The Phoenix in Flight (34 page)

“He got out of range too soon,” said Tallis. “His high end’s
a little better than we thought.” The estimates on the screen changed as he
tapped in a few instructions. “Nothing on the scan?”

“No, sir.”

Tallis’s mouth quirked at the inadvertent respect in
Anderic’s form of reply. Rage churned up Anderic’s stomach, but he kept his
self-control.

“What’s your estimate on his time-to-skip, with the
instability he’s got?”

Anderic stabbed at his console, running a simulation on the
waveform he’d picked up after the near miss. “About two hundred fifty seconds.”
He paused. “No reaction yet on the scan.”

“He can’t have gotten very far. He only boosted at ten gee
toward the end there. We’ll see him skip, and we should be able to pull a
vector fast enough to fire an intercept. Navigation, check my setup here with
the figures posted.”

Tallis had returned to his habit of addressing the crew by
their function, instead of by name as he did when he was rattled or anxious.
He
feels in control, but why?
Judging from past performances, Tallis should be
nervous and fretful by now, and there was no indication from his past that he
was capable of the complex pursuit he was now so successfully commanding.

Anderic sneaked a covert scan of the bridge. The others
gazed at Tallis with expressions ranging from respectful disbelief to near hero
worship. Lennart’s lips were pursed, but she seemed impressed. And Tallis was
soaking it in, looking happier than the tech had ever seen him. Then Anderic
caught sight of Luri peeking into the bridge, her eyes wide and lips parted
with a peculiar mixture of delight and lust as she stared at Tallis’s back.

Bile surged into Anderic’s throat.
The little
nacker-tease.
He’d been making progress with her, but that was all for
naught now, unless he could figure out what Tallis was up to and turn it to his
advantage.

“Looks good, Cap’n,” the navigator confirmed.

“Slave your console to me. I want to orient on that
intercept, fire, and then skip under his tail for another try. If we’re fast
enough, we can use his wake to suck the missile right into his radiants.”

Tallis leaned back in his command pod and favored Anderic
with a gloating grin, clearly secure in his command of the situation. Tallis
was aware of Luri’s gaze, too, and was just as clearly enjoying its effect on
Anderic, who strove to keep his face neutral. But he did not stop watching.

Anderic’s console bleeped as it detected the wake of the
fleeing booster. A green line slashed across the grid of the main view as the
starfield slewed rapidly across it, lining the ship up on intercept. Tallis
stabbed peremptorily at his console. A thrill of recognition burred through
Anderic’s nerves.
Tallis hit the pads
after
the ship began to slew.
There’s something else running the helm!

Then, as Tallis slapped the launch button and the ship
skipped out, Anderic remembered the little Barcan troglodyte, swathed from head
to foot in yards of shimmering
shanta-silk,
who had visited Tallis
during the last major refitting of the
Satansclaw.
Luri had said that he
was trying to sell Tallis a set of Tikeris fighting androids—the Rifter
captain’s passion for the Tikeris arena was legendary. Anderic hadn’t tried to
talk to the trog himself. The little man’s bulbous, dark red goggles and
grotesquely huge codpiece had repelled him, along with the scent of forbidden
technology that was the heritage of every Barcan.

The certainty of what had to be controlling the ship hit
Anderic like a blow. He could feel his blanch and swiveled back to his console
to hide his reaction, gripping the edge of his console tightly to still his
involuntary shudder.
A logos.

Memories from his childhood on Ozmiron burst up from deeply
repressed layers of his mind, old stories many times heard. He’d rejected
almost everything of his former life, but as with all Downsider or
Highdweller-born Rifters, there were some attitudes he had never questioned.

The fervent abhorrence of machine intelligence and rigid
affirmation of the Ban by every Ozmiront was one of these. Ozmiron was a
stifling place, dominated for almost three centuries by a rigid and righteous
cult born of horror and pain. Anderic remembered his amazement, after he’d fled
his home as a teenager, when he found an old history chip that described the
ancient Ozmironts as infamous hedonists, devoted to all forms of physical and
psychic pleasure. That was something the dour, never-smiling Phanists of the
Organic Communion had never mentioned. The rest of the story they told again
and again in detail: how a luckless, greedy, and very stupid scavenger found a
hibernating Adamantine in the outer system and brought it downside; how his
tinkering awoke it from its eight-hundred-year sleep; and how, before it was
destroyed, it had converted nearly the entire planet.

Unfortunately it hadn’t killed very many of the inhabitants.
That task was left to those left unconverted. The death chambers had operated
for many months following the fall of the Adamantine Hive, granting the last
and only benison possible to the organic machines that had once been human. The
agonies of the survivors, recognizing family and friends still alive but
irredeemable, had never faded from the Ozmiront psyche. In the rest of the
Thousand Suns, the Adamantine Horror was a millennium past; on Ozmiron, it was
yesterday.

“Communications! Stop your nacker-flipping and get that scan
reset before we emerge. Now!”

Tallis’s angry voice jolted Anderic out of memory. He
punched at his console with shaking fingers, the coarse laughter of the other
bridge monitors raking his emotions.

He gave the whole crew a three-day leave on Rifthaven,
just after the Barcan left, but nobody saw him that whole time. But when we
came back, his eyes were all puffy and red—he said it was from celebrating the
last raid.
Anderic sneaked another glance at Tallis, who was again staring
intently at something no one else could see. Now that he knew what was going
on, he wondered why no one noticed, it seemed so obvious. He shuddered again
involuntarily.
Did he let them do something to his eyes?

Luri glanced at him, then looked away, uninterested.
She
was disappointed when Tallis didn’t buy the Tikeris... so she doesn’t know
about the logos.
How would she react if she found out? How would the crew
react? Anderic’s dread slowly eased as he considered how he might exploit his
discovery.

As the flesh incarnates a human being, so the
Satansclaw
embodied
the logos: a web of thought and purpose whose flesh was steel and crystal and
dyplast and the dynamics of space-stressing engines, tunneled throughout with
tubes of corrosive oxygen traversed by bionts emitting clouds of deadly
hydrogen oxide. Now, in submission to the will of the Tallis biont, it bent its
efforts to fulfilling the nature of the ship that gave it flesh: to pursue and
destroy.

Microsecond succeeded microsecond in their measured pace as
the executive node of the logos watched the problem-space shrink toward
resolution. The multitude of its slave nodes piped and chittered as they
wrenched and twisted at the polydimensional space that modeled the pursuit,
crumpling it toward a solution path that would end in a satisfying burst of
energy and the concomitant release of tension, as ordained by its creator.

Yet for all its avid focus on the fleeing ship, the steady
pulse of its awareness touched introspectively on information flowing
constantly from sensors within the ship as well. Engines, weapons, hull
integrity—the logos scanned thousands of data points in intervals barely long enough
for one of the bionts with which it shared its body to emit one databit of the
sluggish acoustic modulations they used for communication. Nonetheless, the
crystalline mind hidden deep within the destroyer’s circuitry devoted much of
its time, in the intervals between other tasks, to observing those bionts, for
in them was found the only uncertainty in a worldview otherwise bounded by the
certainties of physical law.

So it was that many millions of microseconds into the
pursuit, the node assigned to monitor biological activity on the bridge alerted
the executive to a marked change in the physiological parameters of the Anderic
biont and their correlation with the actions of the Tallis. Finding itself
unable to decipher the interaction, and alarmed by the intensity of the
Anderic’s parameters, the executive invoked the subjective mode and awoke the
god from his dreams.

o0o

Ruonn tar Hyarmendil, fifth eidolon of the fleshly Ruonn,
cursed and rolled off the houri as a hole suddenly dilated in the wall beside
his opulent couch. It emitted a small cloud of royal-blue vapor that dissolved
into the apologetic voice of his vizheer. “The Great Slave desires an audience
with the god.”

For a moment Ruonn was confused, then the knowledge of his
cybernetic exile within the circuits of a logos welled up within him. He was
still Ruonn, and yet was not; he was the fifth eidolon his archetype had
created, hidden in the illegal intelligent machines he sold. Now, in the hope
of eventual reunion with the Ruonn archetype and the rewards promised by the
Matria of Barca, he sighed and waved the room, houri, cloud and all, into
oblivion.

He found himself suspended in a dimensionless sea of light,
and after a moment of disorientation, willed himself into congruence with the
ship. A thrilling rush of prepotency engulfed him and spread out to his
uttermost bounds as the
Satansclaw
fitted itself around his mind and
opened his senses to a rush of perceptions that no biologic human would ever
experience. Space and time poured in on him with kaleidoscopic radiance. He
felt his body expand and harden. In his sex he felt the charging skipmissile
like the gathering of an orgasm, felt the thrust of the engines with the
satisfaction of a runner in the smooth pounding of his legs. There were no
other words for it, he thought: verily, he was a god.

He reveled in the flood of power and delight. How could he
ever again find satisfaction in his fantasy world? He resolved not to retreat
from his full incarnation within the
Satansclaw.
Then the voice of the
executive node interrupted his exaltation.

“THE ANDERIC BIONT HAS EXCEEDED ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL
PARAMETERS FOR STRESS. THERE IS A STRONG CORRELATION WITH THE ACTIONS OF THE
TALLIS BIONT DURING THE PURSUIT ACTION. ADVISE.”

Ruonn replayed the visuals from the bridge monitors and saw
immediately what had happened.
Overconfidence and laziness.
The captain
had forgotten himself and let the logos run ahead of his actions, and the
communications monitor had seen it. But why had Anderic reacted so strongly?
Not just curiosity, but almost panic. The associative nodes of the logos
delivered the knowledge from the ship’s personnel records.
Ozmiron.

This was very bad. There could be no peace with an Ozmiront.
Anderic would have to be eliminated. Like a man flexing his muscles to test his
bonds, Ruonn reviewed his settings and found, as he had feared, that the Rifter
captain had blocked him off from all interior effectors. He had control of the
ship’s navigation and external weapons, but his interior presence was entirely
passive. Not surprising, he thought, remembering the resistance he’d had to
overcome to sell Tallis the logos.
He wanted it and feared it. This will
take time.
He would have to work through the captain, and there was no
telling how much time Anderic would leave him.

The first order of business was to discover the dynamics of
the crew’s psychology. How firmly was Tallis in control, and how much influence
did Anderic have? Ruonn attempted to access the internal monitor data, and was
distressed to find the internal sensors on a twenty-four-hour loop. Tallis had
him more severely limited than he’d hoped.
Let’s see how much he’s come to
depend on the logos, then.
He accessed the history registers of the
executive node, to be seized by acute rage and horror. Except for a brief trial
this was the first time the Rifter captain had activated him!
Over a year
wasted!
Unless one of his other eidoloi had succeeded in returning to
Barca, he was another year behind Rimur, his cousin and the favorite of the family,
whose first eidolon had returned for reunion with a payload of data most
pleasing to the Matria just before Ruonn’s
Satansclaw
installation.

If Ruonn had still been in the flesh he would have been
flushed and shaky with anger. As it was, the bridge instruments relayed a large
power surge from the engines, but the monitor on that station was intent on the
screens displaying the chase and didn’t see it. In a flash of misery Ruonn
remembered the Elevation of his cousin Rimur to Potency: the vast bodies of the
Matria of Barca awash in their baths, glimmering in the torchlight, their husky
voices intertwined in awesome polyphony, chanting the genetic triumphs of the
Barcan seed over the harsh forces of an unloving planet. Most of all he
remembered the gloating blush of triumph that shone from Rimur’s face as he was
granted ten progeny from Annempta, a third-level Mater. Ten! Thanks to this
fool Tallis he would never catch up!

An irresistibly intense wash of pleasure ruptured his
thoughts, and it was some time before Ruonn either wanted to or could analyze
the source. The skipmissile! It had discharged, and his cybernetic image had
interpreted this as a sensation akin to orgasm, but more intense than any he
had ever felt in the rapture tank at home. Strange. He didn’t remember
programming that correspondence.

He was about to invoke an introspection of his programming
when the strangeness of the ship’s mission finally penetrated his
consciousness. Ruonn forgot about the disproportionate pleasure response as his
mind now integrated the information supplied by the data nodes of the logos and
the ship’s computer. They were deep in the Charvann system, a minor Panarchic
center, in hot pursuit of a military courier...