The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Kiera’s authority now extended the length of the habitat, and encompassed a zone a hundred thousand kilometres in diameter outside the shell. All in all, not a bad little fiefdom for an ex-society wife from New Munich.

  She’d glimpsed it briefly once before, this position, the influence, importance, and respect which authority endowed. It could have been hers for the taking back then; she had the breeding and family money, her husband had the ambition and skill. By rights a cabinet seat awaited, and maybe even the chancellorship (so she dreamed and schemed). But he’d faltered, betrayed by his ambition and lack of patience, making the wrong deals in search of the fast track. A weak failure condemning her to sitting out her empty life in the grand old country house, working studiously for the right charities, pitied and avoided by the social vixens she’d once counted as her closest friends. Dying bitter and resentful.

  Well, now Kiera Salter was back, younger and prettier than ever before.

  And the mistakes and weaknesses of yesteryear were not going to be repeated again. Not ever.

  “We finished going through the last starscraper three hours ago,” she told the council she’d assembled (oh-so-carefully selecting most of the members). “Valisk now effectively belongs to us.”

  That brought applause and some whistles.

  She waited for it to die down. “Bonney, how many non-possessed are left?”

  “I’d say a couple of hundred,” the hunter woman said. “They’re hiding out, with Rubra’s help, of course. Tracking them down is going to take a while. But there’s no way for them to get out; I’ll find them eventually.”

  “Do they pose any danger?”

  “The worst case scenario would be a few acts of sabotage; but considering we can all sense them if they get close enough to us, it would be very short-lived. No, I think the only one who could hurt us now would be Rubra. But I don’t know enough about him and what his capabilities are.”

  Everyone turned to look at Dariat. Kiera hadn’t wanted him on the council, but his understanding of affinity and the habitat routines was peerless. They needed his expertise to deal with Rubra. Despite that, she still didn’t consider him a proper possessed; he was crazy, a very ruthless kind of crazy. His agenda was too different from theirs. A fact which to her mind made him a liability, a dangerous one.

  “Ultimately, Rubra could annihilate the entire ecosystem,” Dariat said calmly. “He has control over the environmental maintenance and digestive organs; that gives him a great deal of power. Conceivably he could release toxins into the water and food, replace the present atmosphere with pure nitrogen and suffocate us, even vent it out into space. He can turn off the axial light tube and freeze us, or leave it on and cook us.

  None of that would damage him in the long term; the biosphere can be replanted, and the human population replaced. He cares less for the lives of humans than we do, his only priority is himself. As I told you right at the start, everything else we achieve is completely pointless until he is eliminated. But you didn’t listen.”

  “So, shitbrain, why hasn’t he done any of that already?” Stanyon asked contemptuously.

  Kiera put a restraining hand on his leg under the table. He was a good deputy for her, his intimidating strength accounting for a great deal of the obedience she was shown; he also made an excellent replacement for Ross Nash in her bed. However, vast intelligence was not one of his qualities.

  “Yes,” she said levelly to Dariat. “Why not?”

  “Because we have one key element left to restrain him,” Dariat said. “We can kill him. The hellhawks are armed with enough combat wasps to destroy a hundred habitats. We’re in a deterrence situation. If we fight each other openly, we both die.”

  “Openly?” Bonney challenged.

  “Yes. Right now, he will be conferring with the Edenist Consensus about methods of reversing possession. And as you know, I’m investigating methods of transferring my personality into the neural strata without him blocking it. That way I could assume control of the habitat and eliminate him at the same time.”

  Which isn’t exactly the solution I want, Kiera thought.

  “So why don’t you just do it?” Stanyon asked. “Shove yourself in there and fight the bastard on his own ground. Don’t you have the balls for it?”

  “The neural strata cells will only accept Rubra’s thought routines. If a thought routine is not derived from his own personality pattern it will not function in the neural strata.”

  “But you fucked with the routines before.”

  “Precisely. I made changes to what was there, I did not replace anything.” Dariat sighed elaborately, resting his head in his hands.

  “Look, I’ve been working on this problem for nearly thirty years now. Conventional means were utterly useless against him. Then I thought I’d found the answer with affinity enhanced by this energistic ability. I could have used it to modify sections of the neural strata, force the cells to accept my personality routines. I was exploring that angle when that drunk cretin Ross Nash blew our cover. So we went overt and showed Rubra what we can do; fine, but by doing that we threw away our stealth advantage. He is on his guard like never before. I’ve had enough evidence of that over the last ten hours. If I try to convert a chunk of the neural strata ready to accept me, it drops out of the homogeneity architecture, and he does something to the cells’ bioelectric component, too, which kills them instantly. Don’t ask me what—breaks down the natural chemical regulators, or simply electrocutes them with nerve impulse surges. I don’t know! But he’s blocking me every step of the way.”

  “All very interesting,” Kiera said coldly. “What we need to know, however, is can you beat him?”

  Dariat smiled, his gaze unfocused. “Yes. I’ll beat him, I feel the lady Chi-ri touching me. There will be a way, and I’ll find it eventually.”

  The rest of the council exchanged irritated or worried glances; except for Stanyon who merely gave a disgusted groan.

  “Can we take it then, that Rubra does not pose any immediate threat?” Kiera asked. She found Dariat’s devotion to the Starbridge religion with its Lords and Ladies of the realms another indication of just how unstable he was.

  “Yes,” Dariat said. “He’ll keep up the attrition, of course. Electrocution, servitor housechimps cracking rocks over your skull; and we’ll have to abandon the tubes and starscraper lifts. It’s an annoyance, but we can live through it.”

  “Until when?” Hudson Proctor asked. He was an ex-general Kiera had drafted in to her initial coterie to help plan their takeover strategy.

  “Rubra is in here with us, and the Edenists are outside. Both of them are doing their damnedest to push us back into the beyond. We have to stop that, we must fight back. I’m damned if I’m prepared to sit here and let them win.” He glanced around the table, buoyed by the level of silent support shown by the council.

  “Our hellhawks are easily a match for any voidhawk,” Kiera said. “The Edenists cannot get inside Valisk, all they can do is sit at a safe distance and watch. I don’t consider them a problem at all, let alone a threat.”

  “The hellhawks might be as good as a voidhawk in a fight, but what’s to make them stay and guard us?”

  “Dariat,” Kiera said, irked at having to defer to him again. But he was the one who’d worked out how to keep the hellhawks loyal to Valisk.

  “The souls possessing the hellhawks will help us for as long as we want,” Dariat said. “We have something they ultimately want: human bodies.

  Rubra’s descendants can all use their affinity to converse with Magellanic Itg’s blackhawks. That means the souls can get out of the hellhawks and into those bodies the same way as they got in. During our takeover we captured enough of Rubra’s descendants to provide each hellhawk possessor with a human body. They’re all stored in zero-tau, waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?” Hudson Proctor asked. “This is what gets me. I don’t even know why we’re bothering with this discussion in the first place.�
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  “What do you suggest we should be doing, then?” Kiera asked.

  “The blindingly obvious. Let’s just go. Now! We know we can do it; together we have the power to lift Valisk clean out of this universe. We can create our own universe around us; one with new laws, a place where there’s no empty eternity around us, and where we’re safely sealed off from the beyond. We’ll be safe there, from Rubra, from the Edenists, from everybody. Safe and immortal.”

  “Quite right,” Kiera said. Most possessed had only been back for a few hours, but already the urge was growing. To run, to hide from the dreadful empty sky. Enclosed Valisk was better than a planet; but Kiera had hated the starscrapers with their windows showing the naked stars, always reminding her of the beyond. Yes, she thought, we will have to leave that sight eventually. But not yet. There were other, older instincts prising at her thoughts. For when Valisk departed to a universe where anything became possible to every individual, the need for leadership would fade away, lost among the dream of eternal sybaritic life into which they would all fall. Kiera Salter would cease to be anything special. Maybe it was inevitable, but there was no need to rush into it. “What about the threat from ourselves?” she asked them, a high note of curiosity in her voice. As if they’d already solved the obvious problem.

  “What threat?” Stanyon asked.

  “Think about it. How long are we intending to leave this universe for?”

  “I wasn’t planning on coming back,” Hudson Proctor said caustically.

  “Me neither. But eternity is rather a long time, isn’t it? And those are the terms we’re going to have to start thinking in nowadays.”

  “So?” he demanded.

  “So how many people are there in Valisk right now? Stanyon?”

  “Close to nine hundred thousand.”

  “Not quite nine hundred thousand people. And the purpose of life, or the nearest definition I’ll ever make, is to experience. Experience whatever you can for as long as you can.” She gave the councillors a morbid smile.

  “That isn’t going to change whatever universe we occupy. As it stands, there aren’t enough of us; not if we want to keep providing ourselves with new and different experiences for all of eternity. We have to have variety to keep on generating freshness, otherwise we’ll just be playing variants on a theme for ever. Fifty thousand years of that, and we’ll be so desperate for a change that we’ll even come back here just for the novelty.” She’d won them; she could see and sense the doubt and insecurity fission in their minds.

  Hudson Proctor sat back in his chair and favoured her with a languid smile. “Go on, Kiera, you’ve obviously thought this through. What’s the solution?”

  “There are two possibilities. First, we use the hellhawks to evacuate ourselves to a terracompatible world and begin the possession campaign all over again. Personally I’d hate to risk that. Srinagar’s warships might not be able to break into Valisk, but if we tried to land on the planet it would be a shooting gallery. Alternatively, we can play it smart and gather people in to us. Valisk can support at least six or seven million, and that’s without our energistic ability enhancing it. Six million should be enough to keep our society alive and fresh.”

  “You’re joking. Bring in over five million people?”

  “Yes. It’ll take time, but it can be done.”

  “Bringing some people in, yes, but so many … Surely our population is going to grow anyway?”

  “Not by five million it isn’t. We’d have to make permanent pregnancy compulsory for every female for the next ten years. This council might be in command now, but try implementing that and see how long we last.”

  “I’m not talking about right now, I’m talking about after. We’ll have children after we leave.”

  “Will we? These aren’t our actual bodies, they’d never be our children. The biological imperative isn’t driving us anymore; these bodies are sensory receptors for our consciousness, nothing else. I certainly don’t intend to have any children.”

  “All right, even assuming you’re right, and I’m not saying you are, how are you going to get that kind of influx, launch the hellhawks on pirate flights to capture people?”

  “No,” she said confidently. “Invite them. You’ve seen the Starbridge tribes. There are the disaffected just like them in every society throughout the Confederation. I know, one of the charities I used to work for helped rehabilitate youngsters who couldn’t cope with modern life. Gather them all together, and you could fill twenty habitats this size.”

  “But how? What’s going to make them want to come here, to Valisk?”

  “We just have to find the right message, that’s all.”

  ***

  Even by day, Burley Palace stood aloof from the city of Atherstone; surrounded by extensive parkland at the top of a small rise, it surveyed the sprawling lower districts with a suitably regal detachment. At night the isolation made it positively imperious. Atherstone’s lights turned the motorways, boulevards, and grand squares into a gaudy mother-of-pearl blaze which shimmered as though it were alive. Right in the centre, however, the palace grounds were a lake of midnight darkness. And in the centre of that, Burley Palace shone brighter than it ever did under the noon sun, illuminated by a bracelet of five hundred spotlights. It was visible from almost anywhere in the city.

  Ralph Hiltch observed it through the Royal Navy Marine flyer’s sensor suite as they approached. It was a neoclassic building with innumerable wings slotting together at not quite geometrical angles, and five quadrangles enclosing verdant gardens. Even though it was nearly one o’clock in the morning, there were a lot of cars using the long drive which cut through the parkland, headlights creating a near-constant stream of white light. Although highly ornamental, the palace was the genuine centre of government; so given the planet’s current state of alert, the activity was only to be expected.

  The pilot brought the flyer down on one of the discreetly positioned rooftop pads. Roche Skark was waiting for Ralph as he came down the airstairs, two bodyguards standing unobtrusively a few metres behind.

  “How are you?” the ESA director asked.

  Ralph shook his hand. “Still in one piece, sir. Unlike Mortonridge.”

  “That’s a nasty case of guilt you’ve got there, Ralph. I hope it’s not clouding your judgement.”

  “No, sir. In any case, it isn’t guilt. Just resentment. We nearly had them, we were so close.”

  Roche gave the younger operative a sympathetic look. “I know, Ralph. But you drove them out of Pasto, and that’s got to be a colossal achievement.

  Just think what would have happened if it had fallen to the likes of Annette Ekelund. Mortonridge multiplied by a hundred. And if they’d possessed that many people they wouldn’t have been content to stay put like they are on the peninsula.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They walked into the palace.

  “This idea the pair of you came up with. Is it workable?” Roche asked.

  “I believe so, sir,” Ralph said. “And I appreciate you allowing me to outline it to the Princess myself.” The notion had evolved from several strategy reviews he and Colonel Palmer had held during the occasional lull in the frantic two days of the Mortonridge evacuation. Ralph knew that it contained suggestions which had to be made to the Princess personally. He feared it being diluted by navy staff analysts and tacticians if he routed it through the correct procedural channels.

  Smooth minds polishing away the raw substance to present a sleek concept, one that was politically acceptable. And that wouldn’t work, nothing short of hundred per cent adherence to the proposal would produce success.

  Sometimes when he stood back and observed this obsessional character he’d become he wondered if he wasn’t simply overdosing on arrogance.

  “Given the circumstances, it was the least we could do,” Roche Skark said. “As I told you, your efforts have not gone unnoticed.”

  Sylvester Geray was waiting for them in the deca
gonal reception room with its gleaming gold and platinum pillars. The equerry in his perfect uniform gave Ralph’s borrowed marine fatigues a reluctant appraisal, then opened a set of doors.

  After the opulence of the state rooms outside, Princess Kirsten’s private office was almost subdued, the kind of quietly refined study a noble landowner would run an estate from. He couldn’t quite make the leap to accepting that the entire Ombey star system was ruled from this room.

  He stepped up to the desk, feeling he ought to salute, but knowing it would appear ridiculous; he wasn’t military. The Princess didn’t look much different from her images on the news, a dignified lady who seemed to be locked in perpetual middle age. No amount of discipline was able to stop him checking her face. Sure enough, there was the classic Saldana nose, slender with a downturned end; which was almost her only delicate feature, she had an all-over robustness of a kind which made it impossible ever to imagine her growing into a frail old grandmother.

  Princess Kirsten acknowledged him with a generous nod. “Mr Hiltch. In the flesh at last.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Thank you so much for coming. If you’d like to sit down, we can start.”

  Ralph took the chair next to Roche Skark, grateful for the illusion of protection his boss gave him. Jannike Dermot was eyeing him with what was almost a sense of amusement. The only other person in the room, apart from the equerry, was Ryle Thorne, who didn’t appear to care about Ralph’s presence one way or the other.

  “We’ll bring in Admiral Farquar now,” Kirsten said. She datavised the desk’s processor for a security level one sensenviron conference. The white bubble room emerged to claim them.

  Ralph found he was sitting to the right of the admiral, down at the end of the table away from the Princess.

  “If you’d like to summarize the current Mortonridge situation for us, Mr. Hiltch,” Kirsten said.