The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Sir?”

  “That was an order, mister. But in case you need an incentive, the possessed are here.”

  The two of them swapped a worried glance. “Aye, sir.”

  Erick started accessing schematics of the asteroid as they went through the Navy Bureau and out into the public hall. He followed that up by requesting a list of starships currently docked at the spaceport. There were only five; one of which was the Villeneuve’s Revenge, which cut his options down to four.

  His neural nanonics designed a route to the axial chamber which didn’t use any form of powered transportation. Seven hundred metres, two hundred of which were stairs. But at least the gravity would be falling off.

  They went in single file, with Erick in the centre. He ordered both ratings to put their combat programs into primary mode. People turned to stare as they marched down the middle of the public hall.

  Six hundred metres to go. And the first stairwell was directly ahead. The hall’s light panels started dimming.

  “Run,” Erick said.

  Kingsley Pryor’s cell measured five metres by five. It had one bunk, one toilet, and one washbasin; there was a small AV lens on the wall opposite the bed, accessing one local media company. Every surface—fittings, floor, walls—was the same blue-grey lofriction composite. It was fully screened, preventing any datavises.

  For the last hour the light panel on the ceiling had been flickering. At first, Kingsley had thought the police were doing it to irritate him.

  They had been almost fearful as they escorted him from the Villeneuve’s Revenge with a Confederation Navy officer. A member of the Capone Organization. It was only to be expected that they would try to re-establish their superiority with such sad psychology, demonstrating who was in control. But the shifts of illumination had been too fitful for any determined effort. The AV images were also fragmenting, but not at the same time as the light. Then he found the call button produced no response.

  Kingsley realized what was happening, and sat patiently on his bunk.

  Quarter of an hour later the humming sound from the conditioning grille fan faded away. Nothing he could do about it. Twice in the next thirty minutes the fan started up again briefly, once to blow in air which stank of sewage. Then the light panel went out permanently. Still Kingsley sat quietly.

  When the door did finally open, it shone a fan of light directly across him, highlighting his almost prim posture. A werewolf crouched in the doorway, blood dripping from its fangs.

  “Very original,” Kingsley said.

  There was a confused puppylike yap from the creature.

  “I really must insist you don’t come any closer. Both of us will wind up in the beyond if you do. And you’ve only just got here, haven’t you?”

  The werewolf outline shimmered away to reveal a man wearing a police uniform. Kingsley recognized him as one of his escorts. There was a nasty pink scar on his forehead which hadn’t been there before.

  “What are you talking about?” the possessed man asked.

  “I am going to explain our situation to you, and I want you to observe my thoughts so that you know I’m telling the truth. And after that, you and your new friends are going to let me go. In fact, you’re going to give me every assistance I require.”

  A hundred and fifty metres to the axial chamber. They were almost at the top of the last flight of stairs when the well’s lights went out. Erick’s enhanced retinas automatically switched to infrared. “They’re close,” he shouted in warning.

  A narrow flare of white fire fountained up the centre of the stairwell, arching around to burst over the rating behind him. He grunted in pain and swung around, firing his TIP carbine at the base of the streamer.

  Purple sparks bounced out of the impact point.

  “Help me,” he cried. A smear of white fire was cloaking his entire shoulder. Terror and panic were negating all the suppression programs which his neural nanonics had doused his brain with. He stopped firing to flail at the fire with his free hand.

  The other rating slithered past Erick to fire back down the stairs. A flat circle of brilliant emerald light sprang over the floor of the stairwell, then started to rise as if it were a fluid. The flare of white fire withdrew below its surface. Shadows were just visible beneath it, darting about sinuously.

  The burned rating had collapsed onto the stairs. His partner was still shooting wildly down into the advancing cascade of light. The TIP pulses were turning to silver spears as they penetrated the surface, trailing bubbles of darkness.

  The next door was eight metres above Erick. The ratings would never last against the possessed, he knew, a few seconds at best. That few seconds might enable him to escape. The information he had was vital, it had to get to Trafalgar. Millions of innocents depended on it, on him. Millions.

  Against two.

  Erick turned and flung himself up the last few steps. In his ears he could hear a voice shouting: “… two of my crew are dead. Fried! Tina was fifteen years old!”

  He barged through the door, ten per cent gravity projecting him in a long flat arc above the corridor floor, threatening to crack his head against the ceiling. The persecuting noises and fog of green light shut off as the door slid shut behind him. He touched down, and powered himself in another long leap forwards along the corridor. Neural nanonics outlined his route for him as if it were a starship vector plot; a tube of orange neon triangles that flashed past. Turning right. Right again. Left.

  Gravity had become negligible when he heard the scream ahead of him.

  Fifteen metres to the axial chamber. That was all; fifteen bloody metres!

  And the possessed were ahead of him. Erick snatched at a grab hoop to halt his forwards flight. He didn’t have any weapons. He didn’t have any backup. He didn’t even have Madeleine and Desmond to call on, not anymore.

  More screams and pleas were trickling down the corridor from the axial chamber as the possessed chased down their victims. It wouldn’t be long before one of them checked this corridor.

  I have to get past. Have to!

  He called up the schematic again, studying the area around the axial chamber. Twenty seconds later, and he was at the airlock hatch.

  It was a big airlock, used to service the spaceport spindle. The prep room which led to it had dozens of lockers, all the equipment and support systems required to maintain space hardware, even five deactivated free-flying mechanoids.

  Erick put his decryption program into primary mode and set it to work cracking the first locker’s code. He stripped off his ship-suit as the lockers popped open one after the other. Physiological monitor programs confirmed everything he saw as the fabric parted. Pale fluid tinged with blood was leaking out of his medical nanonic packages where the edges were peeling from his flesh; a number of red LEDs on the ancillary modules were flashing to indicate system malfunctions. His new arm was only moving because of the reinforced impulses controlling the muscles.

  But he still functioned. That was all that mattered.

  It was the fifth locker which contained ten SII spacesuits. As soon as his body was sealed against the vacuum he hurried into the airlock, carrying a manoeuvring pack. He didn’t bother with the normal cycle, instead he tripped the emergency vent. Air rushed out. The outer hatch irised apart as he secured himself into the manoeuvring pack. Then the punchy gas jets fired, sending him wobbling past the hatch rim and out into space.

  André hated the idea of Shane Brandes even being inside the Villeneuve’s Revenge. And as for the man actually helping repair and reassemble the starship’s systems … merde. But as with most events in André’s life these days, he didn’t have a lot of choice. Since the showdown with Erick, Madeleine had retreated into her cabin and refused to respond to any entreaties. Desmond, at least, performed the tasks requested of him, though not with any obvious enthusiasm. And, insultingly, he would only work alone.

  That just left Shane Brandes to help André with the jobs that needed more than one p
air of hands. The Dechal’s ex-fusion engineer was anxious to please. He swore he had no allegiance to his previous captain, and harboured no grudges or ill will towards the crew of the Villeneuve’s Revenge. He was also prepared to work for little more than beer money, and he was a grade two technician. One could not afford to overlook gift horses.

  André was re-installing the main power duct in the wall of the lower deck lounge, which required Shane to feed the cable to him when instructed.

  Someone glided silently through the ceiling hatch, blocking the beam from the bank of temporary lights André had rigged up. André couldn’t see what he was doing. “Desmond! Why must …” He gasped in shock. “You!”

  “Hello again, Captain,” Kingsley Pryor said.

  “What are you doing here? How did you get out of prison?”

  “They set me free.”

  “Who?”

  “The possessed.”

  “Non,” André whispered.

  “Unfortunately so. Ethenthia has fallen.”

  The anti-torque tool André was holding seemed such a pitiful weapon. “Are you one of them now? You will never have my ship. I will overload the fusion generators.”

  “I’d really rather you didn’t,” Pryor datavised. “As you can see, I haven’t been possessed.”

  “How? They take everybody, women, children.”

  “I am one of Capone’s liaison officers. Even here, that carries enormous weight.”

  “And they let you go?”

  “Yes.”

  A heavy dread settled in André’s brain. “Where are they? Are they coming?” He datavised the flight computer to review the internal sensors (those remaining—curse it). As yet no systems were glitching.

  “No,” Pryor said. “They won’t come into the Villeneuve’s Revenge. Not unless I tell them to.”

  “Why are you doing this?” As if I didn’t know.

  “Because I want you to fly me away from here.”

  “And they’ll let us all go, just like that?”

  “As I said, Capone has a lot of influence.”

  “What makes you think I will take you? You blackmailed me before. It will be simple to throw you out of the airlock once we are free of Ethenthia.”

  Pryor smiled a dead man’s smile. “You’ve always done exactly as I wanted, Duchamp. You were always supposed to break away from Kursk.”

  “Liar.”

  “I have been given other, more important objectives than ensuring a third-rate ship with its fifth-rate crew stay loyal to the Organization. You have never had any free will since you arrived in the New California system. You still don’t. After all, you don’t really think there was only one bomb planted on board, do you?”

  Erick watched the Villeneuve’s Revenge lift from its cradle. The starship’s thermo-dump panels extended, ion thrusters took over from the verniers. It rose unhurriedly from the spaceport. When he switched his collar sensors to high resolution he could see the black hexagon on the fuselage where plate 8-92-K was missing.

  He didn’t understand it, Duchamp was making no attempt to flee. It was almost as if he was obeying traffic control, departing calmly along an assigned vector. Had the crew been possessed? Small loss to the Confederation.

  His collar sensors refocused on the docking bay he was approaching, a dark circular recess in the spaceport’s gridiron exterior. It was a maintenance bay, twice as wide as an ordinary bay. The clipper-class starship, Tigara, which sat on the docking cradle seemed unusually small in such surroundings.

  Erick fired his manoeuvring pack jets to take him down towards the Tigara. There were no lights on in the bay; all the gantries and multi-segment arms were folded back against the walls. Utility umbilicals were jacked in, and an airlock tube had mated with the starship’s fuselage; but apart from that there was no sign of any activity.

  The silicon hull showed signs of long-term vacuum exposure—faded lettering, micrometeorite impact scuffs, surface layer ablation stains—all indicating hull plates long overdue for replacement. He drifted over the blurred hexagons until he was above the EVA airlock, and datavised the hatch control processor to cycle and open. If anyone was on board, they would know about him now. But there were no datavised questions, no active sensor sweeps.

  The hatch slid open, and Erick glided inside.

  Clipper-class starships were designed to provide a speedy service between star systems, carrying small high-value cargoes. Consequently, as much of their internal volume as possible was given over to cargo space. There was only one life-support capsule, which accommodated an optimum crew of three. That was the principal reason Erick had chosen the Tigara. In theory, he would be able to fly it solo.

  Most of the starship systems were powered down. He kept his SII suit on as he moved through the two darkened lower decks to the bridge. As soon as he was secured in the captain’s acceleration couch he accessed the flight computer and ordered a full status review.

  It could have been a lot better. Tigara was in the maintenance bay for a complete refit. One of the fusion generators was inoperative, two energy patterning nodes were dead, heat exchangers were operating dangerously short of required levels, innumerable failsoft components had been allowed to decay below their safety margins.

  None of the maintenance work had even been started. The owners hadn’t been prepared to commit that much money while the quarantine was in force.

  Dear Lord, Erick thought, the Villeneuve’s Revenge was in better condition than this.

  He datavised the flight computer to disengage the bay’s airlock tube, then initiated a flight prep procedure. The Tigara took a long time to come on-line. At every stage he had to order backup sequences to take over, or override safety programs, or re-route power supplies. He didn’t even bother with the life-support functions, all he wanted was power in the energy patterning nodes and secondary drive tubes.

  With a fusion generator active, he ordered some sensor clusters to deploy. An image of the bay filled his mind, overlaid with fragile status graphics. He scanned the electromagnetic spectrum for any traffic, but there was only the background hash of cosmic radiation. Nobody was saying anything to anybody. What he wanted was someone asking Ethenthia what was happening, why they’d gone off the air. A ship close by that could help.

  Nothing.

  Erick fired the emergency release pins which the docking cradle’s load clamps were gripping. Verniers sent out a hot deluge of gas which shimmered across the bay’s walls, shaking loose blankets of thermal insulation from the gantries. Tigara rose a metre off its cradle, straining at the nest of umbilical hoses jacked into its rear fuselage.

  The snapfree couplings began to break, sending the hoses writhing.

  The starship was low on cryogenic fuel; he couldn’t afford to waste delta-V reserve aligning himself on an ideal vector. The astrogation program produced a series of options for him.

  None of them were what he’d been hoping for. So what else was new?

  The last of the umbilicals broke, and the Tigara lurched up out of the bay. Erick ordered the flight computer to extend the communications array and align it on Golmo and the Edenist habitats orbiting there. Sensor clusters began to sink down into their recesses as energy poured into the patterning nodes.

  The flight computer alerted him that an SD platform was sweeping the ship with its radar. Then it relayed a signal from traffic control into his neural nanonics.

  “Is that you, Erick? We think it’s you. Who else is this stupidly ballsy? This is Emonn Verona, Erick, and I’m asking you: Don’t do it. That ship is completely fucked; I’ve got the CAB logs in front of me. It can’t fly. You’re only going to hurt yourself, or worse.”

  Erick transmitted a single message to Golmo, then retracted the communications array down into its jump configuration. The SD platform had locked on. Some of the patterning nodes were producing very strange readings in the prejump diagnostic run-through. CAB monitor programs flashed up jump proscription warnings. He switched them
off.

  “Game over, Erick. Either return to the docking bay or you join our comrades in the beyond. You don’t want that. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Right? Of all people, you must believe that.”

  Erick ordered the flight computer to activate the jump sequence.

  Chapter 06

  The hellhawk Socratous was a flat V-shaped mechanical spacecraft with a grey-white fuselage made up from hundreds of different component casings, a veritable jigsaw of mismatched equipment, not all of it astronautic.

  Two long engine nacelles were affixed to the stern, transparent tubes filled with a heavy opaque gas which fluoresced its way through the spectrum in a three-minute cycle.

  It was an impressive sight as it slid down out of the starfield for a landing on Valisk’s docking ledge. Had it been real, it would be capable of taking on an entire squadron of Confederation Navy ships with its exotic weapons.

  The illusion popped as a crew bus rolled across the ledge towards it.

  Socratous reverted to a muddy-brown egg-shape with a crew toroid wrapped around its midsection. Rubra could just see two small ridges on the rear quarter which hadn’t been there before. They corresponded roughly with the nacelles of the fantasy starship. He wondered if the tumours would be benign. Did the energistic ability prevent metastasis from exploding inside possessed bodies as the wished-for changes became less illusion and cells multiplied to obey the will of the dominant soul? It seemed an awfully complex requirement for such a crude power, modifying the molecular structure of DNA and taming the mitosis process. The apparent milieux of their energistic ability was blasting holes through solid walls and contorting matter into new shapes; he’d never seen any demonstrations of subtlety.

  Perhaps the whole possession problem would burn itself out in an orgy of irreversible cancer. Few of the returned souls were content with the physical appearance of the bodies they had claimed.

  How superbly ironic, Rubra thought, that vanity could be the undoing of entities who had acquired near-godlike powers. It was also a dangerous prospect, once they realized what was happening. Those people remaining free would become even more valuable, the attempts to possess them ever more desperate. And Edenism would be the last castle to besiege.