To culminate the effect, he was wearing, in conformance with firing range regulations, a pair of mirrored goggles polarized against his muzzle flare and electrical beam weapon backscatter; and he was smoking, in defiance of air circulation regulations, a cigar longer than a tall man’s coffin. The cigar’s ring gauge was upward of 660. It was as if a smokestack dangled from his sneering lip.

Big Montrose was standing in front of the manual control rack to erect the lifting cable. The dome overhead was made of some material, neither liquid nor solid, which would part around solid objects passing through it, as if to them it were insubstantial as a curtain of rain, but conform so tightly to any shape passing slowly through, that its electrostatic edges could repel air molecules and keep them within.

Visible beyond this magically solid and unsolid dome, a large silvery balloon made similarly of a substance and a state of matter that had not existed when Montrose was young, was tethered to an ion-drive tug. This was a barge that consisted of little more than a biosuspension balloon holding an atmosphere. It was slow, but could return the deserters to the inner system in a century or less. It was their hope of escape.

The hundred-foot fall from balcony to diamond floor was not what was making the Myrmidons hesitate. The drop in microgravity would hardly have jarred their knee motors.

No, the hesitation had a different source. The larger Montrose was saying in a patient drawl, “I will personally take great pleasure, gentlemen, obliterating any man jack of you that steps down off that balcony. Ah”—It was at this point in time that the smaller Montrose slid to a stop near the toe of the immense black boots.—“looks like reinforcements are on their way. You know what kind of weapons I can train on this spot.”

One of the Myrmidons spoke. “No signals pass into or out of this place. Hence, no remote weapons can target us.”

Montrose said, “Maybe so, maybe no. My other versions of me might always toss a blockbluster-sized wad of jellied petrol here, and blow everything to stinking perdition. You think they won’t? All the little me’s have my curly-wolf cold-hearted killing personality, but there weren’t not no room to install my kindly nature. Atrocious little buggers, them. Either way, your brain signals will not leave this place, if you all die here.”

He paused to let that sink it, and shifted his massive and stinking cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Oh, sure,” he continued thoughtfully, “you may have twins and backups and earlier versions of yourself on some of the other planets of the Black Fleet. But none of your recent memories, none of those of you who decided to mutiny, none of that will get out. Because you shut off neural communications as soon as your thoughts started taking mutiny seriously, right? Because you fellers live with each other poking and moiling in each other’s brains all the time, right?

“So that means any twins of you, any memories of you, they will be loyal to me.

“And they know—like you know—that I am damn well going to kill any disloyal members among you.”

The one Myrmidon who had spoken, now stepped forward off the edge and floated to the diamond floor, saying, “We take our base memories from Del Azarchel, our prime, who knows you have not the strength of character to kill without reason. Hence your comment can be disregarded as a deception, as mere bluff.…”

Montrose, without changing the direction of his glance or taking his hand from his immense cannon, leaned and put his boot on the Myrmidon who was speaking, and slowly crushed him to yellow paste beneath his boot. For a moment, the Myrmidon screamed both vocally and on all electronic bands, trying to find a clear channel to send his brain information into another housing. What else he may have said was lost. Montrose ground the bootheel back and forth, collapsing the armored shell of the Myrmidon and popping his braincase and splattering the ground with gray matter from the organic component of the brains.

“I got a good reason and a damn good one.” Montrose slid his foot back, rubbing the boot free of goo on the angled floor clamp of the antenna cable spool. “This is the first time in human history we have a chance to strike back at the Hyades. They have never even bothered to poxing talk to us, we are so low on their evolutionary scale.

“And you see, I’ve been wondering for, oh, eleven thousand three hundred and one years now if I did the right thing by selling mankind into slavery and letting Blackie’s Jupiter Brain experiment and torture and breed the majority of man into freakish little suicidal sexless morts like you.

“I felt rather low about all that. I keep thinking Rania won’t like it when she finds out.

“But, Judas hopping on hotplates in Hell, if’n I do this, if I drive the shepherds away and free the sheep to roam as we’d like, well, I reckon that even Jupiter Brain will see no point in meddling with human history no more, and leave all the lower folk to mind their own business their own way.

“We get to kill all tyrants, foreign and domestic, with this one shot. Is Blackie’s personality really that chickenpoxed, that y’all flinch now?

“The Hyades maybe might not kill you, since they don’t love you like I do, but I surely will kill anyone else who crosses that line, or crosses my cherubic good temper.”

With all the electronics blocked, the Myrmidons could not speak among themselves without making noise. Big Montrose could overhear the first, since his ears were larger than an elephant’s, and his ear hairs as small and as fine as could fit into the wide spaces of his inner ear, giving him a range both higher and lower than normal human.

The Myrmidons, knowing this, did not bother to whisper. “Brother, we outnumber him. He is two and we are many. He cannot kill us all before we reach and deploy the elevator.…”

Little Montrose drew his sidearm, dialed it to induction field, and swept it back and forth over the control rack Big Montrose leaned against. The rack contained the energy cells controlling the deployment winches of the space elevator. The electrostatic charge danced over the cells with a spectacular display of pyrotechnics, and the cores melted into the gearbox. For good measure, Little Montrose splashed some hooch from his hip flask into the power cell bank, just so that puddles and flying drops of alcohol would flare up with a blue fire, and add to the general smell and smolder. Then he took a drink and pocketed the flask again.

Big Montrose (who had leaned in alarm away from the burning control rack) was grinning so hard that his cigar flicked upward like a gun being raised in salute. “Get back to your pestiferous goddamn posts, my good gentlemen. We have an alien invasion fleet to incinerate.”

5. Jiminy Cricket

The Myrmidons, in less dignity than perhaps they wished, had retreated. Regulars from other branches of the Myrmidon memory heritage, and militia of Firstlings (including incarnations from channels of the Telluric Noösphere more clearly loyal to Montrose) now occupied cross-corridors within the world-fortress of Sedna and within nodes within the planetary infosphere.

Montrose—both of him—was unwilling to leave the spot beneath the dome, as it was still the only location by which the Myrmidons could physically depart. But Big Montrose was weary, and had programmed the floor to assume the shape of a wide bowl or tub, now filled with salt water so salty it was practically mud. Into this the vast, groaning, naked body was lowered, and his bandaged arm was soaked, and his wounded feet.

Little Montrose, the same who had rushed in to aid him, was perched on the tentlike hills of cloth of the discarded uniform, watching the Sedna mind through her myriad remote-gauntlets (ranging in size from microscopic to serpentine limbs as thick as tree trunks) undo the damage he had done to the cells and gearboxes of the space elevator launch system.