The Phoenix in Flight

by Sherwood Smith

  In other words, is he ex-navy?

  Osri was silent, every line of his body in its form-fitting suit expressive of outrage.

  Deralze winced as another skip transition seemed to balloon the sutures of his skull, and tongued another painkiller. How much longer can the fiveskip take this? Osri’s medical telltale blinked to orange. He must be on his third or fourth painkiller. Now even if he got the key back from Brandon, the ship would refuse to activate his console.

  Deralze sat back, smiling. Now we might survive.

  Brandon tapped at his console, paused as another transition wrenched at them, then keyed the big go-pad. The navigation overlay froze and the red letters overlaid on the display: COURSE INTERSECTS ATMOSPHERE.

  The green line of their projected path flared red where it merged with the fuzzy blue-green circle that represented Warlock. Behind the nav window the bulky red-orange glare of Warlock mocked the graphic artifacts of the computer, man’s feeble attempt to master spacetime and its immensity.

  Brandon keyed the console and an overlay popped up: SHIELD 140%, GRAVITORS 144%, TRACKING 0.1%, MAXIMUM GEE ON PROJECTED COURSE = 8.6.

  There was a blip as the medical circuit interrupted. HULL ABLATION WITHIN ACCEPTABLE RANGE. SHOCK TRAUMA WITHIN TOLERANCE.

  Deralze’s throat constricted as Warlock’s true size reached out of the viewscreen and took possession of him.

  “You can’t do that!” Osri yelped. “The ship will come apart.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping our Rifter escort will think,” Brandon said, his voice going hoarse. “But we don’t have enough delta to rendezvous with any body in the Warlock system, let alone Dis, unless we use atmospheric braking. The ship seems to think we can do it with one more skip.”

  “That’s insane.” Osri’s voice wavered as he glared at the image of the gas giant now seemingly dead ahead. “We’re headed straight for a gas giant, and you’re going to skip? We’re too close to radius. Given the choice, I’d rather be vaporized than turned inside out.”

  Deralze was glad of the medication now, glad of the muzziness that muted his helpless panic. Ships that hit radius in skip rarely reemerged into fivespace. Those that did were found inverted in three dimensions—passengers, cargo, and hull—by the drive’s interaction with a planetary gravity well. Deralze remembered one particular training chip, and nausea tugged at his throat with the memory of those obscene sausage-like objects topped with something like pink broccoli. Or the courier that had emerged with its pilot forming the outer hull.

  “That’s about all the choice you have,” said Brandon, grinning at them both. Then he slapped shut his faceplate. His voice changed as it came over the comm. “Better seal up. We may bust a seam during braking.”

  Osri had to have the last word. “If the gravitors don’t fail first and turn us into jam.”

  For a moment longer Warlock bulked foursquare ahead, an orange wall blocking off the stars they couldn’t reach. Then the screen blanked as the fiveskip engaged, and Deralze wondered what radius would feel like.

  o0o

  Silence gripped the bridge of the Satansclaw as the skipmissile leapt away toward the booster. Even the demented chatter of the logos ceased, but Tallis barely noticed as he glared at the main screen.

  He knew it was irrational to be furious with Kherrimun for having been blown up, but here he was alone on a chase, with no backup. He could feel the grins of the bridge monitors, especially Anderic’s, even though not one of them was foolish enough to look toward him. His rage mounted until tears started in his eyes, making him even more furious. Then the missile struck.

  “Got ’em!” shouted Ninn hoarsely. “We got the...” The little fire-control tech broke off as a reddish chain-of-pearls Cerenkov wake announced the escape of the booster.

  The cheers of the crew ceased. Tallis knew what they were thinking—speculating what Hreem would do to him for letting the nyr-Arkad escape. He started to lower himself into his pod, his head reeling with half-imagined plans for escaping Hreem’s vengeance, and then froze as a quiet voice spoke in his ear.

  “REPAIR SEQUENCE COMPLETE. TACTICALS UPDATED.”

  o0o

  Anderic’s fierce enjoyment of his captain’s failure evaporated as Tallis abruptly straightened up, his expression of dismay hardening into intent. His prominent larynx bobbed rapidly as that peculiar internal dialogue the tech had noted before the attack recommenced. Then Tallis sat down and began issuing commands while he tapped at his console.

  “Anderic, run a scan on his wake. It looks wrong. Ninn, charge another missile. Sho-Imbris, hop us over into his wake and orient to fire up his ass. Now!”

  The crew jolted into frantic action as Tallis shouted the last word. The main screen rippled into a new configuration, with a prominent time count superimposed on the forward view. Anderic set up the scan, and in the moments before his console reported back, stared at Tallis’ reflection in the carefully polished metal above his screen. The captain again appeared to be listening intently to something, and his eyes were following something on the screen, something that, as far as Anderic could see, wasn’t there. Did no one else notice? He stole a glance around and his lip curled in disdain. Except for that close-faced Lennart at Damage Control, the rest of the crew obviously hadn’t a clue.

  He scowled at short, spare Lennart, who’d turned slightly in her pod, her brows furrowed in puzzlement as she observed Tallis. She knew something was wrong, but clearly didn’t know what. Just as well. She was both popular and ambitious, which made her an automatic enemy.

  Anderic gnawed on the inside of his cheek at the reminder that he still didn’t know, either. Then his console beeped. He stared at the readout in disbelief. How did Tallis know?

  He considered his words before reporting. “His high end’s gone, Captain. I estimate no more’n three cee or so... and really unstable.”

  Tallis smiled as the skip cut in briefly. “Right. If he stays in skip, his wake’ll suck our missile right into him. If he drops out and tries to maneuver, we’ll catch up.”

  The ship dropped back into fourspace and the stars skewed rapidly across the screens as the missile tube oriented on the fleeing booster. Only the remnants of its wake, a faint red blotch, were visible. Tallis slapped the launch button, then keyed some more instructions into his console. A series of bracketed distance estimates joined the time count on the forward view, with the fading wake of the skipmissile as background. There was something wrong about his actions, but Tallis didn’t give him any time to puzzle it out.

  “Sho-Imbris, take us straight along twenty-five light-seconds. Anderic, run a full-sphere scan as soon as we drop out and push the results over to me. Ninn, charge it up.”

  The navigator hesitated, looking at the main screen, where the center distance estimate read 25. “This missile, Cap’n?”

  “Do it, nacker-face!” Tallis shouted. “It’s already detonated or missed. The shields can handle it.” He tapped at his console some more, then stared at the screen again. Once more, Anderic noted a sort of dissonance to his actions.

  The tech set up his scan and then watched Tallis intently as the ship leapt forward into skip. The main screen kept changing as the captain punched at his console. More windows popped up, and a spherical grid overlaid the main view, now blanked for skip. Then the ship dropped out and Anderic’s console began flickering through a full-scan sequence, with no immediate results. None of the views on-screen showed anything but a normal starfield. A clean miss.

  “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 stab
bed 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.

  NINE

  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 circuit
s 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.