by John Wright
"How amusing. You? An untrained man from a com-pletely peaceful society, without any pistol or energy weapons, think you can kill me in my Neptunian body? I have given you every opportunity for surrender! You have proven yourself a useless pet of the machines after all"
Phaethon spoke aloud: "No. It is I who call on you to surrender. I suspect that you will not. I merely make the offer so that my conscience will be clean, later." Xenophon deigned not to reply.
Efficiency, if nothing else, should dictate that Xenophon kill Phaethon now, immediately, before taking him out of his armor. But perhaps he could not. No weapon could penetrate the Chrysadamantium plates; even the ghost-particle machine had to wait until the thought ports in the shoulderboards were opened before seizing control of the suit's circuitry. And even that control of the armor's command channels was insufficient: the protective feedbacks were hardwired into the nanomachine lining core. The armor simply could not understand or accept any orders that would harm the wearer.
"You overestimate your technology, Phaethon! Your Golden Oecumene has many advances, perhaps, but you are curiously lacking in the one science in which the Silent Ones excel: thought worms, mind viruses, psychic corruption. Even Sophotechs, pure and supreme among intellects, were no more than slaves and toys and playthings after our mental warfare science had done its work. You think your simpleminded suit could withstand me, if it were my purpose to make it do my will? But, no: my purpose is to corrupt, not your suit's mind but yours. And despair shall be my ally. Despair makes men weak, vulnerable to redaction, and self-hatred makes men unable to resist mental reconditioning. My circuits are ready: your memories and skills will soon be at the service of the Silent Oecumene. But first, despair requires hope. You must be allowed to struggle for a moment before you are absorbed."
And, with that, the armor opened.
The golden plates slid aside, and Phaethon tried to get up.
But the pool of Neptunian body substance in which he lay gave him no time to move. It merely swirled up around him, a thousand strands like clinging snakes, and engulfed him. The blue material surrounded him, cocooned him, immobilized his limbs, pressed against his face, intruding in his mouth and eyes. It hardened; even Phaethon's strength could not budge it, lacking any leverage. He was trapped like a fly in amber.
Filaments of neurocircuitry swam forward out of the blue mirk, webbed his skull, and sought the contact points to invade his brainspace.
His personal thoughtspace flickered into and then out of existence again. In the corner of one imaginary eye, he saw the last memory casket, the one with the figure of the winged sword, open, and he felt the wild, drugged, dreamlike sensation that massive memory downloading created, a blur of activity in his cortex and midbrain.
It was a preliminary to all mental surgery to open all unopened memories, so that the restructured mind, after redaction, would not have any old memory chains to lead back to its former personality....
A sarcastic voice appeared in his sense filter. Apparently the Silent One was not pleased with whatever level of hope or rage still burned in Phaethon's mind. "Here is the thought virus which consumed the Silent Oecumene. After it consumes you, as it has done me, you will regard me as your most generous savior. Why do you still resist? You cannot move. In a moment you will be unable even to think. What has happened to the dire revenge you vowed, Phaethon? How did you imagine you could defeat me?"
But at that same moment, the second mass of Neptunian body met, melted with, and combined with the first mass. Phaethon saw the brain activity double and redouble as the creature's intelligence climbed back to normal levels.
The surge of activity around him paused. He could see, floating in the blue material, the main brain group, with the nerve trunk, like a tentacle, leading to the skullcap gripping him. He could detect the neurological changes and endocrinal nerve reactions of fear, panic, and shock.
"Wait. There has been an error. Your face. You are not Phaethon. All is wrong.... You ..."
Memory came. The cells of his outer skin, each and every one of them, contained a nanomachine energy weapon in the cell membrane. They were activated by a command sent through his endocrine system.
Fire lined his body for an instant of pain. A positronic charge was released through his skin by billions of molecule-sized fullerene antiparticle containers. The sections of Neptunian material in contact with his skin ignited, positrons canceling electrons in a clenched spasm of furious radiation.
At the same time, a weapon made of his own neural tissue, invisible and camouflaged (hidden in the centers of his brain otherwise used for creative thought), sent a charge of nerve agent back along the skullcap gripping him, destroying cells and disorganizing consciousness.
Skin ruptured, he was covered from head to toe with his own blood. The Neptunian parted around him.
Another memory came: his blood was toxic. In addition to white and red blood cells were so-called black blood cells, an army of assemblers and disassemblers, programmed to poison, unmake, dissolve, and destroy any biological substance it touched which was not him. The Neptunian was dissolving.
As the Neptunian body fell back to either side, wounded and burnt, he rolled, grasped the katana Atkins had dropped beneath him, came to his feet. Static sparks crawled along the bloodstains as the waste heat from the nanomachine black blood was converted to radio white noise, jamming all signals in the area, disrupting noumenal circuits, preventing any thought transfer.
In one swift motion, with infinite grace, he lunged and shouted and struck. His movement, stance, and execution were controlled and forceful, a perfect example of the art. The finely tempered swordblade punctured the yielding material of the Neptunian body in a way no energy weapon could have done, neatly severing the major nerve groups where his advanced senses told him the Silent One brain activity was housed. Housed, and unable to escape, while the burning blood jammed all thought traffic in the area.
With the withdrawal stroke he severed the brain mass a second time for good measure, and came back to a balanced, upright posture, flourished the sword (light glanced from the beautiful antique perfection of the steel), and drew it down to his side, where a scabbard would have been had he not been nude.
A rough circle of blue-gray Neptunian substance still surrounded him, crawling and writhing, and it showed neuroelectronic activity in some of its segments, perhaps routines still attempting to carry out the Silent One's orders. Near his foot was the smaller blade, a wakizashi, which he had noticed hanging beneath the symbol table when he first woke here. This knife had been under the noetic unit, and therefore had survived the incineration of the bridge: the wreckage of the table, the noetic unit, and the blade had all been under Phaethon's armor during the blast.
He hooked the sheath with his toe, kicked the knife up into his left hand, and, with a wrist flick that sent the sheath continuing upward, exposed the blade.
The knife was not an antique but a modern weapon, shaped like a knife so that it could be used for stabbing when its charge ran out. The charge was full. He glanced at the control surface set into the blade, so that circuits could track his eye movements, and then he looked at what he wished destroyed.
A battle mind in the hilt found the pattern to his eye movements, extrapolated, defined the target, and (before he even finished looking at what he wanted struck) sent a variety of energetics and high-speed nanomaterial packages out from projectors along the blade surface and blade edge to destroy the remaining Neptunian bodies and microbes in the room.
The blade also emitted command signals to lock out those sections of the ship's mind that may have been affected by enemy thought viruses, made a prioritized list of cleanup procedures, made contact with the stealth remotes still hovering in the area, reconfigured them, programmed them for new tasks, and sent them to disable the ghost-particle generator housed in the disrupters planted along the ship's drive core.
All this, in less time than it would take a man, dazed by the blaze o
f fire and lightning coming from that knife, to blink.
The scabbard reached the apex of its arc, and then fell. With his left hand he caught the scabbard on the blazing knife tip, mouth-first, so that it fell neatly onto the blade and sheathed it.
He looked left and right. The deckplate was broken and black. He was alone. The enemy was dead.
He looked in astonishment and horror at his bloodstained hands, crawling with steam and sparks, and at the knife and sword, which seemed so familiar in his grip.
His whisper came hoarsely from his throat: 'Who the hell am I?"
Across the wide chamber, one of the surviving mannequins, Sloppy Rufus, first dog on Mars, turned away from the last bank of still-functional detection assessors, stood on his hind legs, put his forefeet up on the balcony rail, and, with muzzle between paws, peered gravely down. A naked man with a naked sword stood in a circle of black and steaming destruction, that once had been the bridge, and stared back up at him.
"Isn't it obvious, my good sir? You are Atkins." The voice from the dog was Phaethon's voice.
"The hell I am. I don't want to be Atkins. I'm Phaethon. I built this!" He gestured with the still-dripping sword left and right at the bridge around him. Perhaps he was pointing at the wreckage. The man's voice sounded nothing like Phaethon's.
The dog said, "I'm quite sorry, sir, but to be quite blunt, you are an atrocious version of me. Half the things you thought were exaggerated mockeries of what I believe, that other half were pure Atkins. And why did you kill Ao Varmatyr? That was reprehensible! He could have been captured safely, kept alive, cured, saved. Vengeance? Wasteful notion. Besides, you should have known Diomedes was not dead. You recorded him, and most of Xenophon, into the noume-nal recorder before you spoke with the Silent One."
The man dropped sword and knife and pressed his palms against his brow, eyes strained, as if trying to keep some terrible pressure inside his brain from exploding. The memories are still going off inside my head! Burning cities, clouds of nerve logics, a thousand ways to kill a man... You've got to stop it. Where's the noetic unit?! My life is boiling away! I'm Phaethon! I want to stay Phaethon! I don't want to turn into... into..." He was on his knees scrambling for the noetic unit.
The dog said: "Your desire not to be Atkins is probably just an exaggeration of what you think I think about you. Its really not true. I'm sure killing is a use-ful and necessary service to perform in barbaric times, or under barbarous cicumstances like these. ..."
"Then you be Atkins! I'll transfer the mnemonic templates to you-"
"Good God, no! "
The man took up Phaethon's helmet and put it over his head, and slung the breastplate across his shoulders. The thought ports in the epaulettes opened; responder lights in the noetic unit winked on. A circuit was established between the noetic unit and the thought systems in the helm and wired under the man's skull.
The man's fingers were tapping impatiently on the casing of the noetic unit. "Hurry ... hurry ...," he muttered. "I'm losing myself...."
Interruption came. A beam came from the hilt stone of the knife the man had dropped to the bloodstained and burnt deckplates. The beam touched the shoulder board and negated the circuit. The noetic unit went dark.
A voice came from the weapon: "HALT!"
The man ripped off the helmet he wore. There were tearstains running down his bloody cheeks. His face was purple-black with emotion. Veins upon his brow stood out in sharp relief.
The man said in a voice of murderous calm: "You cannot stop me. I am a citizen of the Golden Oec-umene; I have rights. No matter what I was before, I am a self-aware entity now, and I may do to myself whatever I please. If I want to continue being this me that I am now, that's my right. No one owns me! That rule is true for everyone in our Utopia!"
"FOR EVERYONE BUT YOU. YOU BELONG TO THE MILITARY COMMAND. YOU DO AND DIE AS YOU ARE ORDERED."
"No!" The man shouted.
The dog said to the knife: "I don't mind the copyright violations, if he really wants to use my template for a while... I mean, can't you just let him, ah... Don't you have other copies of him and such?"
The weapon said to the man: "RETURN TO YOUR DUTY. RETURN TO YOUR SELF-IDENTITY."
"But I'm a citizen of the Oecumene! I can be who I want! I am a free man!"
"YOU ALONE, MARSHAL ATKINS, ARE NOT AND CANNOT BE FREE. IT IS THE PRICE PAID SO THAT OTHERS CAN BE."
"Daphne! They're going to make me forget that I love you! Don't let them! Daphne! Daphne!"
Weeping, the nameless man fell to his face. A moment later, looking mildly embarrassed or amused, face stern, Atkins climbed to his feet.
"Well, that operation turned out to be a clusterfoxtrot, didn't she?" he muttered.
Atkins spoke with his knife for a few minutes, making decisions and listening to rapid reports concerning the details of the cleanup procedure that the battle mind in the weapon had initiated.
Phaethon's voice came down from the mannequin dog on the upper balcony: "Don't dismantle the ghost-particle broadcast array in the drive core!"
Atkins stared up at the dog. He said (perhaps a bit harshly, for he was not in a good mood), "What the hell's the problem? Bad guy is dead. War's over. There might be some sort of deadman switch or delayed vendetta program running through those things. Best to dismantle them now before something else weird happens."
"With all due respect, Marshal, the idea is unwise. Firstly, they are the only working models in existence of what amounts to a Silent Oecumene technology. Secondly-"
Atkins made a curt, dismissive gesture with his katana. "That's enough. Thank you for your concern. But I've already decided how to handle this."
"An interesting conceit, sir, but irrelevent, as that ghost-particle broadcast array is my property, being found on my ship, and having no other true owner. I believe the heirs and assigns of Ao Varmatyr died several centuries ago in another star system."
"I've had a hard day, civilian. Don't try to play that legalistic hugger-mugger rights game with me. This is still a military situation; those are enemy weapons; and I'm still in charge."
"But you just declared the war was over, my dear sir. And that legalistic 'rights game,' as you call it, is what you are sworn to protect, soldier, and it gives the only justification to your somewhat bloody existance. You are here to protect me, remember? I never did join your hierarchy, my cooperation is voluntary, and you are my guest. If, as a guest, you overstep the bounds of politeness and decent conduct, I would be within my rights to have you put off this vessel."
Atkins lost his temper: "You trying to butt heads with me? Come on. Let's butt heads. I am the God-damnednest Number-one Ichi-ban First-Class Heavyweight Champion Tough-as-Nails Ear-biting Eye-gouging Hard-assed Head-Butter of all Time, mister, so don't try me!"
The dog pricked its ears, looking mildly surprised.
After a quiet moment, Phaethon's voice came: "I suspect, Marshal Atkins, that you and I are both a bit ruffled by the events here. I am, quite frankly, not used to violence, and am dismayed at how you have chosen to conduct this affair. I suspect you are still suffering from memory shock, and are half-asleep." The dog lowered its head, and continued: "But, unlike you, I have no excuse for my conduct. I have let emotions get the better of me, which is a vice in which a true gentleman never indulges. For that I proffer my apologies."
Atkins drew a deep breath, and used an ancient technique to calm himself and balance his blood-chemistry levels. "Apology accepted. You have mine. Let's say no more about it. I guess I'm a little disappointed that there wasn't any superior officer in all this, that our communication tracks did not lead to the Silent One's boss. If he had one."
"But that is what I was attempting to tell you, Marshal. There have been periodic signals leaving this vessel ever since Xenophon came to the bridge."
"Leaving how? The hull is made of adamantium!"
"Leaving through the drive, which was wide open and showering energy out into the universe."
"Aimed?"
"As far as I can determine, yes. The signals were encoded as ghost particles generated by Xenophon's array of disruptors."
"Aimed where?"
"I could not trace them."
"That's what you were supposed to be doing, friend, while I was getting my little butt kicked."
"I did not understand the nature of the signal until Xenophon boasted of the technology, and described it. This ghost-particle technology is not one with which I, or any one else in the Golden Oecumene, is familiar. I had to design and build new types of detection equipment while you and Xenophon were making all that noise. But the broadcasts are occurring at regular intervals. Those magnetic disruptors are still drawing power out of my fuel cells, charging for their next broadcast. There is still a piece of instruction cycling in the ship-mind's broadcast circuit, written in that Silent Oecumene encryption I cannot decode. It will be a directional broadcast, or so I guess, since there are also line actions in the navigational array. When this next broad-I cast comes-and this is the second reason why I would ask you not to dismantle my ghost-particle array-I hope to be able to track the signal to its receiver."
"Xenophon's CO. The Nothing Sophotech."
"And, if I am not mistaken, the Silent Phoenix, or whatever starship they used to come here."
"You did not believe his story?"
"No more than did you, Marshal. The enemy is still at large. Come! We have much to discuss before the next broadcast."
Atkins looked down at his blood-drenched body, the blasted deckplates underfoot, and said, "Is there some place I can scrub up? My blood is a weapon, and I don't want to get any of it near you."
"My dear sir, is there any part of your body which they have not turned into a weapon?"
"Just one. They let me keep that for morale purposes."
"Well, come up to the main bridge, where my body is stored: I have antinanotoxins and biosterilizers which can clean, and robe you."