The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

<> the old man asked sharply.

  Syrinx swallowed nervously. <>

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  <> There were shapes flickering in the darkness, consolidating into outlines which she thought she recognized. The owl hooted softly. Guilty, Syrinx jerked her gaze back to Wing-Tsit Chong.

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  She gestured to the window. <>

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  She shrugged her shoulders, mortified that here she was in front of the founder of Edenism, and couldn’t answer a simple question for him. <>

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  <> She twitched a smile of relief.

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  <> She grinned broadly, straightening her shoulders to say formally: <>

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  <> Humour quirked his lips for a moment. <>

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  <> she said proudly, the logical answer.

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  <> she said cautiously.

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  <> He smiled kindly, a gesture of his hand inviting her to continue.

  <> Even as she said it she could feel her heart rate increase, but the blood quickening in her veins only seemed to make her skin colder.

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  Syrinx grinned. <>

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  Syrinx gave a downcast smile, not entirely perturbed. <>

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  She steeled herself, foolish that it was, clenching her stomach muscles and fisting her hands.

  <> Wing-Tsit Chong instructed. <>
/>
  The owl blinked at her, and half extended its wings. She stared at the flecked pattern of ochre and hazel feathers. They were running like liquid, becoming midnight-blue and purple. “Oenone!” she shouted. Pernik island rushed towards her at a speed which made her grasp the balcony rail in fright.

  <> Oenone asked. The deluge of misery and longing entwined with that simple request made her eyes brim with tears. <>

  <> Her whole body was trembling in reaction to the years of memory yawning open in her mind. And right at the end, the last before stinking darkness had grasped at her, most vivid of all, the dungeon and its torturers.

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  <> she reassured the voidhawk unsteadily. <>

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  <> Wing-Tsit Chong said.

  When Syrinx raised her head she saw the old man’s face smiling softly, the multiplying wrinkles aging him another decade. <>

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  He sighed theatrically. <>

  Syrinx opened her eyes to look up at a sky-blue ceiling. The dark blobs around the edges of her vision field resolved into three terribly anxious faces bending over her.

  “Hello, Mother,” she said. It was very difficult to talk, and her body felt as though it were wrapped in a shrunken ship-tunic.

  Athene started crying.

  ***

  There were fifteen holoscreens in the editing suite, arranged in a long line along one wall. All of them were switched on, and the variety of images they displayed was enormous, ranging from a thousand-kilometre altitude view of Amarisk with the red cloud bands mirroring the Juliffe tributary network, to the terrifyingly violent starship battle in orbit above Lalonde; and from Reza Malin’s mercenaries flattening the village of Pamiers, to a flock of overexcited young children charging out of a homestead cabin to greet the arrival of the hovercraft.

  Out of the five people sitting at the editing suite’s table, four of them stared at the screens with the kind of nervous enthusiasm invariably suffered by voyeurs of suffering on a grand scale, where the sheer spectacle of events overcame the agony of any individual casualty. In the middle of her colleagues, Kelly regarded her work with a detachment which was mainly derived from a suppressor program her neural nanonics were running.

  “We can’t cut anything else,” Kate Elvin, the senior news editor, protested.

  “I don’t like it,” said Antonio Whitelocke. He was the head of Collins’s Tranquillity office, a sixty-year career staffer who had plodded his way to the top from the Politics and Economics division. An excellent choice for Tranquillity, but hardly empathic with young rover reporters like Kelly Tirrel. Her Lalonde report scared him shitless. “You just can’t have a three hour news item.”

  “Grow some bollocks,” Kelly snapped. “Three hours is just dip-in highlights.”

  “Lowlights,” Antonio muttered, glaring at his turbulent new megastar. Her skinhead hairstyle was devastatingly intimidating, and he’d heard all about poor Garfield Lunde. Marketing always complained about the use of non-mainstream image anchors. When he thought of that pretty, feminine young woman who used to present the breakfast round-up just last month he could only worry that one of the possessed had sneaked back from Lalonde after all.

  “The balance is perfect,” Kate said. “We’ve incorporated the fundamentals of the doomed mission, and even managed to end on an upbeat note with the rescue. That was a stroke of sheer brilliance, Kelly.”

  “Well, gee, thanks. I would never have gone with Horst and the mercs back to the homestead unless it made a better report.”

  Kate sailed on serenely through the sarcasm; unlike Antonio she’d been a rover once, which had included a fair share of combat assignments. “This edit will satisfy both our corporate objectives, Antonio. First off, the rumour circuit has been overheating ever since Lady Macbeth came back; Marketing hasn’t even needed to advertise our evening news slot.

  Everybody in Tranquillity is going to access us tonight—I’ve heard the opposition are just going to run soap repeats while Kelly’s on. And once our audience access they aren’t going to stop. We’re not just giving them sensenviron impressions of a war, we’ve got a whole story to tell them here. That always hooks them. Our advertising premium for this is going to be half a million fuseodollars for a thirty-second slot.”

  “For one show,” Antonio grumbled.

  “More than one, that’s the beauty. Sure, everyone is going to make a flek of tonight. But Kelly brought back over thirty-six hours of her own fleks, and then we’ve got the recordings taken from Lady Macbeth’s sensors from the moment they emerged in the Lalonde system. We can milk this for a month with specialist angle interviews, documentaries, and current affairs analysis panels. We’ve won the ratings war for the whole goddamn year, and we did it on the cheap.”

  “Cheap! Do you know what we paid that bloody Lagrange Calvert for those sensor recordings?”

  “Cheap,” Kate insisted. “Tonight alone is going to pay for those. And with universal distribution rights we’ll quadruple Collins group profits.”

  “If we can ever get it distributed,” Antonio said.

  “Sure we can. Have you accessed the civil starflight prohibition order? It just prevents docking, not departure. Blackhawks can simply stay inside a planet’s emergence zone and datavise a copy to our local office.

  We’ll have to pay the captains a little more, but not much, because they’re losing revenue sitting on the endcap ledges. This can work. It’ll be head office seats for us after this.”

  “What, after this?” Kelly said.

  “Come on, Kelly.” Kate squeezed her shoulder. “We know it was rough, we felt it for ourselves. But the quarantine is going to stop the possessed from spreading, and now we’re alert to the problem the security forces can contain them if there is an outbreak. They won on Lalonde because it’s so damn backwards.”

  “Oh, sure.” Kelly was operating on stimulant programs alone now, fatigue toxin antidote humming melodically in her head. “Saving the galaxy is a breeze now we know. Hell, it’s only the dead we’re up against after all.”

  “If you’re not up to this, Kelly, then say so,” Antonio said, then played his mastercard. “We can use another anchor. Kirstie McShane?”

  “That bitch!”

  “So we can go ahead as scheduled, can we?”

  “I want to put in more of Pamiers, and Shaun Wallace. Those are the kind of events which will make people more aware of the situation.”

  “Wallace is depressing, he spent that entire interview telling you that the possessed couldn’t be beaten.”

  “Damn right. Shaun’s vital, he tells us what we really need to know, to face up to the real problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “Death. Everyone’s going to die, Antonio, even you.”

  “No, Kelly, I can’t sanction this sort of slant. It’s as bad as that Tyrathca Sleeping God ceremony you recorded.”

  “I shouldn’t have let you cut that out. Nobody even knew the Tyrathca had a religion before.”

  “Xenoc customs are hardly relevant at a time like this,” he said.

  “Kelly, we can use that Tyrathca segment in a documentary at a later date,” Kate said. “Right now we need to finalize the edit. Christ, you’re on-line in another forty minutes.”

  “You want to keep me sweet, then put in all of Shaun’s interview.”

  “We’ve got half of it,” Antonio said. “All the salient points are covered.”


  “Hardly. Look, we have got to bring home to people what possession is really all about, the meaning behind the act,” Kelly said. “So far all the majority of Confederation citizens have had is this poxy official warning from the Assembly. It’s an abstract, a problem on another planet. People have to learn it’s not that simple, that there’s more to this disaster than simple physical security. We have to deal with the philosophical issues as well.”

  Antonio pressed the palm of his hand onto his brow, wincing.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Kelly asked hotly. Her arm waved at the holoscreens with their damning images. “Didn’t you access any of this?

  Don’t you understand? We have to get this across to people. I can do that for you. Not Kirstie blowbrain McShane. I was there, I can make it more real for anyone who accesses the report.”

  Antonio looked at the holoscreen which showed Pat Halahan running through the smoky ruins of Pamiers, blasting his bizarre attackers to shreds of gore. “Great. Just what we need.”

  ***

  This just wasn’t the way Ione had expected it to go. Joshua hadn’t even looked at her bedroom door when they arrived back at the apartment, let alone show any eagerness. There had been times with him when she hadn’t made it to the bed before her skirt was up around her waist.

  Yet somehow she knew this wasn’t entirely due to the traumas of the mission. He was intent and troubled, not frightened. Very unfamiliar territory as far as Joshua was concerned.

  He’d simply had a shower and a light supper, then settled down in her big settee. When she sat beside him she was too uncertain about the reaction to even rest her hand on his arm.

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