The horses and men of the cavalcade, outwardly shaped like humans, were constructed of Neptunian polymer armor, gleaming like statues of blue glass, and seething with strands and globules of complex brain matter and neurocircuitry throughout their lengths, visible beneath the semitranslucent skin. The image of Queen Victoria was more realistic, as only her face and hands shined with the ice blue Neptunian body substance. The black dress and high crown were real. Unfortunately, a human body was too small to hold all the mass of which a Neptunian Eremite was composed, so the body of the queen was the size of the Colossus of Rhodes, and her huge head overtopped some of the pillars lining the roads, and her crown brushed the triumphal arches under which the cavalcade passed.
Neoptolemous's ownership override opened the great doors leading from the inner bay to the fuel area. Here, the insulation space surrounding the drive axis extended seventy kilometers or more. When the ship was not under thrust, this space was cleared of any obstructions or dangerous radiation. It was actually rather clever of Neoptolemous to enter by this shaft: this was the quickest way to get to the living quarters from the aft of the great ship.
Phaethon thought: It would require only a simple command to the machines controlling the main drive. One-hundredth of a second of thrust would sweep that area with radiation. No complex subatomic particles would remain.
But Phaethon did not issue that command. While all his other men were delayed, out of contact with him, an left behind, Phaefhon allowed Neoptolemous to come closer, ever closer.
It seemed the cavalcade, horses, men, carriage and all. were all part of one master organism, which had, built into it, the same engines and thrusters which Phaethon had seen the Neptunian legate use so long ago in the grove of Saturn-trees: for, once the caval-cade moved into the wide and weightless insulation shafts surrounding the main drive, it began to rocket down the shaft toward the bow of the ship. Men-shapes and horse-things were half melted by the stress of acceleration, and bits of Neptunian body substance be-gun to drop off along the way.
The giant holding cells of the fuel, like an endless geometric array of snowballs, loomed around them for a hundred kilometers. The living quarters and ship's brain, even though it was a large as a good-sized space colony, larger than most ships, was absurdly dwarfed by comparison, not unlike the acorn-sized brain of the original, prehistoric version of a dinosaur.
Neoptolemous was coining.
Phaethon activated the olive drab cards he had found in his memory casket. Information from the three groups of stealth remotes poured into his brain.
The ship was under attack. The attack had been under way for several minutes.
The first attack, of course, had been through thought contamination. Viruses had been introduced into the ship mind with the first communication download; those viruses had been editing every recorder and vision cell of which the ship mind was aware, and blocking all knowledge of the attack from Phaethon.
But the ship mind was not aware of the military remotes monitoring ship-mind actions, and editing out of the ship mind all evidence and awareness of themselves and their two brother swarms.
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.