The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Far overhead, Valisk’s light tube gleamed. The intensity hurt Tolton’s eyes. He was a night person, used to the clubs, bars, and vestibules of the starscrapers, delivering his poet sermons to the ship crew burnouts, bluesensers, stimmed-out wasters, and mercenaries who sprawled throughout the lower floors of the starscrapers. They tolerated him, those lost entities, listening to (or laughing at) his carefully crafted words, donating their own stories to his wealth of experiences. He moved among the descriptions of shattered lives as vagrants moved through the filthy refuse of a darkened cul-de-sac, forever picking, trying to understand what they said, to bestow some grace to their wizened dreams with his prose, to explain them to themselves.

  One day, he told them, I will incorporate it all into an MF album. The galaxy will know of your plight, and liberate you.

  They didn’t believe him, but they accepted him as one of their own. It was a status which had saved him from many a bar fight. But now, in his hour of desperate need, they had failed him. However difficult it was to acknowledge, they had lost; the toughest bunch of bastards in the Confederation had been wiped out in less than thirty-six hours.

  “Take the left hand channel at the next fork,” the processor block clipped to his belt told him.

  “Yes,” he mumbled obediently.

  And this was the greatest, most hurtful joke of all: him, the aspirant anarchist poet, pathetically grateful to Rubra, the super-capitalist dictator, for helping him.

  Ten metres on two gurgling streams merged together. He turned left without hesitation, the foaming water splashing his knees. Fleeing from the starscraper, it was as though an insane montage of all the combat stories he’d ever been told had come scampering up out of his subconscious to torment him. Horror and laughter pursued him down every corridor, even the disused ones he thought only he walked. Only Rubra, a calm voice reeling off directions, had offered any hope.

  Water made his black trousers heavy. He was cold, partly from the fright, partly cold turkey.

  There had been no sign of pursuit for three hours now, though Rubra said they were still tracking him.

  The narrow creek began to widen, its banks lowering. Tolton walked out into a tarn fifteen metres across with a crescent cliff cupping the rear half. Fat xenoc fish lumbered out of his way, apparently rolling along the bottom. There was no other exit, no feed stream.

  “Now what?” he asked plaintively.

  “There’s an inlet at the far end,” Rubra told him. “I’ve shut down the flow so you’ll be able to swim through. It’s only about five metres long, it bends, and there’s no light; but it leads to a cave where you’ll be safe.”

  “A cave? I thought caves were worn into natural rock over centuries.”

  “Actually, it’s a surge chamber. I just didn’t want to get technical on you, not with your artistic background.”

  Tolton thought the voice sounded tetchy. “Thank you,” he said, and started to wade forwards towards the cliff. A couple more directions, and he dived under the surface. The inlet was easy to find, a nightmare-black hole barely a metre and a half wide. Knowing he would never be able to turn around or even back out, he forced himself to glide into the entrance, bubbles streaming behind him.

  It couldn’t have been five metres long, more like twenty or thirty. The curves were sharp, one taking him down, the other up. He broke surface with a frantic gasping cry. The cave was a dome shape, twenty metres across, every surface was coated in a film of water, thin ripples were still running down the walls. He had emerged in the pool at the centre.

  When he looked up there was a large hole at the apex, droplets splattered on his upturned face. A high ring of electrophorescent cells cast a weak pink-white glow into every cranny.

  He paddled over to the side of the pool and pushed himself out onto the slippery floor. A bout of shivering claimed his limbs; he wasn’t sure if it was from the cold water or the nagging feeling of claustrophobia. The surge chamber was horribly confined, and the fact that it was usually full of water didn’t help.

  “I’ll have one of the housechimps bring you some dry clothes and food,” Rubra said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You should be safe here for a while.”

  “I …” He looked around apprehensively. Everyone always said Rubra could see everything. “I don’t think I can stay very long. It’s a bit … closed in.”

  “I know. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you moving, keep you ahead of them.”

  “Can I join up with anyone else? I need to be around people.”

  “There aren’t that many of you left free, I’m afraid. And meeting up with them isn’t a good idea, that would just make you easier to locate. I haven’t quite worked out how they track the non-possessed yet; I suspect they’ve got some kind of ESP ability. Hell, why not? They’ve got every other kind of magic.”

  “How many of us are there?” he asked, suddenly panicky.

  Rubra considered giving him the truth, but Tolton wasn’t the strongest of characters. “A couple of thousand,” he lied. There were three hundred and seventy-one people left free within the habitat, and assisting all of them simultaneously was pure hell.

  Even as he was reassuring Tolton he perceived Bonney Lewin stalking Gilbert Van-Riytell. The tough little woman had taken to dressing in nineteenth-century African safari gear, a khaki uniform with two crossed bandoleer straps holding polished brass cartridges in black leather hoops. A shiny Enfield .303 rifle was slung over her shoulder.

  Gilbert was Magellanic Itg’s old comptroller, and had never really stood a chance. Rubra had been trying to steer him along some service tunnels below a tube station, but Bonney and her co-hunters were boxing him in.

  “There’s an inspection hatch three metres ahead,” Rubra datavised to Van-Riytell. “I want you to—”

  Shadows lifted themselves off the service tunnel wall and grabbed the old man. Rubra hadn’t even noticed them. His perception routines had been expertly circumvented.

  Once again, he purged and reformatted local sub-routines. By the time he regained some observation ability Van-Riytell’s legs and arms were being tied around a long pole, ready to be carried away like a prize trophy. He wasn’t even struggling anymore. Bonney was supervising the procedure happily.

  One of her hunting team was standing back, watching aloofly; a tall young man in a simple white suit.

  Rubra knew then. It had to be him.

  <>

  The young man’s head jerked up. For an instant the illusion flickered.

  Long enough for Rubra. Under the outline of the handsome youth lurked Horgan. Horgan with a shocked expression wrenching his thin face.

  Incontrovertible proof.

  <> Rubra said. In a way the knowledge came almost as a relief.

  <> Dariat answered. <>

  <>

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  <
  King Alastair would have come here asking me for tips on how to run his Kingdom. Do you really think a shipload of fucking zombies could have walked in here

past passport, customs, and immigration without anyone even noticing if that kind of regime had been in place? Don’t you dare try and avoid facing up to what you’ve done.>>

  <>

  “Bastard!” Dariat screamed. Everyone in the hunting party stared at him, even Van-Riytell. “I’ll find you. I’ll get you. I’ll crush your soul to death.” Rage distended his face. He flung both arms out horizontally from his body, a magus Samson thrusting against the temple pillars. White fire exploded from his hands to chew into the tunnel walls. Polyp flaked and cracked, black chips spinning away through the air.

  <> Rubra mocked. <>

  “Pack it in, you maniac!” Bonney yelled at him.

  “Help me!” Dariat shouted back. The energistic hurricane roaring through his body was turning his brain to white-hot magma, wanting to burst clean out of his skull. “I’m going to kill him. Help me, for Chi-ri’s sake.” White fire hammered at the crumbling tunnel, desperate to reach the neural strata, to reach the very substance of the mind, and burn and burn and burn …

  “Stop it, right now.” Bonney aimed her Enfield at him, one eyebrow cocked.

  Dariat slowly allowed the white fire to sink back into the passive energistic currents stirring the cells of his possessed body. His shoulders hunched in as smoke from the scorched polyp spun around him. He reverted to Horgan, even down to the unwashed shirt and creased trousers.

  Hands were pressed to his face as he resisted the onrush of tears. “I’ll get him,” Horgan’s quavering, high-pitched voice proclaimed. “I’ll fucking have him. I’ll roast him inside his shell like he was some kind of lobster. You’ll see. Thirty years I’ve waited. Thirty! Thole owes me my justice. He owes me.”

  “Sure he does,” Bonney said. “But just so you and I are clear on this: pull another stunt like that, and you’ll need a new body to work out of.” She jerked her head to the team trussing up Van-Riytell. They lifted the old comptroller off the ground and started off down the tunnel.

  The hunter woman glanced back at Dariat’s hunched figure, opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it. She followed the rest of the hunters along the tunnel.

  <> Rubra sneered. <>

  <> Dariat said shakily. <>

  <>

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  <
  Look at yourself. If you want Anastasia back, bring her back. Find her in the beyond, get her back here. You can have everything now, remember? Kiera said so, did she not? Are you a part of that, Dariat? You have to decide, boy. Someday. If you don’t, they’ll do it for you.>>

  “I can’t bring her back,” he whispered.

  <>

  <>

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  Dariat glanced around with cold anger, his appearance sliding back to the white-suited ascetic. <>

  <>

  <> he demanded.

  <>

  <>

  Rubra’s principal routine watched Dariat’s rage run its course. He thought at one point that the man would revert to flailing at the tunnel walls with white fire again. But Dariat managed to hang on to that last shred of control—barely.

  Rubra stayed silent. He knew it was too early to play his ace, the one final secret he had kept safe for the last thirty years. The doubt he had planted deep in Dariat’s mind would have to be teased further, tormented into full-blown paranoia before the revelation was exposed.

  ***

  Lady Macbeth’s event horizon vanished, allowing her mushroom-shaped star trackers to rise out of their jump recesses and scan around. Fifteen seconds later the flight computer confirmed the starship had emerged fifty thousand kilometres above Tranquillity’s non-rotational spaceport.

  By the time her electronic warfare sensors registered, eight of the habitat’s Strategic Defence platforms had locked on to the hull, despite the fact their coordinate was smack in the centre of a designated emergence zone.

  “Jesus,” Joshua muttered sourly. “Welcome home, people, nice to see you again.” He looked over to Gaura, who was lying on Warlow’s acceleration couch. “Update Tranquillity on our situation, fast, please. It seems a little trigger-happy today.” Combat sensors had located four blackhawks on interception trajectories, accelerating towards them at six gees.

  Gaura acknowledged him with an indolent wrist flick. The Edenist’s eyes were closed; he’d been communicating with the habitat personality more or less from the moment the starship had completed the ZTT jump. Even with affinity it was difficult to convey their situation in a single quick summary; explanations, backed up with full memory exposure, took several minutes. He detected more than one ripple of surprise within the personality’s serene thoughts as the story of Lalonde unfolded in its mentality.

  When he’d finished, Ione directed her identity trait at him in the Edenist custom. <> she said. <>

  <>

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  The flight computer’s display showed the Strategic Defence platforms disengaging their weapons lock. Joshua received a standard acknowledgemen

t from the spaceport’s traffic control centre followed by a datavised approach vector.

  “I need a docking bay which can handle casualties,” he datavised back.

  “And put a pediatric team on alert status, as well as some biophysics specialists. These kids have had a real hard time on Lalonde, and that only finished when they got nuked.”

  “I am assembling the requisite medical teams now,” Tranquillity replied. “They will be ready by the time you dock. I am also alerting a spaceport maintenance crew. Judging by the state of your hull, and the vapour leakages I can observe, I believe it would be appropriate.”

  “Thank you, Tranquillity. Considerate as ever.” He waited for Ione to come on-line and say something, but the channel switched back to traffic control’s guidance updates.

  If that’s the way she wants it … Fine by me. His features slumped into a grouch.

  He ignited the Lady Mac’s two functional fusion tubes, aligning the ship on their approach vector. They headed in for Tranquillity at one and a half gees.

  “They believe all that spiel about possession?” Sarha asked Gaura, a note of worried scepticism in her voice.

  “Yes.” He queried the habitat about the fleks from Avon. “The First Admiral’s precautions have been endorsed by the Assembly. By now ninety per cent of the Confederation should be aware of the situation.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dahybi said. “We only just got back here from Lalonde, and we didn’t exactly hang around. How the hell could that navy squadron alert Avon two or three days ago?”

  “They didn’t,” Gaura said. “The possessed must have got off Lalonde some time ago. Apparently Laton had to destroy an entire Atlantean island to prevent them from spreading.”

  “Shit,” Dahybi grunted. “You mean they’re loose in the Confederation already?”

  “I’m afraid so. It looks like Shaun Wallace was telling Kelly the truth after all. I had hoped it was all some subtle propaganda on his part,” the Edenist added sadly.

 

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