The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Oh, shut up,” Alkad said aloud. “All right, come in.”

  The young woman who walked into the penthouse was in her early twenties.

  Her skin was several shades lighter than Alkad’s, though her hair was jet black, and her face was rounded by a little too much cellulite for her to be pretty; it fixed her expression to one of continual shy resentment.

  She wore a long tartan-print summer dress, with a kilt-style skirt that had been the fashion on Garissa the year of the genocide.

  Alkad ran a visual comparison program search through her memory cells.

  “Gelai? Gelai, is that really you?”

  “My soul, yes,” she said. “Not my body. This is just an illusion, of course.” For a moment the solid mirage vanished, revealing a teenaged Oriental girl with fresh jagged scars on her legs.

  “Mother Mary!” Alkad croaked. She’d hoped the tales of torture and atrocity were just Confederation propaganda.

  Gelai’s usual profile returned. The flicker of exposure was so fast, it made Alkad’s mind want to believe Gelai’s was the true shape; the abused girl was something decency rejected.

  “What happened?” Alkad asked.

  “You know her?” Voi demanded indignantly.

  “Oh, yes. Gelai was one of my students.”

  “Not one of your best, I’m sorry to say.”

  “You were doing all right, as I recall.”

  “This enhances stress relief nicely,” Voi said. “But you haven’t told us why you’re here.”

  “I was killed in the planet-buster attack,” Gelai said. “The university campus was only five hundred kilometres from one of the strikes. The earthquake levelled it. I was in my residence hall when it hit. The thermal flash set half of the building alight. Then the quake arrived; Mary alone knows how powerful it was. I was lucky, I suppose. I died in the first hour. That was reasonably quick. Compared to a lot of them, anyway.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Alkad said. She had rarely felt so worthless; confronted by the pitiful evidence of the greatest failure it was possible to have.

  “I failed you. I failed everybody.”

  “At least you were trying,” Gelai said. “I didn’t approve at the time. I took part in all the peace demonstrations. We held vigils outside the continental parliament, sang hymns. But the media said we were cowards and traitors. People actually spat on us in the streets. I kept going, though, kept protesting. I thought if we could just get our government to talk to the Omutans, then the military would stop attacking each other. Mary, how naïve.”

  “No, Gelai, you weren’t naïve, you were brave. If enough of us had stood for that principle, then maybe the government would have tried harder to find a peaceful solution.”

  “But they didn’t, did they?”

  Alkad traced Gelai’s cheeks with her finger, touching the past she’d thought was so far behind her, the cause of the present. Feeling the ersatz skin was all she needed to know she had been right to do what she’d done thirty years ago. “I was going to protect you. I thought I’d sold my very soul so that you would all be safe. I didn’t care about that. I thought you were worth the sacrifice; all you bright young minds so full of the silliest hopes and proudest ideals. I would have done it, too, for you. Slain Omuta’s star, the biggest crime in the galaxy. And now all that’s left of us are the ones like these.” She waved a hand limply at Voi and Eriba. “Just a few thousand kids living in rocks that mess with their heads. I don’t know which of you suffered the worst fate. At least you had a taste of what our people might have achieved if we’d lived. This new generation are just poor remnants of what they could’ve been.”

  Gelai puffed up her lips and stared firmly at the floor. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I came here. Warn you or kill you.”

  “And now?”

  “I didn’t realize why you were doing it, why you went off to help the military. You were this aloof professor that we were all a bit in awe of, you were so smart. We respected you so much, I never gave you human motives, I thought you were a lump of chilled bitek on legs. I see I was wrong, though I still think you are wrong to have built anything as evil as the Alchemist.”

  Alkad stiffened. “How do you know about the Alchemist?”

  “We can see this universe from the beyond, you know. It’s very faint, but it’s there. I watched the Confederation Navy trying to get people off Garissa before the radiation killed them. I’ve seen the Dorados, too. I even saw you a few times in Tranquillity. Then there are the memories that we tear from each other. Some soul I encountered knew about you.

  Perhaps it was more than one, I don’t know. I never kept count; you don’t, not when you do that hundreds of times a day. So that’s how I know what you built, although no one knows what it is. And I’m not the only one, Doctor; Capone knows about it too, and quite a few other possessed.”

  “Oh, Mother Mary,” Alkad groaned.

  “They’ve shouted into the beyond, you see. Promised every soul bodies if they cooperated in finding you.”

  “You mean the souls are watching us now?” Voi asked.

  Gelai smiled dreamily. “Yes.”

  “Fuck!”

  Mzu glanced at the penthouse’s door, which was closed on Gelai’s two companions. “How many possessed are on Nyvan?”

  “Several thousand. It will belong to us within a week.”

  “That doesn’t leave us much time,” Alkad said.

  Voi and Eriba were starting to look panic-stricken.

  “Forget the Alchemist,” Voi said heatedly. “We must get ourselves outsystem.”

  “Yes. But we have a few days grace. That gives us time to be certain about our escape, we can’t afford a mistake now. We’ll charter a ship as we always intended; Opia’s service subsidiary can do that for us. But I don’t think there will be enough time to have the carrier built. Ah well, if it comes to it, we can always load the Alchemist onto a combat wasp.”

  “You can fit it on a combat wasp?” Voi was suddenly intrigued. “Just how big is it?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  The tall girl scowled.

  “Gelai, will you warn us if any of the possessed come close?”

  “Yes, Doctor, we’ll do that much. For a couple of days anyway, just while you find a ship. Are you really going to use the Alchemist after all this time?”

  “Yes, I am. I’ve never been as sure about it as I am now.”

  “I don’t know if I want you to, or not. I can never accept that revenge wrought on such a scale is right. What can it ever achieve except make a few bitter old refugees feel better? But if you don’t use it against Omuta, then someone else will take it from you and fire it at another star. So if it must be fired, then I suppose I’d rather it was Omuta.” Naked distress swarmed over her face. “Funny how we all lose our principles at the end, isn’t it?”

  “You haven’t,” Alkad told her. “Killed by the Omutans, thirty years in the beyond, and you would still spare them. The society that can produce you is a miracle. Its destruction was a sin beyond anything our race had committed before.”

  “Except perhaps possession.”

  Alkad slipped her arms around the distraught girl and hugged her. “It will be all right. Somehow, this dreadful conflict will finish up without us destroying ourselves. Mother Mary wouldn’t condemn us to the beyond forever, you’ll see.”

  Gelai broke away to study Mzu’s face. “You think so?”

  “Strange as it seems for a semi-atheist, yes. But I know the structure of the universe better than most, I’ve glimpsed order in there, Gelai. There has always been a solution to the problems we’ve posed. Always. This won’t be any different.”

  “I’ll help you,” Gelai said. “I really will. We’ll make sure all three of you get off the planet unharmed.”

  Mzu kissed her forehead. “Thank you. Now what about the two who came with you, are they Garissans as well?”

  “Ngong and Omain? Yes. But not from the sam

e time as me.”

  “I’d like to meet them. Ask them to come in, then we can all decide what to do next.”

  “What bloody high life?” Joshua challenged. “Listen, I risked everything—balls included—to earn the money to refit Lady Mac. You wouldn’t catch me crawling to the banks and finance companies like you did. True Calverts are independent. I’m independent.”

  “How we established ourselves was due entirely to circumstances,” Liol retorted. “My only prospect came from the Dorados Development Agency grants. And by God did I take it. Quantum Serendipity was built up from nothing. I’m self-made and proud of it, I wasn’t born with your kind of privileges.”

  “Privileges? All Dad left me was a broken down starship and eighteen years unpaid docking fees. Hardly a plus factor.”

  “Crap. Just living in Tranquillity is a privilege which half of the Confederation aspires to. A plutocrat’s paradise floating in the middle of a xenoc gold mine. You were never not going to make money. All you had to do was stick your hand out to grab a nugget or two.”

  “They tried to kill me in that fucking Ruin Ring.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have been so sloppy, should you? Earning your wealth is always only half of the problem. Hanging on to it, now that’s tough. You should have taken precautions.”

  “Absolutely,” Joshua purred. “Well I’ve certainly learned that lesson. I’m hanging on to what I’ve got now.”

  “I’m not going to stop you from captaining Lady Mac. But …”

  “If it’s of any interest,” Sarha announced loudly. “We’ve emerged in the middle of a hostile electronic environment. I’ve got two of Nyvan’s SD networks asking for our flight authorization at the same time they’re saturating our sensors with overload impulses.”

  Joshua grunted disparagingly, and returned his attention to the datavised displays from the flight computer. He chided himself for the lapse, it wasn’t like him not to pay attention to the jump emergence sequence. But when you’ve got a so-called brother with a lofriction conscience …

  Sarha was right. Space between Nyvan and its orbiting asteroids was being subjected to a variety of powerful electronic disruption effects. Lady Mac’s sensors and discrimination programs were sophisticated enough to pierce most of the clutter; Nyvan’s SD networks were using archaic techniques, it was the sheer wattage behind them that was causing the trouble.

  With Sarha’s help, Joshua managed to locate the network command centres and transmit Lady Mac’s standard identification code, followed by their official Tranquillity flight authorization. Only Tonala and Nangkok responded, giving him permission to approach the planet. New Georgia’s SD network, based at Jesup, remained silent.

  “Keep trying them,” Joshua told Sarha. “We’ll head in anyway. Beaulieu, how are you doing tracing the Tekas?”

  “Give me a minute more, Captain, please. This planet has a very strange communications architecture, and their usual interfaces seem to be down today. I expect that is a result of the network barrage. I am having to access several different national nets to find out if the ship arrived.”

  On the other side of the bridge from the cosmonik, Ashly snorted bitterly. “Boneheads, nothing on this damned world ever changes. They always brag about how different they are to each other; I never noticed myself.”

  “When were you here last?” Dahybi asked.

  “About 2400, I think.”

  Joshua watched Liol slowly turn his head to look at the pilot; his eyebrow was raised in quizzical dissension.

  “When?” Liol asked.

  “Twenty-four hundred. I remember it quite well. King Aaron was still on Kulu’s throne. There was some kind of dispute between Nyvan’s countries because the Kingdom had sold one of them some old warships.”

  “Right,” Liol said. He was waiting for the punch line.

  Lady Mac’s crew propagated dispassionate expressions right across the bridge.

  “I’ve found a reference,” Beaulieu said. “The Tekas arrived yesterday. According to Tonala’s public information core it had an official flight authorization issued by the Dorados council. It docked at one of their national low orbit stations, the Spirit of Freedom, then departed an hour later; with a flight plan filed for Mondul. Four people disembarked, Lodi, Voi, Eriba, and Daphine Kigano.”

  “Jackpot,” Joshua said. He datavised traffic control for an approach vector to the Spirit of Freedom. After the eighth attempt, traffic control confirmed contact through the jamming and gave him a vector.

  Spirit of Freedom was Tonala’s main low-orbit civil spaceport, orbiting seven hundred and fifty kilometres above the equator. A free-floating hexagonal grid two kilometres in diameter and a hundred metres thick.

  Tanks, lounges, corridor tubes, thermal-dump panels, and docking bays were sandwiched between the framework of grey-white alloy struts, tapering spires extended out from each corner, tipped with a cluster of fusion drive tubes to hold the structure’s attitude stable.

  As well as a port for commercial starships and cargo spaceplanes, it was also the flight hub for the huge tugs which brought down the metal mined from Floreso asteroid. Several of the heavy-duty craft were keeping station alongside the Spirit of Freedom as Lady Mac approached; open lattice pyramids with a clump of ten big fusion drive tubes at the tip, and load attachment points at each corner.

  They were designed to ferry down four ironbergs apiece. Seventy-five thousand tonnes of spongesteel: incredibly pure metal foamed with nitrogen while it was still in its molten state. Floreso’s industrial teams solidified it into a squat pear shape, with a base that was scalloped by twenty-five gently rounded ridges. After that, the ironbergs were attached to the tugs for a three-week flight, spiralling down into a slightly elliptical two-hundred-kilometre orbit. For the last two days of the voyage, electric motors in the load attachment points would spin them up to one rotation per minute. In effect, they became the biggest gyroscopes in the galaxy, their precession keeping them perfectly aligned as they flew free along the final stretch of their trajectory.

  Injecting the ironbergs into the atmosphere was an inordinately difficult operation for the tugs, requiring extreme precision. Each ironberg had to be at the correct attitude, and following its designated flight path exactly, so that its blunt base could strike the upper atmosphere at an angle which would create the maximum aerobrake force. Once its velocity started to drop off, gravity would pull it down in a steepening curve, which created yet more drag, accelerating the whole process. Hypersonic airflow around the scalloped base would also perpetuate the spin, maintaining stability, keeping it on track.

  If everything went well—if the asteroid crews had got the internal mass distribution balanced right, if the injection point was correct—the ironberg would be aerobraked to subsonic velocity about five kilometres above the ocean. After that, nothing else mattered, no force in the universe could affect that much mass hanging in the sky in a standard gravity field. It fell straight down at terminal velocity to splash into the water amid an explosion of steam that resembled the mushroom cloud of a small nuclear bomb. And there it bobbed among the waves, its foamed interior making it buoyant enough to float without any aids.

  When all four ironbergs from one tug had splashed down, the recovery fleet would sail in. The ironbergs would be towed into a foundry port ready to be broken up and fed to Tonala’s eager mills. An abundant supply of cheap metal, obtained without any ecological disturbance, was a healthy asset to the nation’s economy.

  So not even the chaotic electronic war being fought between the SD networks was allowed to interrupt the operation. The tugs around the Spirit of Freedom continued to receive their regular maintenance schedule. SII-suited engineering crews crawled over the long struts, while MSVs and tankers drifted in close attendance. The service craft were the only other vehicles flying apart from Lady Mac. Joshua had a trouble-free approach, making excellent time. As they flew over the station, sensors showed him eleven other starships nestled snugly in the docking bays.

  The inspection from port officers was one he was expecting; checking everyone on board for possession, then going through the life-support capsules and the two ancillary craft with electronic warfare blocks to make sure there were no unexplained glitches. Once they’d been cleared, Joshua received an official datavised welcome from Tonala’s Industry Ministry, with an invitation to discuss his requirements and how local firms could help. They were also authorized to fly Lady Mac’s spaceplane down to Harrisburg.

  “I’ll take a pair of serjeants, Dahybi, and Melvyn,” Joshua announced.

  “You too, Ashly, but you stay in the spaceplane in case we need evacuating. Sarha, Beaulieu, I want Lady Mac maintained at flight-ready status. Same procedure as before, we may have to leave in a hurry, so keep monitoring groundside, I want to be told if and when the crap hits the fan.”

  “I can come with you,” Liol said. “I know how to handle myself if it gets noisy down there.”

  “Do you trust my command judgement?”

  “Of course I do, Josh.”

  “Good. Then you stay up here. Because my judgement is that you won’t follow my orders.”

  It was dark in Jesup’s biosphere cavern now, a permanent joyless twilight, and cold. Quinn had ordered it so. The solartubes strung out along the axial gantry were producing an enfeebled opalescent glow, whose sole purpose was to show people where they were going.

  As a result, an impossible autumn had visited the lush tropical vegetation. After a futile search twisting around on their stems in search of light, the leaves were yellowing. In many places they had begun to fall, their edges crisping black from the bitter air. Already the neat filigree of pretty streams was clogging with soggy mush, overspill channels were blocked, pools were flooding the surrounding ground.

  The experience of accelerated decay was one which Quinn savoured. It demonstrated his power over his surroundings. No reality dysfunction this, making things different as long as you didn’t blink. This was solid change, irreversible. Potent.

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