The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

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  Serina’s bitek processor block converted her affinity voice into a straight datavise. “Captain Thakrar? Are you receiving this, sir? We’re Edenists from Golomo; we received your message.” The ice-encrusted figure didn’t move. She waited a moment, then made her way towards him. <>

  They all saw it at the same time: ancillary medical modules anchored to Thakrar by small plastic tubes which burrowed through the SII suit material. Two of the modules had red LEDs shining under their coating of frost, the others were completely dark. The tubes had all frozen solid.

  <> Syrinx instructed. <>

  Caucus was waiting with a stretcher right outside the MSV’s airlock.

  Oenone had stopped generating a gravity field in the crew torus so that Serina and Oxley could tow Thakrar’s inert form through the cramped little tube without too much difficulty. He was shedding droplets as they went, the layer of frost melting in the warm air. They got him onto the stretcher, and Oenone immediately reinstated gravity in the torus, tugging the crew down to the decking again. Oxley held on to the dead medical modules as they raced around the central corridor to the sick bay.

  <> Caucus told Serina as the stretcher was wheeled under the diagnostic scanner. She issued the order to the suit’s control processor, which examined the external environment before obeying. The black silicon retreated from Thakrar’s skin, sliding from his extremities to glide smoothly toward his throat. Dark fluids began to stain the stretcher. Syrinx wrinkled her nose up at the smell, putting a hand over her nose.

  <> Oenone asked.

  <>

  <>

  <>

  <>

  <>

  <>

  <> she recited; in her mind it was Wing-Tsit Chong’s voice which spoke the phrase. <>

  Caucus winced at the sight which was unveiled. Thakrar’s lower right arm was new, that much was obvious. The medical packages wrapped around it had shifted, opening large gashes in the translucent immature skin. AT muscles lay exposed, their drying membranes acquiring a nasty septic tint. Scars and skin grafts on the legs and torso were a livid red against the snowy skin. The remainder of his packages appeared to have withered, green surfaces crinkling up like aging rubber, pulling the edges back from the flesh they were supposed to heal. Sour nutrient fluids dripped out of torn inlet plugs.

  For a moment, all Caucus could do was stare in a kind of revolted dismay.

  He simply didn’t know where to start.

  Erick Thakrar’s bruised eyelids slowly opened. What alarmed Syrinx the most was the lack of confusion they showed.

  “Can you hear me, Erick?” Caucus said in an overloud voice. “You’re perfectly safe now. We’re Edenists, we rescued you. Now please don’t try and move.”

  Erick opened his mouth, lips quivering.

  “We’re going to treat you in just a moment. Are your axon blocks functional?”

  “No!” It was very clear, very determined.

  Caucus picked up an anaesthetic spray from the bench. “Is the program faulty, or have your neural nanonics been damaged?”

  Erick brought his good arm around and pressed his knuckles into Caucus’s back. “No, you will not touch me,” he datavised. “I have a nerve burst implant. I will kill him.”

  The spray fell from Caucus’s hand to clatter on the deck.

  Syrinx could barely credit what was happening. Her mind instinctively opened to Caucus, offering support to his own frightened thoughts. All the crew were doing the same.

  “Captain Thakrar, I am Captain Syrinx, this is my voidhawk Oenone. Please deactivate your implant. Caucus was not going to harm you.”

  Erick laughed, an unsteady gulp which shook his whole body. “I know that. I don’t want to be treated. I’m not going back, not out there. Not again.”

  “Nobody is going to send you anywhere.”

  “They will. They always do. You do, you navy people. Always one final mission, one little bit of vital information to collect, then it will all be over. It never is, though. Never.”

  “I understand.”

  “Liar.”

  She gestured to the outlines of the medical packages visible through her ship-tunic. “I do have some knowledge of what you have been through. The possessed had me for a brief time.”

  Erick gave her a scared glance. “They’ll win. If you saw what they can do, you’ll know that. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “I think there is. I think there must be a solution.”

  “We’ll die. We’ll become them. They’re us, all of us.”

  <>

  Syrinx was aware of Edwin, out in the central corridor, a maser carbine raised. The blank muzzle was pointing at Erick Thakrar’s back. A feed from the weapon’s targeting processor showed it was aimed precisely on Thakrar’s spinal column. The coherent microwaves would sever his nerves before he could use the implant.

  <> she said. <> For the first time in a long time, she was angry at an Adamist for being just that, an Adamist. Closed mind, locked up tight in its skull. No way of knowing what others were thinking, never really knowing love, kindness, or sympathy. She couldn’t take the simple truth to him directly. Not the easy way.

  “What do you want us to do?” she asked.

  “I have information,” Erick datavised. “Strategic information.”

  “We know. Your message to Golomo said it was important.”

  “I will sell it to you.”

  There was a collective burst of surprise from the crew.

  “Okay,” Syrinx said. “If I have the price on board, you will have it.”

  “Zero-tau.” Erick’s face became pleading. “Tell me you have a pod on board. For God’s sake.”

  “We have several.”

  “Good. I want to be put inside. They can’t get to you in there.”

  “All right, Erick. We’ll put you in zero-tau.”

  “Forever.”

  “What?”

  “Forever. I want to stay in zero-tau forever.”

  “Erick …”

  “I thought about this; I thought about it a lot, it can work. Really it can. Your habitats can resist the possessed. Adamist starships don’t work for them, not properly. Capone is the only one who has any military ships, and he won’t be able to keep them going for long. They’ll need maintenance, spares. He’ll run out eventually. Then there won’t be any more invasions, only infiltrations. And you won’t let your guard down. We will, Adamists will. But not you. In a hundred years from now there will be nothing left of our race, except for you. Your culture will live forever. You can keep me in zero-tau forever.”

  “There’s no need for this, Erick. We can beat them.”

  “No,” he brayed. “Can’t can’t can’t.” The effort of speaking made him cough painfully. His breathing was very heavy now. “I’m not going to die,” he datavised. “I’m not going to be one of them; not like little Tina. Dear little Tina. God, she was only fifteen. Now she’s dead. But you don’t die in zero-tau. You’re safe. It’s the only way. No life, but no beyond, either. That’s the answer.” Very slowly, he took his hand away from Caucus. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have hurt you. Please, you have to do this for me. I can tell you where Capone is going to invade next. I can give you the coordinate of an antimatter station. Just give me your word, as an Edenist, as a voidhawk captain; your word that you will take my pod to a habitat, and that your culture will always keep me in zero-tau
. Your word, please, it’s so little to ask.”

  <> she asked her crew.

  Their minds merged, awash with compassion and distress. The answer, she felt, was inevitable.

  Syrinx walked over and took Erick’s cold, damp hand in hers. “All right, Erick,” she said softly. Wishing once more for a single second of genuine communication. “We’ll put you in zero-tau. But I want you to promise me something in return.”

  Erick’s eyes had closed. His breathing was very shallow now as he datavised several files into the toroid’s net. Caucus was exuding concern at the read-out from the diagnostic scanner. <> he urged.

  “What?” Erick asked.

  “I want your permission to take you out of zero-tau if we find a proper solution to all this.”

  “You won’t.”

  “But if we do!”

  “This is stupid.”

  “No it isn’t. Edenism was founded on hope, hope for the future, the belief that life can get better. If you have faith in our culture to preserve you for eternity, you must believe in that. Jesus, Erick, you have to believe in something.”

  “You are a very strange Edenist.”

  “I am a very typical Edenist. The rest just don’t know it yet.”

  “Very well, deal.”

  “I’ll talk to you soon, Erick. I’ll be the one who wakes you up and tells you.”

  “At the end of the universe, perhaps. Until then …”

  Chapter 08

  Alkad Mzu hadn’t seen snow since she left Garissa. Back in those days she’d never bothered indexing a memory of winter in her neural nanonics.

  Why waste capacity? The season came every year, much to Peter’s delight and her grudging acceptance.

  The oldest human story of all: I never knew what I had until I lost it.

  Now, from her penthouse in the Mercedes Hotel, she watched it falling over Harrisburg, a silent cascade as inexorable as it was gentle. The sight made her want to go outside and join the children she could see capering about in the park opposite.

  The snow had begun during the night, just after they landed at the spaceport, and hadn’t let up in the seven hours since. Down on the streets tempers were getting shorter as the traffic slowed and the pavements turned slippery with the slush. Ancient municipal mechanoids, backed up by teams of men with shovels, struggled to clear the deep drifts which blockaded the main avenues.

  The sight didn’t exactly bode well. If the Tonala nation’s economy was so desperate that they used human labour to clean the streets of their capital …

  So far Alkad had managed to keep her objective in focus. She was proud of that; after every obstacle thrown in her way she had proved herself resourceful enough to keep the hope alive. Even back on the Tekas she’d thought she would soon be retrieving the Alchemist.

  Nyvan had done much to wreck her mood and her confidence. There were starships docked at the orbiting asteroids, and the local astroengineering companies could probably provide her with the equipment she wanted; yet the decay and suspicion native to this world made her doubt. The task was slipping from her grasp once more. Difficulties were piling up against her, and now she had no more fallback positions. They were on their own now: she, Voi, Lodi, and Eriba, with money as their only resource. True to his word, Prince Lambert had taken the Tekas out of orbit as soon as they’d disembarked. He said he was flying to Mondul, it had a strong navy, and he knew people there.

  Alkad resisted accessing her time function. Prince Lambert must have made his third ZTT jump by now, and another potential security hazard was no more.

  “That’s a new one,” Eriba announced. He was stretched out along the settee, bare feet dangling over the armrest. It meant he could just see the holoscreen on the far wall. A local news show was playing.

  “What is?” Alkad asked him. He had been consuming news ever since they arrived, switching between the holoscreen and the communications net’s information cores.

  “Tonala has just ordered every border to be closed and sealed. The cabinet claims that New Georgia’s actions are overtly hostile, and other nations can’t be trusted. Apparently, the SD networks are still blasting each other with electronic warfare pulses.”

  Alkad grimaced. That clash had been going on when the Tekas arrived. “I wonder how that affects us? Are those the land borders, or are they going to prohibit spaceflight as well?”

  “They haven’t said.”

  The door chimed as it admitted Voi. She strode into the big living room shrugging out of her thick navy-blue coat and shaking grubby droplets of melted snow on the white carpet. “We’ve got an appointment for two o’clock this afternoon. I told the Industry Ministry we were here to buy defence equipment for the Dorados, and they recommended the Opia company. Lodi ran a check through the local data cores, and they own two asteroid industrial stations along with a starship service subsidiary.”

  “That sounds promising,” Alkad said guardedly. She had left all the organization to Voi. The agencies would be looking for her; zipping around town would be asking for trouble. As it was, using the Daphine Kigano passport when they arrived was a risk, but she didn’t have any others prepared.

  “Promising? Mary, it’s spot on. What do you want, the Kulu Corporation?”

  “I wasn’t criticising.”

  “Well it sounded like it.”

  Voi had slowly reverted to her original temper during the voyage. Alkad wasn’t sure if the waspy girl was recovering from her father’s death or reacting to it.

  “Has Lodi found out if there are any suitable starships for hire?”

  “He’s still checking,” Voi said. “So far he’s located over fifty commercial vehicles stranded insystem due to the quarantine. Most of them are docked in low orbit stations and the asteroid ports. He’s running performance comparisons against the requirements you gave us. I just hope he can find us one at a Tonala facility. Did you hear about the border restrictions? They’re even closing down net interface points with the other nations.”

  “That’s a minor problem compared to the one we’ll have crewing the ship.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our flight is not the kind of job you normally give mercenaries. I’m not sure money will guarantee loyalty for this mission.”

  “Why didn’t you say so, then? Mary, Alkad, how can I help if you keep complaining after the fact? Be more cooperative.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind,” Alkad said mildly.

  “Is there anything else we should know?”

  “I can’t think of anything, but you’ll be the first to be told if I do.”

  “All right. Now, I’ve arranged for a car to take us to Opia’s offices. The security company which supplied it is also providing bodyguards. They will be here in an hour.”

  “Good thinking,” Eriba said.

  “Elementary thinking,” Voi shot back. “We’re foreigners who have arrived in the middle of an Assembly-imposed quarantine. That’s hardly an optimum low-visibility scenario. I want to downgrade our risk to a minimum.”

  “Bodyguards ought to help, then,” Alkad said prosaically. “You should go and take a rest before we visit Opia. You haven’t slept since we landed. I’ll need you to be fresh for the negotiations.”

  Voi gave a distrustful nod, and went into her bedroom.

  Alkad and Eriba exchanged a glance and smiled simultaneously.

  “Did she really say low-visibility scenario?” he asked.

  “Sounded like it to me.”

  “Mary, that detox therapy was a bad idea.”

  “What was she like before?”

  “About the same,” he admitted.

  Alkad turned back to the window and the snow softening the city skyline.

  The door chimed again.

  “Did you order something from room service?” she asked Eriba.

  “No.” He gave the door a worried look. “Do you think it’s the bodyguards Voi hired?”

  “They’re very e
arly, then; and if they’re professional they would datavise us first.” She picked up her shoulder bag and selected one of the devices inside. When she datavised the penthouse’s net processor to access the camera in the corridor outside there was no response. The cut crystal wall lights began to flicker. “Stop!” she told Eriba, who had drawn his laser pistol. “That won’t work against the possessed.”

  “Do you think …”

  He trailed off just as Voi burst back into the lounge. She was gripping a maser carbine tight in her hand.

  The penthouse’s entrance door swung open. Three people were standing behind it, their features lost in the darkened corridor.

  “Do not come in,” Alkad said loudly. “My weapons will work, even against you.”

  “Are you quite sure, Doctor?”

  Sections of Alkad’s neural nanonics were dropping out. She datavised a primer code at the small sphere she held in her hand before she lost even that ability. “Fairly sure. Do you want to be the first experimental subject?”

  “You haven’t changed; you were always so confident you were right.”

  Alkad frowned. It was a female voice, but she couldn’t place it. She didn’t have the processing power left in her neural nanonics to run an audio comparison program. “Do I know you?”

  “You used to. May we come in, please? We really aren’t here to harm you.”

  Since when did the possessed start saying please? Alkad thought the circumstances out and said: “It only needs one of you to speak. And if you’re not a threat, stop glitching our electronics.”

  “That last request is difficult, but we will try.”

  Alkad’s neural nanonics started to come back on-line. She quickly re-established full control over the device.

  “I’ll call the police,” Voi datavised. “They can send a Tac Squad. The possessed won’t know until it’s too late.”

  “No. If they wanted to hurt us, they would have done it by now. I think we’ll hear what she has to say.”

  “You shouldn’t expose yourself to a negative personal safety context. You are the only link we have to the Alchemist.”