The Architect of Aeons (35 page)

“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 No
ö
sphere 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'
é
tat, 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.

“If all goes as planned,” said Big Montrose, “then the first beam impact bathes the Cahetel cloud in radiation, destroying ninety percent of its mass in the first nine seconds of the war. The cloud disperses as fast as it can, and the beam spreads to compensate, becoming less focused and so less potent. Another nine percent of the mass is destroyed during the next two years. Shortly after that, the Black Fleet passes through the area, using their worldlet-based observatories and weapons to detect and destroy the final nine-tenths of one percent. The real task begins then, a long hard war to insure no smallest particle finds other little bits of matter to attach to and convert into picotech substance.

“That one-tenth of one percent will haunt us for years,” Big Montrose continued, “but without matter and without energy, what good is it? Technology is the ability to use units of information to manipulate units of matter-energy into new forms. No matter how high the level of technology, there are Planck limits and Heisenberg limits to how much information can be packed into how small a space—and we can starve any small clouds coming from that remnant, and burn them with the solar beam if they approach closer than Neptune. That gives us an eight-hour sighting and response time, rather than the two-year interval we are dealing with now.”

“You're optimistic,” said Little Montrose.

“Damn right I am!” Big Montrose grinned his alarming gargoyle grin, which looked monstrous when portrayed on a smile several feet wide. “Both Tellus and me have thought through every possible maneuver a decentralized cloud-shaped being could perform. It cannot move faster than the speed of light; it cannot see faster than the speed of light. So the first hint Cahetel can possibly have of our plan, the first thing it sees, is the core beam passing through the heart of the cloud. I don't care what it is, if it is made of matter, made of small particles held in electron clouds around nucleons, held together with the weak and strong nuclear forces, then, by God, it comes apart. There is just too much energy in that beam for anything to absorb it. If it tries to disperse, the outer segments of cloud can only move as fast as their mass can account for if the remaining mass of the cloud is converted to pure energy and used as a perfect fuel—and in any case not faster than lightspeed. We keep opening the cone of the beam to kept the fleeing cloud segments under continuous fire. Hell! We've finally got them! The laws of physics are on our side. No matter how advanced these aliens are, they cannot break the laws of nature!”

“I meant you are
optimistic
by which I mean
idiotic
.”

“How you figure? What do you think you thought which Tellus ain't thought through a zillion times over from every angle?”

Little Montrose said, “If it was that easy for conquered races to fight off the Hyades, they would not be the Hyades. And the Dominion at Praesepe Cluster would not have conquered Hyades and the other dominations. And the Authority at M3 would not have conquered Praesepe and the other dominions.”

“You're a pessimist. Other planets might not organize resistance like this. Or maybe out of every thousand planets, only one gives in without a fight, and we are among the nine hundred ninety-nine that get our backs up and put out claws. Like I said, we thought all this through! Inside and out!”

“All theory. You sound like Del Azarchel.”

“Have some faith in smarter minds than yours.”

“Why am I here, again?” said the little Montrose, with a sour look on his face. “As a pet for myself?”

“To keep me honest, squirt.”

“Well, how honest was your little show just now?”

“What do you mean?” asked Big Montrose uneasily.

“You killed that man.”

“He ain't got no folks, no mother to mourn him, no orphans left behind.”

“So that makes it worse, not better, don't it?”

“You know I had to do it, squirt.”

“You didn't had to do it so slowlike. Did you? I saw. You put your foot on him, pushed halfway down, let them hear him scream, and then crushed the life out of him. Pure sadism. Why not shoot him?”

“No shells in the damn gun. Besides, I had to do it slowlike enough to make my point.”

“The
point
was that some of these critters have that one little bit of Blackie's brain that loves Rania, and that thought is a red-hot iron thorn in the tender groin of your self-love.”

The giant slowly shook his head. “You ain't reading my heart aright.”

“Don't need to. All I need to do is read my own heart. It's all there plain enough.”

“Now I wonder why Pinocchio did not just step on his damned cricket. I am beginning to see the drawbacks of a conscience that talks aloud.”

“What? Gunna step on me, too?”

“It's tempting…”

“Yeah,” grunted Little Montrose. “I
know
. That is why most consciences don't talk aloud.”

The big man was silent for a moment, trying not to let a scowl darken his features. Slowly he stood, and small rivers poured from his vast limbs. Robotic arms, large enough to serve as cranes in the dockyard for seagoing battleships, draped the yards of fabric around him. It was easier, given his size, for the arms to hold the cloth segments up to his body and send sewing machines the size of mice scampering on many legs up and down the yards, to sew up seams. It was easier to sew on buttons rather than to button them. Big Montrose did not wince as the damaged arm had its bandages changed, and was wrapped up again to his chest.

Finally, he was once again the very picture of ancient military sartorial splendor. Big Montrose said, “If the solar beam ignited on time, we should see it light up all the sails in a moment. Now is not the time to fret on past misdeeds, eh? This will make up for it all. They will not send a Third Sweep if this Second Sweep is deep-fat-fried and gobbled up whole: they are just as much slaves to their goddam Cold Equations as we are to them.

“With the threat of the Hyades gone”—Big Montrose grinned—“the human race will have forty-six thousand years to kick back and enjoy ourselves before Rania arrives with our manumission papers. Jupiter will have no rationale to maintain his control. By the flaming dung in the latrines of Hell, what will a puny twelve thousand years of servitude to Jupiter be then? A few millennium of sadistic eugenic practice, experimenting on human babies, committing genocide on unwanted breeds, forced marriages, inseminations and abortions and abominations—everything Jupiter did to create the colonists and then the Myrmidons—” Big Montrose snapped his fingers, making a noise like the thud of a bass drum. “Ha! What will it mean? Merely a footnote in history!”