Big Montrose grunted, by which he meant, “Where is the countdown at?”

Little Montrose held up his pinky and thumb, the spacer’s hand sign for six, by which he meant, “If everything is on schedule, the Solar Beam was ignited at Sol six hundred minutes ago. Five days and change. In half an hour, the beam should pass through this area of space, and we will see the Black Fleet start to accelerate.”

The fifty worlds of the Black Fleet formed a rough ring or toroid hanging in space. This armada ring could be seen on instrument screens lining the balcony rail below the dome. Their sails, tens of thousands rather than merely hundreds of miles in diameter, were deployed, spread by pressure beams radiating from the worldlets, and from this angle, fifty images of the sun could be seen gleaming in their mirrored surfaces.

“That’s assuming there was not a successful mutiny at the solar station,” continued little Montrose, speaking more in implications than in words. “The images we are getting now from the telemetry tower show the Montrose there still seems to be in command, as of four days ago. If he was overthrown, we will find out when the beam does not come.”

“Or if the core beam hits the world-ships and obliterates them,” observed Big Montrose sourly.

The operation plan was to have the core beam pass through the center of the armada ring, and carry the main destructive force to the enemy. The secondary beams surrounding this core, emitted at far lesser energies, were meant to act as acceleration pressure for the sails. Nothing known to or theorized by human science could endure for a microsecond within the action of the core beam.

“You don’t think the mutineers would go that far?” Little Montrose said, or implied. “The Myrmidons asked us to do this. To make war on the Hyades invader.”

“Well, considering that they asked us two thousand years ago, back when Earth life was still mostly living on the surface, maybe they changed their semi-collective mind. And, more important, back then I was just the senior civilian advisor to the Myrmidons. That was three coups d’état, two century-long worldwide riots, and one intercontinental war ago. Now I got Blackie’s old job, and I am the Master of the World in all but name, and even though in theory I still report to the Myrmidon High Commission to Lesser Races, and they in theory take orders from Jupiter. And Jupiter ain’t given no orders to no one for a thousand years, and no one, not Tellus, and not Selene, can figure out what he’s up to. If Jupiter gave some secret signal to the mutineers, made a deal with them, who knows? I been the smartest man on the planet for so long, I ain’t got the first clue how to act or how to think now that there is something out there smarter than me. Two things, counting Tellus. In half an hour, something will happen. Who the hell knows what?”

“And if the beam lights up as planned?”

Big Montrose gestured at the screens. The images showed the fifty worlds of the Solar System, all the smaller ones, including Ceres and Pluto and his own transplutonian worldlet of Ixion. The orbs had been converted into electrophotonic brains of golden nanotechnological Aurum with small black cores of copied picotechnological murk. All were crewed with additional biological brains of the Myrmidons, housed in independent bodies or wired into the mind core as duty and convenience dictated. Some had additional crew of First Men, Hibernals and Nyctalops, or squads of Chimerae, Giants, and Sylphs woken from ultra-long-term archives. One or two boasted Second Men advisors and observers, the eerie and solitary Swans.

For two thousand years mankind had been living in austerity, conserving nine-tenths of the energy budget of their civilization so that there would be enough power at hand to ignite the beam.

Even so much energy was merely the spark plug compared to the energy output of the alien rings of artificial neutronium that created the beam itself, drawing directly from the pressurized plasma beneath the surface of the Sun. But the earthly energy was needed to accelerate the rings to the space-distorting Einsteinian rotations needed for them to function.

The rings were focused to a point beyond the heliopause, along the incoming path of the Cahetel cloud, at a distance of one lightyear. On this scale, that was point-blank range.

“If all goes as planned,” said Big Montrose, “then the first beam impact bathes the Cahetel cloud in radiation, destroying ninety percent of its mass in the first nine seconds of the war. The cloud disperses as fast as it can, and the beam spreads to compensate, becoming less focused and so less potent. Another nine percent of the mass is destroyed during the next two years. Shortly after that, the Black Fleet passes through the area, using their worldlet-based observatories and weapons to detect and destroy the final nine-tenths of one percent. The real task begins then, a long hard war to insure no smallest particle finds other little bits of matter to attach to and convert into picotech substance.

“That one-tenth of one percent will haunt us for years,” Big Montrose continued, “but without matter and without energy, what good is it? Technology is the ability to use units of information to manipulate units of matter-energy into new forms. No matter how high the level of technology, there are Planck limits and Heisenberg limits to how much information can be packed into how small a space—and we can starve any small clouds coming from that remnant, and burn them with the solar beam if they approach closer than Neptune. That gives us an eight-hour sighting and response time, rather than the two-year interval we are dealing with now.”

“You’re optimistic,” said Little Montrose.

“Damn right I am!” Big Montrose grinned his alarming gargoyle grin, which looked monstrous when portrayed on a smile several feet wide. “Both Tellus and me have thought through every possible maneuver a decentralized cloud-shaped being could perform. It cannot move faster than the speed of light; it cannot see faster than the speed of light. So the first hint Cahetel can possibly have of our plan, the first thing it sees, is the core beam passing through the heart of the cloud. I don’t care what it is, if it is made of matter, made of small particles held in electron clouds around nucleons, held together with the weak and strong nuclear forces, then, by God, it comes apart. There is just too much energy in that beam for anything to absorb it. If it tries to disperse, the outer segments of cloud can only move as fast as their mass can account for if the remaining mass of the cloud is converted to pure energy and used as a perfect fuel—and in any case not faster than lightspeed. We keep opening the cone of the beam to kept the fleeing cloud segments under continuous fire. Hell! We’ve finally got them! The laws of physics are on our side. No matter how advanced these aliens are, they cannot break the laws of nature!”

“I meant you are optimistic by which I mean idiotic.”

“How you figure? What do you think you thought which Tellus ain’t thought through a zillion times over from every angle?”

Little Montrose said, “If it was that easy for conquered races to fight off the Hyades, they would not be the Hyades. And the Dominion at Praesepe Cluster would not have conquered Hyades and the other dominations. And the Authority at M3 would not have conquered Praesepe and the other dominions.”

“You’re a pessimist. Other planets might not organize resistance like this. Or maybe out of every thousand planets, only one gives in without a fight, and we are among the nine hundred ninety-nine that get our backs up and put out claws. Like I said, we thought all this through! Inside and out!”

“All theory. You sound like Del Azarchel.”

“Have some faith in smarter minds than yours.”