The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  It was no different from her own hometown, the one over on the Esparta continent where her parents never quite made the leap to real money contracts because they lacked the connections. Excluded, by class, by money.

  She did nothing for half a minute after the decrypted datavise slipped from her mind, sitting staring at the desktop processor. Accessing the net’s police architecture was illegal enough, owning a level two decryption program was grounds for deportation. But she couldn’t ignore this. Couldn’t. It was everything she’d become a reporter for.

  “Hugh?” she called.

  The communications technician sharing the graveyard shift with her cancelled the Jezzibella album he was running and gave her a disapproving look. “What?”

  “How would the authorities announce a curfew to the general public, one where everyone is confined to their house? Specifically, a curfew here in Exnall.”

  “Are you having me on?”

  “No.”

  He blinked away the figments of the flek and accessed a civil procedures file in his neural nanonics. “Okay, I’ve found it; it’s a pretty simple procedure. The chief inspector will use his code rating to load a universal order into the town’s net for every general household processor. The message will play as soon as the processor is accessed, no matter what function you asked for—you tell it to cook your breakfast or vacuum the floor, the first thing it will do is tell you about the curfew.”

  Finnuala patted her hands together, charting out options. “So people won’t know about the curfew until tomorrow morning after they wake up.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Unless we tell them first.”

  “Now you really are winding me up.”

  “No way.” The smile on her face was carnivorous. “I know what that prat Latham is going to do next. He’ll warn his friends before anyone else, he’ll make sure they’re ready to be evacuated first. It’s his style, this whole bloody town’s style.”

  “Don’t be so paranoid,” Hugh Rosler said edgily. “If the evacuation is under McCullock’s command, nobody will be able to pull a fast one from this end.”

  Finnuala smiled sweetly and datavised an order into the desktop processor block. It accessed the net’s police architecture again, and the monitor programs she designated went into primary mode.

  The results simmered into Hugh’s mind as a cluster of grey, dimensionless icons. Someone at the police station was datavising a number of houses in the town and outlying areas. They were personal calls, and the households they were being directed at were all depressingly familiar.

  “He already is,” Finnuala said. “I know these people as well as you do, Hugh. Nothing changes, not even when our planet is under threat.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “What this agency is supposed to do: inform people. I’ll assemble a package warning everyone about the sequestration, but instead of just releasing it on the media circuit I want you to program the agency processor to datavise it to everyone in Exnall right away, coded as a personal priority message. That way we’ll all have an equal chance to get clear when the military transports arrive.”

  “I don’t know about this, Finnuala. Maybe we ought to check with the editor first …”

  “Bugger the editor,” she snapped. “He already knows. Look who was seventh on Latham’s list. Do you think his priority is to call us? Do you? Right now he’s getting his fat wife and their backwards brat dressed ready to take off for the landing site. Are your wife and kids being told, Hugh? Are they being made safe?”

  Hugh Rosler did what he always did and offered no resistance. “All right, Finnuala, I’ll modify the processor’s program. But by Christ, you’d better be right about this.”

  “I am.” She stood up and pulled her jacket off the back of the chair.

  “I’m going down to the police station, see if I can get a personal comment from that good man Chief Inspector Latham on the crisis facing his little fiefdom.”

  “You’re pushing it,” Hugh warned.

  “I know.” She grinned sadistically. “Great, isn’t it.”

  Ralph knew he didn’t have anything to prove anymore. The AT Squads were alert to the terrible danger, they’d been fully blooded. So there was no practical reason for him to take a police hypersonic out to Mortonridge.

  Yet here he was with Cathal, Will, and Dean heading south at Mach five.

  His justification … well, the marine brigade coming down from the orbital bases would need to be brought up to speed. And he might have some advice invaluable to those on the ground.

  In reality, he needed to see those towns cordoned off for himself. The threat contained, pinned down ready for extermination.

  “It looks like your idea about zero-tau was on the ball,” Roche Skark datavised. “All six prisoners we captured at Moyce’s have now been placed in the pods shipped down from Guyana. Four of them fought like lunatics before the AT Squads could force them in. The other two were apparently cured before they went in. In both cases the possessors just gave up and left the bodies rather than undergo exposure to temporal stasis.”

  “That’s about the best news I’ve had for ten hours,” Ralph replied. “They can be beaten, squeezed out without killing the body they’re possessing. It means we’re not just fighting a holding action.”

  “Yes. Well, full credit to you for that one, Ralph. We still don’t know why the possessed can’t tolerate zero-tau, but no doubt the reason will turn up in debrief at some time.”

  “Are you shoving the cured prisoners into personality debrief?”

  “We haven’t decided. Although I think it’s inevitable eventually. We must not get sidetracked from neutralizing the Mortonridge towns. Frankly, the science of it all can wait.”

  “What sort of state are the prisoners in?”

  “Generally similar to Gerald Skibbow, disorientated and withdrawn, but their symptoms are nothing like as severe as his. After all they were only possessed for a few hours. Skibbow had been under Kingston Garrigan’s control for several weeks. Certainly they’re not classed as dangerous. But we’re placing them in secure isolation wards for the moment, just in case. It’s the first time I’ve agreed with Leonard DeVille all day.”

  Ralph snorted at the name. “I meant to ask you, sir. What is it with DeVille?”

  “Ah, yes; sorry about him, Ralph. That’s pure politics between us and our dear sister agency. DeVille is one of Jannike’s puppets. The ISA keeps tabs on all major Kingdom politicians, and those who are squeaky clean are nudged forward. DeVille is obnoxiously pure in heart, if devious in mind. Jannike is grooming him as a possible replacement for Warren Aspinal as Xingu’s Prime Minister. Ideally, she’d like him in charge of the hunt operation.”

  “Whereas you had the Princess appoint me as chief advisor …”

  “Exactly. I’ll have a word with Jannike about him. It’s probably heretical of me, but I think the problem the possessed present us might be slightly more important than our little internal rivalries.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’d be nice to have him off my back.”

  “I doubt he’d be much more of a problem anyway. You’ve done some sterling work tonight, Ralph. Don’t think it’s gone unnoticed. You’ve condemned yourself to a divisional chief’s desk for the rest of eternity now. I can assure you the boredom is quite otherworldly.”

  Ralph managed a contemplative smile in the half-light of the hypersonic’s cabin. “Sounds attractive right now.”

  Roche Skark cancelled the channel.

  With his mind free, Ralph datavised a situation update request to Hub One. The squadron of Royal Marine troop flyers were already halfway down from Guyana. Twenty-five police hypersonics carrying AT Squads were arrowing across the continent, converging on Mortonridge. All motorway traffic had now been shut down. An estimated eighty-five per cent of non-motorway vehicles had been located and halted. Curfew orders were going out to every general household processor in Xingu. Police in t
he four Mortonridge towns were preparing to enforce the martial law declaration.

  It looked good. In the computer, it looked good. Secure. But there must be something we missed. Some rogue element. There always is. Someone like Mixi Penrice.

  Someone … who abandoned the Confederation marines in Lalonde’s jungle. Who left Kelven Solanki and his tiny, doomed command to struggle against the wave of possessed all alone.

  All actions which were fully justifiable in the defence of the realm.

  Maybe I’m not so dissimilar to DeVille after all.

  Twenty minutes after Neville Latham had issued his assignment orders, the station situation management room had settled down into a comfortable pattern. Sergeant Walsh and Detective Feroze were monitoring the movement of the patrol cars, while Manby was maintaining a direct link to the SD centre. Any sign of human movement along the streets should bring a patrol car response within ninety seconds.

  Neville himself had taken part in issuing dispatch orders to the patrol officers. It felt good to be involved, to show his people the boss wasn’t afraid of rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in there. He’d quietly accepted the fact that for someone his age and rank Exnall was a dead end posting. Not that he was particularly bitter; he’d realized twenty-five years ago he wasn’t cut out for higher office. And he fitted in well here with these people, the town was his kind of community. He understood it.

  When he retired he knew he would be staying on.

  Or so he’d thought until today. Judging from some of the latest briefing updates he’d received from Pasto, after tomorrow there might not be much of Exnall left standing for him to retire to.

  However, Neville was determined about one thing. Nonentity he might be, but Exnall was going to be protected to the best of his ability. The curfew would be carried out to the letter with a competence which any big city police commander would envy.

  “Sir.” Sergeant Walsh was looking up from the fence of stumpy AV pillars lining his console.

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Sir, I’ve just had three people datavise the station, wanting to know what’s going on, and is the curfew some kind of joke.”

  Feroze turned around, frowning. “I’ve had five asking me the same thing. They all said they’d received a personal datavise telling them a curfew was being effected. I told them they should check their household processor for information.”

  “Eight people?” Neville queried. “All receiving personal messages at this time of night?”

  Feroze glanced back at one of his displays. “Make that fifteen, I’ve got another seven incoming datavises stacked up.”

  “This is absurd,” Neville said. “The whole point of my universal order was to explain what’s happening.”

  “They’re not bothering to access it,” Feroze said. “They’re calling us direct instead.”

  “Eighteen new datavises coming in,” Walsh said. “It’s going to hit fifty any minute.”

  “They can’t be datavising warnings to each other this fast,” Neville murmured, half to himself.

  “Chief,” Manby was waving urgently. “SD control reports that house lights are coming on all over town.”

  “What?”

  “Hundred and twelve datavises, sir,” Walsh said.

  “Did we mess up the universal order?” Neville asked. At the back of his mind was the awful notion that the electronic warfare capability Landon McCullock warned him about had glitched the order.

  “It was straight out of the file,” Feroze protested.

  “Sir, we’re going to run out of net access channels at this rate,” Walsh said. “Over three hundred datavises coming in now. Do you want to reprioritize the net management routines? You have the authority. We’d be able to re-establish our principle command channels if we shut down civilian data traffic.”

  “I can’t—”

  The door of the situation management room slid open.

  Neville twisted around at the unexpected motion (the damn door was supposed to be codelocked!), only to gasp in surprise at the sight of a young woman pushing her way past a red-faced Thorpe Hartshorn. A characteristics recognition program in his neural nanonics supplied her name: Finnuala O’Meara, one of the news agency reporters.

  Neville caught sight of a slender, suspicious-looking processor block which she was shoving back into her bag. A codebuster? he wondered. And if she has the nerve to use one inside a police station, what else has she got?

  “Ms O’Meara, you are intruding on a very important official operation. If you leave now, I won’t file charges.”

  “Recording and relaying, Chief,” Finnuala said with a hint of triumph.

  Her eyes with their retinal implants were unblinking as they tracked him.

  “And I don’t need to tell you this is a public building. Knowing what happens here is a public right under the fourth coronation proclamation.”

  “Actually, Miss O’Meara, if you bothered to fully access your legal file, you’d know that under martial law all proclamations are suspended. Leave now, please, and stop relaying at once.”

  “Does that same suspension give you the right to warn your friends about the danger of xenoc sequestration technology before the general public, Chief Inspector?”

  Latham blushed. How the hell did the little bitch know that? Then he realized what someone with that kind of command access to the net could do. His finger lined up accusingly on her. “Have you datavised personal warnings to people in this town?”

  “Are you denying you warned your friends first, Chief Inspector?”

  “Shut up, you stupid cow, and answer me. Did you send out those personal alarm calls?”

  Finnuala smirked indolently. “I might have done. Want to answer my question now?”

  “God in Heaven! Sergeant Walsh, how many calls now?”

  “One thousand recorded, sir, but that’s all our channels blocked. It may be a lot more. I can’t tell.”

  “How many did you send, O’Meara?” Neville demanded furiously.

  She paled slightly, but stood her ground. “I’m just doing my job, Chief Inspector. What about you?”

  “How many?”

  She arched an eyebrow, aspiring to hauteur. “Everybody.”

  “You stupid—The curfew is supposed to be averting a panic; and it would have done just that if you hadn’t interfered. The only way we’re going to get out of this with our minds still our own is if people stay calm and follow orders.”

  “Which people?” she spat back. “Yours? The mayor’s family?”

  “Officer Hartshorn, get her out of here. Use whatever force is necessary, and some which isn’t if you want. Then book her.”

  “Sir.” A grinning Hartshorn caught Finnuala’s arm. “Come along, miss.” He held up a small nervejam stick in his free hand. “You wouldn’t want me to use this.”

  Finnuala let Hartshorn tug her out of the situation management room. The door slid shut behind them.

  “Walsh,” Neville said. “Shut down the town’s communications net. Do it now. Leave the police architecture functional, but all civil data traffic is to cease immediately. They mustn’t be allowed to spread this damn panic any further.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The police hypersonic carrying Ralph had already started to descend over the town of Rainton when Landon McCullock datavised him.

  “Some bloody journalist woman started a panic in Exnall, Ralph. The chief inspector is doing his best to damp it down, but I’m not expecting miracles at this point.”

  Ralph abandoned the hypersonic’s sensor suite. The image he’d received of Rainton was all in the infrared spectrum, rectangles of luminous pink glass laid out over the black land. Glowing dots converged in the air above it, marine troop flyers and police hypersonics ready to implement the isolation. Given they were the forces of salvation, their approach formation looked strangely like the circling of giant carrion birds.

  “I suggest you or the Prime Minister broadcasts
to them directly, sir. Appeal to them to follow the curfew order. Your word should carry more weight than some local dignitary. Tell them about the marines arriving; that way they’ll also see that you’re acting positively to help them.”

  “Good theory, Ralph. Unfortunately Exnall’s chief inspector has shut down the town’s net. Only the police architecture is functional right now. The only people we can broadcast to are the ones sitting in the patrol cars.”

  “You have to get the net back on-line.”

  “I know. But now it seems there’s a problem with some of the local management processors.”

  Ralph squeezed his fists, not wanting to hear. “Glitches?”

  “Looks like it. Diana is redirecting the AIs to interrogate Exnall’s electronics. But there aren’t nearly enough channels open for them to be as effective as they were in Pasto.”

  “Hellfire! Okay, sir, we’re on our way.” He datavised a quick instruction to the pilot, and the hypersonic rose above its spiralling siblings before streaking away to the south.

  Two hundred and fifty kilometres above Mortonridge, the SD sensor satellite made its fourth pass over Exnall since the network had been raised to a code three alert status. Deborah Unwin directed its high-resolution sensors to scan the town. Several specialist teams of security council analysts and tactical advisors were desperate for information about the town’s on-the-ground situation.

  But they weren’t getting the full picture. In several places the satellite images were fuzzy, edges poorly defined. Switching to infrared didn’t help; red ripples swayed to and fro, never still.

  “Just like the Quallheim Counties,” Ralph concluded morosely when he accessed the data. “They’re down there, all right. And in force.”

  “It gets worse,” Deborah datavised. “Even in the areas relatively unaffected we still can’t get a clear picture of what’s going on below those damn harandrid trees. Not at night. All I can tell you is that there are a lot of people out on the streets.”

  “On foot?” Ralph queried.

  “Yes. The AIs loaded travel proscription orders into all the processor controlled vehicles in the town. Some people will be able to break the order’s code, of course. But basically the only mechanical transport left in Exnall right now are the bicycles.”