John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

He spread his hands, puzzled. "I do not see why you are upset." He spoke in a voice of infinite, calm reason, "I wanted to spare you the anxiety. And it would have been negligent of me not to watch the explosive shock-wave crawl, inch by inch, across the hull, just in case, after all, it turned out that I could have done something. As it was, the Shockwave did even less damage, and was more perfectly balanced, that any model predicted. Sort of strange, actually...."

She stood up, hands on hips. "Not as strange as you're going to feel when I yank out your lying tongue four feet, wrap it around your neck, and strangle you with it! I came along with you because, out of everyone, Atkins, Diomedes, your father, everyone, I was the only one who believed in you. And now you don't believe in me! Do you still think I'm a coward, is that it? Or do you think I would not have had anything to offer, no ideas, not even comfort or support, while you spent a month by yourself waiting to see if we would die? If you don't think I can take what you can, why did you bring me along? Why?"

Phaethon held up his finger. "While I would really like to continue this argument-it makes me feel like we're already married, you know, and that is comforting-why don't we store this conversation in a back file and play it out later? We can store our emotions so that you'll be just as mad and I'll be just as tired. Because there is something very bad happening right now, and I'd like your advice and support on the issue." "Well. Okay. But no backup files. I hate old conversations. Since there is nothing but empty ship mind all around us, why don't we send two partials to finish that conversation for us, provided we agree to abide by the results? We still have the portable noetic unit right here." Phaethon agreed, and they established copies of themselves to continue the argument on another of the ship's channels. Meanwhile, Phaethon showed Daphne what he had found during the hundred hours (for him) that had taken place during the split second (for her) it had taken the Shockwave to pass across the ship.

He pointed to a mirror that now showed a yellow-white haze rippled by feathery clouds of red and dark red.

"The Shockwave threw us out of the funnel of He-lion's low-pressure area," said Phaethon. "And I do not know where we are. Helion may have also lost track of us." He pointed toward the mirror. "The environment here looks like we have dropped into the radiative zone, but we may still be inside the bubble of higher-density plasma that erupted over us."

Daphne said, "How bad is that? I mean, all we were doing was waiting until the bad guys found us."

"I had been hoping to get to the location to which the ghost-particle machine was sending its periodic broadcasts. But since I do not know where we are, I will not know where that point is, until the machine broadcasts again."

She said, "The plasma outside is about twenty times as dense as solid iron. The magnetics you had been using to bore through the material you are now using (now that we are lower that we had planned to go) to reinforce the hull against a breach. So how can we be moving?"

"I must keep the drives firing at full blast, in order to overcome back pressure and dump waste heat. That is actually adding relatively little movement to our vector, because of the density of the medium. But even if we are at rest relative to the current of superdense core plasma around us now, we do not know where or how quickly that current is moving. An area of plasma a hundred times the diameter of Jupiter just closed around us; if that area is moving at the speed of some of the equatorial currents, we could be an immense distance away from where we were a few minutes ago. So the question is: How do we find out where we are, how do we get to where we want to go? And we do not have all the time in the world. Six days from now, as soon as the fuel runs out, the plasma from the sun pours into the drives, atomizing everything inside, including us."

She said, "Do you have any magnetic power left over to put to the treads, to dig us out of this super-dense area?"

Phaethon said, "No. I'm using every erg to brace the ship against the internal currents here, within the area. Just to make this clear: we could be inside the radiative zone, falling toward the core, or this sphere of plasma could be rising like a bubble up through the convective zone, and it has not yet dispersed because of its immense size. It seems very ironic-silly, actually-to get killed this way by some accident of internal solar meteorology, without ever seeing the enemy." He sighed and raised his hand toward his faceplate, as if about to open it, saying, "Perhaps I should not have kept watch for so many subjective, hours during that Shockwave. I do feel very tired...."

Daphne felt the nape-hairs of her neck stir. She felt as if she were being watched.

She reached out and grabbed his hand. "Keep your helmet on, you fool!"

Phaethon paused, startled. "But why-?"

Because Daphne had been trained by Warlocks, she could trigger pattern-finding intuitions from nonverbal sections of her brain, and deduce insights from partial information. So somehow she knew: "It's the only thing saving us!"

Phaethon froze. He said, "Check the ship's brain."

Daphne called up a status report on the mirror next to her chair arm. "Still empty. No one's in the ship mind except our two copies. Otherwise it's empty."

"Why are you so sure the enemy is aboard?" For some reason, even though the brightly lit bridge was wide and empty around them, his voice had dropped to a whisper.

It took her a moment to find the words, to bring the Warlock intuition to the forefront of her mind, like tempting some wild beast out from its dark cave. She said: "Too many coincidences. We know the enemy can manipulate solar currents and raise storms just like your father does; that is what killed Helion Prime. So we're caught by a super-dense current. It may be carrying us, helpless, to the surface, just where the enemy wants to go, if they are aboard and if they want to escape the Golden Oecumene. If the enemy cannot escape, they wait a few days until the fuel runs out, and kill us both, so, at least, our side doesn't have the ship. The current that caught us cannot be natural: it breaks the hull, but it somehow is more careful, more evenly balanced, that you expected; and at the same time, it puts on just enough pressure, no more, no less, to neutralize the hull magnetics we need to use to maneuver."

He said, "But there is no evidence of anything reed through the thought ports I jammed open. How did their ship transmit any crew-mind information aboard the Phoenix?"

She said, "That I do not know. Maybe the ghost-particle machine acted like a Trojan horse, and was receiving information from an outside source."

"Through the hull...?"

'Your drive ports are open. Besides, you were using it just now to send and receive neutrino bursts. If it can receive information from inside, it can receive it from outside. And probably send as well. Just because your closed hull stops some of the particles the ghost array puts out-the particles you detected-does not necessarily mean there were not other groups of signals you did not detect. The Nothing Sophotech probably did actually receive Ao Varmatyr's dying broadcast, and knows everything he found out about the ship, your plans, and you."

"I don't really mind if the Nothing knows everything we said and did. Our strategy, in fact, relies on total honesty. But I wonder why it did not take over the ship's mind. One would think it would welcome the higher thought-speeds, if for no other reason. Maybe the conscience redactor has given it some specious reason to fear the ship mind.

"Are you sure it's not in there?" Daphne asked. "Our read-out here could be an illusion. Run a line check."