The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Dan Malindi groaned. “Intelligence agencies? Holy Mary, they’ll find out where you’ve been.”

  “Oh, yes, they’ll know you’re involved. Does that bother you?”

  “Bother me? You bitch! I have a family.”

  “Yes. I’ve heard this argument already today. It is beginning to bore me. I have lived the reality of the genocide for thirty years. You, all of you, have just been playing patriot. Each of you has profited in your own field by chanting the cry of nationalism. Well, my being here has put an end to your pathetic game.”

  “Are you threatening us?” Cabral asked.

  “I have always been a threat to your cosy life, even though you never knew I existed.”

  “What exactly do you want?” Feira Ile asked.

  “Two things. A combat-capable starship with a decent crew of committed nationalists. And a secure environment for myself while you prepare them. Do not underestimate the agencies. They now know for certain that the Alchemist is real, which means they will go to any lengths to acquire me.”

  Ikela stood up, placing his hands on the table and leaning forwards. “I say we cannot do this. Mother Mary, we’re sitting here talking about wrecking an entire star system as if it were some kind of difficult business venture. Times have changed, we are not Garissans anymore. I’m sorry if that is painful for you to hear, Doctor, but we’re not. We have to look to the future, not the past. This is madness.”

  “And that is treachery,” Cabral said.

  “Treachery to what? To a planet that was killed thirty years ago? If that’s what it is, then fine, I’m a traitor to it. I don’t care.”

  “Other people might when they get to hear.”

  “Ikela, I really don’t think you’re in any position to back out now,” Feira Ile said. “Given your mission, you are still a serving officer. That means you are required to discharge your obligations.”

  “Then I quit, I resign my commission.”

  “Very well. In that case, I must ask you to hand over the T’Opingtu company to me.”

  “What?”

  “I believe we just heard that it was founded on money provided by the Garissan navy. That means it doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Listen, we can’t make a snap judgement over this,” Kaliua Lamu said.

  “Ikela’s right, we’re talking about wiping out an entire solar system.”

  “I might have known you’d take that attitude,” Dan Malindi said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard. I’m willing to provide as much help as Dr Mzu wants. What the hell is the Confederation going to do to us if we’re armed with Alchemists?”

  “There is only one,” Alkad said.

  “You can build more, can’t you?”

  She hesitated uncomfortably. “If there was a requirement, it could be duplicated.”

  “There you are then. You can’t leave what’s left of the Garissan nation and culture unprotected, can you?”

  “You want to start a damn arms race as well?” Ikela yelled. “You’re as mad as she is.”

  “Curb your language. Have you forgotten the possessed?”

  “In Mary’s name what have they got to do with this?”

  “If we were armed with Alchemists, that bastard Capone would think twice before sending his fleet here.”

  “And who precisely is going to be in charge of these Alchemists?”

  “The Dorados council, of course,” Dan Malindi said scornfully.

  “Exactly, and we all know how much influence you have there.”

  “Enough!” Alkad slammed her fist down. “I will not supply Alchemists to anyone. You have no conception of what it is capable of. It is not some bigger and better bomb you can use for political advantage. It was built for one purpose, to destroy the people who threatened our world. It will be used for one purpose, our revenge against them.” She looked at each of them in turn, furious and sickened that this was all that remained of the planet she was once so proud of. Where was their dignity, their resolution? Could none of them perform one single act of remembrance? “I will give you thirty minutes to debate this. After that you will tell me which of you support me, and which do not.”

  “I certainly support you,” Kaliua Lamu said loudly, but he was talking to her back as she limped away.

  The shouting had already begun again before the door closed behind her.

  All the bodyguards and aides in the anteroom stared; Alkad barely saw them. If she had just known or anticipated the shambles which the partizans had become, then she would have been mentally geared up.

  “Alkad?” Voi was bending down, giving the smaller woman an anxious look.

  “Don’t mind me, I’ll be all right.”

  “Please, I have something to show you. Now.”

  The girl took Alkad’s arm, hustling her across the room and out into the corridor. Alkad couldn’t be bothered to protest, although force of habit made her activate a threat analysis program. Her enhanced retinas began scanning the length of the corridor.

  “Here,” Voi said triumphantly. She opened her palm to reveal a tiny squashed spider.

  “Mother Mary! Have you completely flipped?”

  “No, listen. You know you said you thought the intelligence agencies were following you.”

  “I should never have told you that. Voi, you don’t know what you’re getting involved with.”

  “Oh, yes I do. We started checking the spaceport log. There’s a delegation of Edenists here to discuss strengthening our defences. Three voidhawks brought thirty of them.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mapire only rated one voidhawk, and six Edenists to discuss our mutual defence with the council. It should be the other way around, the capital should have got the larger delegation, not Ayacucho.”

  Alkad glanced at the little brown blob in the girl’s hand, a bad feeling sinking through her. “Go on.”

  “So we thought about how Edenists would search the asteroid for you. Adamists would use spylenses and hack into the communications net to get at public monitor security cameras. Edenists would use bitek systems, either simulants or affinity-bonded animals. We started looking. And here they are. Spiders. They’re everywhere, Alkad. We checked. Ayacucho is totally infested.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily prove—” she said slowly.

  “Yes it does.” The hand with the crushed blob was shaken violently. “This is from the Lycosidae family. Ayacucho’s ecologists never introduced any Lycosidaes into the biosphere. Check the public records if you don’t believe me.”

  “All sorts of things can get through bio-quarantine; irradiation screening isn’t perfect.”

  “Then why are they all male? We haven’t found a single female, not one. It’s got to be so they can’t mate, they won’t reproduce. They’ll die off without causing any sort of ecological imbalance. Nobody will ever notice them.”

  Strangely enough, Alkad was almost impressed. “Thank you, Voi. I’d better go back in there and tell them I need more security.”

  “Them?” Voi was utterly derisory. “Did they leap to help you? No. Of course not. I said they wouldn’t.”

  “They have what I need, Voi.”

  “They have nothing we don’t. Nothing. Why don’t you trust us? Trust me? What does it take to make you believe in us?”

  “I do believe in your sincerity.”

  “Then come with me!” It was an agonized plea. “I can get you out of here. They don’t even have any way to get you out of the office without the spiders seeing.”

  “That’s because they don’t know about them.”

  “They don’t know, because they’re not concerned about security. Look at them, they’ve got enough bodyguards in there to form a small army. Everybody in the asteroid knows who they are.”

  “Truthfully?”

  “All right, not everybody. But certainly every reporter. The only reason they don’t say anything is because of Cabral
. Anyone coming to the Dorados who really wanted to make contact with the partizan movement wouldn’t need more than two hours to find a name.”

  “Mary be damned!” Alkad glanced back at the door to the anteroom, then at the tall girl. Voi was everything her father was not: dedicated, determined, hurting to help. “You have some kind of safe route out of here?”

  “Yes!”

  “Okay. You can take me out of this section. After that I’ll get in touch with your father again, see what they’re going to do for me.”

  “And if they won’t help?”

  “Then it looks like you’re on.”

  “Yeah? So, I’m late. Sue me. Listen, this meeting caused me a shitload of grief. I don’t need no lecture from the ESA on contact procedures right now.”

  …

  “Yeah, she’s here all right, in the flesh. Mother Mary, she’s really got the Alchemist stashed away somewhere. She’s not kidding. I mean, shit, she really wants to take out Omuta’s star.”

  …

  “Course I don’t know where it is, she wouldn’t say. But, Mary, Ikela used to be a frigate captain in the Omuta navy. He flew escort on the Alchemist mission. I never knew. Twenty years we’ve been plotting away together, and I never knew.”

  …

  “Sure you want to know where we are. Look, you’re going to come in here shooting, right? I mean, how do I know you’re not going to snuff me? This is serious heavy-duty shit.”

  …

  “All right, but if you’re lying you’d better make sure you finish me. I’ll have you if you don’t, no matter what it costs. And hey, even if you do kill me, I can come back and get you that way. Yeah. So you’d better not be fucking me over.”

  …

  “Oh, absolutely. I always believe every word you people say. Okay, listen, we’re in Laxa and Ahmad’s conference office. The bodyguards are all in the anteroom. Tell your people to be fucking careful when they come in. You let them know I’m on your side, yeah?”

  …

  “No, she’s out in the anteroom. She went out there twenty minutes ago so we could argue about what to do. The vote was three to two for wasting Omuta’s star. Guess how I voted.”

  “Laxa and Ahmad, the conference office,” Monica said. “Mzu’s in the anteroom along with the bodyguards.”

  <> Samuel ordered.

  The twenty Edenist agents closed on the Laxa and Ahmad offices. Floor plans were pulled from the asteroid’s civil engineering memory cores.

  Entry routes and tactics were formulated and finalized while they jogged towards their target, the general affinity band thick with tense exchanges.

  Monica kept three paces behind Samuel the whole way. It irked her, and she wasn’t looking forwards to her debrief, either. Teaming up with Edenists! But at least this way the Alchemist would be neutered.

  Providing Samuel kept his part of the agreement. Which she was sure he would do. Although high politics could still screw everything up. God!

  It took them four minutes to reach Laxa and Ahmad. One featureless corridor after another. Thankfully there were few people about, with only a handful of workaholics left. They barged past an old man carrying several flek cases, a man and a woman who looked so guilty they were obviously having an affair, a pair of teenage girls, one very tall and skinny and black, the other small and white, both wearing red handkerchiefs around their ankles.

  When she reached Laxa and Ahmad the Edenist team was already inside. Two agents stood guard out in the corridor. Monica stepped wearily through the crumpled door, drawing her pistol.

  Samuel drew his breath sharply. “Damnation.”

  “What?” she asked. By then they had reached the conference office anteroom. The partizan bodyguards were all sprawled on the floor with limbs twitching erratically. Six Edenists stood over them, their TIP pistols pointing down. Three scorch lines slashed the walls where laser fire had burned the composite. A pair of spent nerve short-out grenades rolled around on the carpet.

  “Where’s Mzu?” Monica asked.

  Samuel beckoned her into the conference office. The partizan leadership had been caught by the nerve short-out pulses, but the door and security screening had saved them from the worst effects. They were still conscious. Four of them. The fifth was dead.

  Monica grimaced when she saw the broad char mark on the side of Ikela’s skull. The beam had fractured the bone in several places, roasting the brain to a black pulp. Someone had made very sure his neural nanonics were ruined. “God, what happened here?”

  Two Edenist agents were standing behind Feira Ile, their pistol muzzles pressed into his neck. His wrists had been secured in a composite zipcuff behind his back. Crumbs of vomit were sticking to his lip; he was sweating profusely from the grenade assault, but otherwise defiant. A laser pistol was lying on the table in front of him.

  “He shot Ikela,” Samuel said in bewildered dismay. He squatted down beside Ikela’s chair. “Why? What was the point? He was one of yours.”

  Feira Ile grinned savagely. “My last duty for the Garissan navy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ikela flew escort duty on the Alchemist. He probably knew where it is. Now he can’t tell you.”

  Monica and Samuel swapped a grim glance.

  “She’s gone, hasn’t she?” Monica said bitterly.

  “It would seem so.”

  “Fuck it!” She stamped over to Kaliua Lamu, who had an agent holding him upright in his chair. “Where did Mzu go?” Monica asked.

  “Screw you.”

  Monica gave an amused glance at the other partizans around the table.

  “Oh, come on, Kaliua,” she said sweetly. “You were eager enough to tell us this meeting’s location.”

  “Liar!”

  She took out a Royal Kulu Bank credit disk. “A hundred thousand pounds, wasn’t it?”

  “Bitch whore! I never,” he shouted at his comrades. “It wasn’t me. For Mary’s sake, it wasn’t.”

  Monica grabbed his chin, and slowly exerted her boosted grip. Kaliua Lamu gagged fearfully at the force which threatened to shatter his jawbone.

  “You said I’d better be certain when I finish you. Well, I intend to be extremely thorough extinguishing your life unless I know where she went.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Debrief nanonics would be the pleasant option, but we don’t have time for that. Fortunately, old-fashioned pain can still produce some pretty impressive results during field interrogation. And they trained me very well, Kaliua.” She pushed her face centimetres from his bugging eyes.

  “Would you like to try calling my bluff? Or perhaps you think you’re strong enough to resist me for a couple of hours after I’ve fused your neural nanonics into ash? Once they’re dead you can’t block the pain. And the field way to fuse neural nanonics is with electrodes. Crude, but it works. Guess where they’re applied.”

  “No. Please! Don’t.” His eyes were watering as he started shaking.

  “Where then?”

  “I don’t know. I promise. She was gone when we finished. I told you she was supposed to be waiting outside for us to finish. But she wasn’t there.”

  “Then who did she leave with?”

  “It was a girl, my bodyguard said. Ikela’s daughter, Voi. She’s tall, young. They were talking together and never came back. Honestly, that’s all I know.”

  Monica let go of his chin. He slumped back in the chair, trembling in relief.

  “A tall girl,” Monica whispered. She was looking at Samuel in dawning dismay as the memory blossomed. She hurriedly accessed the neural nanonics memory cell she’d kept running to record the operation.

  In the corridor on the way up. Two girls, one tall and black, the other white and small. Pressed against the wall in alarm as she and Samuel ran past. The memory cell image froze. Green neon grid lines closed around the smaller girl, calculating her height. It matched Mzu’s. So did the approximated weight.

  A backpack fit
ted with a long shoulder strap hung at the girl’s side.

  Monica had seen that backpack once before. Never in her life would she need help from neural nanonics to remember that time. The backpack had been flapping behind a small spacesuit-clad figure who was clinging desperately to a rope ladder.

  “Dear God, we walked right bloody past her,” she told an aghast Samuel.

  “The bitch is wearing a chameleon suit.”

  Neutronium Alchemist:

  Conflict

  Chapter 01

  Lady Macbeth slipped slowly into place above the docking cradle, her equatorial verniers sparkling briefly as Joshua compensated for drift.

  Optical-band sensors gave a poor return here; Tunja’s ruby glow was insipid even in clear space, and down where Ayacucho lurked among the disk particles it was an abiding roseate gloom. Laser radar guided the starship in until the cradle latches clamped home.

  The bay’s rim lights sprang up to full intensity, highlighting the hull, their reflected beams twisting about at irregular angles as the thermo-dump panels folded back into the fuselage. Then the cradle started to descend.

  In the bridge not a word was spoken. It was the mood which had haunted them all the way from Narok, an infection passed down from captain to crew.

  Sarha looked over the bridge at Joshua for some sign of … humanity, she supposed. He had flown them here, making excellent time as always.

  And apart from the kind of instructions necessary to keep the ship humming smoothly, he hadn’t put ten words together. He’d even taken his meals alone in his cabin.

  Beaulieu and Dahybi had told the rest of the crew of the Norfolk possession, and how concerned Joshua had been for Louise. So at least Sarha knew the reason for his blues, even though she found it slightly hard to believe. This was the Joshua with whom she’d had an affair for over six months last year. He was so easy about the relationship that when they did finally stop sleeping together she’d stayed on as part of the crew without any awkwardness on either side.