Del Azarchel fell some ten feet to the soil, which was covered with a leafy mold that would have broken his fall even in full gravity. He twisted in midair to land in a crouch and a spray of leaf muck expanding from his boots. His green eyes blazed like the eyes of a wolf, full of murder, and he drew two liquid knives from his sleeve. The blades slithered into their full extension and changed state from liquid to solid with a snap of noise.
“You shall die for that affront!” he said with a smile. There was blood on his teeth. “Whenever the better angels of my nature urge that I should spare you, always you contrive some further indignity.”
“Pox you.” Montrose sneered. “You were rutting about with the machinery while I slept. What’d you expect?”
With no answered word, Del Azarchel leaped up the ten feet—not a difficult jump in the low gravity—and drove the blades toward Montrose, cutting him deeply along the left forearm that Montrose had raised to block. Montrose grabbed Del Azarchel’s right wrist as the blade sought his throat. The momentum carried them both off the branch and into one of the many decorative pools that dotted the garden. As they fell, the blade that Montrose was holding away from his throat suddenly elongated, driving its point inward.
The water rose up slowly and oddly in the low gravity, more like oblate balloons than like a natural splash two men striking the surface should have made. As the water closed over them both, Montrose felt the blade enter him and begin to hoax the cells touched, spreading the command to enter hibernation.
His throat turned white, and his nervous system shut down, forcing him to use his molecular-based nanotech brains scattered throughout his body as a backup.
Over and over in the liquid the combatants tumbled, blood and hibernation fluids staining the medium. Montrose was unable to draw his pistol, since both hands were involved in the clench, but he could send an electric signal from his brain to the firing mechanism, to turn off the shielding and fire. It was an old-fashioned magnetic linear accelerator or caterpillar drive gun, and the expended slug struck Del Azarchel in the foot, removing his big toe; but, more importantly, the electromagnetic pulse from the unshielded firing charge scrambled the brains in Del Azarchel’s daggers, turning them both into limp whips of metal and preventing any more signals from the dagger blade from interfering with Montrose’s internal tissue command structure.
Unexpectedly, the water between the two of them grew thick like mud, solidified, and threw the two of them apart. Both regained their feet. They stood on opposite sides of the pond, near the lip, where it was shallow, Del Azarchel with a metal whip in either hand, Montrose with one hand hanging useless at his side, white and coated with blood, the other holding a glass pistol pointed squarely at Del Azarchel’s head.
“When I decide you need a beating,” said Montrose, “you’ll take it and like it and ask for more!”
“Or what, you subhuman cur? You’ll kill me? We have already agreed on that. It is you who broke the truce between us, not I! My honor is clean!”
“You are up to something, you sneaking spore mold! What were you doing?”
“Scientific research. I was broadcasting my brain information ahead to various points in the Praesepe Cluster, attempting to make contact with the Domination here. If we are to continue, I would like parity of weapons.”
Montrose looked surprised, and looked down at the glass pistol in his hand.
“You have the advantage,” Del Azarchel continued. “I expected you to use a firearm against a man without, but your use of the water here is cowardly.” Montrose saw that the fluid had solidified around Del Azarchel’s legs. “It is understandable that you programmed the objects in the ship to protect you from me.”
“My aunt Bertholda’s scrofulous uvula I did! As if I needed help with a loathsome egomaniacal persistent pandemic pest like you!” He thrust his pistol back into his sash. “Twinklewink! Release him! And put his toe back on while you are at it. Why did you break up the fight?”
A tiny glittering wisp of light glowed from behind a leaf dangling from the low-hanging knotwork of vast trunks and branches overhead. “Captain, I ordered the motile elements in the nanofluid to part you because of your order.”
Del Azarchel arched an eyebrow and delivered a scornful look at Montrose. “I admit I am surprised to have caught you in a lie. This seems somewhat out of character, Cowhand. You are usually too dull to fib.”
Montrose gritted his teeth. “Dammit! I want you dead, but I can’t have you thinking ill of me. I did not give that order!”
Del Azarchel said, “No one else can give orders to the ship but you.”
Montrose said, “Twinklewink! Why did you say I gave that order?”
The leaf moved, and a tiny fairy figurine peered out. Her voice was high and sweet. “I have double-checked with my two backup and parallel sister systems, Glitterdink and Dwinkeltink, and the identification is not in error, despite a margin of divarication. It was clearly you who gave the command.”
Montrose glanced at Del Azarchel, from long habit looking to see if his rival had figured out the puzzle before he did. And Del Azarchel, who had the same habit, was glancing uneasily at him. Each saw the bewilderment in the other man’s face, almost a look of wonder, or fear.
Montrose said, “Point to the spot where I was standing when I gave the order.”
2. Stained-Glass Dyson Sphere
The little fairy figurine raised her tiny wand and pointed away from both of them, at the carpet of twigs and fantastically curled branches blocking the forward hull. As she pointed, dozens of other little darting fairies erupted from nearby clouds or beehives and danced across the branches and trunk segments, turning them white as ice, and a moment later, pulled them apart like a curtain.
The branches fell aside, revealing a glittering vista of space: occupying more than half of the visible universe was a giant curve composed of thousands and tens of thousands of overlapping translucent plates colored like stained glass, rose and crimson, scarlet and blood-red, lilac and lavender, fulvous gold, emerald and smaragd. Only after a moment could the overall shape be discerned: All the plates in their fleets and flotillas were perpendicular to an unseen central sun. Each rectilinear plate was a few hundred miles on a side, a few microns thin, albeit a few were much thicker, and had atmosphere and hydrosphere inside their hollow interiors, as well what might have been manufactories, energy stations, temples, radio houses, quays for docking shuttles. The clouds of plates were not orbiting at the same rate, but were arranged in concentric globes at various distances from the star. A nimbus of crepuscular rays poured out where the colored plates swarmed less thickly and glittered against what might have been escaping particles of gas or winged tools no larger than particles rushing to unknown tasks.
Where a gap in the plates occurred, the rose light of a hotter interior could be glimpsed, with a smaller and tighter curve of orbiting plates within, blue and blue gray, orbiting at an Earth-like distance to the star, and in its gaps, another even deeper, purple and indigo, perhaps the radius of the orbit of Venus.
In the middle distance, orbiting the great sphere at the same altitude as the vessel and off her bow, hung a ringworld the size of the orbit of Mercury. Five planets, large as Earth, orbited the ring as shepherding moons. Two of the satellites were volcanoscapes of rusty soil and ice the color of dried blood; two others were black like burned coals. But the final one was a jewel of beauty: a blue world of white clouds, with the lights of cities shining gemlike on the hemisphere facing away from the sun. The flocks of colored plates had been made thin here so that a beam from the central sun, like a spotlight, was striking that blue planet. From the x-ray emissions, it was clear that an invisible, perhaps microscopic, neutron star hung at the dead center of the turning ringworld, and the ring material itself shielded the five planets surrounding it, for they all orbited in the plane of the x-ray shadow.