The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The news acted as a mood damper right through the starship. Their expected sanctuary wasn’t so secure after all; they’d escaped a battle to find a war brewing. Not even an Edenist psyche could suppress that much gloom. The children from Lalonde (those not squeezed into the zero-tau pods) picked up on it, another emotional ricochet, though admittedly not as large as all the others they’d been through. The happiness Father Horst had promised them waited at the end of their journey was proving elusive. Even the fact the voyage was ending didn’t help much.

  The damage Lady Macbeth had suffered in the fight above Lalonde didn’t affect her manoeuvrability, not with Joshua piloting. She closed in on her designated docking bay, CA 5-099, at the very centre of the spaceport disk, precisely aligned along the vector assigned by traffic control.

  There was no hint that fifteen attitude control thrusters had been disabled, and she was venting steadily from emergency dump valves as well as a couple of fractured cryogenic feed pipes.

  By that time almost a quarter of the habitat population was accessing the spaceport’s sensors, watching her dock. The news companies had broken into their schedules to announce that a single ship had made it back from Lalonde. Reporters had been very quick off the mark in discovering the pediatric teams were assembling in the bay. (Kelly’s boss was making frantic datavises to the incoming starship, to no avail.)

  The space industry people, industrial station workers, and ships’ crews kicking their heels in the bars because of the quarantine observed the approach with a sense of troubled awe. Yes, Joshua had come through again, but the state of old Lady Mac … Charred, flaking nultherm foam exposed sections of her hull which showed innumerable heat-stress ripples (a sure sign of energy beam strikes), melted sensor clusters, only two fusion tubes functional. It must have been one hell of a scrap. They all knew no one else would be returning. Knowledge that every friend, colleague, or vague acquaintance who had accompanied Terrance Smith was either radioactive dust or lost to possession was hard to accept. Those starships were powerful, fast, and well armed.

  The disembarkment process was, as expected, a shambles. People kept emerging from the airlock tube as if Lady Mac were the focus of some dimensional twist, her internal space far larger than that which the hull enclosed. Edenists formed a good percentage of the exiles, much to the surprise of the rover reporters. They helped a horde of wondrously senseogenic, scared-looking refugee kids in ragged clothes. Pediatric nurses floated after them in the reception compartment, while reporters dived like airborne sharks to ask the children how they felt/what they’d seen. Tears started to flow.

  <> Ione asked the habitat.

  Serjeants launched themselves to intercept the reporters.

  Jay Hilton hugged her legs to her chest as she drifted across the compartment, shivering unhappily. None of this was what she’d been expecting, not the starship voyage nor their arrival. She tried to catch sight of Father Horst amid the noisy swirl of bodies bouncing around the compartment, knowing that he had others to look out for and probably couldn’t spare much time for her. In fact, she wouldn’t be needed for anything much now there were plentiful adults around to take care of things again. Perhaps if she hunched up really small everyone would ignore her, and she’d be able to have a look at the habitat’s park. Jay had heard stories of Edenist habitats and how beautiful they were; back in the arcology she’d often daydreamed that one day she’d visit Jupiter, despite everything Father Varhoos preached about the evils of bitek.

  The opportunity to escape the melee never quite presented itself. A reporter soared past her, noticed she was the oldest kid in the compartment, and used a grab hoop to brake himself abruptly. His mouth split into a super-friendly smile, the kind his neural nanonics program advised was best to interface trustfully with Young Children. “Hi there. Isn’t this atrocious? They should have organized things better.”

  “Yes,” Jay said doubtfully.

  “My name is Matthias Rems.” The smile broadened further.

  “Jay Hilton.”

  “Well, hi there, Jay. I’m glad you’ve reached Tranquillity, you’re quite safe here. From what we’ve heard it was nasty for all of you on Lalonde.”

  “Yes!”

  “Really? What happened?”

  “Well, Mummy got possessed the first night. And then—” A hand closed on her shoulder. She glanced around to see Kelly Tirrel giving Matthias Rems an aggressive stare.

  “He wants to know what happened,” Jay said brightly. She liked Kelly, admiring her right from the moment she arrived at the savanna homestead to rescue them. On the voyage to Tranquillity she’d secretly decided that she was going to be a tough, Confederation-roaming reporter like Kelly when she grew up.

  “What happened is your story, Jay,” Kelly said slowly. “It belongs to you; it’s all you’ve got left. And if he wants to hear it he has to offer you a great deal of money for it.”

  “Kelly!” Matthias flashed her a slightly exasperated you-know-the-score grin.

  It made no discernible impression on Kelly. “Pick on someone your own size, Matthias. Ripping off traumatized children is low even for you. I’m covering for Jay.”

  “Is that right, Jay?” he asked. “Did you thumbprint a contract with Collins?”

  “What?” Jay glanced from one to the other, puzzled.

  “Serjeant!” Kelly shouted.

  Jay squeaked in alarm as a glitter-black hand closed around Matthias Rems’s upper arm. The owner of the hand was a hard-skinned monster worse than any shape a possessed had ever worn.

  “It’s all right, Jay.” Kelly grinned for the first time in days. “It’s on our side. This is what Tranquillity uses for its police force.”

  “Oh.” Jay swallowed loudly.

  “I’d like to complain about an attempted violation of confidentiality copyright,” Kelly told the serjeant. “Also, Matthias is breaking the sense-media ethics charter concerning the approach and enticement of minors in the absence of their parents or guardians.”

  “Thank you, Kelly,” the serjeant said. “And welcome home, I offer my congratulations on your endurance through difficult times.”

  She grimaced numbly at the bitek servitor.

  “Come along now, sir,” the serjeant said to Matthias Rems. It pushed away from the compartment bulkhead with its stocky legs, the pair of them heading for one of the hatchways.

  “Don’t ever trust reporters, Jay,” Kelly said. “We’re not nice people. Worse than the possessed really; they only steal bodies, we steal your whole life and make a profit out of it.”

  “You don’t,” Jay said, shoving the full child-force of trusting worship behind the words. A belief which was a sheer impossibility for any adult to live up to.

  Kelly kissed her forehead, emotions in a muddle. Kids today, so knowing, which only makes them even more vulnerable. She gently pushed Jay towards one of the pediatric nurses, and left them discussing what the little girl had eaten last, and when.

  “Kelly, thank Christ!”

  The familiar voice made her twitch, a movement which in free fall was like a ripple running from toe to crown. She held on to a grab hoop to steady herself.

  Feetfirst, Garfield Lunde slid down into her vision field. Her direct boss, and the man who had authorized her assignment. A big gamble, as he told her at the time, this kind of fieldwork is hardly your forte.

  Putting her deeper in his debt; everything he did for his workforce was a favour, an against-the-rules kindness. He owed his position entirely to his mastery of office politics; sensevise talent and investigative ability never entered into it.

  “Hello, Garfield,” she said in a dull tone.

  “You made it back. Great hairstyle, too.”

  Kelly had almost forgotten her hair, cut to a fine fuzz to fit her armour suit’s skull helmet. Style, dress sense, cosmetic membranes: concepts which seemed to have dissolved clean out of her universe. “Well done, Garfield; I can see why your observat
ional ability pushed you right the way up the seniority league.”

  He wagged a finger, almost catching his ponytail which was snaking around his neck. “Tough lady, at last. Looks like you lost your cherry on this assignment; touched a few corpses, wondered if you should have helped instead of recorded. Don’t feel bad, it happens to us all.”

  “Sure.”

  “Is anyone else coming back, any other starships?”

  “If they’re not here by now, they won’t be coming.”

  “Christ, this is getting better by the second. We’ve got us a total exclusive. Did you get down to the planet?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is it possessed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Magnificent!” He glanced contentedly around the reception chamber, watching children and Edenists in free-fall flight, their movements reminiscent of geriatric ballerinas. “Hey, where are the mercs you went with?”

  “They didn’t make it, Garfield. They sacrificed themselves so the Lady Mac’s spaceplane could lift the children off.”

  “Oh, my God. Wow! Sacrificed themselves for kids?”

  “Yes. We were outgunned, but they stood their ground. All of them. I never expected …”

  “Stunning. You got it, didn’t you? For Christ’s sake, Kelly, tell me you recorded it. The big fight, the last noble stand.”

  “I recorded it. What I could. When I wasn’t so scared I couldn’t think straight.”

  “Yes! I knew I made the right decision sending you. This is it, babe. Just watch our audience points go galactic. We’re going to put Time Universe and the others out of business. Do you realize what you’ve done here? Shit, Kelly, you’ll probably wind up as my boss, after this. Wonderful!”

  Very calmly, Kelly let Ariadne’s free-fall unarmed combat program shift into primary mode. Her sense of balance was immediately magnified, making her aware of every slight movement her body made in the minute air currents churning through the chamber. Her spacial orientation underwent a similar augmentation; distances and relative positions were obvious.

  “Wonderful?” she hissed.

  Garfield grinned proudly. “You bet.”

  Kelly launched herself at him, rotating around her centre of gravity as she did so. Her feet came around, seeking out his head, legs kicking straight.

  Two of the serjeants had to pull her off. Luckily the pediatric team had some medical nanonic packages with them; they were able to save Garfield’s eye; it would take a week before his broken nose knitted back into its proper shape, though.

  All the passenger refugees had left Lady Mac. Overstressed environmental systems were calming. The docking bay’s umbilicals sent a cool wind washing through the bridge, taking with it the air of the voyage; ugly air with its smell of human bodies, humidity, and heavy carbon dioxide.

  To Joshua’s mind even the fans behind the grilles weren’t whining so much. Perhaps it was his imagination.

  Now there was only the crew left to soak up the luxuriously plentiful oxygen. The crew minus one. There hadn’t been much time for Joshua to dwell on Warlow during the flight. Racing between jump coordinates, worrying about the energy patterning nodes holding out, the leakages, the damaged systems, children he had suddenly become responsible for, the desperate need to succeed.

  Well, now he’d won, beaten the odds the universe had thrown at him. And it made him feel good, even though there was no happiness to accompany it. Self-satisfaction was a curious state, in this case roughly equivalent to fatigue-induced nirvana, he thought.

  Ashly Hanson came up through the decking hatch and took a swift glance around the lethargic forms still encased by their acceleration couch webbing. “Flight’s over, you know,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Joshua datavised an instruction into the flight computer.

  Harlequin schematics of the starship’s principal systems vanished from his mind, and the webbing peeled back.

  “I think the cleaning up can wait until tomorrow,” Dahybi said.

  “Message received,” Joshua said. “Shore leave is now granted, and compulsory.”

  Sarha glided over from her couch and gave Joshua a tiny kiss. “You were magnificent. After all this is over, we’re going back to Aethra so we can tell him we escaped and got the children off.”

  “If he’s there.”

  “He’s there. You know he is.”

  “She’s right, Joshua,” Melvyn Ducharme said as he cancelled the neurographic visualization of Lady Mac’s power circuits. “He’s there. And even if the transfer didn’t work, his soul is going to be watching us right now.”

  “Jesus.” Joshua shivered. “I don’t even want to think about that.”

  “We don’t have a lot of choice in the subject anymore.”

  “But not today,” Ashly put in heavily. He held out an arm to Sarha. “Come along, we’ll leave these morbids to moan among themselves. I don’t know about you, but I’m having one very stiff drink in Harkey’s first, then it’s bed for a week.”

  “Sounds good.” She twisted her feet off the stikpad by Joshua’s couch and followed the old time-hopper pilot through the hatch.

  A vaguely nonplussed expression appeared on Joshua’s face as they left together. None of your business, he told himself. Besides, there was Kelly to consider, though she’d been almost unrecognizable since returning from Lalonde. And then there was Louise. Ione, too.

  “I think I’ll skip the drink and go straight to bed,” he announced to the other two.

  They went out of the bridge hatch one at a time. It was only when they got to the airlock that they encountered the service company’s systems specialist coming the other way. She wanted the captain’s authority to begin assessing the ship so she could assemble a maintenance schedule.

  Joshua stayed behind to discuss priorities, datavising over the files on systems which had taken punishment above Lalonde.

  There was nobody about when he finally left the starship. The circus in the reception chamber had ended. The reporters had packed up. There wasn’t even a serjeant left to check him over for possession. Sloppy, he thought, not like Tranquillity at all.

  A commuter lift took him along the spindle which connected the spaceport disk to the centre of the habitat’s northern endcap. It deposited him in one of the ten tube stations which served the hub; deserted but for a single occupant.

  Ione stood outside the waiting tube carriage, dressed in a sea-blue sarong and matching blouse. He smiled ruefully at the memory that evoked.

  “I remember you,” she said.

  “Funny, I thought you’d forgotten.”

  “No. Not you, no matter what.”

  He stood in front of her, looking down at a face which owned far too much wisdom for such delicate features. “I was stupid,” he confessed.

  “I think you and I can withstand one argument, don’t you?”

  “I was stupid more than once.”

  “Tranquillity’s been reviewing the memories of the Edenists you saved. I’m very proud of what you achieved on that flight, Joshua, and I don’t just mean all that fancy flying. Very proud indeed.”

  All he could do was nod ineffectually. For a long time he’d dreamed about a reunion like this; going off after they’d had a fight had left too many things open-ended, too much unsaid. Now it was actually happening, his mind was slipping to Louise, who had also been left behind. It was all Warlow’s fault, him and that damn promise to be a little less selfish with his girls.

  “You look tired,” Ione said, and held out her hand. “Let’s go home.”

  Joshua looked down at her open hand, small and perfect. He twined his fingers through hers, rediscovering how warm her skin was.

  ***

  Parker Higgens thought it must have been about twenty years since he last left Tranquillity, a short trip on an Adamist starship to a university on Nanjing so he could deliver a paper and assess some candidates for the Laymil project. He hadn’t enjoyed the experience; free-fall nausea seemed capable of
penetrating whatever defences his neural nanonics erected across his nerve pathways.

  This time it was pleasantly different. The gravity in the blackhawk’s life-support capsule never fluctuated, he had a comfortable cabin to himself, the crew were friendly, and his navy escort officer was a cultured lady who made an excellent travelling companion.

  At the end of the flight he even accessed the blackhawk’s electronic sensors to watch their approach to Trafalgar. Dozens of navy starships swarmed around its two large spaceport globes. Avon provided a sumptuous backdrop; the warm blues, whites, greens, and browns of a terracompatible planet were so much kinder than the abrasive storm bands of Mirchusko, he realized. Parker Higgens almost laughed at the stereotype image he presented as he gawped like some stupefied tourist: the dusty old professor finally discovers there is life outside the research centre.

  Pity he didn’t have time to enjoy it. The navy officer had been datavising Trafalgar constantly since their wormhole terminus closed behind them, outlining their brief and authenticating it with a series of codes. They’d been given a priority approach vector, allowing them to curve around one of the spaceports at an exhilarating speed before sliding into the huge crater which served as a docking ledge for bitek starships (they were the only blackhawk using it).

  After that he’d had a couple of meetings with the First Admiral’s staff officers, an exchange of information which chilled both sides. Parker found out about possession, they were given the data on the Laymil home planet, Unimeron. They decided there wasn’t any room for doubt.

  When he was shown into Samual Aleksandrovich’s big circular office the first thing Parker Higgens felt was an obscure burst of jealousy. The First Admiral had a view out over Trafalgar’s biosphere which was more impressive than the one in his own office back on the Laymil project campus. A true dedicated bureaucrat’s reaction, he chided himself; prestige is everything.

  The First Admiral came around from behind his big teak desk to greet Parker with a firm handshake. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Director; and I’d also like to convey my gratitude to the Lord of Ruin as well for acting so promptly in this matter. It would appear she is a strong supporter of the Confederation; I just wish other heads of state followed her example.”