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.

The 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.