“What is your target?” The voice now came from an overhead dolphin hanging as motionless as a piñata. “How much heat capacity can you bring to bear? What volume of seawater can you evaporate and at what rate? As you who built them know, our central node housings are at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
“I forebear to mention our cities and arcologies occupying the Great Stalactite. What point would be served by opening fire?” continued the voice, now coming from a high-cheeked, sharp-featured woman who had not spoken previously, her eyes like night, her hair standing and swaying of its own accord. “The surface world, which is the only home or habitat hereafter available to you, defines the reach of your contemplated damage.
“Even were the threat sober,” continued the Anserine sardonically, now speaking through the mouth of a thin, silver-haired man, “you would have limited time to carry it out. We are engaged in meteorological engineering. The ice caps are becoming vapor; cloud cover will soon increase dramatically, and the albedo of the planet become too reflective for space-borne mirrors to be effective. Meanwhile, the Exarchel circuits and systems aboard your vessel have returned to base-operation state, and are empty of data. Look. Even now the clouds are gathering, as all the snows of the world melt. So to whom will you give the command?”
Del Azarchel looked at Montrose, a look of surprise, of wild emotion, in his dark features. “Cowhand, I think they are daring me! What do you think?”
Menelaus Montrose was clenching and unclenching his maimed hand, so that the pain was worse and worse. He was idly wondering at what point the pain would make him go into shock, or faint. “I think I will never see Rania again. So you should burn at least some of them. Say! What happens if you melt the ion drive lance off the anchoring asteroid of your topless Tower? Can we get it to collapse? It should wrap around the equator six and half times before it comes to rest. That mass, falling at terminal velocity, would be—well, it would be the same as a ring-shaped cannonade of nine-mile-wide asteroids all hitting every inch of ground in a spiral belt around the world half a dozen times.”
“Ha! Whenever I start hating you too much, Menelaus, you always say just the right thing to remind me why I so liked the way you thought when we were young. You have scope! Come: I will give the order, you will give the firing solution.”
Del Azarchel strode in his clanking duelist’s armor toward where the black-robed and -hooded Iron Ghosts of the Hermetic Order stood with some other people in a circle, facing inward: Ull and Coronimas, D’Aragó and De Ulloa. Ctesibius the Savant stood with them, solemn in his long white wig and his green robes trimmed with gold.
They stood in postures suggesting that they were conversing with someone their backs blocked from view. It was odd to see the Hermeticists from behind, for the dark silk shipsuit, from this angle only, was bright, since the uniform included a cape of white foil hanging from the shoulder.
Montrose walked with Del Azarchel, matching him stride for stride, and their heavy boots clanged together.
As they came near, they saw whom the Hermeticists addressed: Alalloel of Anserine. And behind her, on the other side of the circle, were his gathered Seconds: Illiance, Soorm, Mickey, Scipio, and Sir Guiden.
With them also stood the two Beta Maidens, Vulpina and Suspinia; Aea and Thysa the Nymphs; Keirthlin the Gray; and the blank-eyed but softly smiling Trey Azurine the Sylph. All stood on the back of a cnidarian which had not only landed, but flattened its circular mantle to the ground no thicker than a silvery carpet.
To one side, a little ways away, stood Oenoe the Nymph, writhed in her living mantilla of leaves and flowers. She was speaking with Sarmento i Illa d’Or, the only Hermeticist yet housed in a biological body.
Curious, Montrose turned his head that way, amplified his hearing, and sharpened his eyesight; then he noticed Del Azarchel had his gaze and attention turned the same way. He was not the only one who noticed: Sarmento i Illa d’Or raised his hand in a grave gesture, and beckoned them forward.
Oenoe dropped her eyes and curtseyed, bending her back leg and bowing at the waist, somehow making this awkward pose graceful and alluring. She stepped back, and then turned to walk with light footstep and overly swaying hip in the direction of where Sir Guiden, her husband, stood with the others, listening to Alalloel.
Sarmento spoke in the abbreviated fashion of posthumans familiar with each other’s mental contours. If written out in words, the look on the face of Sarmento, the brief syllables he spoke, would have read, “Crewman Fifty-One. Ready for a rematch? I would not have shot at the ground.”
And he gave Del Azarchel a look of scorn. Del Azarchel was taken by surprise, too puzzled to be angry at this unexpected hostility.
Montrose quirked an eyebrow, asking without words, “Nice to see you too, Learned i Illa d’Or, you pug-ugly soaplock. So what was that conversation about?” All three men turned and stared for a moment at the legs, hips, and general contours of the retreating girl in green.
Sarmento answered, partly in words, partly by implication, “She was asking me to bless her marriage. Do not look surprised, learned gentlemen: I am still, after all, the father of her race, and the creator of her world. You might think ill of my age, but she does not. Was there ever a time of greater happiness and peace?”
Del Azarchel said and implied, “A moment ago, I was your master, and the center of your loyalty, Learned i Illa d’Or. What changed?”
Sarmento answered in the same abbreviated way, “I was always loyal to our idea, not to your person, Senior. We stood for the principle that the higher form of life must rule the lower. Did we not? Was that not the motto we used to excuse everything, justify everything, allow ourselves everything? As it happens, the Swans are higher than you. Will you bow the knee to them? Or do you seriously think any of us will carry out your order to have the Emancipation open fire?”
Del Azarchel said and implied, “No matter where they are on the Darwinian scale of being, they are still in rebellion against me. Am I not, by their own rules, their lawful sovereign?”
“Have you lost your mind, Senior? The surface of this world is merely the hull of an Earth-sized fortress. What good would burning it do? Our most powerful weapons could not crack open the crust, much less reach down through the mantle to the outer core. We do not have the focusing power even to boil the seas away; and all the ice cap is rapidly becoming a cloud layer—like that the world enjoyed the last time the Cetaceans were in charge.”
Del Azarchel turned away in disgust, and stomped in his heavy armor toward Alalloel.
Sarmento said softly to Montrose, “I wanted to kill the princess and make Del Azarchel Captain. He wouldn’t do it. We would not have suffered all this trouble, millennia of toil, if only he’d done that. It would have been easy to let the princess die in some fashion, gently, without pain, which the Little Big Brother would not have considered murder. It was a stupid machine, after all, easy to fool, and we should not have been so afraid of it.”
Little Big Brother had been the internal security system aboard the antimatter-star-mining vessel. It enforced the rules and regulations to prevent exactly what had happened, the mutiny of the crew. The human crew had outsmarted the simplistic Mälzel brain of the ship by offering Rania, who shared genetic and legal traits with Captain Grimaldi, as the new Captain; and the ship’s brain had no choice but to accept the deception.
Montrose gave him a level, cool look. “Blackie shot at the ground because he realized that the Melusine wanted me dead. The moment the snow started sublimating, he figured it out. He is a bad man, don’t get me wrong, and needs killing if ever a man did; but he’s got some sort of principles. One of them is not doing dirty work for any critter not polite enough to ask it of him. Do you have any principles?”