The Golden Transcendence

THE DEFEAT

Like gentle snow, a nanotechnological substance coating the surface of the dome above began to drip into the superheated plasma that once had been air. The "snow" bonded atom to atom, dampening molecular heat motions and forming exothermic compounds. As the cloud filtered downward, softly, silently, the plasma at the top of the dome began to cool and turn transparent. Phaethon had been turned to lie on his back; his armor, once so loyal to him, now formed a skintight prison. He lay in the surviving puddle of Xenophon. He watched without interest as falling snowlike crystals drifted down across his upturned 'faceplate. The blackened ruins to each side of him were slowly covered with soft white layers. The air cleared and the far sides of the dome grew visible.

The bridge was not totally devastated: around the far circumference, certain of the taller balconies had survived the discharges. The pressure curtains had been engineered, when under catastrophic overpres-sure to collapse into energy-inert shells guarding the far walls. Those shells enjoyed a temporary, unstable existence, but survived long enough (several measurable parts of a second) to protect a handful of the bridge mannequins (including Sloppy Rufus, first dog on Mars), some of the more important navigational hierarchy controls, as well as a mass of blue Neptunian body material, undamaged.

That mass, in reaction to some signal issuing from the body on which Phaethon lay, now rolled heavily off the balcony, dripped from one shattered bank of thought boxes to the next, and began to crawl, drop by drop, across the burnt floor toward him. Xenophon was collecting himself.

Phaethon also was not totally devastated. But he felt not unlike his handiwork: broken and blasted at the center, with just a fringe of working thoughts circling the aching emptiness.

Nor was it Atkins he was mourning. The death of that brave man, yes, he regretted: but he knew another copy of Atkins (missing these present events) would be awake back on Earth. This version, the son, so to speak, of Atkins, had died in fire and pain, but such a death as that Atkins, a soldier to the last, would not have flinched from.

No, it was the death of Diomedes whom Phaethon mourned. His Neptunian friend, trapped inside the flesh of Xenophon, had perished in that first salvo. Being Neptunian, and therefore poor, Diomedes doubtless lacked any noumenal copies of himself. Any copies that might have once existed no doubt had been consumed by Xenophon when he maneuvered to take legal title to the Phoenix Exultant, so that no second claimant would exist.

Diomedes was dead. Phaethon, in his heart, vowed bloody revenge. He would kill Xenophon, or the Silent One, or Ao Varmatyr, or whatever this unnamed being was calling itself.

So his thoughts circled, again and again: but his thoughts never dared touch the blackened center of his pain, the aching emptiness that once had been at his heart....

Until the hateful voice of Xenophon came once more into his helmet: "Your core belief, your childlike faith in the intelligence and wisdom of your Sophotechs, that is what is at the core of all your sorrow. You have told yourself, again and again, that you understood the Sophotechs were not gods; you told yourself that you knew they had limitations, didn't you? But now you wonder why they, in all their alleged brilliance, did not save you, and did not save your ship. You had faith in your machines; but they failed. You had faith in Atkins; he has failed. He made the crucial tactical error of incarnating himself inside of a material body.

"And you also had faith in yourself, your own visionary dream, your own high purpose, your own righteousness and noble resolve. All has failed. Do not bother to deny it, and do not attempt, even in your own mind, to refuse the truth of what I say. We both know that I can see in your mind that it is true."

More to distract himself than anything else, more to shut out that hateful voice than because of any real purpose, Phaethon attempted to reset his sense filter, to see how much control he had over it.

Multiple visual channels and analysis routines were still standing by. Xenophon either could not or did not care to shut those off from him. Phaethon could detect the brain-actions in the Neptunian body he was lying atop; he could see the communication pulses flickering back and forth between that body and the new, larger mass approaching slowly across the steaming, snow-covered slabs of cracked deck.

Second groups of signals were being funneled through the noetic unit, through his armor circuitry, and into the ship's brain. At the same time, the deck seemed to tilt; the gravity increased slightly. The Phoenix Exultant had come about.

Phaethon set a routine to translate those signals. What was Xenophon ordering the ship to do?

The routine could not determine; Xenophon's thoughts were still opaque. But the volume of thought traffic was now very low. Phaethon could see the amount of brain activity inside the body on which he lay had dropped dramatically. Xenophon had been badly damaged in the fight. His IQ had dropped to about 350 or 400; a little above average, but not by much. Obviously he was calling the undamaged body over to him to mingle his brain substances with the spare neurocircuitry that empty body carried. As soon as the two bodies merged, Xenophon's intellect would be restored to its near-Sophotech levels.

But what was he telling the ship? Even if Phaethon's sense array could not decode Xenophon's thoughts, there had to be a translation matrix decoding those thoughts into a format the ship's brain could read. Somewhere in the signal traffic Phaethon was seeing, there should be a translator he could find. He sent a subroutine to search....

A moment passed while he waited. The second body, like a rolling lake, picked its way across the snow-coated, steaming deckplates of the hull, over or around cracked curtain pediments, smashed mannequins, melted table bases. It came closer to Phaethon's inert body.

While he waited, curiosity, or anger, or some peculiar fanatical fascination with problems he could not solve, now prompted Phaethon to review the entire battle in slow motion. His sensory array allowed him to discover the effect that had broken open Atkins's final defense, popping his pseudo-material shields and abolishing his heavier weapons....

His neutrino detectors and weakly interacting parti- cle sensitives showed disproportional activity at specific moments before and during the battle, including the moment when all of Atkins's pseudo-material shields and weapons evaporated. Similar signatures were clustered around the noetic unit, the thought ports on Phaethon's epaulettes, and the central control triggers of the thought box nexi lining the surviving balconies on the bridge.

The hateful voice came again: "I see you have discovered our little secret. Yes; what you observe is an application of a technology known only to the Silent Oecumene. The Silent Oecumene studied the specific effects of near-event-horizon boundary conditions. You are aware that the speed of light limits motion not exactly, but only within the more general boundary imposed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Since the speed of a particle cannot be determined more precisely that the uncertainty limit, there are, statistically, certain particles traveling slightly above or below light-speed at any given moment. This cre-ates the Hawking radiations, which escape black holes, and also produces the multidimensional partic-ulate rotations, from existence to nonexistence and back again, of so-called virtual particles. The Silent Oecumene learned how to focus and control this fundamental effect of nature. It is one of the secrets that close study of a singularity over generations can disclose.

"Overlapping arrays of constructive interference allow me to direct wave potentials of virtual particles into any area within a limited spacetime-the area in-volved is roughly one light-minute-and have those particles appear, en mass, within any object without passing through the intermediary space. If enough vir-tual particles are sustained in one place at a given time, a permanent baryonic particle, such as an electron, can be formed out of the base-vacuum state, rotated into existence.

"Hence, electrons can appear within neutral circuits to activate them, controls-such as those in your armor, or in the noetic unit-can be turned on without any outside signal to turn them on. And pseudo-material fields, which require a delicate balance of asymmetrical fundamental particles to maintain, can be collapsed. You understand?"

Phaethon understood that the machine controlling this virtual-particle effect must did not necessarily have to be inside the hull of the Phoenix Exultant, not if the ghost particles could be precipitated inside the hull without passing through the intervening space.

And Xenophon could control it with no necessary equipment on this side, nothing on his person for Phaethon to detect. All that would be necessary would be a receiver to detect how the ghost particles were affected when passing through the specific spacetime area inside Xenophon's brain. Something like a noetic unit could interpret the particle deflections, correlate them to a stored record of Xenophon's mental signatures and silhouettes, and act on any commands Xenophon was thinking at the time.

And so this ghost-particle machine could have been outside the hull. Gould have been: but it was not. No ship of the Golden Oecumene could keep pace with the Phoenix Exultant. For the machine to be in range and stay in range, Xenophon must have built it himself and smuggled it aboard, or constructed it (as most Neptunian machines were constructed) out of the poly-morphetic neurocircuitry that also served them for brain matter, control conduits, and servomechanisms, which all Neptunians carried in their bodies.

And if the ghost-particle machinery required an abundant power supply, or needed to be in an area where the continuous discharges of other energies would mask its operation, where else could it have been placed, except?...

"Your suppositions are correct. The disruption units we placed along the fuel containers were not meant to sabotage this wonderful ship-the stealth remotes Atkins supplied you, and your own knowledge of de-molition. have already told you those disruption units could not have done much damage. They were not in-tended to break the magnetic containers to release massive amounts of fuel and create an explosion, no: they were meant only to release tiny amounts of fuel, to be picked up and used to power what, in your thoughts, you are calling the ghost-particle machine. The actual 'machine' so-called, occupies the entire drive core, and uses the active plasma stream of the Phoenix Exultant engines as an antenna to attract and rotate the virtual particles___."

Phaethon was not interested in the technical details. He merely wanted to know what Xenophon was planning to do, so that he could stop it, stop him, and wreak a bloody and terrible vengeance on Xenophon's person the moment the opportunity arose.

For the first time (perhaps because his intelligence had dropped to a near-human level), Xenophon sounded confused and uncertain: "I... am puzzled. You ... are not reacting as we had anticipated. You ignore the technical details which I thought would fascinate you. You dismiss my offer to make you the captain of the grand fleet, the armada, of Phoenices Exultant I plan to build once the Silent Oecumene is resurrected. You are not attracted to the future I propose, of machine-free humanity, mortal and uncontrolled, spreading across the stars. Why? I do not understand your resentment."

It should have been obvious why Phaethon hated Xenophon.

"It is not obvious. I did not kill Diomedes. Atkins, bloodthirsty Atkins, Atkins the paid killer, did the deed! Nor have I stolen your vessel. The Phoenix Exultant, according to your own laws, is mine."

At that same moment, his search routine had found and triggered the translation matrix compressed within the signal traffic passing between Xenophon and the ship's mind.

Phaethon saw what the enemy was ordering the Phoenix Exultant to do.

The Phoenix had been ordered to adopt a course that would take her in a great hyperbolic arc, around the sun and out into deep space. Once there, the curve would tighten and the acceleration continue, until, after the third day of acceleration, she would be headed back in-system at 90 percent the speed of light. Units of antimatter fuel and kilometer-long canisters from the Neptunian superships were to be ejected from the hull as she passed through, these missiles containing the astronomical kinetic energy that near-light-speed would impart.

Phaethon was not able to calculate, just from the orbital element information, where the missiles would strike. But the time frame was clear; the attack would take place during the Grand Transcendence, when every sapient mind in the Solar System would be preoccupied, interconnected, dream-drowned, intermingled, and helpless.

He had enough control over his personal sense filter to call up his personal thoughtspace. Again, the images surrounded him (this time, tilted sideways, as he was on his back). A symbol table to his right showed the opened memory casket, an unopened casket still inside. To his left were images of service units and honorary commissions. In front of him were the ship controls.

A targeting globe appeared, showing the orbital eClements of Xenophon's bombing run as a possible-course umbrella imposed on the model of the Solar System. The orbits of planets, major habitats, and energy formulations were depicted as a geometry of colored lines, slashed across by the projected run of the Phoenix.

Along the course, within striking range, were Io and Europa, the Ceres group, Demeter Transfer Station, Earth herself, and Mercury Equilateral. At the far end of the run, the major field generators and close-solar orbital elements of Helion's Solar Control Array would also be in target range.

Phaethon needed no further information; he recognized instantly what these targets had in common. They were centers of metals production, of communications, of fuel depots, energy control. They were crucial to the healthy functioning of the Golden Oec-umene as a whole. He recognized what they were. They were military targets.

The translation matrix also decoded Xenophon's other commands to the ship mind. These instructions included upgrades to be made to the thought-cast system and communication antennae along the Phoenix Exultant's prow. With Xenophon's ghost-particle broadcaster, he should have as little problem jamming basic communication circuits or neutralizing security systems as he had had usurping control of the noetic unit here on the bridge.

Or ... (Phaethon should have realized it before)... with as little problem as he had had feeding false information into the Nebuchadnezzar Sophotech's reading of Phaeton's records during the Hortator's Inquest.

During the bombing ran, the Phoenix Exultant, equipped with the ghost-particle broadcaster, should have no difficulty in imposing the Nothing thought virus, the same mind worm that had possessed Xenophon, into the entire Grand Transcendence. During Transcendence, normal barriers between mind and mind were eased, cumbersome security restrictions were relaxed. All minds were One Grand Mind, ready and able to think grand thoughts...

All necks were one neck ready to be lopped off at one stroke.

The Grand Transcendence was the time of greatest weakness, of greatest peace, of least vigilance, which an already weak, peaceful, and unvigilant society enjoyed. And it only occurred once every thousand years....

"Your thinking is not following predicted paths! Your emotional reactions, your degree of aggressiveness and hatred, is not proportional! We had assumed you would be pleased to aid our efforts to restore the Silent Oecumene to her position as the supreme model and central culture for humankind! It is true that we are about to engage in acts of mass murder and mass mind-rape against the Golden Oecumene, destruction and devastation. But your distaste for these things is merely part of the widespread program of thought control imposed upon you by your Sophotechs! It is they who told you that there is an absolute right and wrong, and objective measure of good and evil. Nonsense! If there were such an objective measure, freedom of human thought would be limited, which, by definition, is unthinkable. You merely have an opinion that mass murder and destruction is bad because of your social conditioning. It is irrelevant.

"These things are necessary in order to achieve a greater and long-lasting good; namely, the salvation of the Second Oecumene and the liberation of the human spirit. Unless the Golden Oecumene is severely wounded and weakened, your Sophotechs will maneuver to undo what you and I both dream to do. It is your dream, Phaethon, which causes such bloodshed! Why do you flinch at it now?"

Xenophon must not mean to kill him. Otherwise, why would he still be trying to convince him to join? Was there still something this horrid creature wanted or needed from Phaethon?

"We still need your skills and expertise to run this ship, and to run the armor which controls this ship. We are going to make a more cooperative version of you, merely by editing and rearranging certain of your thoughts and memories. If you cooperate, more of your memory and personality will stay intact. The more vehe-mently you resist, of course, the more thoughts you think that are disloyal to me and my purposes, then obviously, the more of your thoughts will have to be expunged. Be reasonable, be pliant It is safer to agree. Don't your Sophotechs always urge you to be rational and safe?"

Actually, they never did. This Silent One was a fool. He knew nothing about the Golden Oecumene, knew thing about how Phaethon thought, and did not seem realize that Phaethon could not be redacted by the noetic unit unless he was taken out of his armor. And once he was taken out of his armor, his arms and legs would be free, and he could quickly and effi-ciently kill Xenophon.

"How amusing. You? An untrained man from a com-pletely peaceful society, without any pistol or energy weapons, think you can kill me in my Neptunian body? I have given you every opportunity for surrender! You have proven yourself a useless pet of the machines after all"

Phaethon spoke aloud: "No. It is I who call on you to surrender. I suspect that you will not. I merely make the offer so that my conscience will be clean, later." Xenophon deigned not to reply.

Efficiency, if nothing else, should dictate that Xenophon kill Phaethon now, immediately, before taking him out of his armor. But perhaps he could not. No weapon could penetrate the Chrysadamantium plates; even the ghost-particle machine had to wait until the thought ports in the shoulderboards were opened before seizing control of the suit's circuitry. And even that control of the armor's command channels was insufficient: the protective feedbacks were hardwired into the nanomachine lining core. The armor simply could not understand or accept any orders that would harm the wearer.

"You overestimate your technology, Phaethon! Your Golden Oecumene has many advances, perhaps, but you are curiously lacking in the one science in which the Silent Ones excel: thought worms, mind viruses, psychic corruption. Even Sophotechs, pure and supreme among intellects, were no more than slaves and toys and playthings after our mental warfare science had done its work. You think your simpleminded suit could withstand me, if it were my purpose to make it do my will? But, no: my purpose is to corrupt, not your suit's mind but yours. And despair shall be my ally. Despair makes men weak, vulnerable to redaction, and self-hatred makes men unable to resist mental reconditioning. My circuits are ready: your memories and skills will soon be at the service of the Silent Oecumene. But first, despair requires hope. You must be allowed to struggle for a moment before you are absorbed."

And, with that, the armor opened.

The golden plates slid aside, and Phaethon tried to get up.

But the pool of Neptunian body substance in which he lay gave him no time to move. It merely swirled up around him, a thousand strands like clinging snakes, and engulfed him. The blue material surrounded him, cocooned him, immobilized his limbs, pressed against his face, intruding in his mouth and eyes. It hardened; even Phaethon's strength could not budge it, lacking any leverage. He was trapped like a fly in amber.

Filaments of neurocircuitry swam forward out of the blue mirk, webbed his skull, and sought the contact points to invade his brainspace.

His personal thoughtspace flickered into and then out of existence again. In the corner of one imaginary eye, he saw the last memory casket, the one with the figure of the winged sword, open, and he felt the wild, drugged, dreamlike sensation that massive memory downloading created, a blur of activity in his cortex and midbrain.

It was a preliminary to all mental surgery to open all unopened memories, so that the restructured mind, after redaction, would not have any old memory chains to lead back to its former personality....

A sarcastic voice appeared in his sense filter. Apparently the Silent One was not pleased with whatever level of hope or rage still burned in Phaethon's mind. "Here is the thought virus which consumed the Silent Oecumene. After it consumes you, as it has done me, you will regard me as your most generous savior. Why do you still resist? You cannot move. In a moment you will be unable even to think. What has happened to the dire revenge you vowed, Phaethon? How did you imagine you could defeat me?"

But at that same moment, the second mass of Neptunian body met, melted with, and combined with the first mass. Phaethon saw the brain activity double and redouble as the creature's intelligence climbed back to normal levels.

The surge of activity around him paused. He could see, floating in the blue material, the main brain group, with the nerve trunk, like a tentacle, leading to the skullcap gripping him. He could detect the neurological changes and endocrinal nerve reactions of fear, panic, and shock.

"Wait. There has been an error. Your face. You are not Phaethon. All is wrong.... You ..."

Memory came. The cells of his outer skin, each and every one of them, contained a nanomachine energy weapon in the cell membrane. They were activated by a command sent through his endocrine system.

Fire lined his body for an instant of pain. A positronic charge was released through his skin by billions of molecule-sized fullerene antiparticle containers. The sections of Neptunian material in contact with his skin ignited, positrons canceling electrons in a clenched spasm of furious radiation.

At the same time, a weapon made of his own neural tissue, invisible and camouflaged (hidden in the centers of his brain otherwise used for creative thought), sent a charge of nerve agent back along the skullcap gripping him, destroying cells and disorganizing consciousness.

Skin ruptured, he was covered from head to toe with his own blood. The Neptunian parted around him.

Another memory came: his blood was toxic. In addition to white and red blood cells were so-called black blood cells, an army of assemblers and disassemblers, programmed to poison, unmake, dissolve, and destroy any biological substance it touched which was not him. The Neptunian was dissolving.

As the Neptunian body fell back to either side, wounded and burnt, he rolled, grasped the katana Atkins had dropped beneath him, came to his feet. Static sparks crawled along the bloodstains as the waste heat from the nanomachine black blood was converted to radio white noise, jamming all signals in the area, disrupting noumenal circuits, preventing any thought transfer.

In one swift motion, with infinite grace, he lunged and shouted and struck. His movement, stance, and execution were controlled and forceful, a perfect example of the art. The finely tempered swordblade punctured the yielding material of the Neptunian body in a way no energy weapon could have done, neatly severing the major nerve groups where his advanced senses told him the Silent One brain activity was housed. Housed, and unable to escape, while the burning blood jammed all thought traffic in the area.

With the withdrawal stroke he severed the brain mass a second time for good measure, and came back to a balanced, upright posture, flourished the sword (light glanced from the beautiful antique perfection of the steel), and drew it down to his side, where a scabbard would have been had he not been nude.

A rough circle of blue-gray Neptunian substance still surrounded him, crawling and writhing, and it showed neuroelectronic activity in some of its segments, perhaps routines still attempting to carry out the Silent One's orders. Near his foot was the smaller blade, a wakizashi, which he had noticed hanging beneath the symbol table when he first woke here. This knife had been under the noetic unit, and therefore had survived the incineration of the bridge: the wreckage of the table, the noetic unit, and the blade had all been under Phaethon's armor during the blast.

He hooked the sheath with his toe, kicked the knife up into his left hand, and, with a wrist flick that sent the sheath continuing upward, exposed the blade.

The knife was not an antique but a modern weapon, shaped like a knife so that it could be used for stabbing when its charge ran out. The charge was full. He glanced at the control surface set into the blade, so that circuits could track his eye movements, and then he looked at what he wished destroyed.

A battle mind in the hilt found the pattern to his eye movements, extrapolated, defined the target, and (before he even finished looking at what he wanted struck) sent a variety of energetics and high-speed nanomaterial packages out from projectors along the blade surface and blade edge to destroy the remaining Neptunian bodies and microbes in the room.

The blade also emitted command signals to lock out those sections of the ship's mind that may have been affected by enemy thought viruses, made a prioritized list of cleanup procedures, made contact with the stealth remotes still hovering in the area, reconfigured them, programmed them for new tasks, and sent them to disable the ghost-particle generator housed in the disrupters planted along the ship's drive core.

All this, in less time than it would take a man, dazed by the blaze of fire and lightning coming from that knife, to blink.

The scabbard reached the apex of its arc, and then fell. With his left hand he caught the scabbard on the blazing knife tip, mouth-first, so that it fell neatly onto the blade and sheathed it.

He looked left and right. The deckplate was broken and black. He was alone. The enemy was dead.

He looked in astonishment and horror at his bloodstained hands, crawling with steam and sparks, and at the knife and sword, which seemed so familiar in his grip.

His whisper came hoarsely from his throat: 'Who the hell am I?"

Across the wide chamber, one of the surviving mannequins, Sloppy Rufus, first dog on Mars, turned away from the last bank of still-functional detection assessors, stood on his hind legs, put his forefeet up on the balcony rail, and, with muzzle between paws, peered gravely down. A naked man with a naked sword stood in a circle of black and steaming destruction, that once had been the bridge, and stared back up at him.

"Isn't it obvious, my good sir? You are Atkins." The voice from the dog was Phaethon's voice.

"The hell I am. I don't want to be Atkins. I'm Phaethon. I built this!" He gestured with the still-dripping sword left and right at the bridge around him. Perhaps he was pointing at the wreckage. The man's voice sounded nothing like Phaethon's.

The dog said, "I'm quite sorry, sir, but to be quite blunt, you are an atrocious version of me. Half the things you thought were exaggerated mockeries of what I believe, that other half were pure Atkins. And why did you kill Ao Varmatyr? That was reprehensible! He could have been captured safely, kept alive, cured, saved. Vengeance? Wasteful notion. Besides, you should have known Diomedes was not dead. You recorded him, and most of Xenophon, into the noume-nal recorder before you spoke with the Silent One."

The man dropped sword and knife and pressed his palms against his brow, eyes strained, as if trying to keep some terrible pressure inside his brain from exploding. The memories are still going off inside my head! Burning cities, clouds of nerve logics, a thousand ways to kill a man... You've got to stop it. Where's the noetic unit?! My life is boiling away! I'm Phaethon! I want to stay Phaethon! I don't want to turn into... into..." He was on his knees scrambling for the noetic unit.

The dog said: "Your desire not to be Atkins is probably just an exaggeration of what you think I think about you. Its really not true. I'm sure killing is a use-ful and necessary service to perform in barbaric times, or under barbarous cicumstances like these. ..."

"Then you be Atkins! I'll transfer the mnemonic templates to you-"

"Good God, no! "

The man took up Phaethon's helmet and put it over his head, and slung the breastplate across his shoulders. The thought ports in the epaulettes opened; responder lights in the noetic unit winked on. A circuit was established between the noetic unit and the thought systems in the helm and wired under the man's skull.

The man's fingers were tapping impatiently on the casing of the noetic unit. "Hurry ... hurry ...," he muttered. "I'm losing myself...."

Interruption came. A beam came from the hilt stone of the knife the man had dropped to the bloodstained and burnt deckplates. The beam touched the shoulder board and negated the circuit. The noetic unit went dark.

A voice came from the weapon: "HALT!"

The man ripped off the helmet he wore. There were tearstains running down his bloody cheeks. His face was purple-black with emotion. Veins upon his brow stood out in sharp relief.

The man said in a voice of murderous calm: "You cannot stop me. I am a citizen of the Golden Oec-umene; I have rights. No matter what I was before, I am a self-aware entity now, and I may do to myself whatever I please. If I want to continue being this me that I am now, that's my right. No one owns me! That rule is true for everyone in our Utopia!"

"FOR EVERYONE BUT YOU. YOU BELONG TO THE MILITARY COMMAND. YOU DO AND DIE AS YOU ARE ORDERED."

"No!" The man shouted.

The dog said to the knife: "I don't mind the copyright violations, if he really wants to use my template for a while... I mean, can't you just let him, ah... Don't you have other copies of him and such?"

The weapon said to the man: "RETURN TO YOUR DUTY. RETURN TO YOUR SELF-IDENTITY."

"But I'm a citizen of the Oecumene! I can be who I want! I am a free man!"

"YOU ALONE, MARSHAL ATKINS, ARE NOT AND CANNOT BE FREE. IT IS THE PRICE PAID SO THAT OTHERS CAN BE."

"Daphne! They're going to make me forget that I love you! Don't let them! Daphne! Daphne!"

Weeping, the nameless man fell to his face. A moment later, looking mildly embarrassed or amused, face stern, Atkins climbed to his feet.

"Well, that operation turned out to be a clusterfoxtrot, didn't she?" he muttered.

Atkins spoke with his knife for a few minutes, making decisions and listening to rapid reports concerning the details of the cleanup procedure that the battle mind in the weapon had initiated.

Phaethon's voice came down from the mannequin dog on the upper balcony: "Don't dismantle the ghost-particle broadcast array in the drive core!"

Atkins stared up at the dog. He said (perhaps a bit harshly, for he was not in a good mood), "What the hell's the problem? Bad guy is dead. War's over. There might be some sort of deadman switch or delayed vendetta program running through those things. Best to dismantle them now before something else weird happens."

"With all due respect, Marshal, the idea is unwise. Firstly, they are the only working models in existence of what amounts to a Silent Oecumene technology. Secondly-"

Atkins made a curt, dismissive gesture with his katana. "That's enough. Thank you for your concern. But I've already decided how to handle this."

"An interesting conceit, sir, but irrelevent, as that ghost-particle broadcast array is my property, being found on my ship, and having no other true owner. I believe the heirs and assigns of Ao Varmatyr died several centuries ago in another star system."

"I've had a hard day, civilian. Don't try to play that legalistic hugger-mugger rights game with me. This is still a military situation; those are enemy weapons; and I'm still in charge."

"But you just declared the war was over, my dear sir. And that legalistic 'rights game,' as you call it, is what you are sworn to protect, soldier, and it gives the only justification to your somewhat bloody existance. You are here to protect me, remember? I never did join your hierarchy, my cooperation is voluntary, and you are my guest. If, as a guest, you overstep the bounds of politeness and decent conduct, I would be within my rights to have you put off this vessel."

Atkins lost his temper: "You trying to butt heads with me? Come on. Let's butt heads. I am the God-damnednest Number-one Ichi-ban First-Class Heavyweight Champion Tough-as-Nails Ear-biting Eye-gouging Hard-assed Head-Butter of all Time, mister, so don't try me!"

The dog pricked its ears, looking mildly surprised.

After a quiet moment, Phaethon's voice came: "I suspect, Marshal Atkins, that you and I are both a bit ruffled by the events here. I am, quite frankly, not used to violence, and am dismayed at how you have chosen to conduct this affair. I suspect you are still suffering from memory shock, and are half-asleep." The dog lowered its head, and continued: "But, unlike you, I have no excuse for my conduct. I have let emotions get the better of me, which is a vice in which a true gentleman never indulges. For that I proffer my apologies."

Atkins drew a deep breath, and used an ancient technique to calm himself and balance his blood-chemistry levels. "Apology accepted. You have mine. Let's say no more about it. I guess I'm a little disappointed that there wasn't any superior officer in all this, that our communication tracks did not lead to the Silent One's boss. If he had one."

"But that is what I was attempting to tell you, Marshal. There have been periodic signals leaving this vessel ever since Xenophon came to the bridge."

"Leaving how? The hull is made of adamantium!"

"Leaving through the drive, which was wide open and showering energy out into the universe."

"Aimed?"

"As far as I can determine, yes. The signals were encoded as ghost particles generated by Xenophon's array of disruptors."

"Aimed where?"

"I could not trace them."

"That's what you were supposed to be doing, friend, while I was getting my little butt kicked."

"I did not understand the nature of the signal until Xenophon boasted of the technology, and described it. This ghost-particle technology is not one with which I, or any one else in the Golden Oecumene, is familiar. I had to design and build new types of detection equipment while you and Xenophon were making all that noise. But the broadcasts are occurring at regular intervals. Those magnetic disruptors are still drawing power out of my fuel cells, charging for their next broadcast. There is still a piece of instruction cycling in the ship-mind's broadcast circuit, written in that Silent Oecumene encryption I cannot decode. It will be a directional broadcast, or so I guess, since there are also line actions in the navigational array. When this next broad-I cast comes-and this is the second reason why I would ask you not to dismantle my ghost-particle array-I hope to be able to track the signal to its receiver."

"Xenophon's CO. The Nothing Sophotech."

"And, if I am not mistaken, the Silent Phoenix, or whatever starship they used to come here."

"You did not believe his story?"

"No more than did you, Marshal. The enemy is still at large. Come! We have much to discuss before the next broadcast."

Atkins looked down at his blood-drenched body, the blasted deckplates underfoot, and said, "Is there some place I can scrub up? My blood is a weapon, and I don't want to get any of it near you."

"My dear sir, is there any part of your body which they have not turned into a weapon?"

"Just one. They let me keep that for morale purposes."

"Well, come up to the main bridge, where my body is stored: I have antinanotoxins and biosterilizers which can clean, and robe you."

"Main bridge? I thought this was the main bridge."

"No, sir. This is just the auxiliary. You don't think I'd expose my real bridge to danger, do you?"

"You have two bridges?"

"Three. And a jack-together I can plug into any main junction. I am a very conservative engineer: I believe in triple redundancy."

"Where did you put two other whole bridge complexes? How could you be sure Xenophon would not find it?"

"Surely you are joking, Marshal! On a ship this size? I could hide the moons of Mars! In fact, I'm not sure one of them did not wander into my intake ram by mistake when we passed Martial orbit. Has anyone seen Phobos lately ... ?"

"Very funny."

"Come: follow the armor. It will lead you to the nearest railway station."