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___."