“You are here to witness my glorious victory,” said Big Montrose in a hollow, hearty voice that fooled neither himself, nor his other self. “There is nothing that can endure the output of a star focused into a narrow beam.”
“Nothing we know,” said Little Montrose sourly. “Tell me, Cap’n! What are the rings made out of? You know, those gigantic spinning hoops of infinitely dense material that rotate at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, drawing up the solar plasma into a lased beam? We call it artificial neutronium. What is it made of?”
Big Montrose said, “Sonny, rather than explain things that are way over your head and way out of your price range and way above your pay grade, why don’t we just toast the victory?”
“I toast it when I see it.”
“Skeptical you. Then let us toast her.”
Little Montrose pulled out his hip flask, poured himself a shot of whiskey in the cap that doubled as a chaser glass. “What’s the chance of getting a beer? Shouldn’t drink this straight up if we are on military duty here. Or is wheat and hops extinct?”
Big Montrose said, “We’ve entered a strange and new age. Matter is programmable, thanks to advances Jupiter has released to Tellus. I can have the anything-maker make you whatever we got the raw materials for, including an ersatz beer.”
“Just like the food replicators on Asymptote! When do we get teleport booths?”
“The same day we get faster-than-light unicorns that shoot rainbows out of their butts. We cannot turn anything into anything, but we can turn a lot of things into a lot of other things, and put thinking and talking circuits into nearly all of it.”
“Talking beer? I want to go back to the past.”
“Doesn’t taste as good as the real thing, but, hey—gotta have a drink to salute what we’re fighting and dying for.”
A silent Myrmidon in civilian garb—a shape that looked like a three-legged stool wearing its iron mask on the seat—now brought a beer stein to Little Montrose. The stein was covered with a low-gravity lid of semi-permeable membrane. Little Montrose raised the smaller glass to the titanic version of himself. “To her we drink, for her we pray, our voices silent never!”
The big version raised a mug the size of a bathtub and dropped a frost-covered whiskey glass the size of a bucket into it, glass and all. It fell with dreamlike slowness in the microgravity. “For her we’ll fight, come what may, fair Rania forever!”
The smaller man tossed the contents of the shot glass to the back of his throat, coughed and wiped his eyes and slurped from the beer stein, all before the bigger version took his first tidal-wave-sized sip from the huge mug.
The smaller man coughed again. “No fair you putting my brain into a body that cannot hold its liquor. Damnification!”
Both were silent, and watched through the dome overhead, seeing a line of sparks, glowing at first like embers, then more brightly, scattered here and there in the black sky. For less than a minute, they flamed, dazzling, and went dark.
With no background against which to judge depth, it was not until signals from other instruments orbiting far from Sedna could triangulate on the flare-bursts, and produce a stereoscopic view.
This was a cylinder of destruction wider than the diameter of a gas giant, that had intersected particles of gas, fragments of ice or stone, or comet masses between the size of a baseball and the size of a mountain. Everything within the core beam was not just incinerated, not just vaporized, not just ignited, but annihilated. Each atom of every dust-mote and asteroid exploded into a scatter of electrons, protons, and smaller particles.
Little Montrose was impressed, and let out a long, low whistle.
Big Montrose said, “Roughly five quintillion joules of energy.”
Little Montrose said, “Hope all the worldlets of the Black Fleet are clear of the beam path.”
“That is the plan.”
Even as they watched, the light grew cherry red and dimmed. As planned, after the initial discharge, the beam was spreading and dimming. The beam was now powerful enough to impart acceleration to the worldlets, but not so potent as to obliterate them. One by one, over the next few months, their orbits would carry them into the beam path, and they would begin their long, slow trek toward Cahetel.
The first contingent of the flotilla had been waiting in place, just beyond the deadly core beam, to catch the secondary beam as it spread. Their sails lit up. The worldlets and dwarf planets of the Black Fleet now shined like radiant angels, dazzling, immense, blindingly bright. Cheers came dimly from the other corridors and buried decks of Sedna.
Little Montrose started, embarrassed that he had forgotten he was not alone here, forgotten that the Myrmidons, Swans, and various Firstlings, Hibernals, Nyctalops, Giants and Sylphs and Space-Chimerae were still men, and still cheered at the launch of great and terrible fleets.
He suddenly saw the reason for the optimism of his larger, wiser self.
“I take it all back,” Little Montrose said. “The alien entity is big and smart, that is true. But the Cahetel Mass has made the crucial mistake of being made of matter.”
Little Montrose looked more closely at one of the worldlets which was in transit against the broad sail of another more distant member of the fleet. “Maybe we should keep Pluto and throw the other ones at’em,” he said. “I was always kind of sentimental about Pluto. It was not a planet when we were born. Poor thing, getting demoted like that.”
“No time for sentiment,” said Big Montrose. “I’d throw Jupiter at Cahetel, if I could figure how to rig a lightsail.”
“Strap it to his ring system,” suggested Little Montrose. “And now what?”
“Now we wait,” said Big Montrose. “Smoke’em if you got’em.”
But Big Montrose made no move to light up one of his titanic and odious cigars. Instead, his skin, acre by acre, was going pale as ice, as nanomachines in his bloodstream were placing his cells in biosuspension.
Little Montrose took the time to find a chair and sit down, and he did the same.
6. Upon Reflection
A.D. 24101
“Wake up, sleepyhead!” said Big Montrose in a cheerful voice. He was both smiling and scowling, an odd expression which drew his eyebrows together and turned the corners of his lips up mirthlessly. “You don’t want to miss the whole war! This will be all over but the weeping in four minutes. And a few decades or centuries of hunting down survivors, of course.”
Little Montrose shook the last of the biosuspension frost off his face and hands, and stood up, blinking. He stood up so quickly that in the microgravity he found himself floating awkwardly in midair. The chair politely extended a serpentine—a whip of semi-intelligent self-repairing metal—and drew him back to the deck.
Little Montrose was confounded to see a serpentine here, a technology invented by the Sylphs, and used in later ages by the Chimerae as weapons, events so far in the past that only he had living memory of them. The serpentine really was a plateau technology, it seemed. Like the shape of an axhead or shiphull, it would never need improvement.
The screens that thronged the dome showed the views from various elements of the fleet of worldlets. Sedna was currently near the rear of the flotilla, which occupied a doughnut-shaped volume. The flotilla had traveled roughly one hundred twenty light-minutes in the last two years, while the Cahetel entity had approached fifty-two thousand light-minutes closer to the Solar System. On an astronomical scale of a battlefield larger than solar systems, they could hardly said to have moved from their initial positions.
Little Montrose wondered, not for the first time, what kind of minds, with what kind of psychology, could grasp these astronomical distances and make plans along such astronomical intervals.
Pluto was the most forward of the planetary flotilla, and had polarized her mighty sails during the last month, to give her surface observatories a clear view of the enemy. Spending two years in the penumbra of the solar beam had heated her surface elements and formed an atmosphere, and the crewmen aboard Pluto had emerged to cover the lee hemisphere of the planet, the side facing the Sol’s beam, with gardens and arbors.