The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “And the crews of those that are still in the air have been required to datavise files from their neural nanonics to us here,” Diana said. “That way we can be reasonably certain that none of them have been infected by Tremarco or Gallagher.”

  “There was an awful lot of traffic using the city roads when I flew over,” Ralph said. “I’d like to see that shut down now. I can’t emphasize enough that we must restrict the population’s movement.”

  “It’s only ten o’clock in Pasto,” Leonard DeVille said. “People are still on their way home, others are out for the evening and will want to return later. If you shut down the city’s ground traffic now you will cause an astounding level of confusion, one which would be beyond the police force’s ability to resolve for hours. And we must have the police in reserve to deal with the embassy people when we detect them. We thought it made more sense to allow everyone to go home as normal, then introduce the curfew. That way, the vast majority will be confined to their houses come tomorrow morning. And if Tremarco and Gallagher have started infecting them, any outbreak will be localized, which means we should be able to isolate it relatively easily.”

  Sit down and make an impact, why not? Ralph thought sourly. I’m supposed to listen and advise, not barge in and act like a loudmouth arsehole.

  Damn, but Kerwin and the plane has me hyped too hot.

  Trying to hide how foolish he felt, he asked: “What time will you introduce the curfew?”

  “One o’clock,” the Prime Minister said. “Only die-hard nightbirds will still be out and about then. Thank heavens it’s not Saturday night. We really would have been in trouble then.”

  “Okay, I can live with that,” Ralph said. There was a quick victory smile on DeVille’s face, which Ralph chose to ignore. “What about the other cities and towns; and more importantly the motorways?”

  “All Xingu’s urban areas are having their curfew enacted at one o’clock,” McCullock said. “The continent’s got three time zones, so it’ll be phased in from the east. As for the motorways, we’re already shutting down their traffic; so cities and major towns are going to be segregated. That wasn’t a problem, all motorway vehicles are supervised by the Transport Department route and flow management computers. It’s the vehicles on the minor roads which are giving us a headache; they’re all switched to autonomous control processors. And even worse are the farm vehicles out there in the countryside, half of those bloody things have manual steering.”

  “We estimate it will take another three hours to completely shut down all ground traffic movement,” Diana said. “At the moment we’re setting up an interface between Strategic Defence Command and our police traffic division. That way when the low-orbit SD sensor satellites locate a vehicle moving on a minor road they’ll perform an identification sweep and catalogue it. Traffic division will then datavise the control processor to halt. For manually operated vehicles we’ll have to dispatch a patrol car.” A hand waved lamely in the air. “That’s the theory, anyway. A continent-wide detection and identification operation is going to tie up an awful lot of processing power, which we really can’t spare right now. If we’re not very careful we’ll wind up with a capacity shortfall.”

  “I thought that was impossible in this day and age,” Warren Aspinal interjected mildly.

  Diana’s humour became stern. “Under normal circumstances, yes. But what we’re attempting to do has no precedent.” She offered the others sitting at Hub One a reluctant shrug. “My team has got three AIs in the basement and two at the university which are attempting to access and analyse every single processor in the city simultaneously. It’s a refinement of Admiral Farquar’s idea of tracking the energy virus through the electronic distortion it generates. We’ve seen it demonstrated on Adkinson’s plane, so we know the approximate nature of the beast. All we have to do is perform the most massive correlation exercise ever mounted.

  We find out which processors have suffered glitches during the last eight hours, and cross-reference the time and geographical location. If it happened to several unrelated processors in the same area at the same time, then it’s a good chance the glitch was caused by someone who has the virus.”

  “Every processor?” Vicky Keogh queried.

  “Every single one.” Just for a moment, Diana’s dried-up face wore an adolescent’s smile. “From public net processors to streetlight timers, AV adverts, automatic doors, vending machines, mechanoids, personal communications blocks, household supervisor arrays. The lot.”

  “Will it work?” Ralph asked.

  “No reason why not. As I said, there’s a possible capacity problem, and the AIs might not manage to format the correlation program within the time frame we need. But when the program comes on-line it should provide us with the electronic equivalent of seeing footprints in snow.”

  “And then what?” Warren Aspinal asked quietly. “That’s what you were really brought down here for, Ralph. What do we do with these people if we find them? There is something of a political dimension involved in using the SD systems every time we locate one of the afflicted. I don’t dispute the necessity of eliminating Adkinson’s plane. And people will certainly agree to us using force to obliterate the threat to start with.

  But ultimately we have to find a method of eradicating the energy virus itself, and without damaging the victim. Not even the Princess can go on authorizing such destruction for ever, not when it’s aimed against the Kingdom’s own subjects.”

  “We’re working on it,” said Admiral Farquar. “Gerald Skibbow is going into personality debrief right now. If we can find out how he was infected, and how he was purged, then we ought to be able to come up with a solution, some kind of countermeasure.”

  “How long will that take?” Leonard DeVille asked.

  “Insufficient information,” the admiral answered. “Skibbow isn’t very strong. They’re going to have to go easy on him.”

  “Yet if our preparations are to mean anything,” Landon McCullock said, “we have to catch the embassy duo tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest. And not just them, but anyone they’ve come into contact with.

  This situation could escalate beyond our ability to contain. We must have a policy ready for dealing with them. So far the only thing we know that works is overwhelming firepower.”

  “I’ve got two things to offer,” Ralph said. He looked at Bernard Gibson, and gave him a penitent smile. “Your squads are going to have to take the brunt of this, especially to start with.”

  The police AT Squad commander grinned. “What we get paid for.”

  “Okay, here it is then. First off, contact with someone who is carrying the energy virus doesn’t necessarily mean you contract it yourself. Will and Dean are excellent proof of that. They captured Skibbow, they manhandled him, they were in very close proximity to him for hours, and they’re both fine. Also, I was on the Ekwan with the embassy trio for a week, and I wasn’t infected.

  “Secondly, despite their power they can be intimidated into submission.

  But you have to be prepared to use ultraviolence against them, and they have to know that. One hint of weakness, one hesitation, and they’ll hit you with everything they’ve got. So when we do find the first one, it’ll be me and my team which heads the actual assault. Okay?”

  “I’m not arguing so far,” Bernard Gibson said.

  “Good. What I envisage is spreading the experience of an assault in the same fashion the virus is spread. Everyone who is with me on the first assault will be able to familiarise themselves with what has to be done.

  After that you assign them to head their own squads for the next round of captures, and so on. That way we have your whole division brought up to speed as swiftly as possible.”

  “Fine. And what do we do with them once we’ve subdued them?”

  “Shove them into zero-tau.”

  “You think that’s what got rid of Skibbow’s virus?” Admiral Farquar asked sharply.

  “I believe it’s
a good possibility, sir. He was extremely reluctant to enter the pod in Ekwan. Right up until then he was quite docile. When he found out we were going to put him in the pod, he became almost hysterical. I think he was frightened. And certainly when he came out of the pod at this end the virus was gone.”

  “Excellent.” Warren Aspinal smiled at Ralph. “That course of action is certainly more palatable than lining them all up against a wall and shooting them.”

  “Even if zero-tau isn’t responsible for erasing the virus, we know it can contain them the same way it holds ordinary people,” Ralph said. “We can keep them in stasis until we do find a permanent solution.”

  “How many zero-tau pods have we got available?” Landon asked Diana.

  The technology division chief had a long blink while her neural nanonics chased down the relevant files. “Here in the building there are three. Probably another ten or fifteen in the city in total. They tend to be used almost exclusively by the space industry.”

  “There’s five thousand unused pods in the Ekwan right now,” Ralph pointed out. “That ought to be enough if this AI correlation program works. Frankly, if we need more than that, we’ve lost.”

  “I’ll get some maintenance crews to start disconnecting them straight away,” Admiral Farquar said. “We can send them down to you in cargo flyers on automatic pilot.”

  “That just leaves us with forcing infected people into them,” Ralph said.

  He caught Bernard’s gaze. “Which is going to be even worse than capturing them.”

  “Possible trace,” Diana announced without warning as she received a datavise from one of the AIs. Everyone sitting at Hub One turned their attention on her. “It’s a taxi which left the spaceport twenty minutes after the embassy trio’s spaceplane arrived. The vehicle’s processor array started suffering some strange glitches five minutes later. Contact was lost after a further two minutes. But it can’t have been a total shutdown, because traffic control has no record of a breakdown in that sector this afternoon. It simply dropped out of the route and flow control loop.”

  The warehouse which housed Mahalia Engineering Supplies was sealed up tight, one of twenty identical buildings lined up along the southern perimeter of the industrial park, separated from its neighbour by strips of ancient concrete and ranks of spindly trees planted to break the area’s harshness. It was seventy metres long by twenty-five wide, fifteen high; dark grey composite panels without a single window. From outside it looked inert; innocuous if somewhat spurned of late. Furry tufts of Ombey’s aboriginal vegetation were rooting in the gutters. Denuded chassis of ancient farm vehicles were stacked three or four deep along one wall, sleeting rust onto the concrete.

  Ralph focused his shell helmet’s sensors on the broad roll-up door in the centre of the end-wall fifty meters in front of him. It had taken him and his team four minutes to get here from police headquarters in one of the force’s hypersonics, following the city-wide trail of route and flow processor dropouts located by Diana and the AIs. Three police Armed Tactical Squads had also been dispatched to the industrial park, under orders from Bernard Gibson. In total, eight of the little planes had landed, encircling the warehouse at a five-hundred-metre distance.

  There wasn’t a single crack of light leaking around the door. No sign of life. Infrared didn’t reveal much, either. He scanned along the side of the building again.

  “The conditioning unit is on,” Ralph observed. “I can see the motor’s heat, and the grille’s venting. Someone’s in there.”

  “Do you want us to infiltrate a nanonic sensor?” Nelson Akroid asked. He was the AT Squad’s captain, a stocky man in his late thirties, barely coming up to Ralph’s shoulder. Not quite the image one expected from someone in his profession, but then Ralph was used to the more bulky G66 troops. Ralph suspected Nelson Akroid would be a healthy opponent in any hand-to-hand fighting, though; he had the right kind of subdued competence.

  “It’s a big building, plenty of opportunities for ambush,” Nelson Akroid said. “We’d benefit from positioning them exactly. And my technical operators are good. The hostiles would never know they’d been infiltrated.” He sounded eager, which could be a flaw given this situation. Ralph couldn’t imagine him and his squad seeing much active duty on Ombey. Their lot was more likely endless drills and exercises, the curse of any specialist field.

  “No nanonics,” Ralph said. “We could never depend on them anyway. I want the penetration team to deploy using standard search and seizure procedures. We can’t believe any information from a sensor, so I want them going in fully alert.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Diana?” he datavised. “What can the AIs tell me?”

  “No change. There are no detectable glitches in the warehouse processors it can access. But there’s very little electronic activity in there anyway, the office and administration systems are all switched off, so that doesn’t mean much.”

  “What’s the taxi’s maximum capacity?”

  “Six. And the Industry Department says Mahalia employs fifteen staff. They service and distribute parts for agricultural machinery right across the continent.”

  “Okay, we’ll assume the worst case. A minimum of twenty-one possible hostiles. Thanks, Diana.”

  “Ralph, the AIs have discovered another two possible glitch traces in the city’s route and flow network. I instructed them to concentrate on vehicle traffic around the spaceport in the period after the embassy trio arrived. Another taxi suffered a lot of problems, and the other’s a freight vehicle.”

  “Shit! Where are they now?”

  “The AIs are running search routines; but these two are proving harder to find than the first taxi. I’ll keep you updated.”

  The channel closed. Ralph reviewed the AT Squad as they closed in on the warehouse, black figures who seemed more mobile shadows than solid people. They know their job, he admitted grudgingly.

  “Everyone’s in place, sir,” Nelson Akroid datavised. “And the AIs have taken command of the security cameras. The hostiles don’t know we’re here.”

  “Fine.” Ralph didn’t tell him that if Tremarco or Gallagher were in there they’d know for sure that the AT Squad was outside. He wanted the squad charged up and professional, not shooting at phantoms.

  “Stand by,” Ralph datavised to the Squad. “Status of the assault mechanoids, please?”

  “On-line, sir,” the AT Squad’s technical officer reported.

  Ralph gave the roll-up door another scan. Like Pandora’s box, once it was open there would be no going back. And only he, Roche Skark, and Admiral Farquar knew that if the virus carriers got past the AT Squad, then the industrial park would be targeted by SD platforms.

  He could feel the low-orbit observation satellite sensors focusing on him.

  “Okay,” he datavised to the squad. “Go.”

  The assault mechanoid which Ombey’s AT Squads employed looked as if the design team had been accessing too many horror sensevises for inspiration. Three metres high at full stretch, it had seven plasmatic legs, resembling tentacles with hooves, which could move it over the most jumbled terrain at a sprint that even boosted humans couldn’t match. Its body was a segmented barrel, giving it a serpentine flexibility. There were sockets for up to eight specialist limb attachments, varying from taloned climbing claws to mid-calibre gaussrifles. Control could be either autonomous, operating under a preloaded program, or a direct waldo datavise.

  Five of them charged across the parking yard outside the warehouse, covering the last thirty metres in two seconds. Long, whiplike cords lashed out from the top of their bodies, slashing against the door’s centimetre-thick composite. Where they hit, they stuck, forming a horizontal crisscross grid four metres above the ground. A millisecond later the cords detonated; the shaped electron explosive charge was powerful enough to cut clean through a metre of concrete. The ruined door didn’t even have time to fall. All five assault mechanoids slammed against it in a beautiful demonstration of
synchronized mayhem. What was left of the door buckled and burst apart, sending jagged sections tumbling and bouncing down the warehouse’s central aisle.

  With a clear field of fire established, the mechanoids sent a fast, brutal barrage of short-range sense-overload ordnance blazing down the length of the building. Sensors instantly pinpointed the designated-hostile humans flailing around in panic, and concentrated their fire.

  Behind the assault mechanoids, the AT Squad flashed through the smoking doorway. They scuttled for cover between the stacks of crates, scanning the deeper recesses of the warehouse for hidden hostiles. Then, with the mechanoids taking point duty down the central aisle, they began to fan out in their search and securement formation.

  Mixi Penrice, proprietor of Mahalia Engineering Supplies, had been struggling to remove the linear motor from the stolen taxi’s rear axle when the assault mechanoids crashed into the warehouse door. The noise of the shaped electron explosive charges going off was like standing next to a lightning strike.

  Shock made him jump half a metre in the air, not an easy feat given he was about twenty kilos overweight. Terrible lines of white light flared at the far end of the warehouse, and the door bulged inwards briefly before it disintegrated. But he wasn’t so numbed that he didn’t recognize the distinctive silhouette of the assault mechanoids sprinting through the swirl of smoke and composite splinters. Mixi shrieked and dived for the floor, arms wrapping around his head. The full output of the sense-overload ordnance struck him. Strobing light which seemed to shine through his skull. Sound that was trying hard to shake every joint apart.

  The air turned to rocket exhaust, burning his tongue, his throat, his eyes. He vomited. He voided both his bladder and his bowels; a combination of sheer fright and nerve short-out pulses.

  Three minutes later, when pain-filled consciousness returned, he found himself lying flat on his back, shaking spastically, with disgustingly thick liquids cooling and crusting across his clothes. Five large figures wearing dark armour suits were standing over him, horribly big guns trained on his abdomen.