The words were: "Submit the password. If your body completes its cycle before the drives are shut down, you perish."
Phaethon wondered why the noetic reader did not simply pick the password out of his memory.
"The password we read from your memory is not valid."
Phaethon truly wished he could have somehow not thought the next thought which leaped into his mind. Because that thought was this: If his password was invalid, then someone had overridden it. The only one who could possibly have an override to Phaethon's authority over this ship, the only person who could convince the ship to ignore Neoptolemous's legal ownership, was Atkins. During the period Phaethon had erased from his memory, Phaethon must have given Atkins an override.
Which meant Atkins was aboard the ship.
"Where?"
Phaethon did not remember.
Atkins must have planned to do the same thing he did with the enemy hidden in Daphne's horse. Namely, to allow the enemy to defeat and kill Phaethon, and watch to see what they did with the spoils of victory.
"You think we are defeated? Your conclusion that Atkins, wherever he is hiding, will simply be able to destroy me is unwarranted. Why hasn't he shown himself?"
Obviously, because the Silent One had not yet done whatever it was he had come here to do. Atkins was waiting for the enemy to reveal his real plans.
"I have told you all my plans. You still do not believe that I act in good faith? You are a fool! But I still need you to save my people. Tell me the password; otherwise you die; I die; and even Atkins, if he is aboard, is carried away out of your Solar System at twenty-five gravities, aboard a ship that no one can stop and no one can board."
But Phaethon did not remember the password.
"Open your memory caskets."
The Silent One was able to manipulate at least some of the functions in Phaethon's sense filter: A memory casket seemed to appear on the symbol table next to him.
"If Atkins is aboard, as you believe he is, and you think he is ready to destroy me once I show my real goals, as obviously you do, then not only does it not matter if I gain access to the ship-mind-the real ship-mind this time, not the dummy with which you deceived me before-it actually aids your cause, doesn't it?"
The problem with dealing with an enemy who was reading one's mind was that bluff, deceit, or delay was impossible. The Silent One knew that Phaethon thought Atkins was aboard and waiting. But the Silent One simply did not believe Phaethon's beliefs were correct.
Of course, Phaethon had no notion of what was going on inside of the Silent One's mind.
"I wish you did. If there were a way I could make this noetic reader able to decode my thoughts, I would use it; then you would see that I am not your enemy; that I am, ultimately, the only true friend you have, Phaethon."
Very well. Phaethon would open the first memory casket, looking for a password, and turn the ship over to the Silent One. If the Silent One was sincere, and if he truly intended no harm to the Golden Oecumene, Atkins would no doubt let him live. If not, the Silent One would no doubt perish. Much as he disliked the man, Phaethon had no doubt whatsoever that Atkins could kill any living creature he was permitted to kill, once he was unleashed.
"You have an almost religious faith in your war god, don't you, Phaethon? But I see you have decided."
With an imaginary hand (Phaethon could not have moved his real one), Phaethon opened the memory casket.
There was a second casket inside the first. There was an image of a thought card in the lid of this second casket, inscribed with the sign of a winged sword. When he saw it, he began to remember....
The password was the first thing that returned to his memory: Laocoon. What a strange choice for a password. It was the name of one of the L5 asteroid cities at Trailing Trojan, a place of no particular military significance. There was also some sort of classical allusion to that name, some mythical figure, but Phaethon could not bring it to mind at the moment.
He sent the password into the menu: the menu winked out, and a rush of numbers, figures, and ideograms flashed across the surfaces of the energy mirrors lining the bridge. The Silent One was taking control of the ship's mind for the second time. Perhaps this task was occupying the Silent One's full attention.
Several of the bridge mannequins looked up at the rush of information on the mirrors, looks of simulated surprise on their simulated features. Sloppy Rufus barked and scrambled up to an upper balcony near the major communication nexus.
Phaethon realized, with a sensation of shock, that no external observer could have known just what had passed between Phaethon and the Silent One. How could anyone or anything be able to tell Phaethon's armor had been taken over by the enemy? His armor was opaque to every radiation or probe; no one could tell, from the 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.