The main barrel of the big gun shot a 914mm exploding shell, weighing one and a quarter tons, that could easily break the dome, and expel one and all of the men he faced, and himself, into outer space. The secondary emitter slung underneath the main barrel was rated for projection in the million-volt range.
Big Montrose was not steadying the weapon with his other arm because his other arm was in a sling. The microscopic machines in his bloodstream for weeks would not be done repairing the special substances he used for bone material.
He and one of the officers of the central Admiralty of the Myrmidons, a memory line named Superintendent of the First Elite Process, had had a falling out, and the Superintendent had been unwise enough to mention Princess Rania during the discussion. Some echo of the memories of Blackie, perhaps lacking Blackie’s diplomatic polish, had led the Superintendent to say that the marriage to Princess Rania was irregular, hence invalid.
“Pestiferous gods of Hell!” Montrose had replied. “You dare speak her holy name?”
The two had decided to settle the argument in the old-fashioned way.
It turned out that the Myrmidons had enough of Blackie’s memories and personality characteristics that the custom of dueling was common and respected among them. The duels were allegedly a matter of prestige among the more “limpid” of the Myrmidons, that is, ones who had or claimed to have more of Del Azarchel’s original memories, tics, tastes, and habits. But the duels which began with such formality and punctilio usually ended in brawls involving swordsticks, bolos, biforks, railguns, splatterguns, splitguns, and eventually explosives and energies that penetrated hull and killed whole companies and barracks in a frenzied surge of decompression.
The Superintendent was dead, and all his memory-clones committed seppuku, and Montrose, albeit victorious, was not yet recovered. Perhaps Montrose should not have fought a second duel with the dead man’s adjutant officer while still recuperating in a hospital coffin, bracing the barrel on the edge of the coffin and holding it steady with his feet. The powder-burns on his feet still pained him, and his slouch, resting his shoulder on the control rack behind him, was to keep his weight off his feet.
Ironically, it was because rather than despite these wounds that Montrose looked relaxed and casual, almost as if the mutineers were not worth the effort of raising his weapon to his shoulder.
Low-level Myrmidons would have lacked the normal human subconscious reactions to matters of poise and posture, nor been able to read expressions, but the higher-level Myrmidons, the generalissimos and grandees gathered here, were closer to Del Azarchel’s neural architecture, and hence closer to a basically human set of personalities and habits. The casual lean and lazy one-handed grip of Montrose, and also his sheer size, unnerved them.
He not only looked impossibly nonchalant, he looked splendid, like a warlord from the nigh forgotten past—but not forgotten by the Del Azarchel memories.
Montrose sported a huge bicorn hat with an eagle of gold in the center of the cockade. On his shoulders were epaulettes of steel. He wore a long blue single-breasted coat with ten ball-buttons of luminous gold, embroidered with froggings on the breast and chevrons on the sleeves, and all the hems stiffened with wire drawn from black murk and gold logic diamond, and matching designs on his trousers. Beneath this were tall black boots with bright gold cuffs.
To culminate the effect, he was wearing, in conformance with firing range regulations, a pair of mirrored goggles polarized against his muzzle flare and electrical beam weapon backscatter; and he was smoking, in defiance of air circulation regulations, a cigar longer than a tall man’s coffin. The cigar’s ring gauge was upward of 660. It was as if a smokestack dangled from his sneering lip.
Big Montrose was standing in front of the manual control rack to erect the lifting cable. The dome overhead was made of some material, neither liquid nor solid, which would part around solid objects passing through it, as if to them it were insubstantial as a curtain of rain, but conform so tightly to any shape passing slowly through, that its electrostatic edges could repel air molecules and keep them within.
Visible beyond this magically solid and unsolid dome, a large silvery balloon made similarly of a substance and a state of matter that had not existed when Montrose was young, was tethered to an ion-drive tug. This was a barge that consisted of little more than a biosuspension balloon holding an atmosphere. It was slow, but could return the deserters to the inner system in a century or less. It was their hope of escape.
The hundred-foot fall from balcony to diamond floor was not what was making the Myrmidons hesitate. The drop in microgravity would hardly have jarred their knee motors.
No, the hesitation had a different source. The larger Montrose was saying in a patient drawl, “I will personally take great pleasure, gentlemen, obliterating any man jack of you that steps down off that balcony. Ah”—It was at this point in time that the smaller Montrose slid to a stop near the toe of the immense black boots.—“looks like reinforcements are on their way. You know what kind of weapons I can train on this spot.”
One of the Myrmidons spoke. “No signals pass into or out of this place. Hence, no remote weapons can target us.”
Montrose said, “Maybe so, maybe no. My other versions of me might always toss a blockbluster-sized wad of jellied petrol here, and blow everything to stinking perdition. You think they won’t? All the little me’s have my curly-wolf cold-hearted killing personality, but there weren’t not no room to install my kindly nature. Atrocious little buggers, them. Either way, your brain signals will not leave this place, if you all die here.”
He paused to let that sink it, and shifted his massive and stinking cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Oh, sure,” he continued thoughtfully, “you may have twins and backups and earlier versions of yourself on some of the other planets of the Black Fleet. But none of your recent memories, none of those of you who decided to mutiny, none of that will get out. Because you shut off neural communications as soon as your thoughts started taking mutiny seriously, right? Because you fellers live with each other poking and moiling in each other’s brains all the time, right?
“So that means any twins of you, any memories of you, they will be loyal to me.
“And they know—like you know—that I am damn well going to kill any disloyal members among you.”
The one Myrmidon who had spoken, now stepped forward off the edge and floated to the diamond floor, saying, “We take our base memories from Del Azarchel, our prime, who knows you have not the strength of character to kill without reason. Hence your comment can be disregarded as a deception, as mere bluff.…”
Montrose, without changing the direction of his glance or taking his hand from his immense cannon, leaned and put his boot on the Myrmidon who was speaking, and slowly crushed him to yellow paste beneath his boot. For a moment, the Myrmidon screamed both vocally and on all electronic bands, trying to find a clear channel to send his brain information into another housing. What else he may have said was lost. Montrose ground the bootheel back and forth, collapsing the armored shell of the Myrmidon and popping his braincase and splattering the ground with gray matter from the organic component of the brains.
“I got a good reason and a damn good one.” Montrose slid his foot back, rubbing the boot free of goo on the angled floor clamp of the antenna cable spool. “This is the first time in human history we have a chance to strike back at the Hyades. They have never even bothered to poxing talk to us, we are so low on their evolutionary scale.