s geo-synchronous altitude. The spool at the end of the fully extended line would act as the counterweight to the miniature space elevator. Of course the launch house was placed in the only spot where the surface-wide planetary armor was pierced with a dome.