After the cloud passed the halfway mark at seventy-five lightyears, the beam of energy issuing from Epsilon Tauri changed in character, and the cloud began losing mass.

Earthly astronomers were not certain how a starbeam overtaking the Cahetel cloud from astern could be decelerating the cloud. There were many theories, from the sensible to the absurd. One of the more sensible was that the Ain beam was exciting certain volatile particles set aside for that purpose into jets facing forward into the bowshock wave of the cloud. These jets acted as rockets to brake the payload mass of the cloud, and at the same time the payload was polarized to not be affected by the beam, not accelerated further.

One of the more absurd was that that starbeam from Ain was magnetic, and retarding the progress of the cloud, or was made of antigravitons, or some other exotic particle, to act as drag-chute or sea anchor or tractor beam.

No one knew. But the loss of cloud mass as the centuries turned into millennia was more consistent with the absurd tractor beam theory than the sensible polarized beam theory.

The cloud was now slowing for a rendezvous for the Solar System, and had matched Sol’s lateral motion through the interstellar medium in Sol’s long, slow orbit around the galactic core. It was one lightyear away.

Montrose had parked his body somewhere, so that technicians could work on increasing his brain capacity, while his mind roamed the libraries of the Noösphere. From the many instruments of many astronomical satellites and observatories, he could see two sources of energy in and near the cloud. Something was boiling at the center of the cloud, giving off vents of X-ray and infrared radiation. There were also smaller flicks or blurs of light streaking the astronomical image, looking almost like a meteor shower.

Hundreds of pellets, from the size of baseballs to the size of aircraft carriers had been placed in the oncoming path of the Cahetel cloud, surfaces inscribed over with the lines and curves and hieroglyphs both of Monument notation and of the later Cenotaph notation left on the moon by Asmodel.

It was a contact message, explaining in the awkward pantomime language of the Monument and the Cenotaph, that mankind intended to defy Cahetel, to render the prospect of forced deracination to far colonies economically unfeasible according to the Hyades’ own cold equations of interstellar power.

“Well, well,” said Montrose to himself, “our modest message in a bottle. Our own little UNWELCOME mat.” Then, remembering his old facility at Fancy Gap, Virginia, he added,

SOL, HAPPY HOME OF THE HUMAN RACE

—M.I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—

THIS PLACE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE BADDEST

BOLDEST WOLF-HEARTED EAR-BITING SUMBITCH

ON WHICH THE SUN HAS EVER SHONE:

TRESPASSERS KILLED ON SIGHT. NO KIDDING.

NO SOLICITING.

He looked again, through many instruments, at the brightness in the core of the cloud. Every thinking processes causes entropy and sheds heat of some sort, no matter how near-perfect the engineering. The activity in the core may have been Cahetel warming up their judgment engines or thawing out their expert brains to think about the messages Earth had left in the path.

“Actually,” said Montrose to himself, “it is a Little Billy Goats Gruff message, ain’t it? Don’t pick on me. Eat my little brother instead.”

Over Montrose’s objection, the Myrmidon High Commands, many years ago when the capsules had been launched, had insisted on including a star map showing the distance and direction to the surviving colonies at Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis. Montrose had argued, but the amassed minds of the Myrmidons had spread out before him the cliometric codes showing that if Tellus were deracinated, neither she nor Nocturne nor Splendor would survive, whereas if Nocturne or Splendor were looted of their populations, Tellus might survive, therefore the human race. Montrose did not know how to argue against the sharp and clear conclusion of the mathematics.

“Well,” Montrose concluded glumly, “if the cart is being chased by wolves, sometimes you throw the smallest kid out so the rest can get away. It ain’t pretty, but that’s life.”

But was it the kind of life he wanted to live?

2. No Reply, No Countermand

A.D. 24097

The message pellets remained bright over the next decade. The cloud was bouncing some sort of beam off them, either searchlights to read them by, or analytical torches to volatize fragments for analysis. It clearly was reading and studying them.

No answer ever came from Cahetel.

During that same decade, Montrose found he had to kill three of the Myrmidon High Command who interfered with the war effort, or who crossed him. Myrmidons had neither families to avenge nor formal laws to forbid such murders, provided they were done with the victim armed, awake, forewarned, and facing you. Eventually he had himself declared Nobilissimus, and that brought the number of challenges and duels down to a manageable level.

Each day, every hour, Montrose expected an imperious command to ring out from beneath the cloud layer of Jupiter, instructing Tellus and the other planetary intelligences to prevent the human races from mounting any opposition to Cahetel.

The call never came. Montrose pondered the silence soberly for many years, and wondered what it meant. He also pondered it while drunk.

But he nonetheless continued with the preparations for the Black Fleet.

3. Fifty Worlds

A.D. 24099

When Montrose was born, there had been eight planets in the Solar System. Two hundred years before that, there had been nine; and two hundred years before that, only six; in antique times, there had been seven, counting the sun and the moon as planets, but not Earth.

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.