outside, that its control mind had been subverted. Unless Atkins had eavesdroppers planted inside the noetic unit, or placed along the beam path leading from Phaethon to the Silent One's brain, it would look simply as if orders were coming from Phaethon's armor and feeding into the bridge thought boxes.
Other memories from the casket were crowding into Phaethon's brain, confused, tangled. As always, memory shock made him feel sleepy. But he was sure they were memories he did not want the Silent One to see.
He fought. He tried to stay confused, to not recall.
It was no use. Phaethon remembered that Atkins did not have any such eavesdroppers. He was hooked into the microscopic stealth remotes, and that was all. Phaethon remembered that they had discussed this: and Atkins, being a military man, had wanted to stick with the traditional hardware and software with which he was familiar. He was relying on that one system to tell him his information.
A system they had decided to have Phaethon run through his armor, because there was no other complex- mind hierarchy aboard the ship...
And now that that system was compromised, Atkins was blind. He was standing right next to Phaethon, and did not know anything was wrong.
Phaethon lunged out with an imaginary hand. But he was far too slow, and his thoughts betrayed him. The thoughtspace vanished, shut off from an outside source. Without his emergency backup personality available, Phaethon's brain operated at biochemical speeds, whereas the Silent One, inside the body of a Cold Duke, had the superconductive, high-speed, shape-changing neurocircuits at his command.
He had reached with his imaginary hand for some control, some way to send a signal and give a warning to Atkins. Because he remembered where Atkins was.
Phaethon tried to scream out a warning, tried to move. The acceleration was dropping; the Silent One was cutting power to the drive; but Phaethon's body had not yet thawed, and even if it had, no noise would have penetrated his armor, no shout could have left his helmet any more than it could have left a sealed, air-tight, long- buried tomb. Atkins was inside Ulysses.
He was not here inside of his biological body; he had never physically been here. Instead, Atkins's armor, hunched from Earth from the only military spaceport in existence (it was in a large field behind Atkins's cottage), had carried a downloaded copy of Atkins's mind and memory. With the portable noetic reader, Phaethon had transferred the download into the mannequin's brain system, and Atkins had woken up.
There was a blur of motion, a flare of light. Phaethon was jerked headlong.
Whatever system the Silent One was using to prevent Phaethon from activating his emergency persona did not prevent Phaethon from activating his rather complex sensory apparatus. Phaethon's senses were acute enough to see the battle.
In the first microsecond, the Silent One used a switch in Phaethon's armor to redirect the aiming beams from the energy mirrors away from their targets in Xenophon's body and focus them at the Ulysses body. Atkins must have detected this: the Ulysses body started forward as quickly as it could under the twenty-five gravities of acceleration; weapons made of pseudo-matter, one after another, appeared and disappeared in Ulysses's hands, all in a matter of several nanoseconds, all firing. Xenophon's body disappeared in a blaze of fire; cut, stabbed, burnt, exploded, vaporized. This explosion took place over the next two microseconds and lasted throughout the remainder of the battle. The overpressure reached a million atmospheres during the explosion itself.
Phaethon was able to detect, during the second microsecond of combat, Xenophon, beaming his brain information out of his burning body into the other empty Neptunian bodies in the bridge. Neptunian bodies were specially designed to permit such high-speed transfers. Several of Atkins's weapons laid down a suppressing fire of jamming signals, thought-seeking mi-cropulses, and webs of force to destroy any noumenal information in motion; Xenophon was killed several times, but redundant backups allowed full copies of his brain information to appear at several points around the room. Atkins's weapons were not programmed to notice that irrational mathematics code was thought information; it looked like gibberish to their circuits; they did not know what type of pattern of forces would block transmissions.
At about this same time, the fire from the mirrors struck Ulysses's body. The rags of his costume were blown off as the air around ignited. Beneath, however, was the black armor of Atkins, empty except for Atkins's mind, absorbing the firepower, shredding concentric layers of ablative, releasing fogs of nanomaterial around him.
The armor propelled itself forward with unthinkable speed. Before the third microsecond was passed, Atkins was crouching behind Phaethon's chair, trying to put Phaethon' s body between himself and the concentrated firepower from the mirrors. The Silent One had lost about half his spare bodies in the same moment of time, due to Atkins's firepower.
The captain's chair and the surrounding tables began to burn. Phaethon, trapped in his motionless armor, began to fall.
In the third microsecond, the Silent One used his control over the drive to send the Phoenix Exultant careening. The deck seemed to wobble; gravity jarred more heavily and lightly.
Ballistic projectiles radiating from every surface and pore of Atkins's black armor went astray; smart projectiles were confused by the air, which, at this mo-ment had turned incandescent and opaque by the ener-gies released long ago, during the outset of the battle in the last microsecond.
There followed a slow period of battle, lasting over severalmicroseconds, a long-drawn-out campaign. The Silent One, in his many bodies, was beaming his brain information from point to point around the room, and propelling sections of his exploding blue-white flesh back and forth across the chamber, maneuvering, Meanwhile, Atkins, blinded by the opaque air, and unable to drive clear signals from one side of the chamber to another, had his tiny bullets and his super-sonic nanoweapons swimming through the incandescent murk, like submarines hunting for enemies in the blind sea.
Phaethon was no tactician, but it looked to him as if this period of hunt-and-seek were clearly in Atkins's favor. More of the blue-white Neptunian substance was burning.
The end of the battle came suddenly. A signal reached Phaethon's armor. He had no control over his limbs. His armor projected a variety of destructive forces, throwing fragments of his captain's chair in each direction, and adding to the general waste heat in the chamber.
His gauntlets grabbed the noetic unit, the unit through which his armor was being controlled, and hugged it to his chest. His mass drivers propelled him sideways and down on his face. He smashed through the status table on his right, and fell into a puddle of blue Neptunian nanomaterial, leaving Atkins unprotected. Many of Atkins's weapons, sensing a concentration of brain information beneath Phaethon, fired harmlessly into Phaethon's backplates, but could not wound the puddle beneath him. In that same split instant of time, the Silent One released his control over Phaethon's dead-man switch.
The pain in Phaethon's body automatically triggered the weapon program he had already set up. It was as if the mirrors brought the cores of several suns into the room.
The thought boxes, the bridge crew, and the pressure curtains were wiped away. The deck was polished clean.
For a long, very long second, concentric bubbles of pseudo-matter appeared around Atkins, additional armor; and he lived even as everything around him was destroyed.
But something strange seemed to twist or distort the space where the pseudo-matter was focused; the pseudo-matter, and all of Atkins's pseudo-material weapons, vanished as their fields collapsed.
During that same long-drawn-out moment, even as he was dying, Atkins drew his ceremonial katana from his belt and, with a cry, launched himself forward in a perfectly executed lunge. He drove the point of the weapon between Phaethon's invulnerable armor and the deck. The sharp edge scraped through Neptunian neural matter, which parted like water and reformed around it. Phaethon's armor moved slightly, slapping an arm down to pin the sword in place, before Atkins could slash again.
The energy from the mirrors peaked. The deck boiled.
Without a cry or call, Atkins vanished in a white ball of incandescent fire. No fragment was left.
Phaethon, in his armor, was safe. Atkins's sword, he could feel beneath him, was safe, the only memento to a futile death. The noetic unit, the thing that allowed the Silent One to control his armor, beneath his chest, still covered, was safe.
And he could also feel, beneath him, the Silent One, stirring. Also safe.
