The Phoenix Exultant

THE ENEMY

Phaethon stood amazed and wondering, Daphne WW(who had, after all, played through many more spy-dramas and dreams where people are shot at) fell to the ground and rolled under the cot.

That very probably saved her life. Shrapnel from the exploding door tore the robe off Phaethon's back, and bounced off his armor with musical chimes of thunder, but the blast was at head level.

There was flame and energy in the door. Phaethon stepped into it; broken wires and destroyed housecoat circuits flashed white-hot around him.

He put his hands around the creature he found there. The motors in his arms and elbows whined. He thrust the thing bodily up the ladder, out of the cabin, and away from Daphne.

A kick (or perhaps it was an explosion) rang off his chest and tumbled him downstairs. Over his shoulder: "Daphne ... ?"

"I'm fine! Get him!"

Thrust by his mass-drivers and thrown upstairs in a wash of magnetic energy, he landed on deck.

All was dark. The diamond parasols overhead had been opaqued, and spread to grasp the rails at every point, so that the deck was now enclosed, like some wide tomb, sealed with a lid.

The only light came from the monster. There it was, rearing up, with steam and hissing liquid dripping from its form. Light came from a circle of fire beneath its hoofs. The rising steam spread in a smoke ring across the black, sealed canopy overhead.

It was Daphne's horse, of course.

Or, rather, it had been the horse. It stood upright on its rear hoofs, forehoofs hanging crookedly high in mid-air. Blue-white semi-translucent material flowed out from its mouth and eyes, radiating waste heat as nanomaterial reaction boiled inside. With gush and a spray of blood, the horse's skull split wide, and a larger mass of the substance spilled into the air. In the dim light, Phaethon could see metal glints from instruments being constructed rapidly within the tendrils of substance vomiting from the shattered skull of the rearing stallion.

Phaethon raised his hand, powered his accumulators ...

"Stop! Negotiate!" came a voice from the horse. It looked something like a rearing centaur from myth now, except with a nest of writhing black whips where a human face should have been. The tentacles of substance swayed and nodded like the heads of so many cobras, but nothing fired.

Ironic. He, the civilized man should have been the first one to call to negotiate. "Who are you?" shouted Phaeton.

"No memory of that has been permitted to me. I am nothing."

(What was the sudden chill that touched him? He had been hoping, secretly, all this time, that everything, his enemies, and their evil, would turn out to be a simulation, a dream, a hoax, a mistake. But here was an enemy. It was all real.)

"You are from Nothing Sophotech?"

No answer. The creature took a mincing step forward, rear hoofs clashing on the blackened deck, forehoofs still held high and crooked. More tendrils of substance pushed out from the shattered horse-skull, these bearing tubes and focusing elements of ominous import. Weapons? In the darkness, it was impossible to see clearly.

Phaethon used the time to make adjustments within his own armor. Heat from the rapid changes he made in his nanomachine lining vented from his armor seams as hissing streams of steam.

Phaethon called out again. "Are you organic or inorganic? Individual or partial?"

"I am nothing you can understand. Comprehension cannot comprehend us." The words were spoken in a monotone, in-flectionless, empty, soulless.

"Do not speak nonsense, sir! Tell me if you are an independent self-aware entity, so that I can deduce whether or not destroying you would be murder."

A toneless and unemotional voice said back: "Self-awareness is nothing. It is illusion, produced by diseased perception. Only pain is real." "What do you want?" "Surrender. Mingle with us." "Surrender? Me ... ? Why? In return for what?" "We will strip your foul lust-corrupted flesh from your naked brain, and sustain your nervous system among our self-ocean. All actions and movement will be taken from you, and you may lay down the horrid burden of individuality. AH sense perceptions, which are lies, will be blinded; all memories of anything other than Nothing will be blotted out. Thus will you know true service, true devotion, true morality. The only true moral action is that which generates no benefit whatsoever to the actor; thus you will receive no good nor any reward of any kind again, no pleasure, no kindness, no self-love. The only true reality is pain; it is the only signal that demonstrates that we are alive. You will embrace an infinity of that reality, as your helpless and disembodied brain will be stimulated to endless pain, forever. This will teach you unpride, unegotism, unselfishness. You will achieve the enlightenment called no-thought."

Phaethon organized his armor to emit several types of discharge, calculated to burn flesh and overload circuitry. His mass-drivers now could sweep the area with brutal force. The creature loomed tall in the darkness. Phaethon raised his hands and focused aiming elements.

Yet he was reluctant merely to shoot down this creature in cold blood, while it was talking. It did not sound sane. Was there some way to discover its origin, its motives?

Dryly, Phaethon said, "Your offer is quite tempting, sir, but I fear I must decline. Frankly, I fail to see how a life of endless and pointless torture benefits either yourself or myself. Surely there is something else you want for yourself... ?"

The rearing creature said in a leaden monotone: "Self is illusion. To seek benefit is selfishness. Seek nothing, achieve nothing, be nothing. True being is non-being."

Phaethon was tempted to open fire. What was this annoying, pathetic, hopeless creature hoping to achieve? Was this talk merely delay while other agents or elements made other attempts?

Phaethon need only think the proper thought-command, and he could log on to the mentality in an instant, and tell the world what was happening here. All the secrecy of the Nothing would be nullified.

But would Phaethon live long enough to tell? Was a virus in the mentality waiting to block any outgoing communications he might attempt? This whole clumsy attack, this final face-to-face confrontation, this emissary of meaningless horror, all this might be merely ah elaborate ploy to force him to log on.

He simply was not sure what to do. Phaethon said, "Explain your conduct. Why attempt force? Violent interaction is mutually self-destructive; peaceful cooperation is mutually beneficial."

"To benefit the self is wrong. It produces pleasure, which is gross corruption. Pleasure produces life, which damages the ecology and is abhorrent to nature, and life produces joy-of-life, which traps the mind in material reality, imprisons the false-self in logic. But once the state of mind beyond all logic is imposed, then there are no definitions, no boundaries, no limits, and endless freedom, the freedom of nothingness, is present. This state cannot be explained or described to you, since you do not exist, and since all descriptions are false. Your brain will be reconstructed. You will be absorbed. Submit."

There was silence in the darkness. Phaethon still could not bring himself to shoot a self-aware being, even an enemy, during negotiations. But did that mean he would have to wait until the alien threatened him again? That would be worse than foolish. His duty was to log on, and to warn the world, even if it cost him his life. Doubt made him hesitate. This was not the kind of problem Phaethon had practiced to solve. He knew how to solve engineering problems, problems made of rational magnitudes, definite structures, clear goals. But this ... ?

A child, or a madman, who was irrational, was a figure to invoke fond patience, or pity. But when that same irrationality controlled the weapons and science of a civilization as great and as powerful as the Silent Oecumene once had been, that was a figure of horror.

Yet how could such unreason, even so, be taken seriously? This was the silliest and the least persuasive negotiator it had ever been Phaethon's bad fortune to meet. There were logical contradictions in its philosophy a schoolboy could see through.

What could it want? And what did one say to such a creature ... ?

Phaethon plucked up his courage and spoke. "Forgive me, sir, but I am going to have to ask you to turn yourself in to the nearest constabulary. Please surrender; I have no wish to harm you. You are quite insane, and so there is no point in arguing with you, but I'm sure our noumenal science can restore you to sanity after a brief redaction."

"You admit, finally, the truth of our proposition," issued the headless horse-creature. "Logic is futile. Truth must be imprinted on captive brains by force. But our truth is not your truth. There is no common ground between us, no understanding, no compromise, no trust. There is nothing between us."

The creature's leaden voice ground to silence.

Phaethon said in a voice of cold bewilderment: "But then why did you ask to negotiate? Or, for that matter, why do anything at all? If your life is so horrible and irrational and meaningless, put an end to it! I won't hinder you, I assure you of that. Quite frankly, it would relieve me of the upsetting chore of doing it for you."

This seemed to be the first thing Phaethon said that produced an emotional response from the creature, for the many tentacles began to writhe and lash, and fragments of material, hooks and weapon-barrels, began to worm their way out through the steaming horseflesh of the chest and haunches with agitated twitches. Blood streamed down the horse's fetlocks and stained the deck. It took little steps back and forth, to the left and right, like a comic little dance, rear hoofs clanging, and the tall upper body swayed, forelegs curling and uncurling.

The two stood facing each other, a man in bright armor, a smoldering and faceless horse-creature, stepping and swaying, looming like a black shadow.

Phaethon took a step back, made certain all his new-made weaponry was aimed and primed and ready. He drew a tense breath.

Neither one of them fired.

The creature planted its rear hoofs again, raised its many arms, and froze in place. The creature's voice, speaking in a deeper tone, came forth: "We have imprinted our over-self into the internal fields of a black hole, beyond the event horizon. In the center of the black hole, there, all irrationalities are reality, all boundary conditions reach infinities and infinitesimals. Logic stops. No rational signal can reach out from the event horizon to communicate with those who have not been absorbed. You are beyond my event horizon. You still exist in the universe limited by logic, selfishness, perception, thought. You will enter us, and be embraced, enter our singularity, and all distinctions between self and other shall cease. You shall cease. We shall cease. Nothing shall triumph."

Phaethon thought: But then what in the world do you want? Why have you been attacking me? Yet he did not bother to say anything aloud. It would have been futile.

The was a bob of light from behind him. Phaethon saw Daphne, a broken cot leg in one hand, like a club, step up the ladder to peer out over the deck. The ring on her finger was producing a thin beam of light. "Phaethon?! What's wrong with you? Haven't you destroyed that creature yet?"

"Daphne!! Stay back!" Phaethon made a noise of frustration and fear and stepped between Daphne and the monster, his back to her, spreading his arms as if to shield her. He was sure that in one of her spy-dramas or bellipographic simulations, the heroine was supposed to use a chair leg or something as a truncheon to beat off the computer-generated figments.

Was she insane, to come up here? His agonized and bitter thought was that Daphne had no real experience of emergencies, and could not judge degrees of danger.

The horse-thing reared back even farther, and its spine elongated, pushing its upper body higher yet in a bloody convulsion of ripping horseflesh. Blood gushed every way across the deck. Two of the tendrils springing from the horse's neck doubled in size, and reached far left and far right, so as to be able to point down at Daphne. Whichever way Phaethon moved so as to block the weapon with his body, left or right, the creature would still have a clear line of fire the other way.

The monster's monotone came: "Surrender, or I destroy the love-object."

" 'Love-object'?!" Exclaimed Daphne in a voice of outrage. "Phaethon, who is this thing?" And then, when the light from her ring fell across the dripping mass of the monster, she gave out a tear-choked gasp: "My horse! My poor Sunset! What have you done to my horse?!"

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.

But why hadn't it destroyed the noetic unit earlier? There was only one answer: It could not afford to let Daphne, or anyone else, get any firm evidence that the Silent Ones existed. A noetic reader that had been clearly and obviously sabotaged would be evidence confirming Phaethon's story, just as much as if the working reader had examined Phaethon and discovered the origin of his false memories.

In each circumstance, the Silent Ones had attempted to avoid detection.

All this flashed though his thoughts in a suspended moment of emergency time. Then, over the next microsecond, he ran through a complete system-check, attempted four different ways to log on to the mentality, to send out emergency signals, or to make any sort of contact with any external circuits or networks. Everything was blocked; all channels were white with static.

Another long microsecond was spent while he made what tests he could on the barrier, sending pulses out from his armor and analyzing the echoes. He attempted to determine its energy levels, its field geometry, its resonating properties. From the reactions, he realized that this was not merely meant to block outgoing energies, but also to trace them.

This fact implied certain obvious conclusions, and suggested a possible course of action. But was that action wise?

Here was the monster, wretched and sad creature that it was, invulnerable to Phaethon's most fierce attack, with all its weapons ready, looming above, threatening Daphne with death, and him with worse than death. But was Phaethon in a weak position now, or a strong one?

The emergency persona recognized that it was unable to make this assessment, which required a value judgment, and so it shut down and dumped Phaethon back into the flow of normal time.

Immediately his fear for Daphne's safety rose to seize him.

"You callous bastard," Phaethon whispered. "You coldblooded, calculating, ruthless son of a bitch."

The monster said, "Your response is not appropriate. We once again demand your surrender. Otherwise the love-object dies in pain."

"I wasn't talking about you," muttered Phaethon.

Daphne, from behind him, said fiercely, "Don't let it win. If it wants the armor, destroy the armor first. If it wants you, kill yourself first. If it tries to use me to control you, shoot me first. This thing cannot win unless you let it!"

Phaethon drew a deep breath. He had tried all the weapons he could build, but that had proven futile. Any agent Nothing Sophotech would send out would obviously be equipped with the best defenses a superintelligent study of Phaethon's armor could predict. What could Phaethon attempt which had not been predicted ... ?

There was one possibility. He was not pleased, but, for Daphne's sake, he saw he had to make the attempt.

Phaethon said, "I will not surrender to you, since you are an insane creature, and I cannot trust that you will keep your word. I am a manorial. I have been born and raised by machines, and I trust only machines. Put me in contact with your Nothing Sophotech. Only if your Sophotech gives me assurance that Daphne will be kept alive and safe and free to go, will I believe in your good faith, and surrender."

The creature said nothing, but its tentacles twitched. Phaethon tried to guess what thought-process might be going on inside that headless skeleton-body. Yet surely it would not regard this request as unusual or strange, coming from him. Everyone knew the manor-born trusted only Sophotechs.

Behind him, Daphne hissed, "Lover, have you lost your mind? Is that helmet cutting off the oxygen to your brain? Do you think it's easy for me to stand here waiting to be shot and to keep telling you to fight that thing? How about a little support for my position here!?"

Phaethon said harshly to her: "My dear, forgive me, but you have read far too many of those romantic fictions of yours. In your type of stories, heroes always prevail because they are good, not because they are correct. But for engineers, reality requires that you solve problems only within the context of what circumstances and available resources permit. It involves trade-offs. It involves compromise. Sometimes the solution isn't pretty, and falls far short of any high ideal. But whatever solution it is that works, that's the one we choose."

To the creature, he said, "You can erase her memory of this event, so that your secrecy will be safe, but I insist that she be set free."

The monster said, "You will service our needs because need is all we have. We have nothing. You have no right to bargain with us or to make demands. Your love, your notions of right and wrong, makes you susceptible. Because you are weak, you must obey."

Phaethon said, "Weak... ? Me ... ? Why in the world do people keep telling me that?" Impatience crept into his voice: "Listen to me, you pathetic vomit-mass of psychotic self-loathing, unless I myself surrender, and freely open this armor, and freely discard it, you have no power to hurt me. None! It is you who has no room to bargain, you who cannot negotiate. You were instructed by your master to capture me and my armor intact. You will fail, and fail utterly, unless I choose otherwise. Very well: you have heard the conditions of my choice. Send a signal to your master: I want confirmation from the Nothing Sophotech itself."

The area was beginning to fill with smoke. The creature stood still, looming high in the darkness, silhouetted dimly against the few dying fires Phaethon's weapons had lit on the far side of the deck, and by the glint from Daphne's ring.

The creature said, "Very well. The signal is being sent..."

It came from somewhere over Phaethon's shoulder and whispered right past his ear. Whatever it was, it must have been traveling faster than the speed of sound, because he heard it only after the monster vanished in a moment of light. Smoking, toppling, the scattered blue-white bone-things seemed to fly apart, as if trying to escape. The dazzling after-echoes of the light seemed to close in around them. Perhaps there was a very quiet hissing noise. And then the blue-white substance was consumed without a trace.

For less than a moment, like an after-echo, a vibration or haze flashed across the deck and the overhead panels, each place the creature had stepped or dripped or touched.

Darkness. All was still.

Only then was Phaethon aware of the needle-thin ray of light striking him from behind. He turned. There was a small melted hole, like a pinprick, piercing the black diamond parasol wall behind him, just above the railings. The hole was so small that, had it not been utterly black inside here, and admitting some little light from outside, it would have passed unnoticed.

Phaethon grimaced. "Come out, come out, wherever you are," he muttered angrily.

Daphne coughed and climbed to her feet and looked around blankly. "What's going on? You were only pretending to give up, I hope. Does this mean you are a hero after all... ?"

Phaethon said, "Not me. I'm just the dupe. The bait. And, as for that..." He nodded toward the empty air where the enemy had just been standing.

"It is dead, I hope ... ? I've never seen a dead thing before, not permanently dead. But I thought there would be a corpse or something. There is always a corpse in mystery fiction."

"The weapon he used involved an energy I haven't seen before. Whatever it was did not even mar the deck where the creature was standing, or touch the pavilion surface behind it."

"He used ... ? He who ... ?" But then she began coughing again.

Phaethon stepped to where he had seen Daphne's horse nosing among the pavilion surfaces. There. The icons and thought-ports were stained with soot, but he saw the wires running to the lock-icon. Once again, a trick anyone with Golden Oecumene technology could have played.

He brushed the wires aside, which interrupted the circuit holding the lock shut. The pavilions turned transparent, slid open, and spread wide, admitting the night sky.

Smoke and stink, trapped beneath the canopy, now poured out from beneath the upper peaks, spilling off of higher canopies, and flowing up to be lost in the air. Daphne stepped to the rail and drew a deep breath.

Across the bay, rose a cliff. Stepping out from a place where the hillside below the burnt houses had fallen away, was a figure in streamlined brown-gray armor. In one hand he held a long thin implement of some sort. When the figure stepped to the top of the cliff, and the night sky was behind him, the armor changed color, turning night-black.

Phaethon squinted, pointed. "There's your answer. He must have known all along. About the invasion. About everything. He lied to you, you know. He may be the only person in the Golden Oecumene who is allowed to lie and get away with it. No wonder people hate him."

Daphne looked at the black figure. The armored man saw they were watching him, he drew a length of silver metal, a sword from his side, held it overhead, and saluted them.

It was Atkins, of course.

Phaethon said, "My access to the mentality was cut off by a barrier which was intended to trace outgoing messages to their destination. His plan was to have the monster succeed, kill you and kill me, and then see where the creature took my head. But I don't understand why Atkins was not stationed here, watching me, from the very first. He must have known where I was."

Daphne sighed in exasperation. "I should have seen this a mile off. This is intrigue, just like in all my stories! He knew they had to be following me. So he must have known my poor Sunset was carrying a monster. He followed us to see what the monster was up to." She shook her head in self-dismay. "I'm simply going to have to read more romances!"

They were both leaning with their elbows on the railing. Both sighed, either with pent anger or with surprised relief. Both turned and looked at each other.

It was only a small motion. Perhaps she only tilted her head a bit toward him, or moved her shoulder. But, somehow, instantly, he had flung his armor clattering to the deck in a swirl of black nanomaterial, and found her arms around him, his arms around her, her warm lips surrendering to his fierce kisses, his mouth stung by her return kiss even more fierce, their bodies pressed together, locked tight, and sighs, cries, and muffled sounds surrounding each extended kiss.

It was Phaethon who drew his head back first. "You know, miss..."

"Shut up," she said. She was as boneless as a sleeping cat in his arms, her head thrown back, her eyes half-closed, her lips half-opened, slender hands without strength against his shoulders. She looked helpless, utterly overcome, and utterly in control. "You talk too much. I'm coming with you."

And she raised her lips to kiss him again.

Her face was just like his drowned wife's face. Her kisses were almost the same as the kisses of her twin.

He put his hands on her shoulders and firmly drew her away from him.

Impish humor, impatience, impertinence all flashed in her gaze, and she opened her mouth to speak. But then she saw the sober look in his eyes. Her expression grew sad. She said nothing.

He dropped his hands away.

"I'm sorry," he said, half-turning away.

Her eyes flashed. "Don't worry. I'll wait. Or maybe I'll just go find some other man. Atkins is pretty cute." And she turned toward the cliff shore and waved her hand high overhead, calling out "Yoo-hoo! Hey, sailor! Over here!"

Atkins had been standing with his hands clasped behind his back, pretending to study the stars and cloud formations, while the two of them were kissing. Now he nodded toward them, and jumped.

Phaethon could not see what engine or flight-system he was using to make the leap all the way across the bay, and Phaethon lost sight of the black armor as it passed overhead. But then Atkins landed on the deck in a crouch, like a cat, and he made no noise at all when he landed.

Atkins turned. His helmet opened into a black halo of hovering beads; but some of the beads fell to the deck, and became simple seashell shapes, and scampered back and forth across the deck and the diamond pavilion surfaces above him.

His face was still immobile, grim, and lined. But there was a sparkle in his eye, which made him look refreshed, alert, and perhaps slightly cheerful.

Phaethon could not hide a hostile expression. He snapped his fingers, and had his black coat reach down and fit his armor back onto him. He left his helmet off.

Atkins had only his katana in his belt. Daphne pointed, and said, "What happened to your big, long gun? The one you shot the monster with?"

"It's not called that, ma'am. Its called a field-disruption directed-energy remote-manifest aiming unit. Or it's called a Hell-hammer. It projects a group of remote micro-units at near-light speed to form a high-energy web assembly around the target, investigate and confuse any anti-disintegration gear, neutralize counter-measures, and then the web negates me-sonic fields coupling basic particles together. It's got an effective range of about fourteen light-minutes, so I could not hit any target outside of the inner system with it, so it's no good for long-range work. Also, the energy-web-targeting capacity falls off sharply if your mass is greater than that of, oh, let's say, thirty thousand metric tons, so it's no good for naval bombardments. But a little bit of close work like this ... ?"

Daphne, seeing Phaethon's eyes narrow in a look of distaste, stepped closer to Atkins, and said in a cooing tone, "That's all very fascinating! But where did you put it... ? You're not carrying it."

"Oh. It was a pseudo-material projection, ma'am."

"Really?" Her eyes sparkled, and she took another step closer.

"Yes ma'am. I carry templates for all possible weapons and other combat systems in my armor, with a long-range pseudo-matter projector, so I can project units of equipment, and fighting machines into my environment, as needed. The thing I put between you and the blast when your husband here set off his little fireworks display, that was an Iron Wizard Heironymous Fifth-Era War Car with attached entrenching blade ..."

She blinked. "What?"

Atkins spoke in a voice of polite surprise: "You did not notice a large, square-treaded vehicle of heavy mobile armored cavalry appear on the deck between you and the blast when the blast went off?"

"I had my eyes closed," she said. "I think Phaethon was looking the other way. Weren't you, Phaethon? Aren't you going to thank the nice man for saving my life? I had evolved back up from 'miss' back to 'wife,' at least at that moment, so don't you think you should say something nice instead of standing there glowering?"

Phaethon said, "Perhaps I should thank you, for saving my ... for saving Daphne's life." "Just doing my duty, sir."

"... Or perhaps I should punch you in the nose. Seeing as how it was you who put her life in harm's way in the first place. Or are you going to say that that was just doing your duty as well?"

The tiny twitch in his jaw, which Atkins used instead of a smile, appeared. "As to that, sir, I cannot say. But, if you're going to try to take a swing at me, you'd better do it now. Because, if you do it later, it will be a court-martial offense."

"What? Why?"

"Because striking a superior officer has always been a court-martial offense for people who join the military. And you are going to sign up, aren't you? Because there is no way you are ever going to get your Starship back out of the hands of the enemy if you don't."