John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

"What else?"

"You stay up top while the Phoenix goes down through the chromosphere into the radiative layer of the core, where the enemy is hiding. You will act as our sounding station, and meteorological eyes-up."

"With no one to help me? It seems a little odd, on a day when everyone else is celebrating, not to sound a universal alarm and call to arms?"

"I think so, too. But the Nothing, smart as it is, may not know how much we know, and if it thinks the Transcendence is going to go off as usual, it may hold its fire until everyone is linked up into one big helpless Transcendent mind. Got it? I don't want to set off the alarm if that will make the Nothing set off its biggest guns."

Helion was silent, thoughtful.

Atkins said, "Well? That's what I want from you. You have a problem with any of this?"

"I have no doubts or reservations. You are not the only one who knows what the word 'duty' means, Captain Atkins."

"Great. And just between you and me, since you're in such a giving mood today ..."

"Yes ... ?"

"Say you're sorry to your kid. He's been moping around ever since we set course for the sun, and it's getting on my nerves. I mean, it would be good for morale."

With another segment of his mind, Helion made contact with his lawyer and accountant subroutines. Aloud, he said, "Very well! You may tell my son, by way of apology, that, by the time he docks at number six, his debts will be cleared, his title reinstated, and the ship he is in shall belong to him once more."

Helion came out of the place still called an air lock, even though it included transformation surgeries, noumenal transfer pools, body shops, neural prosthetics manufactories, and other functions needed to adapt a visitor to the physical environment and mental format of the Phoenix Exultant. This air lock was housed amidships, projecting inward from the hull nine hundred feet, a direction that was, at the moment "down," and surrounded by other housings and machines, all looming like the skyscrapers of some ancient city turned on its head.

Phaethon stood not far away, on a walkway that ran from upside-down rooftop to upside-down rooftop. Behind him, underfoot, far below the fragile railing, rested the fuel cells of the Phoenix Exultant. These cells reached away to each side beyond sight, like an endless beehive of interlocking pyramids, each with a ball of luminous metallic ice at its center.

Helion thought this made a fitting backdrop for his scion-a landscape of frozen antimaterial fire, endless energy held in rigid geometry, capable of vast triumphs or vast destruction. Phaethon wore his gold-adamantium-and-black armor, helmet folded away. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, legs spread, eyes intent and bright; the pose of a youth patiently ready for action.

Helion had dressed in the air lock, constructing a human body (modified for the high solar gravity) and Victorian semiformal dress suit. (Day clothes, of course. Helion long ago determined that no gentleman would sport evening wear while in or near the sun.) He had also constructed a valid legal copy of the receipts for Phaethon's debts, and the petition to the Bankruptcy Court to remove the Phoenix Exultant from receivership. These he had formed to look like golden parchment, stamped with the proper seals and red ribbon. He held up this document, and extended it toward Phaethon.

Before he could say a word, however, Phaethon stepped forward, ignoring the document, and threw his arms around his father. Helion, surprised, raised his arms and embraced his son.

"I never thought I would see you again," said one of them.

"Nor I," said the other.

The document in Helion's hand was quite crumpled and mussed by the time they stepped apart, and Helion dabbed bis joy-wet eyes with it, before he recalled what it was, and extended it sheepishly to his son.

"Thank you, Father; this is the finest of presents," said Phaethon, accepting the crumpled and tearstained mass with a grave and solemn expression. Phaethon looked up. "And Daphne ... ?" Helion nodded at the air lock hatch behind him. "She is still getting changed. You know how women are; she's picking skin color and skeletal structures. I suppose she is trying to find a body which will look as good in this gravity as a Martian's." (Martian women were notoriously vain of the buoyant good looks then-low gravity imparted.)

Phaethon looked pensively at the air lock door. Helion, seeing that look, smiled to himself.

Helion stepped to the rail. "What is the meaning of this intricate activity?" he said, pointing upward.

"Mm?" Phaethon pulled his gaze reluctantly away from the air lock door. "Ah, that. The Phoenix Exultant is installing her solar bathyspheric modifications. There, ranged along the inner hull, are magnetic induction generators. This will create a field along the hull which will act like the treads of a burrowing vehicle, using magnetic current to force dense plasma to either side of the ship, propelling her forward and downward." "Crawling your way into the sun?" They both wore the same expression of ironic humor. "If you like," Phaethon nodded.

"Your refrigeration lasers, I trust, will be adequate to the task? The geometry of your hull does not minimize surface area. Also, the increasing heat of each successive layer as you approach the core exceeds the drive combustion heat of, at least, my bathyspheric probes."

Phaeton pointed. "Can you see about forty kilometers aft of us? That is the line of advancing workers clearing an insulation space of a half kilometer inward of every hull surface, which I intend to flood with superconductive liquid. This liquid will circulate heat to my port and starboard drive cores, which I am using as heat sinks. The centerline drive core will be used as a refrigeration laser, and can easily generate heat greater than the solar core."

Helion did a few hundred calculations in his head, frowned at the answers he got, and said, "So great a volume? With your hull, I would have thought your reflective albedo would near one hundred per cent. Why are you taking in so much heat?"

Phaethon pointed overhead and sent a signal into Helion's sense filter, to show him exterior camera views of work being done outside the hull. "My communication antennae and thought ports are being replaced by crystalline adamantium optic fibers of a bore too large to allow the thought ports to close. I will be taking in heat at these places."

Helions said slowly, "Why in the world are you entering combat with the Second Oecumene Sophotech- who, from what Atkins told me, excels at many forms of virus combat and mind war-with your thought ports jammed open? You will not be able to cut off your ship's mind from external communication, unless your circuit breakers are-"

"The circuit breakers have been replaced by multiple alternate lines of hardwire, welded point to point. There is no way to break the circuit. There is no way to shut out external communication from inside. The hardwire connections cannot even be physically wrecked faster than they can regrow." "But... why?"

"Because this is not going to be a combat. It will be something much more definitive and permanent."

"I do not understand. Please explain it to me." But at that moment, the air lock door opened, and there was Daphne, radiantly beautiful, her eyes alight with cool joy.

Phaethon stared, a smile growing on his features, as if he were storing the image of Daphne at the threshold in his permanent long-term memory. She wore a short-sleeved blouse and long skirt of pale silken fabric, crisp and shining, and a beribboned straw skimmer of the type called a sun hat. Despite the high gravity, she had somehow designed her feet and ankles to be able to wear high-heeled pumps. She stood smiling, her eyes twinkling, one hand raised to hold her hat to her head, as if she expected some impossible breeze to blow through the deck.