Little Montrose was impressed, and let out a long, low whistle.
Big Montrose said, “Roughly five quintillion joules of energy.”
Little Montrose said, “Hope all the worldlets of the Black Fleet are clear of the beam path.”
“That is the plan.”
Even as they watched, the light grew cherry red and dimmed. As planned, after the initial discharge, the beam was spreading and dimming. The beam was now powerful enough to impart acceleration to the worldlets, but not so potent as to obliterate them. One by one, over the next few months, their orbits would carry them into the beam path, and they would begin their long, slow trek toward Cahetel.
The first contingent of the flotilla had been waiting in place, just beyond the deadly core beam, to catch the secondary beam as it spread. Their sails lit up. The worldlets and dwarf planets of the Black Fleet now shined like radiant angels, dazzling, immense, blindingly bright. Cheers came dimly from the other corridors and buried decks of Sedna.
Little Montrose started, embarrassed that he had forgotten he was not alone here, forgotten that the Myrmidons, Swans, and various Firstlings, Hibernals, Nyctalops, Giants and Sylphs and Space-Chimerae were still men, and still cheered at the launch of great and terrible fleets.
He suddenly saw the reason for the optimism of his larger, wiser self.
“I take it all back,” Little Montrose said. “The alien entity is big and smart, that is true. But the Cahetel Mass has made the crucial mistake of being made of matter.”
Little Montrose looked more closely at one of the worldlets which was in transit against the broad sail of another more distant member of the fleet. “Maybe we should keep Pluto and throw the other ones at’em,” he said. “I was always kind of sentimental about Pluto. It was not a planet when we were born. Poor thing, getting demoted like that.”
“No time for sentiment,” said Big Montrose. “I’d throw Jupiter at Cahetel, if I could figure how to rig a lightsail.”
“Strap it to his ring system,” suggested Little Montrose. “And now what?”
“Now we wait,” said Big Montrose. “Smoke’em if you got’em.”
But Big Montrose made no move to light up one of his titanic and odious cigars. Instead, his skin, acre by acre, was going pale as ice, as nanomachines in his bloodstream were placing his cells in biosuspension.
Little Montrose took the time to find a chair and sit down, and he did the same.
6. Upon Reflection
A.D. 24101
“Wake up, sleepyhead!” said Big Montrose in a cheerful voice. He was both smiling and scowling, an odd expression which drew his eyebrows together and turned the corners of his lips up mirthlessly. “You don’t want to miss the whole war! This will be all over but the weeping in four minutes. And a few decades or centuries of hunting down survivors, of course.”
Little Montrose shook the last of the biosuspension frost off his face and hands, and stood up, blinking. He stood up so quickly that in the microgravity he found himself floating awkwardly in midair. The chair politely extended a serpentine—a whip of semi-intelligent self-repairing metal—and drew him back to the deck.
Little Montrose was confounded to see a serpentine here, a technology invented by the Sylphs, and used in later ages by the Chimerae as weapons, events so far in the past that only he had living memory of them. The serpentine really was a plateau technology, it seemed. Like the shape of an axhead or shiphull, it would never need improvement.
The screens that thronged the dome showed the views from various elements of the fleet of worldlets. Sedna was currently near the rear of the flotilla, which occupied a doughnut-shaped volume. The flotilla had traveled roughly one hundred twenty light-minutes in the last two years, while the Cahetel entity had approached fifty-two thousand light-minutes closer to the Solar System. On an astronomical scale of a battlefield larger than solar systems, they could hardly said to have moved from their initial positions.
Little Montrose wondered, not for the first time, what kind of minds, with what kind of psychology, could grasp these astronomical distances and make plans along such astronomical intervals.
Pluto was the most forward of the planetary flotilla, and had polarized her mighty sails during the last month, to give her surface observatories a clear view of the enemy. Spending two years in the penumbra of the solar beam had heated her surface elements and formed an atmosphere, and the crewmen aboard Pluto had emerged to cover the lee hemisphere of the planet, the side facing the Sol’s beam, with gardens and arbors.
The reflected light from the cloud had reached Pluto, from Sedna’s frame of reference, over four hours ago, and the concentrated light from Sol had struck Cahetel a year ago, and took a year to carry the message of what had happened to the observatories on Pluto, which were then relayed to the receivers on Sedna. It was these images Little Montrose raptly watched.
“Space battles would be a lot easier if space was smaller,” muttered Little Montrose.
“Beam impact in ten … nine … eight…” Big Montrose was saying, his eyes fixed on the image of the vast, dark thunderhead of Cahetel. The cloud was irregular, with wispy arms reaching many thousands of miles in each direction. The energy of its deceleration jets, facing toward them, surrounded the whole mass with a spray of nebular discharge paths, glowing blue and blue-white on the upper wavelengths of the spectrum. The whole looked like some freakish flesh-eating blossom of the Amazon river, with a heart of blue and petals of black.
The main mass of the cloud of particles was roughly globular, but since it was four light-minutes in diameter, the trailing hemisphere of the cloud seemed oddly distorted, since the image of the light from the bowshock of the cloud reached the Plutonian receivers four minutes before.
Little Montrose tapped the serpentine still circling his waist, and said. “Hey. You awake? While I was asleep, did anyone ever figure out how Cahetel was decelerating in the middle of an acceleration beam?”
The serpentine said, “Yes. Observers on Pluto, able to detect and analyze short-range discharges, discovered that seven-tenths of the cloud mass are artificial particles such as existed, in theory, during the first three seconds of the universe, and not after. They possess a property called supersymmetry. Such particles were neither electromagnetic, nor neucleonic, nor gravitic, since the forces of the universe had not, before then, been separated into the forces known to the modern universe. The influence of the energy beam from Epsilon Tauri, coming from their stern, breaks the supersymmetrical particles into gravitons and photons and so on in the midst of a super-powerful toroidal magnetic field in the center of the cloud. This acts as a heavy particle accelerator…”
The serpentine helpfully showed him an image on a screen near at hand, the electromagnetic aura of the field throbbing at the center of the cloud, the source of its impossible reverse acceleration.
His eyes bulged, and his jaw dropped. He recognized the characteristics, the magnetic contours. It was a ring of artificial neutronium, a ring wider than the diameter of Earth. It was the same size and shape as the acceleration rings Asmodel had left floating in the surface of the sun. A twin. The energy contour was as identical as the shape of the same snowflake, the same fingerprint.
“POX!” shouted Little Montrose. “Stop the beam! Cease firing! When our beam hits, that thing is going to—!”
Of course, the events he was seeing had happened over a year ago. There was no stopping the solar beam.
“… two … one … Sorry, what were you saying . .?”
The beam struck. The observatory images from Pluto showed what looked like a lance of lightning impaling a storm cloud. The dark mass was suddenly bright with textures and folds of the cloudscape, complex as the folds of a brain cortex. The cloud was as wide as the orbit of Mercury, and even a beam as wide as the diameter of Saturn’s rings was merely a small spotlight playing across the valleys and hills and kraken-armed streamers and films of the cloud mass.