The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “I don’t like being threatened, Lyshol.”

  “I’m not threatening you. I’m asking for help. I need your help. Please.”

  McRobert glanced at his companions. “All right. The Quadin is docked at bay 901-C, we’re scheduled to depart in three hours. Like I said, I can’t guarantee that time with the code two, but if you’re not there I’m not waiting.”

  “I’m ready now.”

  “No baggage? You surprise me. Very well, you can pay me when we get on board. And, Lyshol, don't expect any crew salary.”

  When the four of them came out of Bar Vips, Gerald gave what he believed to be a surreptitious glance along the public hall. There weren't many people about, the code two alert had hauled in all the asteroid’s off-duty military and civil service personnel.

  Loren watched him go, hunched up and tragic between his three escorts.

  They stepped into a lift, and the door closed behind them. She walked the other way down the public hall, a smile playing over her illusory lips.

  After seven and a half hours with over a hundred false alerts and not one genuine sighting, Admiral Farquar was considering running a suppressor program through his neural nanonics. He hated the artificial calm the software brought, but the tension and depression were getting to him. The hunt for the possessed woman was being run from the Royal Navy tactical operations centre. It wasn’t quite the operation envisaged while it was being built, but its communications were easily reconfigured to probe the asteroid’s net, and its AI had been loaded with the tracker programs developed by Diana Tiernan to hunt possessed across Xingu. Given the size of Guyana, and the density of electronic systems spread throughout the interior, they should have had a result within minutes.

  But the woman had eluded them. In doing so, she had forced him to admit to Princess Kirsten that if one could, so could more. There might be any number running around Guyana. For all he knew the entire navy staff could have been possessed, which was why the operations centre kept saying they couldn’t find her. He didn’t believe it himself (he’d visited the centre personally) but no doubt it was an option the cabinet had to consider.

  Even he must be considered suspect, though they’d been tactful enough not to say so.

  As a result, Guyana had handed over Ombey’s Strategic Defence network command to a Royal Navy base in Atherstone. A complete quarantine of the asteroid had been quietly enforced under the guise of the code two defence alert.

  So far it had all been for nothing.

  The office management computer datavised him that Captain Oldroyd, his staff security officer, and Dr Dobbs were requesting an interview. He datavised an acknowledgement, and his office dissolved into the white bubble room of a sensenviron conference room.

  “Have you made any progress finding her?” Dobbs asked.

  “Not yet,” Farquar admitted.

  “That ties in,” the doctor said. “We’ve been running analysis scenarios based on the information we’ve collated so far; and based on that I believe I’ve come up with a rationale for her actions. Extracting Skibbow from our medical facility was slightly puzzling behaviour. It was an awful risk even for a possessed. If the marines had been thirty seconds faster she would never have made it. She must have had an extremely good reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “I think she’s Loren Skibbow, Gerald’s wife. If for no other reason than what she said to Jansen Kovak: You should try being married to him for twenty years. I checked our file, they were married for twenty years.”

  “His wife?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay, I’ve heard stranger.” The admiral faced Captain Oldroyd. “I hope you’ve got some evidence to back up this theory.”

  “Yes, sir. Assuming she is who we suspect, her behavioural profile certainly fits her actions to date. First of all, we believe she’s been in Guyana for some time, possibly right from the beginning when the Ekwan docked. She has obviously had enough time to learn how to move around without activating any of our tracer programs. Secondly, if she can do that, why hasn’t she launched the kind of takeover effort we saw on Xingu? She’s held back for a reason.”

  “Because it doesn’t fit in with her plans,” Dr Dobbs said eagerly. “If the whole asteroid became possessed, her peers would be unlikely to allow Gerald his freedom. This is all personal, Admiral, it’s not part of what’s happening to Mortonridge or New California. She’s completely on her own. I don’t believe she’s any real danger to the Kingdom’s security at all.”

  “Are you telling me we’ve shifted the Principality to a code two alert because of a domestic matter?” Admiral Farquar asked.

  “I believe so,” Dr Dobbs said apologetically. “The possessed are people, too. We’ve had ample proof that they retain a nearly complete range of human emotions. And, er … we did put Gerald through quite an ordeal. If what we suspect is true, it would be quite reasonable to assume Loren would do her best to take him away from us.”

  “Dear God. All right, so now what? How does this theory help us deal with her?”

  “We can negotiate.”

  “To what end? I don’t care that she’s a loving wife. She’s a bloody possessed. We can’t have the pair of them living happily ever after up here.”

  “No. But we can offer to take better care of Gerald. From her viewpoint, of course,” Dr Dobbs added quickly.

  “Maybe.” The admiral would have dearly loved to have found a flaw in the reasoning, but the facts did seem to fit together with uncomfortable precision. “So what do you recommend?”

  “I’d like to broadcast over Guyana’s net, load a message into every personal communications processor, blanket the news and entertainment companies. It’ll only be a matter of time before they access it.”

  “If she answers she’ll give away her location. She’ll know that.”

  “We’ll find her eventually, I’ll make that quite clear. What I can offer is a solution she can accept. Do I have your permission? It will need to be a genuine offer. After all, the possessed can read the emotional content of minds. She’ll know if I’m telling the truth.”

  “That’s a pretty broad request, Doctor. What exactly do you want to offer her?”

  “Gerald to be taken down to the planet and given an Ombey citizenship. We provide full financial compensation for what we put him through, complete his counselling and therapy. And finally, if this crisis is resolved, we’ll do whatever we can to reunite him with his daughter.”

  “You mean that Kiera girl in Valisk?”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “I doubt my authority runs to that …” He broke off as the office management computer datavised a change in Guyana’s status. The operations centre had just issued a full combat alert.

  The admiral opened a channel to the duty officer. “What’s happening?” he datavised.

  “The AI has registered an anomaly, sir. We think it could be her. I’ve dispatched a Royal Marine squad.”

  “What sort of anomaly?”

  “A camera in the spaceport spindle entrance chamber registered a man getting into a transit capsule. When the capsule stopped at section G5 a woman got out. The capsule never stopped at any other section.”

  “What about processor glitches?”

  “The AI is analysing all the electronics around her. There are some efficiency reductions, but well below the kind of disturbance which we were getting from the possessed down in Xingu.”

  The admiral requested a schematic of the spaceport. Section G5 was the civil spaceplane and ion field flyer dock. “Dear God, Dr Dobbs, I think you might have been right after all.”

  Loren floated along the brightly lit tubular corridor towards the airlock. According to the spaceport register, a Kulu Corporation SD2002 spaceplane was docked to it, a thirty-seater craft owned by the Crossen company who used it to ferry staff up to their microgee industrial stations. One of the smallest spaceplanes at Guyana, it was exactly the kind of craft a pair of fairly ignorant
desperadoes would try to steal if they wanted to get down to the planet.

  There was nobody about. The last person she’d seen had been a maintenance engineer who’d boarded the transit capsule she’d arrived in. She toyed with the idea of letting her energistic ability flare out and mess up some of the electronics in the corridor. But that might make them suspicious, she’d controlled herself for so long that any change now would cause questions. She’d just have to hope that their security programs and sensors would catch her. The change of image was a subtle enough betrayal, providing their monitor routines were good enough.

  The airlock tube was five metres long, and narrower than the corridor, barely two metres wide. She manoeuvred herself into it, only to find the hatch at the far end was shut.

  At last, an excuse to use the energistic ability.

  There was a surge of electricity around the hatch. She could sense the main power cables behind the azure blue composite walls, thick lines that burnt with an ember glow of current. There were other cables too, smaller and dimmer. It was one of those which had come alive, connected to a small communications block set into the rim of the hatch.

  “It’s Loren, isn’t it?” a voice from the block asked. “Loren Skibbow, I’m sure it’s you. My name is Dr Riley Dobbs. I was treating Gerald before you took him away.”

  She stared at the block in shock. How the bloody hell had he figured that out?

  The power flowed through her body, twisting up from the beyond like a hot spring; she could feel it squirting through every cell. Her mind shaped it as it rose inside her, transforming it into the pattern she wanted, a pattern which matched her dreamy wish. It began to superimpose itself over reality. Sparks shivered over the surface of the hatch.

  “Loren, I want to help, and I’ve been given the authority which will allow me to help. Please listen. Gerald is my patient, I don’t want him harmed. I believe the two of us agree on that.”

  “Go to hell, Doctor. Better still, I’ll take you there personally. You damaged my husband’s mind. I’m not going to forget that.”

  There were noises in the corridor behind her, soft scraping, clinking sounds. When she focused, she could perceive the minds of the marines closing on her. Cold and anxious, but very determined.

  “Gerald was damaged by the possession,” Dobbs said. “I was trying to cure him. I want to continue that process.”

  The sparks had begun to swirl around the composite of the airlock tube, penetrating below the surface as if they were swimming through the material.

  “Under the muzzle of a gun?” she asked scathingly. “I know they’re behind me.”

  “The marines won’t shoot. I promise that, Loren. It would be pointless. Shooting would just cost the life of the person you’ve possessed. Nobody wants that. Please, come and talk to me. I’ve already obtained huge concessions from the authorities. Gerald can be taken down to the planet. He’ll be looked after properly, I’ll continue his therapy. Perhaps someday he can even see Marie again.”

  “You mean Kiera. That bitch won’t let my daughter go.”

  “Nothing is certain. We can discuss this. Please. You can’t leave on the spaceplane. Even if you get in you can hardly pilot it down through the SD network. The only way Gerald can get down to the planet is if I take him.”

  “You won’t touch him again. He’s safe in my hiding place now, and you never found me, not in all the time I was there.”

  The airlock walls gave out a small creak. All the sparks had blurred together to form a glowing ring of composite encircling her. She smiled tightly. The subterfuge was nearly complete. Dobbs’s intervention had turned out to be a beautiful bonus.

  Loren could sense the marines holding back just past the edge of the airlock tube. She took a deep breath, attempting to deflect the knowledge of what was about to come. White fire burst out of her feet with a terrible screeching sound. It fountained into the corridor and broke apart into an avalanche of individual fireballs which careered into the waiting marines.

  “No, Loren, don’t, I can help. Please—”

  She exerted herself to the full. Dobbs’s voice fractured into a brassy caterwaul before vanishing altogether as the energistic effect crashed every processor within twenty-five metres.

  “Don’t,” Pou Mok pleaded from the heart of Loren’s mind. “I won’t tell them where he is. I promise. They’ll never know. Let me live.”

  “I can’t trust the living,” Loren told her.

  “Bitch!”

  The wall of the airlock tube gleamed brighter than the fireballs, then the composite vaporised. Loren flew out of the widening gap, impelled by the blast of air which stampeded away into the vacuum.

  “Dear God,” Admiral Farquar grunted. The spaceport’s external sensors showed him the jet of air diminishing. Three marines had followed Loren Skibbow out into space. Their armour suits would provide some protection against decompression, and they had a small oxygen reserve. The duty officer had already dispatched some MSVs to chase after them.

  Loren Skibbow was a different matter. For a while she had glowed from within, a fluorescent figure spinning around and around as she left the ruptured dock behind. Now the glow was fading. After a couple of minutes it winked out. The body exploded far more violently than it should have done.

  “Locate as much as you can of her, and bring the pieces back,” Admiral Farquar told the duty officer. “We can take a DNA sample; the ISA ought to be able to identify her for us.”

  “But why?” Dr Dobbs asked, mortified. “What the hell made her do that?”

  “Perhaps they don’t think quite like us, after all,” the admiral said.

  “They do. I know they do.”

  “When we find Skibbow, you can ask him.”

  It was a task which proved harder than expected. There was no response from his debrief nanonics, so the Royal Navy began a physical search of Guyana, monitored by the AI. No room, no service tunnel, and no storage chamber was overlooked. Any space larger than a cubic metre was examined.

  It took two and a half days. Pou Mok’s room was opened and searched thirty-three hours after it began. Because it was listed as being rented (currently unoccupied) by someone on Ombey, and the diligent search turned up nothing, it was closed up and codelocked.

  The cabinet meeting which followed the end of the search decided that one missing mental patient could not justify keeping the navy’s premier defence base isolated, nor could Ombey do without the products of Guyana’s industrial stations. The asteroid was stood down to a code three status, and the problem of the woman’s identity and Skibbow’s whereabouts handed over to a joint ISA ESA team.

  Three and a half days after its original departure time, the Quadin left for Pinjarra. Gerald Skibbow wasn’t aware of it, he had been in zero-tau an hour before Loren’s final diversion.

  Chapter 16

  The Bar KF-T wasn’t up to much, but after a fifty-hour trip squashed into the two-deck life support capsule of an inter-orbit cargo tug with just the captain’s family to talk to, Monica Foulkes wasn’t about to closet herself away in a barren hotel room. A drink and some company, that’s what I need. She sat on a stool up at the bar sipping an imported beer while Ayacucho’s meagre nightlife eddied around her. The economic downturn from the quarantine was affecting every aspect of Dorados life, even here. It was ten-thirty P.M. local time and only five couples were braving the dance floor, there were even some tables free. But the young men were still reassuringly on the prowl; she’d already had three offers of a drink.

  The only cause for concern was how many of them were wearing red handkerchiefs around their ankles, boys and girls. She couldn’t be entirely sure if they wanted to seduce her or simply convert her.

  Deadnight was becoming an alarming trend; the ESA’s head of station in Mapire estimated twenty per cent of the Dorados’ teenage population was getting sucked in. Monica would have put it nearer to fifty per cent.

  Given the blandness of existence among the aster
oids she was surprised it wasn’t even higher.

  Her extended sensory analysis program plotted the tall man’s approach, only alerting her to his existence when he was two metres away and his destination obvious.

  “Can I get you another bottle?”

  Her intended reply perished as soon as she saw the too-long greying hair flopping over his brow. “Sure,” she said, grinning whimsically.

  He sat on the empty stool beside her and signalled the barmaid for a couple of bottles. “Now this is far more stylish than our last encounter.”

  “True. How are you, Samuel?”

  “Overworked and underpaid. Government employees get the same deal the Confederation over.”

  “You forgot unappreciated.”

  “No I didn’t,” he said cheerfully. “That’s the benefit of Edenism, everyone contributes to the greater good, no matter what area we excel in.”

  “Oh, God.” She accepted her new beer from the barmaid. “An evangelical Edenist. Just my luck.”

  “So, what are you doing here?”

  “Negotiating armament manufacturing contracts; it actually says I’m a rep for Octagon Exports on my passport.”

  “Could be worse.” Samuel tried his beer, and frowned at the bottle with some dismay. “Take me, I’m supposed to be part of the delegation from this system’s Edenist habitats, discussing mutual defence enhancement arrangements. I specialize in internal security procedures.”

  Monica laughed, and tipped her bottle at the middle-aged Edenist. “Good luck.” The humour ended. “You must have seen them?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid the possessed are definitely inside the barricades.”

  “Shit! I meant the Deadnight kids.”

  “Ah. Monica, please take care. Our … examination of the Dorados has shown up several cadres of possessed. They’re here, and they are expanding. I do not advise you return to Mapire. Our estimation is that it will fall within another three days, probably less.”

  “Did you tell the governing council?”