The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Chapman,” the ISA duty officer datavised. “Please try and give us a visual of the hijacker. It’s very important.”

  “I’m down to about two kilometres altitude, here. Seventy per cent of my systems have failed, and all you want is to see what he looks like?”

  “It will help us evaluate the situation.”

  Chapman gave the man a sideways glance, loading the image into one of his remaining three functional memory cells. His datavise bit rate was now so low it took an entire second to relay the file.

  Ralph Hiltch watched the pixels slowly clot together above the bubble room’s table. “Savion Kerwin,” he said, unsurprised.

  “Without a doubt,” Admiral Farquar acknowledged.

  “That plane left Pasto ninety minutes after their spaceplane landed,” Jannike Dermot said. “They obviously intend to spread the virus as wide as possible.”

  “As I’ve been telling you,” Roche Skark said. “Ralph, do you think he’s infected anyone else on the plane?”

  “Quite possibly, sir. The flight computer and Chapman’s neural nanonics are obviously being assaulted by a very powerful electronic warfare field. It might be several of them acting in unison, or it could just be Savion Kerwin’s proximity to the electronic systems, after all the flight computer is housed below the cockpit decking. But we really can’t take the chance.”

  “Agreed,” Admiral Farquar said.

  Chapman Adkinson waited for fifteen seconds after he’d datavised the visual file. The crippled flight computer reported the communications channel was being maintained. Nothing happened, there was no update from the ISA officer.

  A Royal Kulu Navy reserve officer himself, Chapman knew of the response procedures for civil emergencies. Rule of thumb: the longer it took to come to a decision, the higher up the command structure the problem was being bumped. This one must be going right to the top. To the people authorized to make life or death decisions.

  Intuition or just a crushing sense of doom, Chapman Adkinson started laughing gleefully.

  The man turned to give him a strange look. “What?”

  “You’ll see, fella, soon enough. Tell me, are you the biohazard?”

  “Am I a—”

  The X-ray laser struck the plane while it was still eighty kilometres away from Atherstone. Ombey’s low-orbit SD platform weapons could hit combat wasps while they were still two and a half thousand kilometres distant. The plane was a mere three hundred kilometres beneath the platform which Deborah Unwin activated. Oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the lower atmosphere simply cracked into their sub-atomic constituents as the X ray punched through the air, a searing purple lightning bolt eighty kilometres long. At its tip, the plane detonated into an ionized fog which billowed out like a miniature neon cyclone. Scraps of flaming, highly radioactive wreckage rained down on the pristine jungle below.

  Chapter 02

  He was actually born in the United States of America, though few people ever liked to admit that particular fact, then or afterwards. His parents were from Naples; and Southern Italians were universally looked down on and despised even by other poor immigrant groups, let alone the superior intellectuals of the time who openly stated their hatred of such an inferior breed of humans. As a consequence, few biographers and historians ever admitted the simple truth. He was, above all, a bona fide made in America monster.

  His birthplace was Brooklyn, on the chilly winter’s day of January 17, 1899, the fourth son of Gabriele and Teresina. At that time the district was home to a seething mass of such burgeoning immigrant families trying to build fresh lives for themselves in this new land of promise. Work was hard, labour cheap, the infamous city political machine strong, and the street gangs and racketeers prominent. But among all these difficulties his father managed to earn enough to support his family. And as a barber he did so independently and honestly, rare enough in that time and place.

  Gabriele’s son never followed that route; there were just too many odds stacked against him. The whole Brooklyn environment seemed designed to turn its young male population from the good.

  After being expelled from school at fourteen for fighting with his (female) teacher he began running errands for the local Association chief. He was one of the lowest of the low. But he learned: of men’s vices and what they would do to obtain them, of the money to be made, of loyalty to his own, and most of all what people gave the Association’s leader: respect. Respect was the key to the world, a commodity no one ever showed him or his father. A man who was respected had everything, a prince among men.

  It was during this criminal apprenticeship that the ultimate seeds of his destruction were sown, ironically by himself. He contracted syphilis in one of the many seedy brothels which local boys of his age and background visited on a regular basis. Like most people he survived the first stage, the boils on his tender genitalia healing within a couple of weeks. Nor did the second stage disturb him to any great extent; an equally short time spent suffering what he convinced himself was a bad case of flu.

  Had he visited a doctor he would have been told that it is the tertiary stage which proves lethal in a fifth of those infected, eating away at the frontal lobes of the brain. But once the second stage has passed, the malicious disease becomes dormant for a long time, sometimes measurable in decades, lulling its victim into a false sense of security. He saw no reason to share the humiliating knowledge.

  Paradoxically, it was this very disease which contributed to his inexorable rise over the next fifteen years. Because of the nature of its attack on the brain it amplified its victim’s personality traits: traits which in his case had been forged in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. They comprised contempt, hostility, anger in tandem with violence, greed, treachery, and guile. Excellent survival qualities for that particular dead-end district, but in a more civilized environment they set him apart. A barbarian in the city.

  In 1920 he moved to Chicago. Within months he was heavily involved with one of the major syndicates. Until that era the syndicates ran the rackets and the brothels and the gambling joints, and raked in a good deal of hard currency. And at that relatively insignificant level they might well have remained. But that was the year when Prohibition came into effect throughout the nation.

  The speakeasies opened, the back alley breweries flourished. Money flooded into the coffers of the syndicates, millions upon millions of easy, dirty dollars. It gave them a power base they had never dreamed of before. They bought the police, they owned the mayor and most of city hall, they intimidated the crusading newspapers and laughed at the law.

  But money brought its own special problem. Everybody could see how vast the market was, how profitable. They all wanted a cut.

  And that was where he finally came into his own. Whole districts of Chicago degenerated into war zones as gangs and syndicates and bosses fought like lions for territory. With the neurosyphilis gradually eroding his rationality he emerged from the ranks of his contemporaries as the most ruthless, the most successful, and the most feared gang boss of them all. Quirks became vainglorious eccentricities; he opened soup kitchens for the poor; for slain colleagues he threw funeral parades which brought the entire city to a halt; he craved publicity and held press conferences to promote his magnanimity in giving people what they really wanted; he sponsored broke jazz musicians. His flamboyance became as legendary as his brutality.

  At its height his tyranny was sufficient to be raised at cabinet meetings in the White House. Nothing the authorities did ever seemed to make the slightest difference. Arrests, inquiries, indictments; he bought his way out with his money, while his reputation (and associates) kept witnesses silent.

  So government did what government always does when confronted with an opposition which can’t be brought down by fair and legal means. It cheated.

  His trial for tax evasion was later described as a legal lynching. The Treasury made up new rules, and proved he was guilty of breaking them. A man who was both directly and indirectly respons
ible for the deaths of hundreds of people was sentenced to eleven years in jail over delinquent taxes to the total of $215,080.

  His atrocious reign was ended, but his life took another sixteen years to wither. In his latter years, with the neurosyphilis raging in his head, he lost all grip on reality, seeing visions and hearing voices. His mind now roamed through a purely imaginary state.

  His body ceased to function in a peaceful enough manner on January 25, 1947, in a big house in Florida, surrounded by his grieving family. But when you are already utterly insane, there is little noticeable difference from your very own delusory universe and the distorted torment of the beyond into which your soul slips.

  Over six hundred years passed.

  The entity which emerged from the beyond into the fractured, bleeding body of Brad Lovegrove, fourth assistant manager (urban sanitation maintenance division) of the Tarosa Metamech Corp of New California, didn’t even realize he was back in living reality. Not to start with, anyway.

  The first possessed being to reach New California did so on a cargo starship from Norfolk, one of the twenty-two insurgents Edmund Rigby had helped possess in Boston. His name was Emmet Mordden, and as soon as he reached the planet’s surface he began the process of conquest; snatching people off the streets and the autoways, inflicting agonizing injuries to weaken their spirits and open their minds to receive the souls in the beyond.

  A small band of possessed filtered unobtrusively through the boulevards of San Angeles in the days which followed, slowly building up their own ranks. Like all of the possessed emerging across the Confederation they had no distinct strategy, simply a single driving impulse to bring more souls back from the beyond.

  But this one among them was of no use to the cause. His mind shattered, he could relate to no external stimuli. He shouted hysterical warnings to his brother Frank, he wept, he delivered huge monologues about his shoe factory where he promised he’d give them all work, tiny spits of energy would fly from him without warning, he giggled constantly, he shat his pants and started slinging it about. Whenever they brought him food his energistic ability would turn it to the image of hot spicy pasta which gave off an appalling stink.

  After two days, the growing cabal simply left him behind in the disused shop they’d been using as a base. Had they bothered to check him before they left they would have noticed that the behaviour was slightly more moderate, the talk more coherent.

  Psychotic thought patterns which had formed in the early 1940s and run on unchecked for six centuries had finally begun to operate within a healthy neurone structure once more. There were no chemical imbalances, no spirochaete bacteria, not even traces of mild alcohol toxicology, for Lovegrove didn’t drink. His sanity gradually returned as thought processes began to move in more natural cycles.

  He felt his mind and memories coming together as though he were emerging from the worst cocaine trip ever (his longtime vice back in the 1920s).

  For hours he simply lay on the floor trembling as events tumbled through his expanding consciousness. Events which sickened the heart, but which belonged to him nonetheless.

  He never heard the shop’s service door open, the surprised grunt of the realtor agent, the heavy footsteps marching towards him. A hand closed around his shoulder and shook him strongly.

  “Hey, dude, how did you get in here?”

  He flinched violently and looked up to see a man in a very strange helmet, as if glossy green beetle wings had folded over his skull. Blank, golden bubble eyes stared down at him. He screamed and spun over. The equally startled realtor took a pace backwards, reaching for the illegal nervejam stick in his jacket pocket.

  Despite six hundred years of technological development he could still recognize a hand weapon when he saw one. Of course, the real giveaway was the expression of superiority and nervous relief on the realtor’s face; the one every frightened man wears when a piece has suddenly swung the odds back in his favour.

  He drew his own gun. Except it wasn’t exactly a draw—no holster. One second he wanted a gun, the next his fingers were gripping a Thompson submachine gun. He fired. And the once-familiar roar of the weapon nicknamed a trench broom hammered his ears again. A curiously white flame emerged from the barrel as he trained it on the cowering figure of the realtor, fighting the upwards kick.

  Next, all that was left was a mangled, jerking body pumping gallons of blood onto the bare carbon-concrete floor. The craterous wounds were smoking, as if the bullets had been incendiaries.

  Bulge-eyed and horrified, he stared at the corpse for a moment, then vomited helplessly. His head was whirling as though the eternal nightmare was returning to clasp him once more.

  “Christ no,” he groaned. “No more of that crap. Please.” The Thompson submachine gun had vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. Ignoring the nausea which sent shivers down every limb he staggered out through the door and into the street. Crazy images mugged him. His head slowly tipped back to view the pulp-magazine fantasy into which he had emerged.

  Low wispy clouds scudding in from the ocean were sliced apart by the chromeglass sword-blade skyscrapers which made up downtown San Angeles.

  Prismatic light gleamed and sparkled off every surface. Then he saw the naked crescent of a small reddish moon directly overhead. Starship exhausts swarmed casually across the cobalt sky like incandescent fireflies. His jaw dropped in absolute bewilderment. “Goddamn, what the hell is this place?” demanded Alphonse Capone.

  Ombey’s rotation had carried the Xingu continent fully into the centre of the darkside as the Royal Navy flyer Ralph Hiltch was using passed over the outskirts of Pasto. The city was situated on the western coast, growing out from the Falling Jumbo seaport in a sustained hundred-year development spree. It was flat country, ideal for urbanization, placing minimal problems in the path of the ambitious civil engineers. Most of the level districts were laid out in geometric patterns, housing estates alternating with broad parks and elaborate commercial districts. Hills, such as they were, had been claimed by the richer residents for their chateaus and mansions.

  Accessing the flyer’s sensor suite, Ralph could see them standing proud in their own lakes of illumination at the centre of large sable-black grounds. The narrow, brightly lit roads which wound around the hills were the only curves amid the vast grid of brilliant orange lines spread out below him. Pasto looked so beautifully crisp and functional, a grand symbol of the Kingdom’s economic prowess, like a merit badge pinned on the planet.

  And somewhere down there, amid all that glittering regimented architecture and human dynamism, were people who could bring the whole edifice crashing down. Probably within a couple of days, certainly no more than a week.

  Cathal Fitzgerald angled the flyer towards the big cube-shaped building which was the Xingu police force headquarters. They landed on a roof pad, at the end of a row of small arrowhead-planform hypersonic planes.

  Two people were waiting for Ralph at the bottom of the airstairs. Landon McCullock, the police commissioner, was a hale seventy-year-old, almost two metres tall, with thick crew-cut ginger hair, dressed in a midnight-blue uniform with several silver stripes on his right arm.

  Beside him was Diana Tiernan, the police department’s technology division chief, a fragile, elderly woman dwarfed by her superior officer, a contrast which tended to emphasize her scholarly appearance.

  “I appreciate you coming down,” Landon said as he shook hands with Ralph.

  “It can’t have been an easy choice for you to face this thing again. The datapackage briefing I’ve had from Admiral Farquar gave me a nasty jolt. My people aren’t exactly geared up to cope with this kind of incident.”

  “Who is?” Ralph said, a shade too mordantly. “But we coped on Lalonde; and we aim to do a little better here.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Landon said gruffly. He nodded crisply to the other three ESA agents coming down the airstairs; Will and Dean carrying their combat gear in a couple of bulky bags. His lips twitched
in a memory-induced smile of admiration as he eyed the two G66 division troopers. “Been a while since I was at that end of an operation,” he murmured.

  “Any update on the plane which was shot down?” Ralph asked as they all walked towards the waiting lift.

  “Nobody survived, if that’s what you mean,” Diana Tiernan said. She gave Ralph a curious look. “Was that what you meant?”

  “They’re tough bastards,” Will said curtly.

  She shrugged. “I accessed a recording of Adkinson’s datavise. This energy manipulation ability Savion Kerwin demonstrated seemed quite extraordinary.”

  “He didn’t show you a tenth of what he could do,” Ralph said.

  The lift doors closed, and they descended to the command centre. It had been designed to handle every conceivable civil emergency, from a plane crash in the heart of the city to outright civil war, a windowless room which took up half of the floor. Twenty-four separate coordination hubs were arranged in three rows, circles of consoles with fifteen operators apiece. Their access authority to the continent’s net was absolute, providing them with unparalleled sensor coverage and communications linkages.

  When Ralph walked in every seat was taken, the air seemed almost solid with the laserlight speckles thrown off by hundreds of individual AV projection pillars. He saw Leonard DeVille sitting at Hub One, a raised ring of consoles in the middle of the room. The Home Office minister’s welcoming handshake lacked the sincerity of McCullock’s.

  Ralph was quickly introduced to the others at Hub One: Warren Aspinal, the Prime Minister of the Xingu continental parliament; Vicky Keogh, who was McCullock’s deputy; and Bernard Gibson, the police Armed Tactical Squad commander. One of the AV pillars was projecting an image of Admiral Farquar.

  “All air traffic was shut down twenty minutes ago,” said Landon McCullock. “Even police patrol flights are down to a complete minimum.”