“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!”

Little Montrose said, “You mean it’s a footnote we are hoping Rania won’t read when she gets back?”

Big Montrose scowled.

Little Montrose said, “I understand that there are things I can no longer understand. I am like a dog to you. But a dog knows when his master is in pain. Just because you are smarter, don’t mean you’ve changed your nature. The conscience still works the same way. You can push just so far and no farther. You push the conscience by playing tricks on yourself—and you have to play along with the trick, let it fool you, or it won’t work. Then you can stretch the truth and stretch it and stretch like India rubber. But there is always an outside limit. Always. When you try to stretch it too far, it snaps back and hurts you.”

Big Montrose said, “I’ve always done whatthehellever I had to do, to get what I want. So why is this different?”

Little Montrose sighed and spread his hands. “Now, I reckon, I’d’ve said I’ve always done whatthehellever I had to do, to get done what was right. If you were at rest with yourself, you would not have made a little Jiminy Cricket for yourself. Which brings us back to my first question. Why am I here?”

“You are here to witness my glorious victory,” said Big Montrose in a hollow, hearty voice that fooled neither himself, nor his other self. “There is nothing that can endure the output of a star focused into a narrow beam.”

“Nothing we know,” said Little Montrose sourly. “Tell me, Cap’n! What are the rings made out of? You know, those gigantic spinning hoops of infinitely dense material that rotate at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, drawing up the solar plasma into a lased beam? We call it artificial neutronium. What is it made of?”

Big Montrose said, “Sonny, rather than explain things that are way over your head and way out of your price range and way above your pay grade, why don’t we just toast the victory?”

“I toast it when I see it.”

“Skeptical you. Then let us toast her.”

Little Montrose pulled out his hip flask, poured himself a shot of whiskey in the cap that doubled as a chaser glass. “What’s the chance of getting a beer? Shouldn’t drink this straight up if we are on military duty here. Or is wheat and hops extinct?”

Big Montrose said, “We’ve entered a strange and new age. Matter is programmable, thanks to advances Jupiter has released to Tellus. I can have the anything-maker make you whatever we got the raw materials for, including an ersatz beer.”

“Just like the food replicators on Asymptote! When do we get teleport booths?”

“The same day we get faster-than-light unicorns that shoot rainbows out of their butts. We cannot turn anything into anything, but we can turn a lot of things into a lot of other things, and put thinking and talking circuits into nearly all of it.”

“Talking beer? I want to go back to the past.”

“Doesn’t taste as good as the real thing, but, hey—gotta have a drink to salute what we’re fighting and dying for.”

A silent Myrmidon in civilian garb—a shape that looked like a three-legged stool wearing its iron mask on the seat—now brought a beer stein to Little Montrose. The stein was covered with a low-gravity lid of semi-permeable membrane. Little Montrose raised the smaller glass to the titanic version of himself. “To her we drink, for her we pray, our voices silent never!”

The big version raised a mug the size of a bathtub and dropped a frost-covered whiskey glass the size of a bucket into it, glass and all. It fell with dreamlike slowness in the microgravity. “For her we’ll fight, come what may, fair Rania forever!”

The smaller man tossed the contents of the shot glass to the back of his throat, coughed and wiped his eyes and slurped from the beer stein, all before the bigger version took his first tidal-wave-sized sip from the huge mug.

The smaller man coughed again. “No fair you putting my brain into a body that cannot hold its liquor. Damnification!”

Both were silent, and watched through the dome overhead, seeing a line of sparks, glowing at first like embers, then more brightly, scattered here and there in the black sky. For less than a minute, they flamed, dazzling, and went dark.

With no background against which to judge depth, it was not until signals from other instruments orbiting far from Sedna could triangulate on the flare-bursts, and produce a stereoscopic view.

This was a cylinder of destruction wider than the diameter of a gas giant, that had intersected particles of gas, fragments of ice or stone, or comet masses between the size of a baseball and the size of a mountain. Everything within the core beam was not just incinerated, not just vaporized, not just ignited, but annihilated. Each atom of every dust-mote and asteroid exploded into a scatter of electrons, protons, and smaller particles.