by John Wright
"Present some further evidence that what you say is true. I might change my mind."
No message came back for several moments. The noetic unit showed high-speed activity in the coded brain sections, but no hint of what that activity implied. Was the Silent One calculating a response?
Then: "Phaethon, you would not have been sent into this situation with your conscience free and your free will and memory intact Which means that there is a partial personality possessing you now, or false memories, or some other restraint or leash by which the War Mind still hopes to control you. Your actions "eem grossly out of character. Your judgment has been rfFected. Think carefully: would the real Phaethon, Phaethon with his mind and soul intact, abandon the dream of his life, and his hopes for mankind, and all bis work, and everything, merely to catch and punish one criminal like me? Is Phaethon's notion of duty, of social obligation, so strong that it overrides all other personal considerations? You did not think so when you built this ship."
"If my judgment has been infected or altered, what point is there in arguing further?"
"Argument might show that part of you who yet is pure how corrupt the other parts become. Answer the question: Is your behavior now in character for you?"
Phaethon was uncomfortable. Because, honestly, he did not recall exactly what it was Atkins had done to him, or had talked him into doing.
And did he trust a man like Atkins? Atkins was, and had to be, the kind of man who would do anything to prevail over his enemies, deceiving them, destroying them, killing them, by any means possible. What life did Atkins have? A life of endless bloodshed, and an endless preparation for future bloodshed. A life of suspicion, harsh discipline, ruthlessness toward others, pitilessness toward himself.
Atkins was a man of destruction. What had he ever created to compare with this great ship? What had he ever built?
For a moment, he was so glad that he was a man like himself, and not like Atkins.
And, after all, Atkins was not the sort of man one could trust.
Phaethon said, "The noetic unit can tell if I've been tampered with."
"Precisely! I was counting on you to come to that very conclusion!" said the Silent One.
Without any further ado, Phaethon opened the epaulettes in his armor, and activated the thought ports, and made a connection between his brain and the noetic reader.
Like an explosion, the wild disorientation that raced through him, and the crushing pains that began to burn into his flesh, were the first signal that something was terribly, terribly wrong. The war for control of Phaethon's nervous system took place at mechanical speeds his brain could not hope to match. The same interference that locked him out of control of his own armor, and blocked his frantic signals to the nanomachine cape that controlled every cell in his body, also prevented him from releasing the deadman switch to burn the Silent One with mirror weapons, and prevented the activation of his high-speed emergency personality.
And so he was simply too slow to react. The Silent One had somehow, without any visible machinery or physical connection to any mechanisms, invaded the noetic reader and reorganized the circuitry.
In the same split instant when Phaethon connected his mind to the machine, and long before he was even aware of what had happened, it was far, far too late.
Phaethon was in pain; he felt faint; sharp pains told him smaller bones in his body had broken, tissues were damaged. How? Blearily, he tried to read from his internal channels, tried to summon his personal thoughtspace. Nothing came. The channels were jammed; something was interfering with the cybernetics webbing his brain.
He tried to shut off his pain centers. That worked. His body was still being damaged, but he was blissfully unaware of it. He could concentrate.
The sensation of heat burning his body told him all be needed to know. His nanomachine cloak was in motion. Somehow (and he had no guess as to how) the Silent One had triggered the release cycle of his body's internal high-gravity configuration. His tissues were softening, his blood was turning to liquid.
But the ship's drive was still exerting massive thrust. Under twenty-five times his normal weight, Phaethon's cells would surely rupture, and he would surely die.
An outside source turned on his personal thought-space, and the familiar images and icons from his adjutant status board were superimposed on the scene around him.
To the left was the dragon sign showing signal command, with information logistics spread like wings behind the picture. Behind him were trophies, emblems, awards, decorations. To his right were a number of pictures: a winged sword, a roaring tiger with a lightning bolt in its claws, an anchor beneath a crossed musket and pike, a three-headed vulture holding, in one claw, a lance, and in the other, a shield adorned with a biohazard triskeleon.
Directly in front of him was a standard naval menu: an olive drab curve of windows and control icons, with a brass wheel and joystick, astrogator's globe, fuel-consumption displays. A menu above the wheel controlled the interface between his armor and the ship mind. This menu showed a red exclamation mark: Password Not Accepted: No Course Corrections Enabled Without Proper Password. Resubmit?
The Silent One's voice came into his ear, directly into his ear. That was a bad sign, since it meant the Silent One had somehow seized control of his armor, or, at least, the circuits in his helmet. But it was not a sign as bad as it might have been: the thought ports in his armor were evidently not allowing the noetic reader to redact or to manipulate his nervous system. The circuit woven into his brain must still be free. The Silent One's words were not appearing, for example, directly in his auditory nerve, or, worse yet, directly into his mind and memory. The noetic reader was not controlling his mind. He still could choose not to listen or not to obey.
The words were: "Submit the password. If your body completes its cycle before the drives are shut down, you perish."
Phaethon wondered why the noetic reader did not simply pick the password out of his memory.
"The password we read from your memory is not valid."
Phaethon truly wished he could have somehow not thought the next thought which leaped into his mind. Because that thought was this: If his password was invalid, then someone had overridden it. The only one who could possibly have an override to Phaethon's authority over this ship, the only person who could convince the ship to ignore Neoptolemous's legal ownership, was Atkins. During the period Phaethon had erased from his memory, Phaethon must have given Atkins an override.
Which meant Atkins was aboard the ship.
"Where?"
Phaethon did not remember.
Atkins must have planned to do the same thing he did with the enemy hidden in Daphne's horse. Namely, to allow the enemy to defeat and kill Phaethon, and watch to see what they did with the spoils of victory.
"You think we are defeated? Your conclusion that Atkins, wherever he is hiding, will simply be able to destroy me is unwarranted. Why hasn't he shown himself?"
Obviously, because the Silent One had not yet done whatever it was he had come here to do. Atkins was waiting for the enemy to reveal his real plans.
"I have told you all my plans. You still do not believe that I act in good faith? You are a fool! But I still need you to save my people. Tell me the password; otherwise you die; I die; and even Atkins, if he is aboard, is carried away out of your Solar System at twenty-five gravities, aboard a ship that no one can stop and no one can board."
But Phaethon did not remember the password.
"Open your memory caskets."
The Silent One was able to manipulate at least some of the functions in Phaethon's sense filter: A memory casket seemed to appear on the symbol table next to him.
"If Atkins is aboard, as you believe he is, and you think he is ready to destroy me once I show my real goals, as obviously you do, then not only does it not matter if I gain access to the ship-mind-the real ship-mind this time, not the dummy with which you deceived me before-it actually aids your cause, doesn't i
t?"
The problem with dealing with an enemy who was reading one's mind was that bluff, deceit, or delay was impossible. The Silent One knew that Phaethon thought Atkins was aboard and waiting. But the Silent One simply did not believe Phaethon's beliefs were correct.
Of course, Phaethon had no notion of what was going on inside of the Silent One's mind.
"I wish you did. If there were a way I could make this noetic reader able to decode my thoughts, I would use it; then you would see that I am not your enemy; that I am, ultimately, the only true friend you have, Phaethon."
Very well. Phaethon would open the first memory casket, looking for a password, and turn the ship over to the Silent One. If the Silent One was sincere, and if he truly intended no harm to the Golden Oecumene, Atkins would no doubt let him live. If not, the Silent One would no doubt perish. Much as he disliked the man, Phaethon had no doubt whatsoever that Atkins could kill any living creature he was permitted to kill, once he was unleashed.
"You have an almost religious faith in your war god, don't you, Phaethon? But I see you have decided."
With an imaginary hand (Phaethon could not have moved his real one), Phaethon opened the memory casket.
There was a second casket inside the first. There was an image of a thought card in the lid of this second casket, inscribed with the sign of a winged sword. When he saw it, he began to remember....
The password was the first thing that returned to his memory: Laocoon. What a strange choice for a password. It was the name of one of the L5 asteroid cities at Trailing Trojan, a place of no particular military significance. There was also some sort of classical allusion to that name, some mythical figure, but Phaethon could not bring it to mind at the moment.
He sent the password into the menu: the menu winked out, and a rush of numbers, figures, and ideograms flashed across the surfaces of the energy mirrors lining the bridge. The Silent One was taking control of the ship's mind for the second time. Perhaps this task was occupying the Silent One's full attention.
Several of the bridge mannequins looked up at the rush of information on the mirrors, looks of simulated surprise on their simulated features. Sloppy Rufus barked and scrambled up to an upper balcony near the major communication nexus.
Phaethon realized, with a sensation of shock, that no external observer could have known just what had passed between Phaethon and the Silent One. How could anyone or anything be able to tell Phaethon's armor had been taken over by the enemy? His armor was opaque to every radiation or probe; no one could tell, from the outside, that its control mind had been subverted. Unless Atkins had eavesdroppers planted inside the noetic unit, or placed along the beam path leading from Phaethon to the Silent One's brain, it would look simply as if orders were coming from Phaethon's armor and feeding into the bridge thought boxes.
Other memories from the casket were crowding into Phaethon's brain, confused, tangled. As always, memory shock made him feel sleepy. But he was sure they were memories he did not want the Silent One to see.
He fought. He tried to stay confused, to not recall.
It was no use. Phaethon remembered that Atkins did not have any such eavesdroppers. He was hooked into the microscopic stealth remotes, and that was all. Phaethon remembered that they had discussed this: and Atkins, being a military man, had wanted to stick with the traditional hardware and software with which he was familiar. He was relying on that one system to tell him his information.
A system they had decided to have Phaethon run through his armor, because there was no other complex-mind hierarchy aboard the ship...
And now that that system was compromised, Atkins was blind. He was standing right next to Phaethon, and did not know anything was wrong.
Phaethon lunged out with an imaginary hand. But he was far too slow, and his thoughts betrayed him. The thoughtspace vanished, shut off from an outside source. Without his emergency backup personality available, Phaethon's brain operated at biochemical speeds, whereas the Silent One, inside the body of a Cold Duke, had the superconductive, high-speed, shape-changing neurocircuits at his command.
He had reached with his imaginary hand for some control, some way to send a signal and give a warning to Atkins. Because he remembered where Atkins was.
Phaethon tried to scream out a warning, tried to move. The acceleration was dropping; the Silent One was cutting power to the drive; but Phaethon's body had not yet thawed, and even if it had, no noise would have penetrated his armor, no shout could have left his helmet any more than it could have left a sealed, air-tight, long-buried tomb. Atkins was inside Ulysses.
He was not here inside of his biological body; he had never physically been here. Instead, Atkins's armor, hunched from Earth from the only military spaceport in existence (it was in a large field behind Atkins's cottage), had carried a downloaded copy of Atkins's mind and memory. With the portable noetic reader, Phaethon had transferred the download into the mannequin's brain system, and Atkins had woken up.
There was a blur of motion, a flare of light. Phaethon was jerked headlong.
Whatever system the Silent One was using to prevent Phaethon from activating his emergency persona did not prevent Phaethon from activating his rather complex sensory apparatus. Phaethon's senses were acute enough to see the battle.
In the first microsecond, the Silent One used a switch in Phaethon's armor to redirect the aiming beams from the energy mirrors away from their targets in Xenophon's body and focus them at the Ulysses body. Atkins must have detected this: the Ulysses body started forward as quickly as it could under the twenty-five gravities of acceleration; weapons made of pseudo-matter, one after another, appeared and disappeared in Ulysses's hands, all in a matter of several nanoseconds, all firing. Xenophon's body disappeared in a blaze of fire; cut, stabbed, burnt, exploded, vaporized. This explosion took place over the next two microseconds and lasted throughout the remainder of the battle. The overpressure reached a million atmospheres during the explosion itself.
Phaethon was able to detect, during the second microsecond of combat, Xenophon, beaming his brain information out of his burning body into the other empty Neptunian bodies in the bridge. Neptunian bodies were specially designed to permit such high-speed transfers. Several of Atkins's weapons laid down a suppressing fire of jamming signals, thought-seeking mi-cropulses, and webs of force to destroy any noumenal information in motion; Xenophon was killed several times, but redundant backups allowed full copies of his brain information to appear at several points around the room. Atkins's weapons were not programmed to notice that irrational mathematics code was thought information; it looked like gibberish to their circuits; they did not know what type of pattern of forces would block transmissions.
At about this same time, the fire from the mirrors struck Ulysses's body. The rags of his costume were blown off as the air around ignited. Beneath, however, was the black armor of Atkins, empty except for Atkins's mind, absorbing the firepower, shredding concentric layers of ablative, releasing fogs of nanomaterial around him.
The armor propelled itself forward with unthinkable speed. Before the third microsecond was passed, Atkins was crouching behind Phaethon's chair, trying to put Phaethon' s body between himself and the concentrated firepower from the mirrors. The Silent One had lost about half his spare bodies in the same moment of time, due to Atkins's firepower.
The captain's chair and the surrounding tables began to burn. Phaethon, trapped in his motionless armor, began to fall.
In the third microsecond, the Silent One used his control over the drive to send the Phoenix Exultant careening. The deck seemed to wobble; gravity jarred more heavily and lightly.
Ballistic projectiles radiating from every surface and pore of Atkins's black armor went astray; smart projectiles were confused by the air, which, at this mo-ment had turned incandescent and opaque by the ener-gies released long ago, during the outset of the battle in the last microsecond.
There followed a slow period of battle, lasting o
ver severalmicroseconds, a long-drawn-out campaign. The Silent One, in his many bodies, was beaming his brain information from point to point around the room, and propelling sections of his exploding blue-white flesh back and forth across the chamber, maneuvering, Meanwhile, Atkins, blinded by the opaque air, and unable to drive clear signals from one side of the chamber to another, had his tiny bullets and his super-sonic nanoweapons swimming through the incandescent murk, like submarines hunting for enemies in the blind sea.
Phaethon was no tactician, but it looked to him as if this period of hunt-and-seek were clearly in Atkins's favor. More of the blue-white Neptunian substance was burning.
The end of the battle came suddenly. A signal reached Phaethon's armor. He had no control over his limbs. His armor projected a variety of destructive forces, throwing fragments of his captain's chair in each direction, and adding to the general waste heat in the chamber.
His gauntlets grabbed the noetic unit, the unit through which his armor was being controlled, and hugged it to his chest. His mass drivers propelled him sideways and down on his face. He smashed through the status table on his right, and fell into a puddle of blue Neptunian nanomaterial, leaving Atkins unprotected. Many of Atkins's weapons, sensing a concentration of brain information beneath Phaethon, fired harmlessly into Phaethon's backplates, but could not wound the puddle beneath him. In that same split instant of time, the Silent One released his control over Phaethon's dead-man switch.
The pain in Phaethon's body automatically triggered the weapon program he had already set up. It was as if the mirrors brought the cores of several suns into the room.
The thought boxes, the bridge crew, and the pressure curtains were wiped away. The deck was polished clean.
For a long, very long second, concentric bubbles of pseudo-matter appeared around Atkins, additional armor; and he lived even as everything around him was destroyed.
But something strange seemed to twist or distort the space where the pseudo-matter was focused; the pseudo-matter, and all of Atkins's pseudo-material weapons, vanished as their fields collapsed.