Swarm One, which had been positioned in the air locks, had followed Neoptoiemous and his cavalcade, and showed Phaethon the picture that the ship-mind vision cells were not showing.
Certain of the flecks of substance falling from Neoptolemous's cavalcade floated to nearby bulkheads, clung, grew, and became Neptunians. These Neptuni-ans (or perhaps they were Neptunian partials, remotes, or servant- things; it was impossible to tell merely by looking at the glassy blue-gray shapelessness that housed them) scattered throughout the insulation space, and began affixing magnetic disrupters to the frameworks holding the fuel cells in place.
The stealth remotes were smaller than bacteria. Some flew into those the disrupters planted by the enemy. Once inside, they emitted radiations, vibrated, probed. Phaethon's many eyes recorded and analyzed. He had his own engineering programs as well as a military demolition routine (part of the stealth remote's threat-assessment software) examine the information. Both civilian and military demolition partials in his mind agreed that there was little or no threat here.
The ship's vision cells showed Neoptoiemous arriving along the outside rim of the living quarters. Here were the ship-mind decks, a nested circle of enormous thought boxes forming the outermost layer of the living quarters. The main group of the cavalcade headed 'up' (toward the center of the carousel) elevator shafts and maintenance wells toward the bridge. But the stealth remotes (seeing what the ship mind was not al-lowed to see) showed a second group breaking off from the main group.
This mass of Neptunians spread out across the floor once they were out on the ship-brain decks. They, or it (Phaethon could not guess at the number of individu-als inhabiting the blue-gray nanomachinery mass), sent a dozen tiny tendrils of substance sneaking across the bulkheads, looking for unshielded jacks or thought ports. They interfaced with the ship's mind and checked on the progress of the original poisonous thought-virus invasion.
The Neptunians were mazed in the complexity of the ship logic. So, of course, they consulted manuals and help guides to discover the addresses and locations of the vital centers of the mental architecture they wished to examine. They opened the shipboard thought shop, downloaded certain tools and routines to accomplish their checks, and began further acts of sabotage.
Phaethon was bitterly amused. He had designed that architecture. He had written those manuals. He had stocked the thought shop, and, in many cases, had designed those tools. Therefore the ship's mind showed the saboteurs only what they expected to see.
The real ship's brain, of course, was in Phaethon's armor, and always had been. What the saboteurs were accessing were merely secondary systems, repeaters and backups. With the help from the second swarm of stealth remotes (those who had grown in and around the thought-box connective tissues and circuit resolves) Phaethon was able to maintain the masquerade with ease.
This ship, this beautiful ship, was his. He knew her every line and point, every joint and joist, every nut and bolt. He knew the ship and they did not. She was the child of his mind. Did they actually think they could take her from him by force?
The intermediate doors on this level had opened and shut. Neoptolemous was approaching. The air lock leading to the bridge was cycling. The ship's vision cells showed that Neoptolemous was mutating the outer surface of his blue-white armored body, making the adjustments necessary to enter a chamber held at Earth-normal temperature and pressure.
Phaethon activated the third and final group of stealth remotes.
Inside the bridge air lock, the third swarm of microscopic and hidden remotes landed on the surface areas of the Neptunian bodies, finer than the finest dust, unde-tectable. During the moment when the Neptunians' armored surfaces were changing, the remotes penetrated through the cell layers, infiltrated the Neptunian internal systems, bonded to neural tissue, gathering near the node points that controlled the external signal traffic.
Phaethon waited, tense as a cat watching a mouse-hole. If Neoptolemous had any Silent Oecumene technology to detect or counter these remotes, he would probably employ it now. Neoptolemous certainly would not enter the bridge if he knew it was a trap.
Evidently, he did not know.
A panel in the deck was already beginning to slide open.
The remotes inside Neoptolemous began making their medical assessment of how much acceleration pressure each particular nerve group and brain mass could withstand.
It was all so easy, so sweet, that Phaethon would have laughed out loud, except that he was already ordering his cloak to stiffen his body into its tough, immobile, supergravity-resistant form, and his face had grown as immobile as a block of wood.
THE SILENT ONE
By a tradition as old as that first orbital village l(that village whose name was lost to history during the Erasure of the World-Library during the De-renaissance), the entrance to the bridge was in the deck, so that to enter was to travel 'up,' that is, toward the dead center of the centrifuge. Therefore it was a section of the 'floor' that opened to admit Neoptolemous.
Like an iceberg rising to the surface of an arctic sea, Neoptolemous entered. The bridge was as large as an ancient amphitheater, and was able to hold his giant body with ease. Up through the doors and to either side now flowed the rest of Neoptolemous's entourage, pools and surging masses of the Neptunian amoeboid body form, and took up positions to the left and right of the large body mass housing Neoptolemous, a semicircle facing the captain's chair. Some formed elephantine legs and heaved themselves upright; others rolled like enormous slugs, the motions and pulsation of their brain stuffs visible through the translucent surface of their integument. The Neptunians glistened in the blue-red light from the pressure curtains, the colored glint from the energy mirrors.
Was there anyone here except for Neoptolemous himself? The medical stealth remotes in the other members of the entourage told him there was little or no neural activity of the kind associated with self-aware thinking, but there was a tremendous thought and nerve-pulse communication with the Neoptolemous body mass. Evidently all the other Neptunians were puppets, backups or sleepwalkers, being used as secondary extensions of his nervous system by Neoptolemous.
The doors closed beneath Neoptolemous. The medical remotes inside of Neoptolemous, by examining the nerve-to-nerve signal traffic, had estimated which brain areas performed which functions, or held which memories. Calmly, efficiently, the military units were calculating a roster of priority. How much of the organism would be held utterly helpless by su-peracceleration? Which parts of which brains should be destroyed by microlaser scalpel first, to prevent the enemy from thinking about any counteraction or defense? And which brain parts could be examined (once the remotes had attached microscopic reader rebroad-casters to the nerve cells involved) by the portable noetic reader for militarily useful information? And also, for how many seconds would the brain cells carry the in- formation once the target had been crushed to death by the acceleration?
Phaethon examined the readings from the medical stealth remotes, and prepared a charge of paralyzing energies in the mirrors. Aiming elements in the mirrors received information from the medical stealth remotes and targeted specific nerve clusters and ganglia, Phaethon's cloak told him that his body was now in its most stress- resistant configuration. He was invul-nerable to gravity. He had estimates and measurements as to how much pressure the Neptunian bodies and neural webs could withstand before blacking out.
There was a range of values, between twenty and thirty gravities, where the Neptunian body could be pinned and held helpless, but risk of unrecoverable death was low. Between forty and fifty, the specially tough Neptunian brain cells would not be able to convey charges from one to the next, and all neural action would stop, but those charges could still be read, and the last dying thoughts be interpreted. Unfortunately, this would destroy all macrocellular structure in the brain, resulting in the instant death of the organism. The military estimator in the stealth remotes politely recommended this option as the maximal to achieve mission goals with a good safety margin.
Phaethon could kill the enemy now, instantaneously, and read the information from the enemy's dead brain matter at his leisure. Phaethon wondered why he was not more horrified at the concept.
