The reflected light from the cloud had reached Pluto, from Sedna’s frame of reference, over four hours ago, and the concentrated light from Sol had struck Cahetel a year ago, and took a year to carry the message of what had happened to the observatories on Pluto, which were then relayed to the receivers on Sedna. It was these images Little Montrose raptly watched.
“Space battles would be a lot easier if space was smaller,” muttered Little Montrose.
“Beam impact in ten … nine … eight…” Big Montrose was saying, his eyes fixed on the image of the vast, dark thunderhead of Cahetel. The cloud was irregular, with wispy arms reaching many thousands of miles in each direction. The energy of its deceleration jets, facing toward them, surrounded the whole mass with a spray of nebular discharge paths, glowing blue and blue-white on the upper wavelengths of the spectrum. The whole looked like some freakish flesh-eating blossom of the Amazon river, with a heart of blue and petals of black.
The main mass of the cloud of particles was roughly globular, but since it was four light-minutes in diameter, the trailing hemisphere of the cloud seemed oddly distorted, since the image of the light from the bowshock of the cloud reached the Plutonian receivers four minutes before.
Little Montrose tapped the serpentine still circling his waist, and said. “Hey. You awake? While I was asleep, did anyone ever figure out how Cahetel was decelerating in the middle of an acceleration beam?”
The serpentine said, “Yes. Observers on Pluto, able to detect and analyze short-range discharges, discovered that seven-tenths of the cloud mass are artificial particles such as existed, in theory, during the first three seconds of the universe, and not after. They possess a property called supersymmetry. Such particles were neither electromagnetic, nor neucleonic, nor gravitic, since the forces of the universe had not, before then, been separated into the forces known to the modern universe. The influence of the energy beam from Epsilon Tauri, coming from their stern, breaks the supersymmetrical particles into gravitons and photons and so on in the midst of a super-powerful toroidal magnetic field in the center of the cloud. This acts as a heavy particle accelerator…”
The serpentine helpfully showed him an image on a screen near at hand, the electromagnetic aura of the field throbbing at the center of the cloud, the source of its impossible reverse acceleration.
His eyes bulged, and his jaw dropped. He recognized the characteristics, the magnetic contours. It was a ring of artificial neutronium, a ring wider than the diameter of Earth. It was the same size and shape as the acceleration rings Asmodel had left floating in the surface of the sun. A twin. The energy contour was as identical as the shape of the same snowflake, the same fingerprint.
“POX!” shouted Little Montrose. “Stop the beam! Cease firing! When our beam hits, that thing is going to—!”
Of course, the events he was seeing had happened over a year ago. There was no stopping the solar beam.
“… two … one … Sorry, what were you saying . .?”
The beam struck. The observatory images from Pluto showed what looked like a lance of lightning impaling a storm cloud. The dark mass was suddenly bright with textures and folds of the cloudscape, complex as the folds of a brain cortex. The cloud was as wide as the orbit of Mercury, and even a beam as wide as the diameter of Saturn’s rings was merely a small spotlight playing across the valleys and hills and kraken-armed streamers and films of the cloud mass.
Nonetheless, where the beam touched, there was a point of light brighter than the sun, and an expanding sphere of destruction, and another, and another. The scattering particles ignited like fireworks. The screens tuned to the X-ray and cosmic-ray bands of the spectrum went white and fell blind. On the visible wavelengths and on radar lengths, the cloud expanded like a smoke ring from the playful mouth of a cigar smoker. The core of the cloud was briefly visible. There were five Earth-sized globes inside, coated with dark ice, arranged in a gravitational pattern called a Kempler’s Rosette. In their middle was a ringworld. The globes acted as shepherding moons to stabilize the spin of the ringworld. In the middle of the ring was glittering the star Ain.
For the first time in thousands of years, the star Ain, Epsilon Tauri, was visible to observers within the Solar System without the Cahetel cloud to obscure it. In the screen image, the star seemed as bright as a nova, for its stellar beam was pointed directly at the cameras and recorders of Pluto. But the star was reddened and distorted, surrounded by arcs and smears of light, as the photons shed by stars behind Ain suffered metric warp passing through the ring. The ring was rotating, creating a circular space warp, the frame-dragging effect. Only Ain, in the precise center of the distortion, was undistorted.
The solar beam of destruction glanced across the cloud like the beam of a warship’s searchlight. For a moment, less than a second, it shone straight, an unbent ray. Then, instantaneously, part of the cloud mass imploded, and a volume of particles larger than a gas giant collapsed suddenly into a pinpoint, smaller (so the instruments Montrose saw reported) than the diameter of an atom. This microscopic black hole bent the solar beam, and focused it into the direct center of the spinning ringworld.
But when the beam, charged with all the output of Sol, struck the center of the Cahetel ring, there was a flare of energy that crackled like lightning out from the ring surface, and traveled up the arms of the vents and filmy extensions of the cloud, as if these were antennae.
“I was saying,” Montrose said softly, in a dull, stunned voice, “that the technology the cloud uses for decelerating inside the beam from Ain will allow them to control our beam as well. That is why they did not come in the same shape as the Asmodel entity.”
And then the last thing Montrose could have expected or imagined happened. The cloud vanished, replaced by the peaceful and gleaming stars of empty space. Ain winked brightly in the middle.
Or, rather, it seemed to vanish. It was not the constellation Taurus he was looking at. It was the constellation Scorpio, and the bright star in the middle was not Ain, but Sol, shining with the deadly emission of the solar beam. Montrose shouted for the Sedna Mind to recalibrate and give him a closer view. The serpentine (which was still embracing him) said softly that Sedna was no longer able to answer.
“What the pox is going on, Big Me?”
There was no reply from behind him, but a ghastly smell. He put his hand on the serpentine to turn himself around.
The figure of the larger Montrose still loomed behind him, but his vast skull was on fire. Flares of a sparks, gushes of heat, and smoke were pouring from the holes where once mouth and nose and eye sockets had been.
The black substance of his brain was now running out of the eyes and nostrils and mouth of what had once been Big Montrose and spreading over the surface of his burnt and blackened head, crawling upward and backward. It looked like a flower opening. The black murk coated the globe of the head, and dripped in inquisitive ropes down his neck and shoulders.
The outline of the skull was visible through the coating of creaking black substance, holes like the fingerholes in a bowling ball marking the position of the eye sockets and mouth, which continued to emit fragments and worms of the murk material from which the brain of Big Montrose had been constructed.
The body of Big Montrose, in one last convulsive movement—almost as if the nerves of his arm and hand had been preprogrammed to perform this action if signals from the central brain were cut—gripped a cylinder of metal from his coat pocket, and extended it unsteadily toward Montrose. It was a standardized brain-storage biosuspension unit, bright green metal marked with a red cross. It slid from the dead man’s giant fingers and fell with dreamlike slowness toward the crystal floor of the domed chamber.