by John Wright
The enemy came aboard swiftly and slowly.
The antennae and thought-port array along the Phoenix Exultant's prow opened to the radio traffic. Phaethon tracked the invasions of the enemy software, and saw the readout begin to register the flows of poison into the hierarchy of the ship's pure mind. This took a matter of seconds.
The prow air lock doors admitted those Neptunians (and there were scores) whose "bodies" were spacewor-thy. Gleaming blue-gray in their flexible housings, these masses of heurotechnology fell across empty vacuum, slid across the hull toward the air locks. Phaethon consulted ship diagrams, and sent a message to gather the high-speed elevators into the living quarters, and lock them there without power. Those Neptunians entering by the forward air locks would have miles to travel before they reached the living quarters, or any system of the ship where they could do any damage.
At the scores of midship docking ports, smaller vessels, space caravans and flying houses, were arriving. The docks here were wide spaces, half a kilometer wide and five kilometers long. Fortunately, the caravans arriving here also were mingled with the arriving biological material, canisters of Neptunian atmosphere under pressure, and acres of Neptunian jungle crystal held in greenhouses. Phaethon simply deactivated half of his robot stevedores and longshoreman, and cut the intelligence budget available to the supercargo. Then he directed the supercargo to ask all the incoming persons and materials to submit to examinations for viruses, prank-craft, explosives, or self-replicating aphrodisiacs. Being Neptunians, they would not think these precautions odd or insulting. If anything, they might think Phaethon's precautions were lax.
An estimator in his armor allowed him to calculate the average confusion or friction caused by these inefficiencies. It would be long minutes before everything entering amidships was loaded or stored.
But a different story obtained at the four gigantic cargo and fuel bays aft. These spaces were so large that there was no crowding, no opportunity to cause confusion. Even the kilometer-long superships of the Neptunian colonists could fit in the vast aft bays with ease.
And Neoptolemous was on one of those ships. Analy-.sis of the signal traffic showed the communication centers, and, presumably, the brains of the operation, were there.
That communication fell silent when all these ships came close enough to the Phoenix Exultant that her hull blocked the line of sight from ship to ship. All the units of the Neptunian crew were now, in effect, isolated from each other.
Phaethon watched the lead supership move from an outer to an inner aft bay. The locks on the doors could not be programmed to deny Neoptolemous access anywhere, since he was the legal owner of the Phoenix Exultant at this point.
But since the other officers and personnel were not owners, of course, they were held at their various outer bays and deck spaces, unable to proceed farther. The kilometer-long ship of Neoptolemous, all alone, wandered forward into the vast gulf of the inner bay.
This lead supership opened like a flower, disassembling itself in a confused rush of nanotechnic writhings, surrounded by waste steam. Globules and arms of the nanostuff attached themselves to the inner bay walls and began constructing the houses, laboratories, nurseries, and conglomeration chambers for the Neptunians who would be residing there. Greek pillars and Georgian-style pediment and roofs grew out of the bulkhead, all oriented along the Phoenix Exultant's main axis (the direction of motion being "up").
Phaethon examined the utterly non-Neptunian architecture with interest. A monumental pillar in the middle of the city was erecting a Winged Victory holding up a laurel crown; this was the emblem of the Silver-Gray.
Out from the newly made and still-steaming palaces and peristyles, past the smoldering pillars, steaming English gardens, glowing Egyptian obelisks, and smoking French triumphal arches, came a cavalcade of pike-men leading the carriage of Queen Victoria.
The horses and men of the cavalcade, outwardly shaped like humans, were constructed of Neptunian polymer armor, gleaming like statues of blue glass, and seething with strands and globules of complex brain matter and neurocircuitry throughout their lengths, visible beneath the semitranslucent skin. The image of Queen Victoria was more realistic, as only her face and hands shined with the ice blue Neptunian body substance. The black dress and high crown were real. Unfortunately, a human body was too small to hold all the mass of which a Neptunian Eremite was composed, so the body of the queen was the size of the Colossus of Rhodes, and her huge head overtopped some of the pillars lining the roads, and her crown brushed the triumphal arches under which the cavalcade passed.
Neoptolemous's ownership override opened the great doors leading from the inner bay to the fuel area. Here, the insulation space surrounding the drive axis extended seventy kilometers or more. When the ship was not under thrust, this space was cleared of any obstructions or dangerous radiation. It was actually rather clever of Neoptolemous to enter by this shaft: this was the quickest way to get to the living quarters from the aft of the great ship.
Phaethon thought: It would require only a simple command to the machines controlling the main drive. One-hundredth of a second of thrust would sweep that area with radiation. No complex subatomic particles would remain.
But Phaethon did not issue that command. While all his other men were delayed, out of contact with him, an left behind, Phaefhon allowed Neoptolemous to come closer, ever closer.
It seemed the cavalcade, horses, men, carriage and all. were all part of one master organism, which had, built into it, the same engines and thrusters which Phaethon had seen the Neptunian legate use so long ago in the grove of Saturn-trees: for, once the caval-cade moved into the wide and weightless insulation shafts surrounding the main drive, it began to rocket down the shaft toward the bow of the ship. Men-shapes and horse-things were half melted by the stress of acceleration, and bits of Neptunian body substance be-gun to drop off along the way.
The giant holding cells of the fuel, like an endless geometric array of snowballs, loomed around them for a hundred kilometers. The living quarters and ship's brain, even though it was a large as a good-sized space colony, larger than most ships, was absurdly dwarfed by comparison, not unlike the acorn-sized brain of the original, prehistoric version of a dinosaur.
Neoptolemous was coining.
Phaethon activated the olive drab cards he had found in his memory casket. Information from the three groups of stealth remotes poured into his brain.
The ship was under attack. The attack had been under way for several minutes.
The first attack, of course, had been through thought contamination. Viruses had been introduced into the ship mind with the first communication download; those viruses had been editing every recorder and vision cell of which the ship mind was aware, and blocking all knowledge of the attack from Phaethon.
But the ship mind was not aware of the military remotes monitoring ship-mind actions, and editing out of the ship mind all evidence and awareness of themselves and their two brother swarms.
Swarm One, which had been positioned in the air locks, had followed Neoptoiemous and his cavalcade, and showed Phaethon the picture that the ship-mind vision cells were not showing.
Certain of the flecks of substance falling from Neoptolemous's cavalcade floated to nearby bulkheads, clung, grew, and became Neptunians. These Neptuni-ans (or perhaps they were Neptunian partials, remotes, or servant-things; it was impossible to tell merely by looking at the glassy blue-gray shapelessness that housed them) scattered throughout the insulation space, and began affixing magnetic disrupters to the frameworks holding the fuel cells in place.
The stealth remotes were smaller than bacteria. Some flew into those the disrupters planted by the enemy. Once inside, they emitted radiations, vibrated, probed. Phaethon's many eyes recorded and analyzed. He had his own engineering programs as well as a military demolition routine (part of the stealth remote's threat-assessment software) examine the information. Both civilian and military demolition partials in his min
d agreed that there was little or no threat here.
The ship's vision cells showed Neoptoiemous arriving along the outside rim of the living quarters. Here were the ship-mind decks, a nested circle of enormous thought boxes forming the outermost layer of the living quarters. The main group of the cavalcade headed "up" (toward the center of the carousel) elevator shafts and maintenance wells toward the bridge. But the stealth remotes (seeing what the ship mind was not al-lowed to see) showed a second group breaking off from the main group.
This mass of Neptunians spread out across the floor once they were out on the ship-brain decks. They, or it (Phaethon could not guess at the number of individu-als inhabiting the blue-gray nanomachinery mass), sent a dozen tiny tendrils of substance sneaking across the bulkheads, looking for unshielded jacks or thought ports. They interfaced with the ship's mind and checked on the progress of the original poisonous thought-virus invasion.
The Neptunians were mazed in the complexity of the ship logic. So, of course, they consulted manuals and help guides to discover the addresses and locations of the vital centers of the mental architecture they wished to examine. They opened the shipboard thought shop, downloaded certain tools and routines to accomplish their checks, and began further acts of sabotage.
Phaethon was bitterly amused. He had designed that architecture. He had written those manuals. He had stocked the thought shop, and, in many cases, had designed those tools. Therefore the ship's mind showed the saboteurs only what they expected to see.
The real ship's brain, of course, was in Phaethon's armor, and always had been. What the saboteurs were accessing were merely secondary systems, repeaters and backups. With the help from the second swarm of stealth remotes (those who had grown in and around the thought-box connective tissues and circuit resolves) Phaethon was able to maintain the masquerade with ease.
This ship, this beautiful ship, was his. He knew her every line and point, every joint and joist, every nut and bolt. He knew the ship and they did not. She was the child of his mind. Did they actually think they could take her from him by force?
The intermediate doors on this level had opened and shut. Neoptolemous was approaching. The air lock leading to the bridge was cycling. The ship's vision cells showed that Neoptolemous was mutating the outer surface of his blue-white armored body, making the adjustments necessary to enter a chamber held at Earth-normal temperature and pressure.
Phaethon activated the third and final group of stealth remotes.
Inside the bridge air lock, the third swarm of microscopic and hidden remotes landed on the surface areas of the Neptunian bodies, finer than the finest dust, unde-tectable. During the moment when the Neptunians' armored surfaces were changing, the remotes penetrated through the cell layers, infiltrated the Neptunian internal systems, bonded to neural tissue, gathering near the node points that controlled the external signal traffic.
Phaethon waited, tense as a cat watching a mouse-hole. If Neoptolemous had any Silent Oecumene technology to detect or counter these remotes, he would probably employ it now. Neoptolemous certainly would not enter the bridge if he knew it was a trap.
Evidently, he did not know.
A panel in the deck was already beginning to slide open.
The remotes inside Neoptolemous began making their medical assessment of how much acceleration pressure each particular nerve group and brain mass could withstand.
It was all so easy, so sweet, that Phaethon would have laughed out loud, except that he was already ordering his cloak to stiffen his body into its tough, immobile, supergravity-resistant form, and his face had grown as immobile as a block of wood.
THE SILENT ONE
By a tradition as old as that first orbital village l(that village whose name was lost to history during the Erasure of the World-Library during the De-renaissance), the entrance to the bridge was in the deck, so that to enter was to travel 'up,' that is, toward the dead center of the centrifuge. Therefore it was a section of the 'floor' that opened to admit Neoptolemous.
Like an iceberg rising to the surface of an arctic sea, Neoptolemous entered. The bridge was as large as an ancient amphitheater, and was able to hold his giant body with ease. Up through the doors and to either side now flowed the rest of Neoptolemous's entourage, pools and surging masses of the Neptunian amoeboid body form, and took up positions to the left and right of the large body mass housing Neoptolemous, a semicircle facing the captain's chair. Some formed elephantine legs and heaved themselves upright; others rolled like enormous slugs, the motions and pulsation of their brain stuffs visible through the translucent surface of their integument. The Neptunians glistened in the blue-red light from the pressure curtains, the colored glint from the energy mirrors.
Was there anyone here except for Neoptolemous himself? The medical stealth remotes in the other members of the entourage told him there was little or no neural activity of the kind associated with self-aware thinking, but there was a tremendous thought and nerve-pulse communication with the Neoptolemous body mass. Evidently all the other Neptunians were puppets, backups or sleepwalkers, being used as secondary extensions of his nervous system by Neoptolemous.
The doors closed beneath Neoptolemous. The medical remotes inside of Neoptolemous, by examining the nerve-to-nerve signal traffic, had estimated which brain areas performed which functions, or held which memories. Calmly, efficiently, the military units were calculating a roster of priority. How much of the organism would be held utterly helpless by su-peracceleration? Which parts of which brains should be destroyed by microlaser scalpel first, to prevent the enemy from thinking about any counteraction or defense? And which brain parts could be examined (once the remotes had attached microscopic reader rebroad-casters to the nerve cells involved) by the portable noetic reader for militarily useful information? And also, for how many seconds would the brain cells carry the in-formation once the target had been crushed to death by the acceleration?
Phaethon examined the readings from the medical stealth remotes, and prepared a charge of paralyzing energies in the mirrors. Aiming elements in the mirrors received information from the medical stealth remotes and targeted specific nerve clusters and ganglia, Phaethon's cloak told him that his body was now in its most stress-resistant configuration. He was invul-nerable to gravity. He had estimates and measurements as to how much pressure the Neptunian bodies and neural webs could withstand before blacking out.
There was a range of values, between twenty and thirty gravities, where the Neptunian body could be pinned and held helpless, but risk of unrecoverable death was low. Between forty and fifty, the specially tough Neptunian brain cells would not be able to convey charges from one to the next, and all neural action would stop, but those charges could still be read, and the last dying thoughts be interpreted. Unfortunately, this would destroy all macrocellular structure in the brain, resulting in the instant death of the organism. The military estimator in the stealth remotes politely recommended this option as the maximal to achieve mission goals with a good safety margin.
Phaethon could kill the enemy now, instantaneously, and read the information from the enemy's dead brain matter at his leisure. Phaethon wondered why he was not more horrified at the concept.
The status boards now showed the main drives were ready. Navigation showed no objects along the Phoenix Exultant's line of flight. Nor was this a surprise. Any acceleration would carry the great ship back along the course through which she had just been decelerating. This area, naturally, was bare of other ships or signals.
With a mental command, Phaethon had the Phoenix Exultant close all her outer hatches, bays, ports and thought ports. Phaethon had paid for every expensive artificial atom of that hull armor. He knew that there were no breaches or breaks in it, not even a pinhole to run a quantum-band antenna through. There was no form of energy, no electromagnetic frequency whatever, that could penetrate that hull. Every known type of communication was blocked.
Neoptolemous, as far as Phaethon could im
agine, was trapped, and unable to communicate with any confederates outside.
Phaethon was uneasy. Was it all to be as simple as that?
He prepared a second charge of much deadlier energies in the mirrors, energies sufficient to destroy anything not encased in adamantium armor. He instructed those mirrors to flood the bridge with fire if Phaethon's thoughts showed any trauma or undue anxiety, or if communication between the ship mind and Phaethon's armor was interrupted.
A signal came from the medical stealth remotes, warning him that chances of discovery where growing with each second of delay. The little machine asked for the kill order. It almost seemed impatient.
Phaethon hesitated. What if this were not the enemy? Didn't he have an obligation to talk to it first? At least to give it a chance to surrender? The Neptunian spoke first.
A voice issued from the bridge speakers. "This is the translator. My client issues parallel simultaneous communication on twenty-four channels, including an introductory file with appended suggestions for artistically proper methods of interrelating the contents of each communication so as to best appreciate the contrasts, similarities, and patterns of many-sided interrelationship. It is not recommended that you continue in your present neuroform, which seems to be capable only of linear-thinking formats.
"For example, in the first suggested configuration, labeled 'Mandelbrot Fractal,' your mind would be subdivided into recursively symmetrical parts, with your subconsciousness receiving information from communication files one through five, your midbrain complexes receiving file six as memory, seven as dream associations (with a separate subfile for scents, as olfactory memories are stored in different areas of your nervous syrstem), and files eight through fourteen simultaneously being experienced by a multiple-personality format, which would later integrate the responses and cross-correlations back into an artificial main self, according to a neurosymphonic pattern orchestrated through file fifteen. Thereafter-"