The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Ah well, our no claims bonus got blown to shit in the battle anyway. Stand by for rendezvous in twelve minutes.”

  “Thank you, Joshua.”

  The contented babble coming from the spaceplane’s cabin was quieting considerably. Acceleration had now declined to a twentieth of a gee as the orbital injection burn was finalized. Both rocket engines cut out.

  The flight computer reported four kilos of reaction mass were left in the tanks.

  Then the first damp groan could be heard from the rear of the cabin.

  Ashly braced himself.

  Acceleration warnings sounded in the Lady Macbeth’s cabins. The Edenists working under the direction of Sarha Mitcham and Dahybi Yadev to prepare for the influx of some thirty children hurried to the couches and temporary mattresses. They all wore variants of the same grey, haunted expression on their faces. Given what they’d been through in the last thirty hours, such consternation was understandable. The high-pitched hooting conjured up all the wrong associations.

  “Don’t worry,” Joshua announced. “No killer gees this time, we’re just manoeuvring.”

  He was alone on the bridge, lights reduced to a pink glimmer, sharpening the resolution of the console hologram displays and AV projections.

  Strangely enough, the solitude felt good. He was now what he had always wanted to be—or thought he did—a starship captain, devoid of any other responsibility. Overseeing the flight computer and simultaneously piloting the big vessel along their new course vector towards the inert spaceplane didn’t leave him with much time to brood on the consequences of their recent actions: Warlow dead, the mercenary team lost, the planet conquered, the rescue fleet broken. The whole shabby disaster really wasn’t one he wanted to reflect on, nor the wider implications of having the possessed loose in the universe. Better to function usefully, to lose oneself in the mechanics of the problem at hand.

  In a way his emotional climb-down was akin to a sense of release. The battles which they’d personally fought in, they’d won. Then they’d rescued the Edenists, the children, and now Kelly. And in a little while they were going home.

  At the end, what more could you ask?

  The unsuppressible guilt was his silent answer.

  Joshua stabilized Lady Mac a kilometre above the spaceplane, allowing orbital mechanics to bring the two together. Both craft had fallen into the penumbra, reducing the planet below to a featureless black smear.

  They were visually dead, only radar and infrared could distinguish between oceans and continents.

  He ordered the flight computer to establish communications circuits with the small number of low-orbit observation satellites remaining. The image they provided built up quickly.

  Amarisk had emerged completely into the daylight hemisphere now. He could see the continent was completely dominated by the huge red cloud. The vast patch must already cover nearly a quarter of the land; and it was expanding rapidly out from the Juliffe basin, its leading edges moving at hurricane velocities. Yet it still retained its silky consistency, a uniform sheet through which no glimpse of the ground below was possible.

  The grey blemish which had hung above the Quallheim Counties during the mercenaries’ brief campaign had also vanished. Even the mountains where the Tyrathca lived proved no barrier; the cloud was bubbling around them, sealing over valleys. Only the very tallest peaks were left unclaimed, their jagged snow caps sticking up from the red veil, icebergs bobbing through a sea of blood.

  The sight had repelled Joshua before. Now it frightened him. The sheer potency it intimated was appalling.

  Joshua flicked back to the images coming in from the Lady Mac’s extended sensor clusters. The spaceplane was five hundred metres away, its wings already folded back. He played the starship’s equatorial ion thrusters, and moved in, bringing the docking cradle around to engage the latches in the spaceplane’s nose cone.

  Sitting in his pilot’s seat, watching the performance through the narrow windscreen, Ashly was, as ever, amazed by Joshua’s ability to control the huge spherical starship’s motions. The docking cradle which had telescoped out of the hangar bay swung around gracefully until it was head-on, then slid over the squashed-bullet nose. Naturally the alignment matched first time.

  Various clunking sounds were transmitted through the stress structure, and the spaceplane was slowly drawn inside the Lady Mac’s narrow cylindrical hangar. Ashly shuddered as another warm, sticky, smelly globe of fluid landed on his ship-suit. He didn’t make the mistake of trying to swat it, that just broke the larger portions into smaller ones. And you could inhale those.

  “Eight of you are going to have to stay inside the spaceplane cabin,” Sarha datavised as the hangar’s airlock tube mated to the spaceplane.

  “You’re kidding me,” a dismayed Ashly replied.

  “Bad luck, Ashly. But we’re maxing out our life support with so many people on board. I really need the spaceplane’s carbon dioxide filters.”

  “Oh, God,” he said miserably. “Okay. But send in some handheld sanitizer units, and quickly.”

  “They’re already in the airlock waiting for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Send out the smallest children first, please. I’m going to cram them into the zero-tau pods.”

  “Will do.” He datavised the flight computer to open the airlock hatch, then left his seat to talk with Father Elwes about which children should go where.

  Lady Macbeth’s two undamaged fusion drive tubes ignited as soon as the spaceplane was stowed inside the hull. She rose away from the planet at a steady one gee, heading up towards a jump coordinate which would align her on Tranquillity’s star.

  Far behind her, the middle section of the red cloud rippled and swirled in agitation. A tornado column swelled up from the centre, extending a good twenty kilometres above the twisting currents of cumulus. It flexed blindly for several minutes, like a beckoning—or clawing—finger. Then the Lady Macbeth’s sensor clusters and thermal dump panels began to retract into their jump positions below the hull. Her brilliant blue-white fusion exhaust shrank away, and she coasted onwards and upwards for a brief minute until an event horizon claimed her.

  The questing finger of cloud lost its vigour, and slowly bowed over in defeat, its glowing vapour reabsorbed into the now quiescent centre of the shroud. The leading edges continued their advance.

  ***

  The view from Monterey’s Hilton was as spectacular as only a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar building could provide. Al Capone loved it. The Nixon suite was on the bottom floor of the tower, giving it a standard gravity. New California glided slowly past the curving, radiation-shielded window which made up an entire wall of the master bedroom. The planet gleamed enticingly against the jet-black starfield.

  His one disappointment was that from here the stars didn’t twinkle like they used to when he watched them at night above his summer retreat cottage at Round Lake. That aside, he felt like a king again.

  The Hilton was a sixty-storey tower sticking out of the Monterey asteroid, orbiting a hundred and ten thousand kilometres above New California. Apart from Edenist habitat starscrapers (which it was modelled on), there were few structures like it in the Confederation.

  Tourists could rarely look down on terracompatible planets in such a fashion.

  Which was stupid, Al thought, big business could make a packet out of hotels like the Hilton. But he couldn’t spend all day looking at New California. He could sense his Organization’s top lieutenants waiting patiently outside the suite. They’d learned quickly enough not to interrupt when he wanted his privacy. But they did need orders, to be kept on their toes. Al knew just how fast things would fall apart if he didn’t ride them hard. The world might be different, but the nature of people didn’t change.

  As if on cue, Jezzibella purred, “Come back here, lover.”

  Well maybe some people did, women never acted like her back in the 1920s and thirties. Then, they were either whores or wive
s. But Al was beginning to suspect there weren’t many girls quite like Jezzibella in this century, either.

  One minute all cute and kittenish, the next an animal as strong and demanding as himself. Al had his energistic strength now, which meant he could do some pretty incredible things with his wang. Things which even Jezzibella hadn’t known about. Performances which made him proud, for a while anyway, because they were the only times he could make her beg him for more, to keep going, tell him how stupendous he was. Most of the time it was the other way around. Shit, she even kissed like a boy. Trouble was, after he’d done all those fantastic things to her hot-rod body, she wanted them done again, and again, and again …

  “Please, baby. I really liked the Egyptian position. Only you are big enough to make that work.”

  With a halfhearted sigh Al left the window and walked back to the sunken bed she was lying on. The oomph girl had no shame, she was absolutely naked.

  He grinned and let the front of his white robe fall open. Jezzibella hooted and applauded as his erection rose. Then she flopped back, character shifting in an instant. Al looked down on a scared-for-her-cherry schoolgirl.

  His entry was fierce, without any attempt at finesse. It made her cry out in disbelief, pleading for him to stop, to be kind. But she couldn’t resist, no girl could, not a lover like him. In minutes his vigorous pumping had turned her cries to rolling moans of delight, her snarl to a smile. Her body was responding, the two of them moving in a slick acrobatic rhythm. He made no attempt to control himself, to wait for her, he climaxed when he was ready, oblivious to anything else.

  When his drowsy eyes opened, he saw her staring drunkenly up at the ceiling, the tip of her tongue licking her lips. “That was a good fantasy fuck,” she drawled. “We’ll have to do that one again.”

  Al gave up. “I gotta get going. I gotta sort the boys out, you know how it is.”

  “Sure, baby. What are you going to get them to do?”

  “Christ, you dumb broad. I’m running the whole fucking planet now. You think that just falls into place? I gotta million problems need looking at. Soldiers, they need orders or they go sour.”

  Jezzibella pouted, then rolled over to grab the processor block which lay on the side of the bed. She typed on it, and frowned. “Al, honey, you must pull in that field of yours.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered, and made an effort to calm his thoughts. It was the best way to make the electric gadgets work.

  Jezzibella whistled in appreciation as she read the data running down the block’s screen (she’d long since given up trying to datavise when she was in Al’s presence). According to the information assembled by Harwood’s office, there were nearly forty million possessed on New California now.

  Hooking up with Al, that wild impulse back at the San Angeles spaceport, looked like being the smartest move she’d ever made. This was the anarchy ride she’d been hunting for most of her life. The buzz of power she got from being with Al—very literally one of life and death—stimmed her higher than any adulation the fans gave during a concert.

  How could anyone know that a gangster from the past would have such a genius for assembling a power structure which could hold an entire planet in bondage? But that was what he’d done. “You just gotta know what strings to jerk,” he’d told her on the flight up to the orbiting asteroids.

  Of course all forty million possessed weren’t perfectly loyal to him, they weren’t even recruited into the Organization. But then neither had the vast majority of Chicago’s citizens sworn fealty to him. Nonetheless, willing or not, they had been his vassals. “All we gotta do is have an Organization in place and ready when the possessed start to emerge,” he explained. “Back in Chicago, they called me a mobster because there was another administration trying to run things parallel to mine: the government. I lost out because the fuckers were bigger and stronger. This time, I ain’t making that mistake. This time there’s only gonna be me from the word go.”

  And he’d been true to his word. She’d watched him at work that first day, just after they’d captured the orbiting asteroids and the SD network, sitting quietly in the background of the Monterey naval tactical operations room which the Organization soldiers had taken over as their headquarters. Watching and learning just what she’d gone and gotten herself involved in. And what she saw was the building of a pyramid, one constructed entirely from people. Without once losing his temper, Al issued orders to his lieutenants, who issued them to their seconds, and so on down the line. A pyramid which was constantly growing, absorbing new recruits at the bottom, adding to the height, to the power of the pinnacle. A pyramid whose hierarchy was established and maintained with the coldly ruthless application of force.

  The first targets to be blasted into lava by the SD platforms had been government centres, everything from the Senate palace and the military bases right down to county police stations. (Al really hated the police. “Those cocksuckers murdered my brother,” he’d growl darkly when she questioned him on it.) Even little town halls in country smallvilles were reduced to cinders after they opened for business in the morning. For eight hours, the platforms had fired energy pulses down on the hapless, helpless planet they had been constructed to defend. Any group who could organize resistance was systematically wiped out. After that, the possessed were free to sweep across the land.

  But Al’s Organization people were among them, directing the onwards march, finding out exactly who had returned from the beyond, when they came from, what they did in their first life. Their details would be sent up to the office which Avram Harwood had set up in Monterey, where they would be studied to gauge their potential usefulness. A select few would then be made an offer which—“They just can’t refuse,” Al chortled jubilantly.

  They were a tiny minority, but that was all it ever took to govern. No rival could ever develop. Al had seen to that; he had the firepower to support his Organization if anyone stepped out of line. And when he captured the SD network, he acquired the ultra-hardened military communications net which went with it, the only one which had a chance of remaining functional in the territories of the possessed. So even if there were objectors among the newly emerged possessed (and there certainly were), they couldn’t get in contact with others who thought along the same lines to create any decent kind of opposition.

  In the end Jezzibella had felt privileged. It was a pivotal moment of history, like watching Eisenhower dispatching his D-day forces, or being with Richard Saldana as he organized the exodus from the New Kong asteroid to Kulu. Privileged and ecstatic.

  More statistics ran down the processor block’s screen. There were over sixteen million non-possessed left in the areas where the Organization ruled supreme. Harwood’s office had declared they should be left alone to keep the utilities and services going, and by and large the Organization ensured they were left alone—for now. How long that would last, though, Jezzibella had her doubts.

  Transport was also being orchestrated to invade the cities and counties which remained uncontaminated. According to the tactical estimates there would be a hundred million possessed living on New California by this time tomorrow. The Organization would achieve absolute control of the entire planet within a further three days.

  And yesterday all she’d had to entertain her were a couple of fresh, gawky kids and the tiresome antics of the entourage.

  “It’s looking pretty fucking fantastic, Al,” she said. “Guess you’ve got what it takes.”

  He slapped her buns playfully. “I always have. Things here ain’t so different from Chicago. It’s just a question of size; this is one fuck of a lot bigger, but I got savvy Avvy’s boys to help sort out that side of things, keeping track and all. Avvy didn’t get to be mayor of San Angeles the way Big Jim Thompson made it into city hall back in Chicago. No, sir, he’s got a flair for paperwork.”

  “And Leroy Octavius, too.”

  “Yep. I see why you wanted to keep him now. I could do with a load more like him.”
r />   “To do what?”

  “To keep going, of course. At least for a few days more.” He slumped his shoulders and rubbed his face in his hands. “Then it’s really gonna hit the fan. Most of the dumb asses down there want to do this magic disappearing act. Je-zus, Jez, I ain’t so sure I can stop them.” Eight times in the last day he’d ordered Emmet Mordden to use the SD platforms to sharpshoot buildings and city blocks over which the wisps of red cloud were forming. Each time the culprits had taken the hint, and the luminous swirl had vanished.

  For the moment he was on top of things. But what was gonna happen after he’d won the planet was giving his brain a real hard time. It was going to be difficult stopping the possessed from vanishing inside the red cloud, because he was the only one among them who didn’t want that to happen. Once he’d delivered the whole planet to them, they’d start looking around at what was stopping them from achieving their true goal.

  And some wiseass with an eye on the main chance would make his bid.

  Wouldn’t be the first time.

  “So give them something more to do,” Jezzibella said.

  “Sure, right, doll. Like after the entire fucking world, what else am I gonna give them, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Listen, you keep telling me this whole setup is going to end once the possessed pull New California out of the universe, right? Everyone’s going to be equal and immortal.”

  “Yeah, that’s about it.”

  “That means you’ll be nothing, least nothing special.”

  “That’s what I’m fucking telling you.”

  Jezzibella shifted again. This time she was like nothing he’d seen before: a librarian or schoolmarm. Not the remotest bit sexy. Al sucked some breath through his teeth, the way she did that was just plain unnerving—her not having the energistic power, and all.

  She leaned over and put a hand on each of his shoulders, stern eyes inches from his. “When you’re nothing, all your lieutenants and soldiers become nothing, too. Deep down they’re not going to want that. You’ve got to find a reason—a fucking good reason—to keep the Organization intact. Once they grab that angle you can keep things humming along sweetly for quite a while yet.”