“And you see, I’ve been wondering for, oh, eleven thousand three hundred and one years now if I did the right thing by selling mankind into slavery and letting Blackie’s Jupiter Brain experiment and torture and breed the majority of man into freakish little suicidal sexless morts like you.
“I felt rather low about all that. I keep thinking Rania won’t like it when she finds out.
“But, Judas hopping on hotplates in Hell, if’n I do this, if I drive the shepherds away and free the sheep to roam as we’d like, well, I reckon that even Jupiter Brain will see no point in meddling with human history no more, and leave all the lower folk to mind their own business their own way.
“We get to kill all tyrants, foreign and domestic, with this one shot. Is Blackie’s personality really that chickenpoxed, that y’all flinch now?
“The Hyades maybe might not kill you, since they don’t love you like I do, but I surely will kill anyone else who crosses that line, or crosses my cherubic good temper.”
With all the electronics blocked, the Myrmidons could not speak among themselves without making noise. Big Montrose could overhear the first, since his ears were larger than an elephant’s, and his ear hairs as small and as fine as could fit into the wide spaces of his inner ear, giving him a range both higher and lower than normal human.
The Myrmidons, knowing this, did not bother to whisper. “Brother, we outnumber him. He is two and we are many. He cannot kill us all before we reach and deploy the elevator.…”
Little Montrose drew his sidearm, dialed it to induction field, and swept it back and forth over the control rack Big Montrose leaned against. The rack contained the energy cells controlling the deployment winches of the space elevator. The electrostatic charge danced over the cells with a spectacular display of pyrotechnics, and the cores melted into the gearbox. For good measure, Little Montrose splashed some hooch from his hip flask into the power cell bank, just so that puddles and flying drops of alcohol would flare up with a blue fire, and add to the general smell and smolder. Then he took a drink and pocketed the flask again.
Big Montrose (who had leaned in alarm away from the burning control rack) was grinning so hard that his cigar flicked upward like a gun being raised in salute. “Get back to your pestiferous goddamn posts, my good gentlemen. We have an alien invasion fleet to incinerate.”
5. Jiminy Cricket
The Myrmidons, in less dignity than perhaps they wished, had retreated. Regulars from other branches of the Myrmidon memory heritage, and militia of Firstlings (including incarnations from channels of the Telluric Noösphere more clearly loyal to Montrose) now occupied cross-corridors within the world-fortress of Sedna and within nodes within the planetary infosphere.
Montrose—both of him—was unwilling to leave the spot beneath the dome, as it was still the only location by which the Myrmidons could physically depart. But Big Montrose was weary, and had programmed the floor to assume the shape of a wide bowl or tub, now filled with salt water so salty it was practically mud. Into this the vast, groaning, naked body was lowered, and his bandaged arm was soaked, and his wounded feet.
Little Montrose, the same who had rushed in to aid him, was perched on the tentlike hills of cloth of the discarded uniform, watching the Sedna mind through her myriad remote-gauntlets (ranging in size from microscopic to serpentine limbs as thick as tree trunks) undo the damage he had done to the cells and gearboxes of the space elevator launch system.
Big Montrose grunted, by which he meant, “Where is the countdown at?”
Little Montrose held up his pinky and thumb, the spacer’s hand sign for six, by which he meant, “If everything is on schedule, the Solar Beam was ignited at Sol six hundred minutes ago. Five days and change. In half an hour, the beam should pass through this area of space, and we will see the Black Fleet start to accelerate.”
The fifty worlds of the Black Fleet formed a rough ring or toroid hanging in space. This armada ring could be seen on instrument screens lining the balcony rail below the dome. Their sails, tens of thousands rather than merely hundreds of miles in diameter, were deployed, spread by pressure beams radiating from the worldlets, and from this angle, fifty images of the sun could be seen gleaming in their mirrored surfaces.
“That’s assuming there was not a successful mutiny at the solar station,” continued little Montrose, speaking more in implications than in words. “The images we are getting now from the telemetry tower show the Montrose there still seems to be in command, as of four days ago. If he was overthrown, we will find out when the beam does not come.”
“Or if the core beam hits the world-ships and obliterates them,” observed Big Montrose sourly.
The operation plan was to have the core beam pass through the center of the armada ring, and carry the main destructive force to the enemy. The secondary beams surrounding this core, emitted at far lesser energies, were meant to act as acceleration pressure for the sails. Nothing known to or theorized by human science could endure for a microsecond within the action of the core beam.
“You don’t think the mutineers would go that far?” Little Montrose said, or implied. “The Myrmidons asked us to do this. To make war on the Hyades invader.”
“Well, considering that they asked us two thousand years ago, back when Earth life was still mostly living on the surface, maybe they changed their semi-collective mind. And, more important, back then I was just the senior civilian advisor to the Myrmidons. That was three coups d’état, two century-long worldwide riots, and one intercontinental war ago. Now I got Blackie’s old job, and I am the Master of the World in all but name, and even though in theory I still report to the Myrmidon High Commission to Lesser Races, and they in theory take orders from Jupiter. And Jupiter ain’t given no orders to no one for a thousand years, and no one, not Tellus, and not Selene, can figure out what he’s up to. If Jupiter gave some secret signal to the mutineers, made a deal with them, who knows? I been the smartest man on the planet for so long, I ain’t got the first clue how to act or how to think now that there is something out there smarter than me. Two things, counting Tellus. In half an hour, something will happen. Who the hell knows what?”
“And if the beam lights up as planned?”
Big Montrose gestured at the screens. The images showed the fifty worlds of the Solar System, all the smaller ones, including Ceres and Pluto and his own transplutonian worldlet of Ixion. The orbs had been converted into electrophotonic brains of golden nanotechnological Aurum with small black cores of copied picotechnological murk. All were crewed with additional biological brains of the Myrmidons, housed in independent bodies or wired into the mind core as duty and convenience dictated. Some had additional crew of First Men, Hibernals and Nyctalops, or squads of Chimerae, Giants, and Sylphs woken from ultra-long-term archives. One or two boasted Second Men advisors and observers, the eerie and solitary Swans.
For two thousand years mankind had been living in austerity, conserving nine-tenths of the energy budget of their civilization so that there would be enough power at hand to ignite the beam.
Even so much energy was merely the spark plug compared to the energy output of the alien rings of artificial neutronium that created the beam itself, drawing directly from the pressurized plasma beneath the surface of the Sun. But the earthly energy was needed to accelerate the rings to the space-distorting Einsteinian rotations needed for them to function.
The rings were focused to a point beyond the heliopause, along the incoming path of the Cahetel cloud, at a distance of one lightyear. On this scale, that was point-blank range.