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hours, the internal fields and bracing systems would have had time slowly to
adjust to the mounting pressure. Now there was no time.
Phaethon was directing the internal magnetic and paramaterial fields of the
Phoenix Exultant to brace
against the pressure shock, receiving information from every square inch of
the hull. The temperature was approaching 16 million degrees; the pressure 160
grams per cubic centimeter. Phaethon was using the magnetic field treads that
coated the adamantium hull to pull magnetic forces out from the energy shower
raging around them, to stave off the pressure by repulsion, adding in some
places, subtracting it in others, so that the stress was even on all sides.
Since the Shockwave was passing over the ship in a microsecond, Phaefhon's
accelerated time sense required him to measure, to calculate, and to
redistribute forces. For each square meter of the hundred kilometers of hull,
another calculation was made, another field was increased or decreased in
tension, orders were given to fluids in the pressure plates. Movement was
frozen in this silent and timeless universe, but every element and every
command would need to be in place when time resumed.
In Daphne's mind's eye she could see a view of Phaethon's calm face, carried
to her from the monitors inside his helmet. In the Warlock dreamspace inside
her head, information from his thalamus and hypothal-amus, the neural energies
that (had time been flowing) would have been shown by changes in his facial
expression, were displayed to her as a system of colored light, as a menagerie
of animals in a field, each beast representing a different passion or emotion.
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But as nanosecond after nanosecond crawled by, as the subjective hours passed,
those lights that she saw burned pale white and unwavering. Lambs and birds
and wolfish dogs, representing Phaethon's meekness, cowardliness, and anger,
lay still and restful on the grass. Only the icon of a large gold lion was on
its feet, and it stood regally, its gold tail lashing.
Daphne could have, at any moment, shut off her high-time, and allowed the next
event to simply happen
to her. The ship would either be destroyed or saved in a moment too quick to
be seen. It did her no good at all to stay on the line with Phaethon, saying
nothing, watch-ing. just watching him work, unable to assist him in my way.
Toward the end of the third subjective hour, she said, "How are we doing?"
His face showed no change of expression. "Not great. The hull has been
breached. A gap about twenty angstroms wide. I'm trying to get the outside
fields to collapse against each other destructively at that spot, to cancel
out and create a bubble. If the magnetics are dense enough, normal plasma
cannot enter. We might make it."
Daphne was thinking that, buried in the midst of this opaque plasma, no
possible noumenal signal or infor-mation could be transmitted out. Even if
they both recorded their minds anywhere on the ship, if the ship were
destroyed, there would be no record of what had happened here, ever again.
"What broke the hull? I thought it was invulnerable."
"Gravitic tides in a concentrated point source. Not something I've seen
before. Of course, no one has ever been this deep before."
In her mind's eye, she saw a stir of uneasy ten-sion through the beasts her
format used to represent Phaethon's emotional and neural tensions. She
switched to a traditional Silver-Gray human face format, and saw the same
emotion depicted as a narrowing of Phaethon's eyes, a twitch of the muscles in
his cheek, a sigh. He said. "There is nothing more I can do at this point.
Either I have balanced the overpressure across the hull or I have not. If I
have, the forces will cancel each other out, and the pressure will pass evenly
across the hull surface. If I have not, greater pressure along one sec-tion
will cause a rupture along other sections, because the Shockwave will be
traveling normal to the hull
rather than parallel. All the models I've run say I have done as much as I can
do. Either we can watch this thing happening to us in terrible slow motion,
unable to affect the outcome, or we can return to our normal time rate. That
way, if I've made a miscalculation, we will be dead before either of us feels
any pain or alarm. Which would you prefer?"
" 'Twere best done quickly," she said. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]