The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “All right! Damn it. But fusion drive authority only. You’re not jumping us anywhere.”

  “Fine.” And the dream finally happened, just as he’d always known it would. Lady Mac’s flight computer opened to him, and all the systems were on-line, filling his mind with glorious wing-sweeps of colour. They fitted just perfectly.

  He designated the procedure menus he needed, bringing the thrusters and drive tubes up to active flight status. Beaulieu and Sarha were working smoothly together, activating the remaining on board systems. Umbilicals retracted from the fuselage, and the cradle started to elevate them out of the shallow docking bay. The viewfield which the flight computer was datavising at him expanded as more of Lady Mac’s sensor clusters lifted above the rim. Three bright, expanding stars were ringed in antagonistic red as they crept up over the curvature of the brilliant blue horizon.

  Liol fired the verniers to take them off the cradle, not caring if the other two could see the stupid smile on his face. For a moment, all the envy and bitterness returned, the irrational pique he’d felt when he first learned that Joshua existed, a usurper brother who was captaining the ship which was rightfully his. This was the rush that belonged to him. The power to traverse the galaxy.

  One day, he and Joshua were going to have to settle this.

  But not today. Today was when he proved himself to his brother and the crew. Today was when he started living the life he knew belonged to him.

  When they were a hundred metres above the docking bay, Liol fired the secondary drive, selecting a third of a gee acceleration. Lady Mac immediately veered off the vector he’d plotted. He pumped a fast correction order into the flight computer, deflecting the exhaust angle.

  Overcompensating. “Wowshit!” The acceleration couch webbing gripped him tighter.

  “The spaceplane hangar is empty,” Sarha said witheringly. “That means our mass distribution is off centre. Perhaps you’d care to bring the level seven balance calibration programs on-line?”

  “Sorry.” He searched desperately around the flight control menus and found the right program. Lady Mac juddered back onto her original vector.

  “Joshua is going to throw me out of the airlock,” Sarha decided.

  It had taken some time for Lodi to get used to having Omain sitting in the hotel suite with him. A possessed for Mary’s sake! But Omain turned out to be quiet and polite (a little sad, to be honest), keeping out of the way. Lodi slowly managed to relax, though this must surely be the strangest episode in his life. Nothing was ever going to out-weird this.

  At first he had jumped every time Omain even spoke. Now, he was relatively cool about the whole scene. His processor blocks were spread out over one of the tables, enabling him to cast trawl programs into the net streams, fishing out relevant information. It was what he did best, so Voi had left him to it while she, Mzu, and Eriba went to the Opia company. His main concern at the moment was monitoring the civil situation now the government had closed the borders. Voi wanted to make sure they would be allowed to get back into orbit. So far, it looked as if they could. There had even been one piece of good luck, the first since they arrived at Nyvan. A starship called Lady Macbeth had docked at the Spirit of Freedom, and it was exactly the type of ship Mzu wanted.

  “They are asking for her,” Omain said.

  “Huh?” Lodi cancelled the datavised displays, blinking away the afterimage the graphics left in his mind.

  “Capone’s people are in orbit,” Omain said. “They know Mzu is here. They are asking for her.”

  “You mean you can tell what’s going on in orbit? Mary! I can’t, not with all the interference from the SD platforms.”

  “Not tell, exactly. This is whispered gossip, distorted by the many souls it has passed through. I have only the vaguest notion of the facts.”

  Lodi was fascinated. Once he began talking, Omain knew some seriously interesting facts. He’d lived on Garissa, and was quite willing to share his impressions. (Lodi had never summoned the courage to ask Mzu what their old world was like.) From Omain’s melancholic descriptions it sounded like a good place to live. The Garissans, Lodi was sure, had lost more than their world by the sound of it; their whole culture was different now, too tight-arsed and Western-ethnic orientated.

  One of the processor blocks datavised a warning into Lodi’s neural nanonics. “Oh, bollocks!”

  “What is it?”

  They had to speak in raised voices, almost shouting at each other. Omain was sitting in the corner of the living room furthest from Lodi, it was the only way the blocks would remain functional.

  “Someone has accessed the hotel’s central processor. They’ve loaded a search program for the three of us, and it’s got a visual reference for Mzu, too.”

  “It cannot be the possessed, surely?” Omain said. “Neural nanonics don’t function for us.”

  “Might be the Organization ships. No. They’d never be able to access Tonala’s net from orbit, not with the platforms still going at it. Hang on, I’ll see what I can find out.” He felt almost happy as he started retrieving tracker programs from the memory fleks he’d brought. The net dons in this city probably had ten times the experience he’d got from snooping around Ayacucho’s communications circuits, but his programs were still able to flash back through the junctions, tracing the origin of the searchers.

  The answer sprang into his mind just as the hotel’s central processor crashed. “Wow, that was some guardian program. But I got them. You know anything about a local firm called Kilmartin and Elgant?”

  “No. But I haven’t been here long, not in this incarnation.”

  “Right.” Lodi twitched a smile. “I’ll see what … that’s odd.”

  Omain had risen from his chair. He was frowning at the suite’s double door. “What is?”

  “The suite’s net processor is down.”

  The door chimed.

  “Did you …” Lodi began.

  Something very heavy smashed into the door. Its panels bulged inwards.

  Splintering sounds were spitting out of the frame.

  “Run!” Omain shouted. He stood before the door, both arms held towards it, palms outwards. His face was clenched with effort. The air twisted frantically in front of him, whipping up a small gale.

  Another blow hammered the door, and Omain was sent staggering backwards.

  Lodi turned to run for the bedroom. He was just in time to see a fat three-metre-long serpent slither vertically up the outside of the window.

  Its huge head reared back, levelling out to stare straight at him. The jaws parted to display fangs as big as fingers. Then it lunged forwards, shattering the glass.

  From his elevated position in the command post, Shemilt studied the ops table below him. One of the girls leaned over and pushed a red-flagged marker closer to the deserted asteroid.

  “In range, sir,” she reported.

  Shemilt nodded, trying not to show too much dismay. All three of the inter-orbit ships were in range of New Georgia’s SD network now. And Quinn had not returned to change his orders. His very specific orders.

  If only we weren’t so bloody terrified of him, Shemilt thought. He still felt sick every time he remembered the zero-tau pod containing Captain Gurtan Mauer. Quinn had opened it up during two of the black mass ceremonies.

  If we all grouped together—But of course, death was no longer the end.

  Throwing the dark messiah into the beyond would solve nothing.

  There was a single red telephone in his command post. He picked up the handset. “Fire,” he ordered.

  Two of the three inter-orbit ships on their way to find out what the teams from Jesup were doing in the deserted asteroids were struck by X-ray lasers. The beams shone clean through the life support capsules and the fusion drive casings. Both crews died instantly. Electronics flash evaporated. Drive systems ruptured. Two wrecks tumbled through space, their hulls glowing a dull orange, vapour squirting from split tanks.

  The third w
as targeted by a pair of combat wasps.

  The officers of the other two national SD networks saw them streaking away from New Georgia’s platform, heading towards the helpless inter-orbit ship. They requested and received fire authority codes. By then the attacking combat wasps had begun dispensing their submunitions drones. Infrared decoys shone like micro-novas amid the shoal of drive exhausts; electronic warfare pulses screamed at the sensors of any SD platform within five thousand kilometres. The offensive was a valid tactic; combat wasps launched to try to protect the remaining ship were confused for several seconds. A time period which in space warfare was critical.

  A flock of one-shot pulsers finally got close enough to discharge into the remaining inter-orbit ship, killing it immediately. That didn’t prevent the kinetic missiles from arrowing in on it at thirty-five gees.

  Nor submunitions with nuclear warheads from detonating when they were within range.

  Lady Mac’s sensors picked up most of the brief battle, though the overspill from the electronic warfare submunitions overlapping the general assault waged by the SD platforms caused several overload dropouts.

  “This is becoming a seriously hazardous location,” Sarha mumbled. The external sensor image was quivering badly as if something was shaking the starship about. Artificial circles of green, blue, and yellow were splashing open against the starfield like raindrop graffiti. Intense blue-white flares started to appear among them.

  “It just went nuclear,” Beaulieu said. “I don’t think I’ve seen overkill on that scale before.”

  “What the hell is going on up there?” Sarha asked.

  “Nothing good,” Liol said. “A possessed would have to be very determined to make a trip to one of those abandoned asteroids; there are no biospheres left, that’ll leave them heavily dependent on technology.”

  “How are the Organization ships reacting?” Sarha asked. Twenty minutes after Lady Mac had left the Spirit of Freedom, the three frigates had docked. Quarter of an hour after that all communication with the station had ceased. They were now holding orbit eight hundred kilometres ahead of Spirit of Freedom, which gave their sensors a reasonable resolution.

  “I’m way ahead of you,” Liol said. “Two of them are launching—wait, they all are. They’re going down into a lower orbit. Damn, I wish we could see what the voidhawks are doing.”

  “I’m registering activity within the station’s defence sensor suite,” Beaulieu said. “They’re sweeping us.”

  “Liol, take us another five hundred kilometres away.”

  “No problem.”

  Sarha consulted the orbital display. “We’ll be over Tonala in another thirty minutes. I’m going to recommend Joshua pulls out.”

  “There’s a lot of ship movements beginning down here,” Beaulieu said.

  “Two more low-orbit stations are launching ships; and those are the ones we can see.”

  “Bugger it,” Sarha grunted. “Okay, go to defence-ready status.”

  Lady Mac’s standard sensor clusters retreated down into their recesses; the smaller, bulbous combat sensors slid smoothly upwards to replace them, gold-chrome lenses reflecting the last twinkling explosions in high orbit. Her combat wasp launch tubes opened.

  All around her, Nyvan’s national navies and SD platforms were switching to the same status.

  Since arriving at Jesup, Dwyer had spent almost every hour helping to modify the bridge systems of the cargo clipper Mount’s Delta. Given his minimal technical background, his time was spent supervising the non-possessed technicians who did most of the installation.

  The bridge compartment was badly cramped, which meant only a couple of people could work in it at any one time. Dwyer had become highly proficient at dodging flying circuit boards and loose console covers. But he was satisfied with the result, which was far less crude than the changes they’d made to the Tantu. With the huge stock of component spares available in the spaceport, the consoles looked as if they’d slipped off the factory production line mere hours earlier. Their processors were now all military grade, capable of functioning while they were subjected to the energistic effect of the possessed. And the flight computer had been augmented until it was capable of flying the ship following the simplest of verbal orders.

  This time there was none of the black sculpture effect, every surface was standard. Quinn had insisted the clipper’s life support capsule must stand up to inspection when they arrived at Earth. Dwyer was confident he had reached that objective.

  Now he was hovering just outside the small galley alcove on the mid-deck watching a female technician replacing the old hydration nozzles with the latest model. A portable sanitation sucker hovered over her shoulder, its fan humming eagerly as it ingested the occasional stale globule which burped out of the tubes she’d unscrewed.

  The unit’s hum rose sharply, becoming strident. A draught of cold air brushed Dwyer’s face.

  “How’s it going?” Quinn asked.

  Dwyer and the technician both yelped in surprise. The clipper’s airlock was in the lower deck, and the floor hatch was closed.

  Dwyer spun around, grabbing at support struts to wrestle his inertia back under control. Sure enough, Quinn was sliding down through the ceiling hatch from the bridge. His robe’s hood was folded back, sticking to his shoulders as if he were in his own private gravity field. For the first time in days his flesh tone was almost normal. He grinned cheerfully at Dwyer.

  “God’s Brother, Quinn. How did you do that?” Dwyer glanced over his shoulder to check the floor hatch again.

  “It’s like style,” Quinn said. “Some of us have it …” He winked at the female technician and flung a bolt of white fire straight into her temple.

  “Fuck!” Dwyer gasped.

  The corpse banged back into the galley alcove. Tools fluttered out of her hands like iron butterflies.

  “We’ll dump her out of the airlock when we’re under way,” Quinn said.

  “We’re leaving?”

  “Yes. Right now. And I don’t want anyone to know.”

  “But … what about the engineering crew in the bay’s control centre? They have to direct the umbilical retraction.”

  “There is no more crew. We can relay the launch instructions to the management computer through the bay’s datanet.”

  “Whatever you say, Quinn.”

  “Come on, you’ll enjoy Earth. I know I will.” He performed a somersault in midair, and slow-dived back up through the hatch.

  Dwyer took a moment to compose himself, clenching his hands so the way his fingers trembled didn’t show, then followed Quinn up into the bridge.

  Anger and worry isolated Alkad from the mundanities of the drive back to the hotel. She hadn’t thought this fast and hard since the days she was working on the Alchemist theory. Options were closing all around her, like the sound of prison doors slamming shut.

  The meeting with two of Opia’s vice presidents had been a typical sounding-you-out session. All very cordial, and achieving very little.

  They had agreed on the principle of the company finding her a starship and crew, which at some yet-to-be-specified time would be equipped with specialist defence systems for duties in the Dorados’ defence force.

  The one hold she had over them was the prospect that this would be the first order by the Dorados council; and if all went smoothly, more would follow. Possibly a great deal more.

  Greed had taken root. She had seen it so many times before in the industrialists who had been supplying Garissa’s navy.

  They would have followed her requests, ignoring the oddities of the situation. She was convinced of it. Then just as the meeting was winding down the Tonala government announced a state of emergency. New Georgia’s SD platforms had opened fire on three ships, one of which belonged to Tonala. Such an action, the Defence Ministry insisted, proved beyond any doubt that the possessed had captured Jesup, that the New Georgia government was lying, and possibly even possessed itself.

  Once agai
n Nyvan’s national factions were at war with each other.

  The Opia executives loaded a program for a crestfallen expression into their neural nanonics. Sorry, but the contract would have to go into suspension. Temporarily. Just until Tonalan might has reigned triumphant.

  The car drew up underneath the sweeping portico of the Mercedes Hotel.

  Ngong was first out, scouring the broad street for threats. Now they had him and Gelai protecting them, Alkad had dispensed with the security firm Voi had hired; although they’d kept the company’s car with its armoured bodywork and secure circuitry.

  There wasn’t much traffic on the street. The team of men shovelling snow had vanished, leaving the dilapidated mechanoids to struggle on by themselves. Ngong nodded and beckoned. Alkad eased herself off the seat and scurried over to the lobby’s rotating door, Gelai a pace behind her the whole time. They had told her of the Organization’s ships during the trip back. It baffled Alkad how Capone had ever heard of her. But there was no disguising Gelai’s rising concern.

  The five of them bundled into the penthouse lift, which rose smoothly.

  Only the annoying flicker of the light panel betrayed Gelai and Ngong for what they were.

  Alkad ignored the lighting. The state of emergency was dangerous. It wouldn’t be long before Tonala retaliated against New Georgia’s SD network. Those starships docked above Nyvan would be pressed into service, if the captains didn’t simply ignore the quarantine and leave.

  She would soon be trapped here without any transport and the Capone Organization closing in. Unless she did something fast, she would belong to the possessed one way or the other, and with her came the Alchemist.

  The spectre of what the device could do to the Confederation if it was used on a target other than Omuta’s star was now preying on her mind.

  What if it was used against Jupiter? The Edenist habitats would die, Earth would be deprived of the He3 without which it could never survive.