The Neutronium Alchemist
Page 110
“One of the smelters,” Ngong said.
“Which means the Disassembly Sheds are on this side.” Voi pointed confidently.
The road became smoother, and the car picked up speed. Its tyres began to squelch through slush that had melted in the radiance of the smelter.
They could see the silhouette of the furnace building now, a long black rectangle with hangarlike doors fully open to show eight streams of radiant molten metal pouring out of the hulking smelter into narrow channels which wound away deeper into the building. Thick jets of steam were shooting out of vents in the roof. Snowflakes reverted to sour rain as they fell through them.
Alkad yelled in fright, and datavised an emergency stop order to the car’s control processor. They juddered to a halt two metres short of the canal. A segment of ironberg was sliding along sedately just in front of them, a tarnished silver banana shape with its skin pocked by millions of tiny black craters.
The sky above turned a brilliant silver, stamping a black and white image of the canal and the ironberg segment on the back of Alkad’s retina.
“Holy Mother Mary,” she breathed.
The awesome light faded.
“My processor block’s crashed,” Eriba said. He was twisting his head around, trying to find the source of the light. “What was that?”
“They’re shooting at the cars again,” Voi said.
Alkad datavised the car’s control processor, not surprised when she couldn’t get a response. It confirmed the cause: emp. “I wish it was only that,” she told them, marvelling sadly at their innocence. Even now they didn’t grasp the enormity of what was involved, the length to which others would go. She reached under the dashboard and twisted the release for the manual steering column. Thankfully, it swung up in front of a startled Eriba. “Drive,” she instructed. “There’ll be a bridge or something in a minute. But just drive.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Sarha grumbled. “Here we go again.”
Lady Mac’s combat sensor clusters were relaying an all-too-clear image of space above Nyvan into her neural nanonics. Ten seconds ago all had been clear and calm. The various SD platforms were still conducting their pointless electronic war unabated. Ships were moving towards the three abandoned asteroids, two squadrons of frigates from different nations were closing on Jesup; while Tonala’s low-orbit squadron was moving to intercept the Organization ships. This orbital chess game between the nations could have gone on for hours yet, allowing Joshua and the others plenty of time to get back up to the ship, and for all of them to jump the hell away from this deranged planet.
Then the Organization frigates had started shooting. The voidhawks accelerated out of parking orbit. And space was full of combat wasps.
“Velocity confirmed,” Beaulieu barked. “Forty gees, plus. Antimatter propulsion.”
“Christ,” Liol said. “Now what do we do?”
“Nothing,” Sarha snapped. So far, the conflict was ahead of them and at a slightly higher altitude. “Standby for emp.” She datavised a procedural stand-by order into the flight computer. “Damn, I wish Joshua were here, he could fly us out of this in his sleep.”
Liol gave her a hurt look.
Four swarms of combat wasps were in flight, etching dazzling strands of light across the darkened continents and oceans. They began to jettison their submunitions, and everything became far too complicated for the human mind to follow. Symbols erupted across the display Sarha’s neural nanonics provided as she asked the tactical analysis program for simplified interpretations.
Nyvan’s nightside had ceased to become dark, enlivened by hundreds of incandescent exhausts blurring together as they engaged each other. It was the fusion bombs which went off first, then an antimatter charge detonated.
Space ahead of Lady Mac went into blazeout. No sensor was capable of penetrating that stupendous energy release.
Tactically, it wasn’t the best action. The blast destroyed every combat wasp submunitions friend or foe within a hundred kilometres, while its emp disabled an even larger number.
“Damage report?” Sarha asked.
“Some sensor damage,” Beaulieu said. “Backups coming on-line. No fuselage energy penetration.”
“Liol!”
“Uh? Oh. Yeah. Flight systems intact, generators on-line. Attitude stable.”
“The SD platforms are launching,” Beaulieu warned. “They’re really letting loose. Saturation assault!”
“I can get us out of here,” Liol said. “Two minutes to jump altitude.”
“No,” Sarha said. “If we move, they’ll target us. Right now we stay low and inert. We don’t launch, we don’t emit. If anything does lock on, we kill it with the masers and countermeasure its launch origin. Then you shift our inclination three degrees either way, not our altitude. Got that?”
“Got it.” His voice was hot and high.
“Relax, Liol, everyone’s forgotten about us. We just stay intact to pick Joshua up, that’s our mission, that’s all we do. I want you cool for a smooth response when it comes. And it will. Use a stim program if you have to.”
“No. I’m all right now.”
Another antimatter explosion obliterated a vast section of the universe.
Broken submunitions came spinning out of the epicentre.
“Lock on,” Beaulieu reported. “Three submunitions. One kinetic, two nukes. I think; catalogue match is sixty per cent. Twenty gees only, real geriatrics.”
“Okay,” Sarha said, proud to find how calm she was. “Kick-ass time.”
A deluge of light from the second antimatter explosion revealed the Disassembly Sheds to all the cars speeding across the foundry yard. A row of blank two-dimensional squares receding to the horizon.
“Go for it!” Alkad urged.
Eriba thumbed the throttle forwards. The snow was abating now, revealing more of the ground ahead, giving him confidence. Furnaces glowed in the distance, coronas of slumbering dragons smeared by flurries of grey flakes. The battered road took them past long-forsaken fields of carbon concrete where ranks of sun-bleached gantries stood as memorials to machinery and buildings aborted by financial reality. Pipes wide enough to swallow the car angled up out of the stony soil like metallized worms; their ends capped by rusting grilles which issued strange heavy vapours.
Lonely wolf-analogues prowled among the destitute technological carcasses, skulking in the shadows whenever the car’s headlights ventured close.
Seeing the other cars falling behind, Eriba aimed for a swing bridge over the next small canal. The car wheels left the floor as it charged over the apex of the two segments. Alkad was flung forwards as it banged down on the other side.
“That’s Shed Six,” Voi said, eagerly looking out of a side window. “One more canal to go.”
“We’re going to make it,” Eriba shouted back. He was completely absorbed by the race, adrenaline rush giving his world a provocative edge.
“That’s good,” Alkad said. Anything else would have sounded churlish.
The snow clouds above the yard were slowly tearing open, showing ragged tracts of evening sky. It was alight with plasma fire; drive exhausts and explosions merging and expanding into a single blanket of iridescence that was alive with choppy internal tides.
Joshua kinked his neck back at a difficult angle to watch it. The car jounced about, determined to deny him an uninterrupted view. Since the first antimatter bomb’s emp had wrecked their car’s electronics Dahybi had been driving them manually. It was a bumpy ride.
Another antimatter explosion turned the remaining clouds transparent.
Joshua’s retinal implants prevented any lasting damage to his eyes, but he still had to blink furiously to clear the brilliant purple afterimage away.
“Jesus, I hope they’re all right up there.”
“Sarha knows what she’s doing,” Melvyn said. “Besides, we’ve got another twenty minutes before they’re above the horizon, and that blast was almost directly overhead.”
&n
bsp; “Sure, right.”
“Hang on,” Dahybi called.
The car shot over a swing bridge, taking flight at the top. They thumped down, skittling sideways until the rear bumper smacked into the road’s side barrier. A wicked grinding sound told them they’d lost more bodywork until Dahybi managed to straighten out again.
“She’s pulling ahead,” Melvyn pointed out calmly.
“Can you do any fucking better?” Dahybi yelled back.
Joshua couldn’t remember the composed node specialist ever getting so aggrieved before. He heard another crunch behind them as the first embassy car cleared the bridge.
“Just keep on her,” Joshua said. “You’re doing fine.”
“Where the hell is she going?” Melvyn wondered out loud.
“More to the point, why doesn’t she care that this circus procession is following her?” Joshua replied. “She has to be pretty confident about whoever she’s meeting.”
“Who or what.” Melvyn sucked in a breath. “You don’t think the Alchemist is hidden around here, do you? I mean, look at this place, you could lose a squadron of starships out here.”
“Don’t let’s imagine things worse than they are,” Joshua said. “My main concern is those two possessed with her.”
“I should be able to deal with them,” a serjeant said. It touched one of the weapons clipped to its belt.
Joshua managed a twitched smile. It was becoming harder for him to associate these increasingly combat-adept serjeants with the old sweet, sexy Ione.
“What’s the Alchemist?” Dick Keaton asked.
When Joshua turned back to their passenger, he was startled by the flood of curiosity emanating from the man. It was what he imagined Edenist affinity must be like. The emotion dominated. “Need to know only, sorry.”
Dick Keaton seemed to have some trouble returning to his usual blasé cockiness.
It bothered Joshua quite badly for some reason. The first glimpse of something hidden behind the mask. Something very wrong, and very deeply hidden.
“They’re changing direction,” Dahybi warned.
Mzu’s car had left the narrow road which ran between the swing bridges, turning onto a more substantial road which led towards Disassembly Shed Four. Dahybi tugged the steering column over as far as it would go, almost missing the junction as they careered around after her.
After standing up against two centuries of saltwater corrosion, cheap slipshod maintenance, bird excrement, algae, and in one memorable instance a small aircraft crash, the walls and roof of Disassembly Shed Four were in a sorry state. Despite that, the structure’s scale was still impressive to the point of intimidating. Joshua had seen far bigger buildings, but not in isolation like this.
“Joshua, look at the last car,” a serjeant said.
Five other cars were still part of the chase. Four of them were big towncars from the Kulu embassy; all smooth dark bodies with opaque windows and powerful fanbeam headlights. The fifth had started out an ordinary car with dark green bodywork; now it was some primitive monstrosity with bright scarlet paint that was covered in brash stickers.
Six round headlights were affixed to a lattice of metal struts which covered the front grille. Primitive it might have been, but it was closing up fast on the last embassy car, its broad tyres giving it excellent traction on the slush.
“Jesus, they’re in front and behind.”
“This might be a good time for us to retire gracefully,” Melvyn said.
Joshua glanced ahead. They were already in the shadow thrown by Disassembly Shed Four. Mzu’s car was almost at the base of the colossal wall, and braking to a halt.
It was very tempting. And he was in an agony of denial not knowing what had happened to Lady Mac.
“Trouble,” Dick Keaton said. He was holding up a processor block, swinging it around to try to locate something. “Some kind of electronic distortion is focusing on us. Don’t know what kind, it’s more powerful than the emp though.”
Joshua ordered his neural nanonics to run a diagnostic. The program never completed. “Possessed!” intuition was screaming at him. “Out, everybody out. Go for cover.”
Dahybi slammed the brakes on. The doors were opening before they stopped.
Mzu’s car was fifteen metres in front of them, stationary and empty.
Joshua threw himself out of the car, taking a couple of fast steps before flinging himself flat onto the slush. One of the serjeants hit the road beside him.
A tremendous jet of white fire squirted down from the shed. It swamped the top of the car, sending ravenous tentacles curling down through the open doors. Glass blew out, and the interior combusted instantly, burning with eerie fury.
Ione knew exactly what she had to do, one consciousness puppeting two bodies. As soon as the first wave of heat swelled overhead she was rising, adopting a crouch position. Four hands were bringing four different guns to bear. As there was one serjeant on either side of the car, she could triangulate the source of the energistic attack perfectly: a line of dirt-greyed windows thirty metres up the shed wall. Two of them had swung open.
She opened fire. First priority was to suppress the possessed, give them so much to worry about they’d be unable to continue their own assault.
Two of the guns she held were rapid-fire machine pistols, capable of firing over a hundred bullets a second. She used them in half-second bursts, swinging them in fast arcs. The windows, surrounding panels, stress rods, and secondary structural girders disintegrated into an avalanche of scything chips as the bullets savaged them. The heavy-calibre rifles followed, explosive-tipped shells chewing ferociously at the edges of the initial devastation. Then she began slamming rounds into the panelling where she estimated the walkway the possessed were using was situated.
“Go!” she bellowed from both throats. “Get inside, there’s cover there.”
Joshua rolled over fast and started sprinting. Melvyn was right behind him. There was nothing to hear above the bone-jarring vibration of the rifles, no pounding footsteps or shouts of alarm. He just kept running.
A streamer of white fire churned through the air above him. It was hard to distinguish in the light fluxing down from the orbital battle. The foundry yard was soaked in a brightness twice as great as the noonday sun, a glare made all the worse by the snow.
Ione saw the fire coming right at her down one half of her vision and pointed the rifle and machine gun along the angle of approach. She held the triggers down on both of them, bullets flaring indigo as if they were tracer rounds. The white fire struck, and she cancelled the serjeant’s tactile nerves, banishing pain. Her machine-gun magazine was exhausted, but she kept on firing the rifle, holding it steady even though the fire burned away her eyes along with her leathery skin.
Then her consciousness was in only one of the bitek constructs; she could see the flaming outline of the other fall to the ground. And shadows were flittering in the dusk behind the yawning hole she’d blasted in the wall.
She slapped a new magazine in the machine gun and raised both barrels.
Joshua had just passed Mzu’s car when the explosive round went crack mere centimetres from his skull. He flinched, throwing his arms up defensively. A small door in the shed wall just in front of him disintegrated. It took a tremendous act of trust, but he kept on going.
Ione had opened the way. There had to be some kind of sanctuary in there.
Alkad Mzu didn’t regard the interior of Disassembly Shed Four as sanctuary, exactly, but she was grateful to reach it nonetheless. The cars were still pursuing her, berserk high-speed skids and swerves across the road showing just how intent their occupants were. At least inside the shed she could choose her opponents.
Just as Ngong closed the small door she caught a glimpse of the surviving police cars leaping the swing bridge, their blue and red strobes flashing. The snow was hot with irradiated light from the battle above, and growing ever brighter. Ngong clanged the door shut and slammed the bolts across.
They made their way forwards through a forest of metal pillars. The shed’s framework structure extended some distance from the panel wall it was supporting, uncountable trusses and struts melding together in asymmetric junctions. Looking straight up, it was impossible to see the roof, only the labyrinthine intertexture of black metal forming an impenetrable barrier. Each tube and I-beam was slick with water, beads of condensation tickled by gravity until they dropped. With the shed’s conditioning turned off, the inside was a permanent drizzle.
Alkad led the others forwards, out from under the artless pillars. There was no ironberg in the huge basin at the middle of the shed, so the water was slopping quietly against the rim. The cranes, the gantry arms with their huge fission blades, the mobile inspection platforms, all of them hung still and silent around the sides of the central high bay. Sounds didn’t echo here, they were absorbed by the prickly fur of metal inside the walls. Scraps of light escaped through lacunas in the roof buttresses, producing a crisscross of white beams that always seemed to fade away before they reached the ground. Big seabirds scurried about through the air, endlessly swapping perches as if they were searching for the perfect vantage point.
“Up here, Dr Mzu,” a voice called out.
She turned around, head tilted back, hand held in a salute to shield her face from the gentle rain. Baranovich was standing on a walkway forty metres above the ground, leaning casually against the safety railing. His colourful Cossack costume shone splendidly amid the gloom. Several people stood in the shadows behind him.
“All right,” she said. “I’m here. Where’s my transport off-planet? From what I can see, there’s some difficulty in orbit right now.”
“Don’t get smart with me, Doctor. The Organization isn’t going to be wiped out by one small war between SD platforms.”