John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

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 over 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.

During that same long-drawn-out moment, even as he was dying, Atkins drew his ceremonial katana from his belt and, with a cry, launched himself forward in a perfectly executed lunge. He drove the point of the weapon between Phaethon's invulnerable armor and the deck. The sharp edge scraped through Neptunian neural matter, which parted like water and reformed around it. Phaethon's armor moved slightly, slapping an arm down to pin the sword in place, before Atkins could slash again.

The energy from the mirrors peaked. The deck boiled.

Without a cry or call, Atkins vanished in a white ball of incandescent fire. No fragment was left.

Phaethon, in his armor, was safe. Atkins's sword, he could feel beneath him, was safe, the only memento to a futile death. The noetic unit, the thing that allowed the Silent One to control his armor, beneath his chest, still covered, was safe.

And he could also feel, beneath him, the Silent One, stirring. Also safe.

Like gentle snow, a nanotechnological substance coating the surface of the dome above began to drip into the superheated plasma that once had been air. The "snow" bonded atom to atom, dampening molecular heat motions and forming exothermic compounds. As the cloud filtered downward, softly, silently, the plasma at the top of the dome began to cool and turn transparent. Phaethon had been turned to lie on his back; his armor, once so loyal to him, now formed a skintight prison. He lay in the surviving puddle of Xenophon. He watched without interest as falling snowlike crystals drifted down across his upturned 'faceplate. The blackened ruins to each side of him were slowly covered with soft white layers. The air cleared and the far sides of the dome grew visible.

The bridge was not totally devastated: around the far circumference, certain of the taller balconies had survived the discharges. The pressure curtains had been engineered, when under catastrophic overpres-sure to collapse into energy-inert shells guarding the far walls. Those shells enjoyed a temporary, unstable existence, but survived long enough (several measurable parts of a second) to protect a handful of the bridge mannequins (including Sloppy Rufus, first dog on Mars), some of the more important navigational hierarchy controls, as well as a mass of blue Neptunian body material, undamaged.

That mass, in reaction to some signal issuing from the body on which Phaethon lay, now rolled heavily off the balcony, dripped from one shattered bank of thought boxes to the next, and began to crawl, drop by drop, across the burnt floor toward him. Xenophon was collecting himself.