“A piratical crime we are still feeling the echoes of,” muttered Montrose. “Had it not been for that, Blackie would not have declared himself King of the World and Emperor of the North Pole or whatever.”

“It was not a crime at all,” said the serpent coolly, “but a perfectly rational action which should have been anticipated. The expedition erred because the authority who sent it assumed a K-strategy, a kinship strategy, could be maintained across a fifty lightyear gap between Sol and the Diamond Star, across the one hundred twenty-five year interval between the expedition launch and return. We calculate that Hyades makes no such error.”

“You mean the Hyades does not give a tinker’s damn about what happens to the Cahetel expedition?”

“Affirmative. Because it is not an expedition properly so called, and neither was Asmodel. They were colonies. They happened to be colonies in motion. According to the Cold Equations the Hyades must use to organize their affairs in the long term, the expense in energy and the profits from cultivating the human race and seeding us to colony worlds, surely is borne by the entities, whatever their form, that live in the Cahetel Cloud or the Asmodel gas giant.”

“Then they stand or fall all on their lonesome. That means—”

It meant that armed resistance to the Hyades was not futile after all. They were not fighting an entire interstellar empire, just one boatload of adventurers, a cross between a squad of big-game hunters and slave-raiding party.

It meant that the realization which so long ago had driven him into this self-inflicted exile was simply and hellishly wrong. Montrose was, despite himself, momentarily appalled at how long it had been. Eleven thousand, one hundred and thirty-five years. It was roughly the same amount of time that separated the Hamburg culture of Late Upper Paleolithic reindeer hunters from the year of his birth. And what had he accomplished during that time? He had napped.

The serpent mask said, “Our psychology, which you dismiss as loveless and cruel, is based on this same mathematical model of reproductive strategy. This enables us to understand Cahetel. If the expense of conquest is too great, she must retreat to serve her own economic self-interest, and seek another target. Cahetel has no loyalty to Hyades, who will not avenge her downfall. If Man can drive off the Cahetel Cloud, she will not be allowed to return home to the Hyades stars.”

“The Swans thought they could make the attack too expensive. All that will happen is that the Hyades will tack the extra cost to our bill, and keep the human race as an indentured servant for longer.”

“Correction: the Cold Equations show that the entities like Cahetel and Asmodel take all the entrepreneurial risk themselves. We suspect Asmodel has been destroyed, because too many human colonies died, and the return on investment was insufficient. And, unlike the First Sweep, we need only maintain opposition for one thousand sixty years. At four lightyears distance, the White Ship will be within effective firing range.”

“Hold up. What opposition? Was Asmodel destroyed? Destroyed? Are you saying—” Montrose realized that the Witch-woman, Zoraida, who had told him so unthinkably long ago that mankind had won the war, had been no wild-eyed idealist. She had been right.

Man had won.

That meant he could win again.

10. Dissent

The biped spoke up, his voice cold and crisp. “Have we not been clear? With the departure of the Senior Del Azarchel, our prime memory chains have suffered divarication. There is an opposition faction among us who advocate a more efficient strategy of Hyades-Tellurian interaction. The five of us here occupying these four bodies represent the memory chains of this faction: you may called us Dissent.”

“What is the, ah, more efficient strategy you advocate for Hyades cooperation?”

The centaur said in a voice like a hunting horn: “Fight to the last man, and die in the breach.”

Montrose did not bother to hide his expression of shocked stupidity. His eyes did not bulge out only because they were so deep set, but he stared, speechless.

The centaur held up its gauntlets and said, “We are come to plead: Lead us. Inspire us, advise us!”

The biped added coolly, “We know, beyond doubt, that you can be trusted to fight and to defy the Hyades. Our own master, Del Azarchel, whose echoes linger in the Jupiter Brain, we do not know beyond doubt.”

Montrose said, “But you think the Jupiter Brain will permit opposition?”

The serpent spoke, “Despite being incomprehensible, Jupiter is rational, surely. The Cold Equations determine what they determine. If it is more efficient to resist than to submit, then that efficiency will prevail even in the multidimensional labyrinths of nested mental ecologies forming the intellect of Jupiter.”

“You hope so,” said Montrose sardonically.

The wheel, in a voice as mechanical and emotionless as it had used before, said, “We cannot live without hope. Are we not men?”

Montrose began slowing down the rate of rotation of the carousel on whose walls this chamber and all the curving corridor before it and behind it rested. The joke of maintaining an Earth-like environment had palled on him. He saw now that his next few centuries would be spent in space.

When the centrifugal force had dropped to half Earth’s gravity, he stood, letting tentacles and bars of the logic crystal (which was, after all, just as much a part of him as his own brain) haul him upright.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have more resources to sustain a siege than ever mankind controlled during the First Sweep. This time, we do not pack everyone in the core of the Earth, and wait for the Hyades agent to blot out the sunlight. We use your asteroid homes. We make them all into ships, or warships, or sailing vessels able to maneuver through the interplanetary battle-volume. We fill them with your people, which y’all can multiply like the ants you are named for. Every asteroid with a nickel-iron core, we turn not into a logic diamond, but into solid murk logic, which is more compact. So instead of one White Ship, we will have a ten-thousand-ship Black Fleet, a glorious fleet! We get more minor planets from the Kuiper Belt, and look around for moons any Gas Giants ain’t using.”

He drew a deep breath, eyes no longer looking at them. He was spellbound with a vision of an entire solar system armed and armored, fortresses larger than worlds, and all the moons and asteroids and meteors streaming like black battlewagons and superdreadnoughts toward the roaring inferno of war.

“I accept the commission and the challenge. I will advise you in an unofficial capacity. I will fight. I’ll do it for her. It will be a fine thing to be alive again.”

Montrose laughed, and it was the laugh of a titan. “By all the pestilence of hell! It will be a damn fine thing to be alive again!”

2

The War of Sol and Ain

1. The Cloud

A.D. 24087

Thousands of years ago, the cloud humans had dubbed Cahetel had been traveling so near to the speed of light that it seemed to earthbound observers to be a disk flattened in the direction of motion, blue-shifted into the cosmic ray band of the spectrum, and so massive that its gravity distorted the image of the star Epsilon Tauri, also called Ain, lying directly behind it.

The exact nature of the beam from Ain, which was pointed directly at Sol, occluded and filtered by passing through the cloud, proved impossible to analyze.