John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

Phaethon said quickly, "What do I need to do to surrender?"

The monster said. "Give us the armor. We need it to fly the ship."

(The armor. Of course. What else could it have been?)

"And if I give you my armor, you will let my wife go?"

Daphne said in a very soft voice from behind him: "Kill the damn thing, Phaethon. You can't bargain with it."

The monster said: "You are impelled by thoughts of love and safety for loved ones, a morality of good and evil. We are beyond good and evil, beyond love. We have ... no loved ones. We have nothing. Nothing fulfills us. You shall give us the armor and submit to selflessness."

Daphne whispered from behind him: "Don't feel fear. Don't listen. Kill it."

Phaethon hesitated.

Daphne's whisper came: "I will be so ashamed of you, so very ashamed, Phaethon, if you let love or fear make you weak. I will hate you forever. Don't be a coward. Kill the damned thing."

Phaethon drew a breath, held it, thought for a moment. He said, "I love you Daphne. I'm sorry."

And he gave a mental command to his armor.

Arms of intolerable fire erupted in thunder out from his gauntlets and stuck the creature. A dozen lightning bolts leapt from discharge-points along his shoulders, lances of incandescent brightness. The main energy cell in his breastplate opened into a single, all-consuming beam of atomic flame. Mass-drivers flung lines of near-light-speed particles into the target. An instantaneous cataclysm of fire converged upon the monster and pierced it.

The horse body exploded and spread flaming debris across the deck. Phaethon, batteries drained, energy exhausted, suddenly felt the full weight of the armor across his shoulders, and fell heavily to one knee.

Phaethon knelt, panting. The concussion within the contained space of the deck had been tremendous. On the deck before him, a column of oily flame was roaring, lashing the black parasols above with writhing arms of smoke.

He turned his head. Daphne was on her face. Was she dead? But then he saw her stir and raise her head. It was impossible and amazing. She was not even bleeding. Had the creature not fired? She had been standing in the shadow of Phaethon's armor, and his weapons had been configured to minimize any backscatter or spread. Even so, the discharge of forces in this enclosed space should have ...

No matter. He accepted it as a miracle.

"You're alive ..." he whispered.

She was on her hands and knees on the threshold of the hatch. Her face was red, and her tears ran down the soot on her cheeks. She coughed, and said, "You called me wife, that time, lover. I guess this means I win ..."

"I tried to log on to the mentality," Phaethon said heavily. "I realized that you must be right, that there is no virus, nothing to fear. But..."

He saw Daphne's eyes, focused beyond his shoulder, turn into circles of horror.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding ..." she murmured.

His head seemed slow, filled with pain, as he turned it again. Out from the column of fire where once a horse had been now stepped a tall skeletal figure, made only of blue-white nanomaterial, and still shaped something like the horse body it had been wearing. Forward it came, mincing delicately on its rear hoofs, upper body looming high. From the upper-spine shape of the structure, a nest of snakes still spread, still holding weapons and instruments pointing down at the two of them.

The monotone came again: "We approve of futile, pointless, and meaningless actions. We welcome your attempt to cause us pain. But we disapprove of your motive, which was selfish. Remove your armor. Insert your head into the cavity we open in this unit, so that we may sever your neck and ingest your brain-material. Your brain will be sustained by artificial means, during transport."

The rib cage opened like two grillworks made of bone, showing a crude mechanism, still steaming with the heat of nanoconstruction, whose orifice was like the jaws of a guillotine.

Tiny flakes of slime fell from the points of the welcoming rib cage bones. The guillotine jaws snapped wide, forming a round, wet hole about the size of a man's head.

Phaethon used his emergency persona to turn off his fear. Immediately, a crisp clarity came into his thoughts, unhampered by emotion.

The first conclusion that entered his mind was that Daphne had been right: His fear of logging on to the mentality had been imposed externally, by the Cacophiles, at the time when Phaethon had just come out from the courthouse. The Silent Ones had not so far demonstrated the ability to manipulate mentality records, erase Sophotech memories, or do any other thing Phaethon had once believed them able to do.

The second conclusion was the screen of interference that was presently blocking his access to the mentality must be grossly conspicuous to network monitors. The entire noumenal mind-information system of Earth, including the thoughts of the Sophotechs and the brain recordings of the immortality circuits, relied on the complete and unobstructed flow of communication, and hence was extraordinarily sensitive to any interruptions.

A third conclusion confirmed the first: Daphne's departure had been a public event. The enemy had merely dispatched a horse, controlled by, or carrying, some nanotechnology package, to find her and have her lead it to him. This meant that Phaethon's whereabouts had in fact been unknown to the enemy till today. This meant the Silent Ones had not invaded the mentality to any great degree. Evidently their penetration was enough to allow them to be aware of public events, but no more.

The intuition which had been nagging him before now became clear. The enemy was not powerful.

From their actions, their goals could now be guessed. The enemy must have made contact with some Neptunians, in distant space, beyond the sight of the inner-system Sophotechs; the Neptunians had contacts with Gannis. Through Gannis the enemy found Unmoiqhotep and the Cacophiles. The enemy had then waited for an opportunity to strike secretly at Phaethon.

But not to kill him. The seizure of his brain and his brain-work, of his knowledge of the ship, of the ship-controlling mechanisms in his armor, must have been their goal from the first. Hence the Neptunian legate who had approached him had attempted to get him physically to come with him. When that failed, they struck next right after the Curia hearing, when the Cacophile Unmoiqhotep poisoned his mind with a black card in the Middle Dreaming, implanting false memories of a nonexistent attack, meant to frighten him into opening his memory casket and to force him into exile. With Phaethon in exile, they then moved to seize control of the Phoenix Exultant.

The enemy had struck right at the moment after Phaethon's debt to Gannis had been canceled by Monomarchos' cleverness. Why? Because the Silent Ones had control of Xenophon, who was able to buy the debt from Wheel-of-Life, and take possession of the ship (which, had it not been for Monomarchos, would have gone to Gannis and been dismantled.)

All of this was meaningless unless they intended to capture the ship (and her pilot) intact.

This led to two possibilities. The less horrifying one to contemplate was that Xenophon did not actually intend to dismantle the ship. The other possibility spelled terrible danger for his friend Diomedes.

The Silent Ones had lost track of him after Victoria Lake (as had, apparently, the Hortators). But then Daphne, using private knowledge about him and about his tastes (which Nothing Sophotech, no matter how intelligent it was, could not have known or deduced) had found him.

And she had brought this Silent One agent, this construct or being or whatever it was, here. It had, during the journey, tampered with the noetic reader only just enough to deter a paranoid Phaethon from using it. When he had finally (and against all better judgment) decided to use it nonetheless, it had directed a beam of energy into the noetic unit's works to destroy the machine. Daphne's ring had detected the beam, and at that moment, the masquerade ended.