Neutronium Alchemist - Consolidation nd-3

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The Organization lieutenants had split into two fractions to run their operations centre. There was Avram Harwood’s staff who dealt purely with the administration and management details of the Organization, essentially the new civil service. Then there were those, a smaller number, working under the auspices of Silvano Richmann and Emmet Mordden, who were operating the military hardware they’d captured. The law enforcers. Al’s laws. He’d given that task to the possessed alone, just in case any non-possessed tried to be a hero.

  When Al and Jezzibella walked into the centre the huge wall-mounted hologram screens were showing satellite views of Santa Volta. Grizzled spires of smoke were rising from several of the city’s blocks. Graphic symbols were superimposed over the real-time layout as the organization advanced its troops. Silvano Richmann and Leroy Octavius stood in front of the colourful screens, heads together as they discussed the best strategy to crack open the population. Filling the eight rows of consoles behind them, the communications team was waiting patiently.

  Everyone turned as Al strode forward. There were grins, smiles, whoops, sharp whistles. He did the rounds, pressing the flesh, joking, laughing, thanking, offering encouragement.

  Jezzibella followed a pace behind him. She and Leroy quirked an eyebrow at each other.

  “So how’s it going?” Al asked a scrum of his senior lieutenants when he’d finished his processional.

  “We’re more or less sticking to the timetable,” Mickey Pileggi said. “Some places put up a fight. Others just roll onto their backs and stick their legs in the air for us. We got no way of knowing in advance. Word’s getting out that we aren’t possessing everyone. It helps. Causes a shitload of confusion.”

  “Fine from my angle, too, Al,” Emmet Mordden said. “Our sensor satellites have been monitoring some of the deep space message traffic. It’s not easy, because most of it is directional tight beam. But it looks like the rest of the system knows we’re here, and what we’re doing.”

  “Is that going to be a problem?” Al asked.

  “No, sir. We caught nearly forty per cent of New California’s navy ships in dock when we took over the orbiting asteroids. They’re still there, and another twenty per cent is on permanent assignment to the Confederation Navy fleets. That just leaves a maximum of about fifty ships left in the system who could cause us any grief. But I’ve got every SD platform on situation-A readiness. Even if the admirals out there get their act together, they know it would be suicide to attack us.”

  Al lit a cigar, and blew a stream of smoke towards the screen. The near-orbit tactical display, Emmet had called it yesterday. It looked pretty calm at the moment. “Sounds like you’re handling your slice of the action, Emmet. I’m impressed.”

  “Thanks, Al.” The nervous man bobbed in appreciation. “As you can see, there’s no spacecraft activity within a million kilometres of the planetary surface, except for five voidhawks. They’re holding themselves stable over the poles, seven hundred thousand kilometres out. My guess is they’re just watching us to see what’s happening.”

  “Spies?” Al inquired.

  “Yes.”

  “We should blow them all to shit,” Bernhard Allsop said loudly. “Ain’t that right, Al? That’ll give the rest of those frigging Commie Edenists the message: Don’t spy on us, don’t fuck with us or it’s your ass.”

  “Shut up,” Al said mildly.

  Bernhard twitched apprehensively. “Sure, Al. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  “Can you hit the voidhawks?” Jezzibella asked.

  Emmet glanced from her to Al, and licked his suddenly sweaty lips. “It’s difficult, you know? They chose those polar positions carefully. I mean, they’re out of range of our energy weapons. And if we launch a combat wasp salvo at them, they’ll just dive down a wormhole. But, hey . . . they can’t hurt us, either.”

  “Not this time,” Al said. He chewed his cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right. “But they can see what we’re about, and it’ll frighten them. Pretty soon the whole goddamn Confederation is going to know what’s happened here.”

  “I told you they’d be trouble, Al baby,” Jezzibella said, on cue. Her voice had shunted down to a tart’s whinny.

  “Sure you did, doll,” he said, not taking his eyes off the tactical display. “We’re gonna have to do something about them,” Al announced to the room at large.

  “Well, hell, Al,” Emmet said. “I’ll give it a go, but I don’t think . . .”

  “No, Emmet,” Al said generously. “I ain’t talking about five crappy little ships. I’m talking about what’s lining up behind them.”

  “The Edenists?” Bernhard asked, hopefully.

  “Partly, yeah. But they ain’t the whole picture, are they, boy? You gotta think big , here. You’re in a big universe now.” He had their complete attention. Damn, but Jez had been right. Typical.

  “The Edenists are gonna broadcast what we’ve done here to the whole Confederation. Then what do you think is gonna happen, huh?” He turned a full circle, arms held out theatrically. “Any takers? No? Seems pretty goddamn obvious to me, guys. They’re gonna come here with every fucking battleship they got, and grab the planet back off us.”

  “We can fight,” Bernhard said.

  “We’ll lose,” Al purred. “But that don’t matter. Does it? Because I know what you’re thinking. Every goddamned dumb-ass one of you. You’re thinking: We won’t be here. We’re gonna be out of this stinking joint any day now, safe on the other side of the red cloud where there ain’t no sky and there ain’t no space, and nobody dies anymore. Ain’t that right? Ain’t that what’s brewing inside those thick skulls of yours?”

  Shuffled feet and downcast eyes was the only response he was offered. “Mickey, ain’t that right?”

  Mickey Pileggi developed an urgent wish to be somewhere else. He couldn’t meet his boss’s interrogatory stare. “Well, you know how it is, Al. That’s a last resort, sure. But shit, we can do like Bernhard says and fight some first. I ain’t afraid of fighting.”

  “Sure you ain’t afraid. I didn’t say you were afraid. I didn’t insult you, Mickey, you rube goof. I’m saying you ain’t thinking level. The Confederation Navy, they’re gonna turn up here with a thousand, ten thousand starships, and you’re gonna do the smartest thing you can do, and hide. Right? I would if they came at me with all pieces shooting.”

  The left side of Mickey’s face began to tic alarmingly. “Sure, boss,” he said numbly.

  “So you think that’s gonna make them give up?” Al asked. “Come on, all of you. I want to know. Who in this room believes the big government boys are just gonna give up if you make New California disappear? Huh? Tell me. They lose a planet with eight hundred million people on it, and the admiral in charge, he’s just gonna shrug and say: Well fuck it, you can’t win them all. And go home.” Al stabbed a finger at the little purple stars of light representing the voidhawks on the tactical display screen. A slim bolt of white fire lashed out, striking the glass. Glowing droplets sprinkled out. A crater bowed inwards, distorting and magnifying the graphics below. “Is he FUCK,” Al bellowed. “Open your goddamn eyes, shitheads! These people can fly among the stars for Christ’s sake. They know everything there is to know about how energy works, they know all about quantum dimensions, hell they can even switch off time if they feel like it. And what they don’t know, they can find out pretty fucking quick. They’ll see what you’ve done, they’ll follow where you take the planet. And they’ll bring it back. Those cruddy longhairs will look at what happened, and they’ll work on it, and they’ll work on it. And they ain’t never going to stop until they’ve solved the problem. I know the feds, the governments. Believe me, of all people, I fucking know. You ain’t never safe from them. They don’t ever fucking stop. Never! And it won’t matter diddly how much you scream, and how much you cuss and rage. They’ll bring you back. Oh, yeah, right back here under the stars and emptiness where you started from. Staring death and beyond in the face.
” He had them now, he could see the doubt blossoming, the concern. And the fear. Always the fear. The way right into a man’s heart. The way a general jerked his soldiers’ strings.

  Al Capone grinned like the devil himself into the daunted silence. “There’s only one fucking way to stop that from ever happening. Any of you cretins figured that out yet? No? Big surprise. Well, it’s simple, assholes. You stop running scared like you have been all your life. You stop, you turn around to face what’s scaring you, and you bite its fucking dick off.”

  • • •

  For five centuries after the first successful ZTT jump, governments, universities, companies, and military laboratories throughout the Confederation had been researching methods of direct supralight communication. And for all the billions of fuseodollars poured into the various projects, no one had ever produced a valid theory let alone a practical system to surmount the problem. Starships remained the only method of carrying data between star systems.

  Because of this, waves of information would spread out like ripples through the inhabited star systems within the Confederation. And as the stars were not arranged in a tidy geometrical lattice, such wavefronts became more and more distorted as time went on. News companies had long since refined a set of equations defining the most effective distribution procedure between their offices. On receiving a hot item (such as the appearance of Ione Saldana), an office would typically charter eight to twelve starships to relay the flek depending on when and where the story originated. Towards the end of the distribution coverage, the information could well arrive in one system from several directions over the course of a fortnight. The nature of the starships employed also had a strong influence on the timing, depending on the marque of ship used, how good the captain was, component malfunctions, a hundred diverse circumstances all contributing to the uncertainty.

  Laton’s appearance had naturally received an overriding precedence from all the Time Universe offices receiving Graeme Nicholson’s flek. But Srinagar was over four hundred light-years away from Tranquillity. News of the Yaku ’s existence, and who it was carrying, arrived several days after the Yaku itself had departed from Valisk.

  Laton!

  Rubra was astonished. They might have been fellow Serpents, but that hardly made them allies. So for the first time in a hundred and thirty years he expanded his affinity and grudgingly contacted the Edenist habitats orbiting Kohistan to tell them the starship had docked briefly.

  But Laton did not come inside,he assured them. Only three crew came through immigration: Marie Skibbow, Alicia Cochrane, and Manza Balyuzi.

  Skibbow was definitely sequestrated, and the other two are likely recipients,the kohistan consensus replied. Where are they?

  I don’t know.it was a humiliating, dismaying admission, especially to make to his former peers. But Rubra had immediately made the connection between Marie Skibbow and Anders Bospoort, in whose apartment Dariat’s corpse had been found. Such a chain of events worried him enormously. But his supposedly infallible memory storage facility had failed him utterly. After Marie and Anders had gone down the starscraper that first time they had simply vanished from his perception; and the sub-routine in the starscraper hadn’t noticed their absence. Nor could he locate them now, not even with his perception sub-routines expanded and upgraded with a new batch of safeguards.

  Do you require our assistance?the kohistan consensus asked. Our neuropathologists may be able to analyse the nature of the distortion in your sub-routines.

  No! You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Getting into my mind again. Poking around to see what makes me pulse.

  Rubra—

  You shits don’t ever give up, don’t ever stop.

  Given the circumstances, do you not think it would be sensible to put old antagonisms behind us?

  I’ll deal with it. By myself. They can only fuck with my peripheral routines. They can’t touch me.

  As far as you know.

  I know! Believe me, I know. I’m me; same as I ever was.

  Rubra, this is only the beginning. They will try to infiltrate your higher-order thought routines.

  They won’t succeed, not now I know what to watch for.

  Very well. But we must recommend to the Srinagar system assembly that starships are prohibited from docking with you. We cannot risk the prospect of any contamination spreading.

  Suits me fine.

  Will you at least cooperate with us on that?

  Yes, yes. But only until I’ve tracked down the three Yaku crew and exterminated them.

  Please be careful, Rubra. Laton’s proteanic virus is extremely dangerous.

  So that’s what you think I’ve got, why my routines are failing. Bastards!

  It took several minutes for his anger to sink back into more rational, passive thought currents. By the time he was thinking logically again, Valisk’s SD sensor network alerted him to five voidhawks emerging from their wormhole termini to take up station half a million kilometres away. Spies! They didn’t trust him.

  He had to find the three people from the Yaku , and those members of his family whose monitor routines had been tampered with.

  While the rest of the Srinagar system went to an agitated stage one military alert status, he tried again and again to scan his own interior for the renegades. Standard visual pattern recognition routines were useless. He upgraded and changed the perception interpretation routines several times. To no avail. He tried loading similar search orders into the servitors, hoping that they might succeed where the sensitive cells woven into every polyp surface had failed. He swept through entire starscrapers with his principal consciousness, certain that they still hadn’t managed to infiltrate and corrupt his identity core. He found nothing.

  After ten hours, the watching voidhawks were joined by three Srinagar navy frigates.

  Inside the habitat, Time Universe played Graeme Nicholson’s recording continuously, agitating the population badly. Opinions were divided. Some said Laton and Rubra were obviously colleagues, comrades in antagonism. Laton wouldn’t hurt Valisk. Others pointed out that the two had never met, and had chosen very different paths through life.

  There was unease, but no actual problems. Not for the first few hours. Then some idiot from the spaceport’s civil traffic control centre leaked the news (actually he was paid two hundred thousand fuseodollars by Collins for the data) that the Yaku had docked at Valisk. Twenty starships immediately filed for departure flights, which Rubra refused.

  Unease began to slip into resentment, anger, and alarm. Given the nature of the residents, they had no trouble asserting their feelings in a manner which the rentcops employed by Magellanic Itg had a hard time damping down. Riots broke out in several starscrapers. Localized ‘councils’ were formed, demanding the right to petition Rubra—who simply ignored them (after memorizing the ringleaders). More thoughtful and prudent members of the population started to hike out into the remoter sections of parkland, taking camping gear with them.

  Such strife was almost designed to make Rubra’s frantic search for the three Yaku crew members difficult verging on impossible.

  Thirty-eight hours after Graeme Nicholson’s flek arrived in the Srinagar system, a voidhawk came from Avon, exposing the true nature of the threat the Confederation was facing. Such was the priority, it even beat the First Admiral’s earlier communiqué warning of a possible energy virus.

  In its wake all incoming starships were isolated and told to prepare for boarding and inspection by fully armed military teams. Civil starflight effectively shut down overnight. Proclamations were issued, requiring all newly arrived travellers to report to the police. Failure to comply was roughly equivalent to thumbprinting your own death warrant. Navy reserves were called in. Industrial astroengineering stations began producing combat wasps at full capacity.

  In one respect, news of the possessed assisted Rubra. It seemed to shock Valisk’s population out of their confrontational attitude. Rubra judged it an appropriate time to appeal to
them for help. Every communications net processor, holoscreen, and AV pillar in the habitat relayed the same image of him: a man in his prime, handsome and capable, speaking calmly and authoritatively. Given that he’d had nothing to do with the general population for a century, it was an event unusual enough to draw everyone’s attention.

  “There are only three possessed at large in the habitat at this moment,” he told his audience. “While they are certainly a cause for concern, they do not as yet present a threat to us. I have issued the police with the kind of heavy-calibre weapons necessary to surmount their energistic ability. And if circumstances warrant, several citizens have the kind of experience which might prove useful in a confrontation.” An ironic, knowing curl of his lip brought an appreciative smile from many watchers. “However, their ability to alter their appearance means they are proving hard for me to track down. I’m therefore asking all of you to look out for them and inform me immediately. Don’t trust people just because they look the same as they’ve always been; these bastards are probably masquerading as friends of yours. Another effect to watch for is the way they interfere with electronic equipment; if any of your processors start glitching, inform me immediately. There’s a half-million-fuseodollar reward for the information which results in their elimination. Good hunting.”

  “Thank you, Big Brother.” Ross Nash tipped his beer glass at the holoscreen over the Tacoul Tavern’s bar. He looked away from the drastically wobbly picture of Rubra, and grinned at Kiera. She was sitting in one of the wall booths, talking in low intense tones with the small cadre she’d been building up; her staff officers, people joked. Ross was mildly bugged that she hadn’t been including him in the consultation process recently. Okay, so he didn’t have much in the way of technical knowledge, and this habitat was a far gone trip into future-world for a guy who was born in 1940 (and died in ’89—bowel cancer); he kept expecting Yul Brynner to turn up in his black gunslinger outfit. But damn it, his opinion counted for something. She hadn’t screwed with him for days either.