The inner ring, in microgravity, housed the Eremites and Frost Children, at one time, servants, children, and bioconstructs of the Neptunians, but now equal partners in their ventures, intermingled in more ways than one, and indistinguishable, these days, except as a different form of body. These too were part of the strange mass-mind of the Duma, representing the interests of the moons, outer colonies, and those Far Ones who dwelt in the cometary halo.
Hanno said, “We are at dock, milord.”
The Phoenix Exultant was not going to couple with any dock, of course. “Docking” for a ship of her immensity merely meant that she would come to rest relative to the Neptunian station, surrounded by such beacons and warnings as traffic control required to warn other ships away from her volume of space.
Ulysses, pointing to one of the mirrors, exclaimed, “Others vessels close with us. Will they be hospitable or no?”
Armstrong reported, “We have radio contact with Neptunian vehicles. They are initiating docking rendezvous.”
Other mirrors showed the view port and starboard. Clusters of radar noise betrayed the presence of ships. Doppler analysis showed they were beginning maneuvers to close with the Phoenix Exultant.
And the sheer number of Neptunian ships was astonishing. There were thousands, some of them over a kilometer in length. Why were so many vessels, equipped with so much mass, closing with him?
Jason, from behind him, spoke up: “Sir. Messages from yonder boats. The Neptunian crew is ready to come aboard.”
Crew? Come aboard?
Jason said again, “Sir! The Neptunian owner, Neoptolemous, is ready to take possession of the Phoenix Exultant. He requests you open the channels leading into the ship mind, so that he can load his passwords and routines to configure the mental environment for the disembodied members of the crew. The supply boats are coming alongside, and requesting you open your ports and bay doors. The physical crew are maneuvering to dock. What is your answer?”
Neoptolemous. The combine-entity built from the memories of his friend Diomedes and the Silent One agent Xenophon.
Phaethon saw swarms of enemy closing in on his ship. Perhaps some of them, perhaps most, were merely innocent Neptunians. But the command staff, and Neoptolemous, no doubt were controlled by the Nothing Sophotech. That meant, in effect, that they were all enemies.
Countless jets of light, flickers from maneuvering thrusters, were twinkling near the hundreds of prow air-lock doors, near the scores of midship docking ports, near the four gigantic cargo and fuel bays aft. Other energy mirrors, tuned to other frequencies, showed the connection beams radiating from off-board computers and boat minds, pinging against the receivers, radio dishes, and sensory array which ran along the lee edge of the great prow armor. The off-board systems were trying to make contact with the ship mind. Preliminary information packages showed hundreds and thousands of files and partials waiting to download into the ship and into her systems.
All waiting for him. The enemy.
“Sir? What is your answer?”
Phaethon reached over and opened the memory casket.
3.
Inside the memory casket were three cards. They were a drab olive green in hue, with no pictoglyph or emblemry at all upon them. They were labeled “SDMF01—Spaceship Defensive Modification Files. Government Issue Polystructual Stealth Microcorder and Retrieval (Remote Unit Control).”
Phaethon raised an eyebrow. The Phoenix Exultant was certainly not a mere “spaceship.” She was a starship. And what ugly names and colors! Did this Atkins fellow truly have no taste at all? Perhaps the military burned the artistic sections of the brain away and replaced it with a weapon or something.
He looked into the Middle Dreaming, and the information about the stealth remotes flowed into his brain. There were three sets or swarms of remotes. The first was gathered around the air locks; the second had interpenetrated the ship-mind thought boxes and established overrides at all the machine-intelligence switch points and circuit resolves; the third were a group of medical remotes hidden under the floor of the bridge.
There were no further instructions or details about the plan.
But there did not need to be. Phaethon was an engineer; he knew tools could only be shaped for one purpose. He studied the specifications on the last group, the medical group, of stealth remotes, and saw the particular modifications that had been made to them, including special combinations to allow them to make transmission connections between Neptunian neurocircuitry and noetic reader circuits.
The grisly and efficient deadliness of the little military remotes should have horrified him. Instead, for some reason, he found himself admiring the ruthless simplicity of the design.
And so it was not without some relish that Phaethon answered his mannequins.
Phaethon said, “Okay, boys. Open communication. Let’s get this show on the road.”
4.
The identification channel opened: The radio encryption bore the heraldic code of the Neptunian Duma, but also of the Silver-Gray.
The visual channel opened: a mirror to his left lit with an incoming call. Here was an image of a tall, dark warrior in Greek hoplite armor, a round shield in his left hand, two spears of ashwood in his right.
For a moment of hope, Phaethon thought it was Diomedes. But a subscript to the image introduced this as Neoptolemous, who merely had inherited the right to the icons and images Diomedes once used to represent himself.
“Behemoth of nature,” Neoptolemous said, “Exemplar of all this Golden Oecumene, at the zenith of her genius, can produce, Phoenix Exultant! We are impatient for your welcome. Open your doors and locks. We have material, and manpower, gallons of crew-brain-swarms, software, hardware, greenware, wetware, smallware, largeware, sumware, and noware, all waiting now to merge with you. This is a fine day for all Neptunians! Already the Duma consumes parts of itself, and moves the thoughts of your high triumph—and my own—to selected parts of long-term memory! Come, Phaethon! Welcome me as befits the fashion of the Silver-Gray! We will exchange no brain materials through any pores, but I will form a hand, after the ancient fashions, and curl your fingers around my fingers, and pump your arm first up, then down, to show we bear no weapons, after we have first agreed upon an up-down axis. I suggest that, if we are under acceleration, the direction of motion always be considered ‘up’!”
Phaethon was caught between amusement and horror, wonder and fear. Amusement, because this odd speech reminded him somewhat of the dry and ironic humor of Diomedes. But that was Diomedes before his marriage of minds with Xenophon, before he commingled himself to create this creature, Neoptolemous.
And the horror was that Diomedes must have had no notion of what kind of mind he had been marrying. Xenophon, either an agent or a puppet of the Silent Ones, must have had redaction traps and thought worms ready to capture Diomedes, a marriage of minds turned into a brutal rape, with noetic readers primed to rob Diomedes of any useful information, ready to turn his personality, imagination, and memory into tools and weapons useful to the enemy.
Was there some part, some ghost, of Diomedes, still alive inside the horrid maze of an alien brain, perhaps aware of what his body now was doing, aware of what vile purposes his thoughts and memories now served?
Neoptolemous said: “Why do you not respond? Why do you not flex the muscles in your cheeks so as to draw skin flesh away from your teeth, just enough to show the teeth, yet not so much as to cause alarm? I know that a face contortion of this kind is the way to show friendship, and welcome.”
The enemy attempt to seize control of Phaethon’s armor made no sense unless they were going to take possession of the ship. And Neoptolemous was the entity who presently held title to the ship. Logically, therefore, Neoptolemous, and Diomedes before him, had been absorbed by the enemy.
Neoptolemous was talking: “Speak! Your ardent admirers and loyal crew hyperventilate with pleasure at the thought of flying to the stars! We have gathered crew partials and full per
sonas from each part of the Neptunian Tritonic Composition. The materials we bring are gathered. Open your ship mind that we may intrude the specially designed routines, useful to our purposes, into your secret core. Then, as soon as all things are aboard, what obstacles would dare to skew our course? We shall all climb far away from the light and gravity of the burning sun, ever upward (for the direction of motion, I have already said, is ‘up’). Yes! Up and away into the dark of endless night, and there, far from where any eyes can see, far away from where any hand could stop us, particular desires of our own will be accomplished.”
Phaethon hesitated. Was he actually planning to let his enemies onboard? Was he supposed to fight this war himself, alone, armed only with what the three olive drab cards in the memory casket had given him?
But then, he had to be alone. Who else had a body that could adjust to such intolerable gravitational pressure?
If this hypothetical plan required that Phaethon, pretending innocence, allow Neoptolemous aboard, any hesitation now would alert the Nothing Sophotech, and perhaps send that entity permanently into hiding. He had to decide immediately.
Phaethon did recall that both the horse monster and Scaramouche had been killed by Atkins in swift and decisive strokes, under circumstances suggesting that Nothing Sophotech could not have heard news of the deaths of his agents. At best, Nothing would be suspicious because messages from Scaramouche were overdue.
But if Nothing’s purpose was to seize control of the Phoenix Exultant before her launch from the Solar System, then this moment now was the evil Sophotech’s last opportunity to act. No matter how suspicious the enemy might be, Nothing had to get Neoptolemous, his agent, aboard, and now.
And so should Phaethon, acting alone, and on the blind faith that he would be able somehow to overcome the agent sent by an unthinkably intelligent enemy Sophotech, the last remnant of a long-dead civilization, an agent armed perhaps with powers and sciences unknown to the Golden Oecumene, should Phaethon knowingly let that agent aboard? . . .
But it seemed it was his duty to do so. Better to follow orders, and do his duty, even if he did not understand that duty, rather than let those duties go undone.
He directed a thought at the mirror.
“Welcome aboard, owners and crew. I am happy to serve as pilot and navigator of this vessel. We shall explore the universe, create such worlds as suit us, and do all else which we have dared to dream to do. Welcome, Neoptolemous of Silver-Gray. Welcome, all.”
5.
The hatches and docks all along the miles of the Phoenix Exultant hull slowly, grandly, began to cycle open.
The enemy came aboard swiftly and slowly.
The antennae and thought-port array along the Phoenix Exultant’s prow opened to the radio traffic. Phaethon tracked the invasions of the enemy software, and saw the readout begin to register the flows of poison into the hierarchy of the ship’s pure mind. This took a matter of seconds.
The prow air lock doors admitted those Neptunians (and there were scores) whose “bodies” were spaceworthy. Gleaming blue-gray in their flexible housings, these masses of neurotechnology fell across empty vacuum, slid across the hull toward the air locks. Phaethon consulted ship diagrams, and sent a message to gather the high-speed elevators into the living quarters, and lock them there without power. Those Neptunians entering by the forward air locks would have miles to travel before they reached the living quarters, or any system of the ship where they could do any damage.
At the scores of midship docking ports, smaller vessels, space caravans and flying houses, were arriving. The docks here were wide spaces, half a kilometer wide and five kilometers long. Fortunately, the caravans arriving here also were mingled with the arriving biological material, canisters of Neptunian atmosphere under pressure, and acres of Neptunian jungle crystal held in greenhouses. Phaethon simply deactivated half of his robot stevedores and longshoreman, and cut the intelligence budget available to the supercargo. Then he directed the supercargo to ask all the incoming persons and materials to submit to examinations for viruses, prank-craft, explosives, or self-replicating aphrodisiacs. Being Neptunians, they would not think these precautions odd or insulting. If anything, they might think Phaethon’s precautions were lax.
An estimator in his armor allowed him to calculate the average confusion or friction caused by these inefficiencies. It would be long minutes before everything entering amidships was loaded or stored.
But a different story obtained at the four gigantic cargo and fuel bays aft. These spaces were so large that there was no crowding, no opportunity to cause confusion. Even the kilometer-long superships of the Neptunian colonists could fit in the vast aft bays with ease.
And Neoptolemous was on one of those ships. Analysis of the signal traffic showed the communication centers, and, presumably, the brains of the operation, were there.
That communication fell silent when all these ships came close enough to the Phoenix Exultant that her hull blocked the line of sight from ship to ship. All the units of the Neptunian crew were now, in effect, isolated from each other.
Phaethon watched the lead supership move from an outer to an inner aft bay. The locks on the doors could not be programmed to deny Neoptolemous access anywhere, since he was the legal owner of the Phoenix Exultant at this point.
But since the other officers and personnel were not owners, of course, they were held at their various outer bays and deck spaces, unable to proceed farther. The kilometer-long ship of Neoptolemous, all alone, wandered forward into the vast gulf of the inner bay.
This lead supership opened like a flower, disassembling itself in a confused rush of nanotechnic writhings, surrounded by waste steam. Globules and arms of the nanostuff attached themselves to the inner bay walls and began constructing the houses, laboratories, nurseries, and conglomeration chambers for the Neptunians who would be residing there. Greek pillars and Georgian-style pediment and roofs grew out of the bulkhead, all oriented along the Phoenix Exultant’s main axis (the direction of motion being “up”).
Phaethon examined the utterly non-Neptunian architecture with interest. A monumental pillar in the middle of the city was erecting a Winged Victory holding up a laurel crown; this was the emblem of the Silver-Gray.
Out from the newly made and still-steaming palaces and peristyles, past the smoldering pillars, steaming English gardens, glowing Egyptian obelisks, and smoking French triumphal arches, came a cavalcade of pikemen leading the carriage of Queen Victoria.
The horses and men of the cavalcade, outwardly shaped like humans, were constructed of Neptunian polymer armor, gleaming like statues of blue glass, and seething with strands and globules of complex brain matter and neurocircuitry throughout their lengths, visible beneath the semitranslucent skin. The image of Queen Victoria was more realistic, as only her face and hands shined with the ice blue Neptunian body substance. The black dress and high crown were real. Unfortunately, a human body was too small to hold all the mass of which a Neptunian Eremite was composed, so the body of the queen was the size of the Colossus of Rhodes, and her huge head overtopped some of the pillars lining the roads, and her crown brushed the triumphal arches under which the cavalcade passed.
Neoptolemous’s ownership override opened the great doors leading from the inner bay to the fuel area. Here, the insulation space surrounding the drive axis extended seventy kilometers or more. When the ship was not under thrust, this space was cleared of any obstructions or dangerous radiation. It was actually rather clever of Neoptolemous to enter by this shaft: this was the quickest way to get to the living quarters from the aft of the great ship.
Phaethon thought: It would require only a simple command to the machines controlling the main drive. One-hundredth of a second of thrust would sweep that area with radiation. No complex subatomic particles would remain.
But Phaethon did not issue that command. While all his other men were delayed, out of contact with him, and left behind, Phaethon allowed Neoptolemous to co
me closer, ever closer.
It seemed the cavalcade, horses, men, carriage and all, were all part of one master organism, which had, built into it, the same engines and thrusters which Phaethon had seen the Neptunian legate use so long ago in the grove of Saturn-trees: for, once the cavalcade moved into the wide and weightless insulation shafts surrounding the main drive, it began to rocket down the shaft toward the bow of the ship. Men-shapes and horse-things were half melted by the stress of acceleration, and bits of Neptunian body substance began to drop off along the way.
The giant holding cells of the fuel, like an endless geometric array of snowballs, loomed around them for a hundred kilometers. The living quarters and ship’s brain, even though it was a large as a good-sized space colony, larger than most ships, was absurdly dwarfed by comparison, not unlike the acorn-sized brain of the original, prehistoric version of a dinosaur.
Neoptolemous was coming.
Phaethon activated the olive drab cards he had found in his memory casket. Information from the three groups of stealth remotes poured into his brain.
6.
The ship was under attack. The attack had been under way for several minutes.
The first attack, of course, had been through thought contamination. Viruses had been introduced into the ship mind with the first communication download; those viruses had been editing every recorder and vision cell of which the ship mind was aware, and blocking all knowledge of the attack from Phaethon.
But the ship mind was not aware of the military remotes monitoring ship-mind actions, and editing out of the ship mind all evidence and awareness of themselves and their two brother swarms.