John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

There was normally no convection or current in the radiative zone. It was too dense there for anything but pure energy to exist. But the tornado of low pressure caused by Helion had suctioned an area larger than Jupiter upward out of the radiative zone into the convection, as if a mountain had dislodged from the bottom of the sea, and risen up to strike the ship. The eruption had come quickly enough to outrun its own images of approach.

Suddenly, the pressures and temperatures were as great now, instantly, as Phoenix Exultant had been expecting to encounter hours from now. During those hours, the internal fields and bracing systems would have had time slowly to adjust to the mounting pressure. Now there was no time.

Phaethon was directing the internal magnetic and paramaterial fields of the Phoenix Exultant to brace against the pressure shock, receiving information from every square inch of the hull. The temperature was approaching 16 million degrees; the pressure 160 grams per cubic centimeter. Phaethon was using the magnetic field treads that coated the adamantium hull to pull magnetic forces out from the energy shower raging around them, to stave off the pressure by repulsion, adding in some places, subtracting it in others, so that the stress was even on all sides.

Since the Shockwave was passing over the ship in a microsecond, Phaefhon's accelerated time sense required him to measure, to calculate, and to redistribute forces. For each square meter of the hundred kilometers of hull, another calculation was made, another field was increased or decreased in tension, orders were given to fluids in the pressure plates. Movement was frozen in this silent and timeless universe, but every element and every command would need to be in place when time resumed.

In Daphne's mind's eye she could see a view of Phaethon's calm face, carried to her from the monitors inside his helmet. In the Warlock dreamspace inside her head, information from his thalamus and hypothal-amus, the neural energies that (had time been flowing) would have been shown by changes in his facial expression, were displayed to her as a system of colored light, as a menagerie of animals in a field, each beast representing a different passion or emotion.

But as nanosecond after nanosecond crawled by, as the subjective hours passed, those lights that she saw burned pale white and unwavering. Lambs and birds and wolfish dogs, representing Phaethon's meekness, cowardliness, and anger, lay still and restful on the grass. Only the icon of a large gold lion was on its feet, and it stood regally, its gold tail lashing.

Daphne could have, at any moment, shut off her high-time, and allowed the next event to simply happen to her. The ship would either be destroyed or saved in a moment too quick to be seen. It did her no good at all to stay on the line with Phaethon, saying nothing, watch-ing. just watching him work, unable to assist him in my way.

Toward the end of the third subjective hour, she said, "How are we doing?"

His face showed no change of expression. "Not great. The hull has been breached. A gap about twenty angstroms wide. I'm trying to get the outside fields to collapse against each other destructively at that spot, to cancel out and create a bubble. If the magnetics are dense enough, normal plasma cannot enter. We might make it."

Daphne was thinking that, buried in the midst of this opaque plasma, no possible noumenal signal or infor-mation could be transmitted out. Even if they both recorded their minds anywhere on the ship, if the ship were destroyed, there would be no record of what had happened here, ever again.

"What broke the hull? I thought it was invulnerable."

"Gravitic tides in a concentrated point source. Not something I've seen before. Of course, no one has ever been this deep before."

In her mind's eye, she saw a stir of uneasy ten-sion through the beasts her format used to represent Phaethon's emotional and neural tensions. She switched to a traditional Silver-Gray human face format, and saw the same emotion depicted as a narrowing of Phaethon's eyes, a twitch of the muscles in his cheek, a sigh. He said. "There is nothing more I can do at this point. Either I have balanced the overpressure across the hull or I have not. If I have, the forces will cancel each other out, and the pressure will pass evenly across the hull surface. If I have not, greater pressure along one sec-tion will cause a rupture along other sections, because the Shockwave will be traveling normal to the hull rather than parallel. All the models I've run say I have done as much as I can do. Either we can watch this thing happening to us in terrible slow motion, unable to affect the outcome, or we can return to our normal time rate. That way, if I've made a miscalculation, we will be dead before either of us feels any pain or alarm. Which would you prefer?"

" 'Twere best done quickly," she said.

"I'm returning us to normal time rates. Any last words?"

"Do you think this is an enemy weapon? That we simply miscalculated and that the Nothing does not want, or cannot risk, to take over the Phoenix Exultant!"

"Believe it or not, no, I don't think this is a weapon. I think this is a natural phenomenon, created by the low-pressure funnel Helion is using to drive us down this deep. If this had been a weapon, the Shockwave would have struck into a vital spot in the hull, or with a pressure imbalance too great for me to counter balance with my hull magnetics. It's a random action. Chaos. Besides, my neutrino radar shows an homogenous temperature gradient in every direction. If there were a ship our size, or made of the hull material one would need to withstand this depth and pressure, it would be as obvious and unusual as an icicle in a furnace, and give my probes a hard return. There's nothing around us. We're alone."

"So if we die now, it's just one of the universe's little ironies. But I'm not afraid. Because you're wrong: we're really not alone." And she sent a tactile signal that his sense filter could interpret as the feeling of her hand sliding into his grasp, and squeezing his fingers.

He said, "I love you."

With a roar of noise, the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears, the roar of blood, returned to her. She realized that she had her eyes squeezed shut, as if to shut out a bright light. She thought, A lot of good that will do in the middle of the sun. Then she thought, By the time it takes you to wonder if you are still alive, the question has already be- come moot. She laughed, gagged on antiacceleration fluid, spat, and cycled her cocoon to turn back into a throne and release her.

There was a long moment while high-speed pumps cleared the bridge of antiacceleration gel, and other circuits swept the deck.

She looked over to see a diamond shell around Phaethon's golden throne also dissolving in a cloud of steam. He still had his helmet faceplate down, but on her internal channel, she could see the emotional monitors, and saw the interior view of his face. He looked haggard. His eyes had that fatigued, red stare that men who've spent a month or more in highspeed time are likely to get.

She said, "You bastard!"

He said, "Hello, my darling. Nice to see you again"

Ah. I mean, of course, it looks like we are still alive-"

She said in a voice of hot fury, "How dare you!"

"How dare I what?"

"Spend days or months in subjective time-how long was it?-just waiting around to see if I would die, without doing me the courtesy of asking if I wanted to wait with you?"

Daphne thought that Phaethon was the least expert liar alive. He said lamely, "What, um, gives you such a quaint idea? I remember specifically telling you it would all be over in a split second...."

"Oh, good grief! If you came out of your cocoon with a nine-year growth of beard, two children, and a new hobby it could not be more obvious! Well! What in the world were you thinking?!"