During that brief golden age when he had ruled, it had offended the majesty of Nobilissimus Del Azarchel that older generations had more worlds in their Solar System than his, and so the Hermetic Order had decreed any object pulled by gravity into a sphere and greater than 250 miles in diameter was a planet.
Hence from those days onward were there fifty planets in the Solar System, including Ceres, Orcus, Pluto, Ixion, Huya, Varuna, Quaoar, Eris, and Sedna, and many other small, cold, outermost worlds named after small, cold, outermost gods: from Apollyon and Ahriman, through Ceto and Chemosh, Eurynomos and Erlig, to Orcus and O-Yama, to Pwcca and Proserpina and Typhon and Tunrida, and onward.
And schoolboys for many centuries after cursed Del Azarchel whenever they had to memorize and rattle off all fifty names, from Abaddon to Zipacna, no doubt wishing that all the hell gods from the various world mythologies whose names they recited would torment him.
Therefore it was upon the fiftieth planet, and the farthest and the coldest, that the admiralty and forward observation post of the Black Fleet of the Myrmidons was stationed, of old called Sedna, after the Eskimo goddess who dwelt in the sunless deeps of the frigid arctic seas.
This outermost world was far beyond the Kuiper belt, her highly elliptical orbit brushing the inner boundary of the protocometary Oort Cloud, ninety times the distance of Earth to sun, or three times the distance of Pluto. Her year was 10500 Earth years, her surface temperature was four hundred degrees below zero. Her face was a cratered mask of rust, an oxidized form of exotic metals, gallium or titanium, beneath a thin veil of silicon oxynitride and frozen ammonia, where no oxygen ever should have existed to combine with them. Sedna was suspected to be the remnant of a perished world from a warmer clime.
It suited Montrose perfectly as the far and final outpost of his long war against the invader from the Domination of the Hyades.
4. Stand off
Montrose, or several of him, was cut off from his central brain as suddenly and completely as if an aneurysm had blinded him, or robbed him of all feeling in his limbs. He sent electronic shouts back toward his central self, not knowing what was happening but fearing the worst.
The calls went nowhere, bouncing off a security wall impervious to password and override alike.
Other twins of his, farther away, replied to the calls, and all spoke at once. “We’re cut off from the gatehouse.” “Is there anything there? Any damn thing? A poxy janitor camera?” “Nothing. Not a plagued thing! Whatever the Myrmidons wanted to speak to big Me about, they didn’t want anyone outside the gatehouse chamber to hear.”
“Do you think they killed Big Me? Are things that bad?”
“Bad? It’s mutiny. What the hell do you think?”
Fortunately, all of them could all talk and listen at once. “Who is closest?” asked more than one of them. “We need to get in and see what is happening. Who is closest?”
“Me!” The nearest version of Montrose to the gatehouse chamber where his huge main body stood was a man-sized semi-independent remote used for astronomy watch. He was already leaping in long loping parabolic arcs down the tall crystal corridors of logic diamond which ran to all points beneath the rusty surface of cold Sedna. The gravity was weak, and the corridors were ten times as high as they were wide.
Taking up that heavy amulet of red metal that contained the launch codes for all the deadliest weapons he commanded, little Montrose sprinted toward the last known position of himself. Montrose could glide for hundreds of yards, kicking off the deck at the end of each leap.
He came suddenly into the central command dome through a hatch somewhere near the height of Big Montrose’s knee. Even when within line-of-eyesight with his larger self, he could not reestablish mind-to-mind electroneural contact. All the communication barriers were up, and all the gems’ bright input ports dotting the gaudy uniform of the huge body were snapped shut.
Little Montrose came through the hatch too suddenly to stop his forward motion. He fell in a long, slow arc, and struck, bounced, and struck the ice-smooth deck. He was in the midst of the no-man’s-land, slipping in microgravity across the floor of logic diamond before he could stop himself. Sliding like a clumsy penguin on his buttocks, he saw above him and behind.
It was a no-man’s-land because he was between the battle lines. Behind him, on a semicircular balcony running halfway around the dome, the dark and streamlined armor of the Myrmidons stood, weapons ready, and motionless as machines on standby. Their iron masks were all carried on the front of their helmets, as if they were humans. Their eye lenses were in their breastplates because their brains were in their chests. The ones who had additional brains in their bodies had additional masks on the back of their helmets, or on their epaulets.
The gold material of their logic-crystal bodies beneath the armor assumed the standardized bipedal humanoid form of the military. Even after all these years, even in space, the gear and weapons of the armed forces followed antique models, as it was easier to command the soldiers to assume identical proportions than it was to change the shapes of triggers and boots and cockpits and the height of doorknobs and control glasses.
That was behind him. Before him, the one-hundred-ninety-ton body of the central version of himself loomed. In the gravity of Sedna, titanic Montrose was only about eight thousand pounds, and with the specially designed muscles and reinforced bones of his larger body, he could stand upright without any exoskeleton, with only a fifty-foot-tall walking stick to lean on.
Except he was not leaning on it. Except it was not a walking stick, not anymore. The sights and trigger had unfolded from the old fashioned smart metal of the wand and the multiple barrels and launchers and emission apertures had opened.
Montrose was resting the fifty-foot-long barrel propped in his one good hand on the apex of the sixty-foot-high launch house directly under the zenith of the dome. This launch house was a metal box holding a wide, squat spool designed to be catapulted into space, unwinding a lifting cable that could reach above the pathetic few hundred yards to Sedna’s geo-synchronous altitude. The spool at the end of the fully extended line would act as the counterweight to the miniature space elevator. Of course the launch house was placed in the only spot where the surface-wide planetary armor was pierced with a dome.
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.
T
he 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.
“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 grinn
ing 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.