The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

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  Syrinx glanced over to Ruben for help, not daring to use the singular engagement mode. She felt she was making progress, of sorts, even if she wasn’t sure where it was leading—though some small traitor part of her mind resented learning that Laton hadn’t lied.

  <> Ruben asked.

  <> There was a tinge of sadness in Malva’s thoughts.

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  <> Syrinx said. <>

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  ***

  The hold-down latches locked the Tantu into the docking cradle, producing a mechanical grinding. Quinn didn’t like the sound, it was too final, metal fingers grasping at the base of the starship, preventing it from leaving unless the spaceport crew granted permission.

  Which, he told himself, they would. Eventually.

  It had taken Twelve-T almost a week to organize his side of the deal.

  After several broken deadlines and threats and high-velocity abuse, the necessary details had finally been datavised to the Tantu, and they’d flown down to Jesup, an asteroid owned by the government of New Georgia.

  The flight plan they’d filed with Nyvan’s traffic control was for a cryogenic resupply, endorsed and confirmed by the Iowell Service & Engineering Company who had won the contract. As the fuel transfer didn’t require the Tantu’s crew to disembark, there was no requirement for local security forces to check for signs of possession. The whole routine operation could be handled by Iowell’s personnel.

  When the docking cradle had lowered the frigate into the bay, an airlock tube wormed its way out of the dull metal wall to engage the starship’s hatch. Quinn and Graper waited in the lower deck for the environmental circuit to be established.

  The next five minutes, Quinn knew, were going to be crucial. He was going to have to use the encounter to establish his control over Twelve-T, while the gang lord would undoubtedly be seeking to assert his superiority at the same time. And although he didn’t know it, Twelve-T had a numerical advantage. Quinn guessed there would be a troop of gang soldiers on the other side of the hatch, congested with weapons and hyped-on attitude. It’s what he would have done.

  What I need, he thought, is the kind of speed which boosting gives the military types. He felt the energistic power shifting inside his body, churning through his muscles to comply with his wishes. Light panels in the airlock chamber began to flicker uncertainly as his robe shrank around his body, eradicating any fabric which could catch against obstructions.

  A cold joy of anticipation seeped up within his mind as he prepared to unleash his serpent beast on the waiting foe. For so long now he had been forced to restrain himself. It would be good to advance the work of God’s Brother again, to watch pride shatter beneath cruelty.

  Twelve-T waited nervously in the docking bay’s reception chamber as the airlock pressurized. His people were spread around the dilapidated chamber, wedged behind tarnished support ribs, sheltered by bulky, broken-down cubes of equipment. All of them covered the ash-grey circular carbotanium hatch with their weapons, sensors focused and fire-control programs switched to millisecond response triggers.

  That shit Quinn might have raged about the delays, but Twelve-T knew he’d put together a slick operation. This whole deal needed the master’s touch. A fucking frigate, for shit’s sake! He’d busted his balls arranging for the starship to dock without the cops realizing what was going down. But then the gang had interests all over New Georgia, half their money came from legitimate businesses. Companies like Iowell—a small operation established decades ago—were easy to muscle in on. The spaceport crew did as the union told them, managers could be persuaded to take their cut.

  Getting his soldiers up to Jesup had been a bitch, too. Like him, they all had the gang’s distinctive silver skull; skin from their eyebrows back to the nape of the neck had been replaced by a smooth cap of chrome flexalloy. Metal and composite body parts were worn like medals, showing how much damage you’d taken for the gang.

  Try slipping twenty of them into Jesup without the administration cops taking an interest.

  But he’d done it. And now he was going to find out just what the fuck was really going on. Because sure as turds floated to the top, Quinn Dexter wasn’t on the level.

  The instrument panel beside the hatch let out a weak bleep.

  “It’s ready,” Lucky Vin datavised. “Shit, Twelve-T, I can’t get anything from the sensors in the tube. They’ve crashed.”

  “Quinn do that, man?”

  “I ain’t too sure. This place … it ain’t the maintenance hotspot of the galaxy, you know.”

  “Okay. Pop the hatch.” He opened the datavise to include the rest of his soldiers. “Sharpen up, people, this is it.”
>
  The hatch seal disengaged, allowing the actuators to hinge it back.

  Absolute blackness filled the airlock tube.

  Twelve-T craned his neck forwards, scar tissue stretching tightly. Even with his retinal implants switched to infrared there was nothing to see in the tube. “Screw this—”

  The blackness at the centre of the tube bulged out, a bulbous cone devouring the chamber’s photons. Five maser carbines and a TIP pistol fired, skewering the anti-light chimera from every direction. It broke open, petals of night peeling apart from the centre to splash against the chamber walls.

  Twelve-T’s neural nanonics began to crash. Blocks clipped to his belt chased them into electronic oblivion. The last datavise he received was from his maser carbine, telling him the power cells were dropping out. He tried to grasp the ten-millimetre machine gun velcroed to his hip, only to find his arm shuddering; the pistonlike actuators he’d replaced the forearm muscles with were seizing up.

  A missile composed of tightly whorled shadow swelled up out of the centre of the flowering blackness. Too fast for the eye to follow in real-time—certainly as far as Twelve-T’s faltering retinal implants were concerned—it shot across the chamber and bounced.

  The first scream clogged the chamber’s air. One of the soldiers was crumpling up, his body imploding in a series of rapid strikes. He seemed to be dimming, as if he were caught at the middle of a murky nebula. Then his head caved in, and it was blood not the sounds of agony that went spraying across the chamber.

  A second soldier convulsed, as if she were trying to jam her head down towards her buttocks. She managed a single bewildered grunt before her spine snapped.

  The third victim darkened, his clothes starting to smoulder. Both of his titanium hands turned cherry-red, glowing brightly. When he opened his mouth to scream a column of pink steam puffed out.

  Twelve-T had it worked out by then. There was always a translucent cloud around the soldiers as they were slaughtered, a grey shadow that flickered at subliminal speed. His disabled arm levered the machine gun off the velcro, and he turned desperately towards the source of the latest screams. His soldiers were losing it, flinging themselves at the exit hatch, wrestling with each other in their struggle to escape.

  The light panels were turning a dark tangerine and beginning to sputter; black iron grids had materialized across them, growing thicker. Oily smoke began to pour forth. The fractured buzzing sound of the conditioning fans was dying away. Globules of blood oscillated through the air, fringes rippling like restive jellyfish. Twelve-T knew then he’d been fucked. It wasn’t Quinn Dexter, rat boy from the arcologies. This was the worst it could possibly get.

  He’d never liked Nyvan. But what the fuck, it was his home planet. Now the possessed were going to violate it, subdue every living body. And he was the total fucking asshole who’d let them in.

  Another of his soldiers was being chopped apart, haloed in quivering dusk. Pure fury powered Twelve-T’s malfunctioning body into a final act of obedience. He swung the machine gun around on the macerated soldier and squeezed back on the trigger. It was only a short burst. A blue flame spat out of the muzzle to the accompaniment of a thunderous roar. Without a neural nanonics operational procedure program to help him, the recoil was far more powerful than he expected. His shoes were ripped free of the stikpad, and he was somersaulting backwards through the air, hollering in surprise.

  The universe paused.

  “Shatter!” a furious voice bellowed.

  The machine gun obeyed, its cool silicolithium fragmenting like a shrapnel grenade. Needle slivers sliced deep into Twelve-T’s flesh, some ricocheting off the metal casings of his replacement parts. He was flailing wildly now, trailing fantails of blood from his shredded hand.

  “Hold him,” someone instructed curtly.

  Quinn slowed himself back from the speedstate, energistic currents sinking down to quiescent levels. As they did, the rest of the world began to accelerate. It had been awesome, moving through an airlock chamber populated by statues, time solidified to a single heartbeat.

  Their time, not his. God’s Brother had granted him impunity from the actions of any non-possessed. What greater sign that he was indeed the chosen one?

  “Thank you, my Lord,” he whispered, humbled. Planets would truly bow before him now; just as Lawrence had prophesied.

  Most of the blood had impacted on a surface, splattering wide into big smears and sticking tenaciously. Grotesque corpses drifted peacefully in the warm air streams. The remnants of the gang were in a sorry state.

  With four possessed in the airlock chamber and pulsing with malevolent power, their artificial body parts had either frozen or were running out of control. And they were all combat vets, heavily dependent on replacements, almost up to cosmonik level. Lawrence and Graper were plucking weapons from unresisting hands, claws, and wrist sockets.

  Quinn kicked off towards Twelve-T. His robe resumed its usual extravagant cut as he glided across the compartment.

  Twelve-T was sweating heavily. One of the soldiers whose arms were mostly the original organic was bandaging the gang lord’s ruined hands with strips torn from his own T-shirt.

  “I admire your strength,” Quinn said. “It can be harnessed to serve God’s Brother.”

  “Ain’t no God, can’t have no fucking—” Pain gripped his left arm, forcing him to cry out. His skin hissed as it rose in huge blisters.

  “You wanted to irritate me,” Quinn said mildly.

  Twelve-T glowered helplessly. He wasn’t used to so much pain, none of them were. Neural nanonics always protected them. That meant it was going to get bad, he realized, real bad. Unless …

  “And I won’t allow you to suicide,” Quinn said. “I know that’s what you were thinking. Everybody does when they grab what’s gonna happen.”

  The strips of cloth bandaging Twelve-T’s hands hardened into shiny nylon.

  Their ends flexed up like blind snakes, then slowly knotted together.

  “You’re so close to me, Twelve-T,” Quinn said earnestly. “Your serpent beast is almost free. You would never have become what you are without realizing what your true nature is. Don’t hold back, embrace God’s Brother. Live in the Night with us.”

  “You’ll make a mistake, asshole. And I’ll be around waiting for it.”

  “I don’t make mistakes. I am the chosen one.”

  “Holy fuck.”

  “Follow me, Twelve-T. Submit to your true self and know the glory of His word. Betray your people for greed and profit. That way you will never know defeat again. My disciples fuck who they want when they want. They see their enemies burn in torment. Enjoy rewards you have never dared take before. Help me, Twelve-T. Tell me where the asteroid cops are.

  Shunt your gang’s money into my credit disk. Show me where the spaceplanes are that can take my disciples down to the surface. Do it, Twelve-T.”

  “You won’t get down to the planet,” Twelve-T grunted. “People are too frightened of the possessed landing. There’s all kinds of weird checks going on down there. You might have beaten my troops, big deal; but you dead freaks ain’t going to turn my planet into holiday hellpark.”

  “You understand nothing,” Quinn said. “I don’t give a fuck about the souls in the beyond. I’m not here to save anyone, least of all them. God’s Brother has chosen me to help Him bring down the Night.”

  “Oh, sweet shit,” Twelve-T whimpered. Quinn was a loon. A motherfucking twenty-four-karat loon.

  “I want two things from this planet,” Quinn continued. “A starship I can use to take me home to Earth; because that’s where I can hurt the Confederation most. It’ll have to be a cargo ship of some kind, one which Govcentral’s defences will accept is harmless. I’m sure there are plenty docked here right now, right?”

  A small jaw muscle twitched on Twelve-T’s face.

  “Good,” said Quinn. The gang lord’s thoughts had betrayed him, bitter defeat mingling with the dregs of resentment and ang
er. “You want to know what the other thing is, don’t you? It’s simple, I intend Nyvan to be the first planet the Light Brother can bring into His kingdom. I’m going to bring the Night to this planet, Twelve-T. Endless Night. Night without hope. Until He comes from the other side of the beyond to grant you salvation.”

  Making sure every word was perfectly clear, Twelve-T said: “Go fuck yourself.” He braced himself for the retribution.

  Quinn laughed softly. “Not that easy, shithead. I told you, I want your help. I need a local smartarse to straighten out crap like a ship and how to sneak my possessed disciples past the pigs guarding the planet. Someone who knows all the access codes around here. And that’s you, Twelve-T. As He chose me, so I have chosen you.” He glanced around at the gang’s remaining soldiers. “We’ll open the rest of this worthless trash for possession; then convert all of Jesup. After that, nobody down below will be able to resist us.”

  “Oh, Jesus, help us,” Twelve-T begged. “Please.”

  “Ain’t no God,” Quinn mimicked savagely. “So he ain’t got no son, has he?” Laughing, he pushed Twelve-T down towards the decking. The gang lord’s knees bent, allowing the stikpad to fasten to his trousers. Quinn stood in front of the supplicant and beckoned Lawrence over. “I know you’re a tough mother, Twelve-T. If you’re possessed you’ll only try to fool your new owner, jazz me about as best you can. You and your dumb pride. I can’t afford that kind of shit anymore. That means I’m gonna have to squeeze what I want to know out of you myself, so I know you’re being honest.”

  Kneeling before the monster, head bowed, Twelve-T said: “I will never help you.”

  “You will. I have many ways of binding my disciples to me. For most it is love or fear. For you, I choose dependence.” He placed his hands on either side of Twelve-T’s silver head. The feat was the converse of a coronation. Quinn lifted the silver cap from the gang lord’s skull with an almost gentle reverence. It came loose with a soft sucking sound. The bone underneath was covered in a sticky red mucus. Ichor dribbled over Twelve-T’s face, mingling with sticky tears.