The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “God’s Brother, but it’s magnificent,” Quinn said. They hadn’t shown him this view when he’d been brought up the Brazilian orbital tower on his way to exile. There were no ports in his deck of the lift capsule, nor on the sections of the mammoth docking station through which the Ivets had passed. He’d lived on Earth all his life, and never seen it, not as it should be seen. Exquisite, and tragically fragile.

  In his mind he could see the dazzling lights slowly, torturously, snuffed out as thick oily shadows slid across the land, a tide which brought with it despair and fear. Then reaching out into space, crushing the O’Neill Halo, its vitality and power. No light would be left, no hope. Only the screams, and the Night. And Him.

  Tears of joy formed fat distorting lenses across Quinn’s eyeballs. The image, the conviction, was so strong. Total blackness, with Earth at its centre; raped, dead, frozen, entombed. “Is this my task, Lord? Is it?” The thought of such a privilege humbled him.

  The flight computer let out an alarmed whistle.

  Furious that his dreams should be interrupted, Quinn demanded: “What is it?” He had to squint and blink to clear his vision. The holoscreens were filling with tumbling red spiderwebs, graphic symbols flashed for attention. Five orange vector lines were oozing inwards from the edge of the display to intersect at the Tantu’s location. “What is happening?”

  “It’s some kind of interception manoeuvre,” Bajan shouted. “Those are navy ships. And the Halo’s SD platforms are locking on.”

  “I thought we were in a legitimate emergence zone.”

  “We are.”

  “Then what—”

  “Priority signal for the Tantu’s captain from Govcentral Strategic Defence Command,” the flight computer announced.

  Quinn glowered at the AV projection pillar which had relayed the message.

  He snapped his fingers at Bajan.

  “This is Captain Mauer, commander of the CN ship Tantu,” Bajan said. “Can somebody tell me what the problem is?”

  “This is SD Command, Captain. Datavise your ship’s ASA code, please.”

  “What code?” Bajan mouthed, completely flummoxed.

  “Does anybody know what it is?” Quinn growled. Tantu had already datavised its identification code as soon as the jump was completed, as per standard procedure.

  “The code, Captain,” SD Command asked again.

  Quinn watched the fluorescent orange vectors of another two ships slide into the holoscreen display. Their weapons sensors focused on the Tantu’s hull.

  “Computer, jump one light-year. Now,” he ordered.

  “No, the sensors …” Bajan exclaimed frantically.

  His objection didn’t matter. The flight computer was programmed to respond to Quinn’s voice commands alone.

  The Tantu jumped, its event horizon slicing clean through the carbon-composite stalks which elevated the various sensor clusters out of their recesses. Ten of them had deployed as soon as the starship emerged above Earth: star trackers, midrange optical sensors, radar, communications antennae.

  All seven warships racing towards the Tantu saw it disappear behind ten dazzling white plasma spumes as its event horizon crushed the carbon molecules of the stalks to fusion density and beyond. Ruined sensor clusters spun out of the radioactive mist.

  The SD Command centre duty officer ordered two of the destroyers to follow the Tantu, cursing his luck that the interception squadron hadn’t been assigned any voidhawks. It took the two starships eleven minutes to match trajectories with the Tantu’s jump coordinate. Everybody knew that was too long.

  Soprano alarms shrilled at painful volume, drowning out all other sounds on the Tantu’s bridge. The holoscreens which had been carrying the sensor images turned black as soon as the patterning nodes discharged, then flicked to ship schematic diagrams. Disturbing quantities of red symbols flashed for attention.

  “Kill that noise,” Quinn bellowed.

  Bajan hurried to obey, typing rapidly on the keyboard rigged up next to his acceleration couch.

  “We took four hull breaches,” Dwyer reported as soon as the alarm cut off. He was the most ardent of Quinn’s new apostles, a former black stimulant program pusher who was murdered at the age of twenty-three by a faster, more ambitious rival. His anger and callousness made him ideal for the cause. He’d even heard of the sects, dealing with them on occasion. “Six more areas have been weakened.”

  “What the fuck was that? Did they shoot at us?” Quinn asked.

  “No,” Bajan said. “You can’t jump with sensors extended, the distortion effect collapses any mass caught in the field. Fortunately it’s only a very narrow shell which covers the hull, just a few micrometers thick.

  But the atoms inside it get converted directly into energy. Most of it shoots outwards, but there’s also some which is deflected right back against the hull. That’s what hit us.”

  “How much damage did we pick up?”

  “Secondary systems only,” Dwyer said. “And we’re venting something, too; nitrogen I think.”

  “Shit. What about the nodes? Can we jump again?”

  “Two inoperative, another three damaged. But they’re failsoft. I think we can jump.”

  “Good. Computer, jump three light-years.”

  Bajan clamped down on his automatic protest. Nothing he could do about the spike of anger and exasperation in his mind though, Quinn could perceive that all right.

  “Computer, jump half a light-year.”

  This time the bridge lights sputtered almost to the point of extinction.

  “All right,” Quinn said as the gloomy red illumination grew bold again.

  “I want some fucking sensor visuals on these screens now. I want to know where we are, and if anyone followed us. Dwyer, start working around those damaged systems.”

  “Are we going to be okay, Quinn?” Lawrence asked. His energistic ability couldn’t hide the sweat pricking his sallow face.

  “Sure. Now shut the fuck up, let me think.” He slowly unbuckled the straps holding him into his acceleration couch. Using the stikpads he shuffled on tiptoe over to Bajan’s couch. His black robe swirled like bedevilled smoke around him, the hood deepening until his face was almost completely hidden. “What,” he asked in a tight whisper, “is an ASA code?”

  “I dunno, Quinn, honest,” the agitated man protested.

  “I know you don’t know, dickhead. But the captain does. Find out!”

  “Sure, Quinn, sure.” He closed his eyes, concentrating on the captain’s mind, inflicting as much anguish as he could dream of to wrest free the information. “It’s an Armed Ship Authorization designation,” he grunted eventually.

  “Go on,” Quinn’s voice emerged from the shadows of his hood.

  “Any military starship which jumps to Earth has to have one. There’s so much industry in orbit, so many settled asteroids, they’re terrified of the damage just one rogue ship could cause. So the captain of every Confederation government navy ship is given an ASA code to confirm they’re legally entitled to be armed and that they’re under official control. It acts as a fail-safe against any hijacking.”

  “It certainly does,” Quinn said. “But it shouldn’t have done. Not with us. You should have known.”

  Nobody else on the bridge was looking anywhere near Bajan, all of them hugely absorbed with their own tasks of stabilizing the damage. And Quinn, looming over him like some giant carrion creature.

  “This Mauer is a tough mother, Quinn. He tricked me, that’s all. I’ll make him suffer for it, I swear. The Light Bringer will be proud of the way I let my serpent beast loose on him.”

  “There’s no need,” Quinn said genially.

  Bajan let out a faltering whimper of relief.

  “I shall supervise his suffering myself.”

  “But … how?”

  In the absolute silence of the bridge, Lawrence Dillon sniggered.

  “Leave us, Bajan, you little prick,” Quinn ordered. “You have failed me
.”

  “Leave? Leave what?”

  “The body I provided for you. You don’t deserve it.”

  “No!” Bajan howled.

  “Go. Or I’ll shove you into zero-tau.”

  With a last sob, Bajan let himself fall back into the beyond, the glories of sensation ripping out of his mind. His soul wept its torment as the crowded emptiness closed around him once again.

  Gurtan Mauer coughed weakly, his body trembling. He had lurched from one nightmare to another. The Tantu’s bridge had become an archaic crypt where technological artifacts protruded from whittled ebony, as if they were the foreign elements. A monk in midnight-black robes stood at the side of his couch, the hint of a face inside the voluminous hood indicated by the occasional carmine flicker striking alabaster skin. An inverted crucifix hung on a long silver chain around his neck; for some reason it wasn’t drifting around as it ought in free fall.

  “You didn’t just defy me alone,” Quinn said. “That I could almost accept. But when you held back that fucking ASA code you defied the will of God’s Brother. Right now I should have been in the docking station, by morning I would have kissed the ground at the foot of the orbital tower. I was destined to carry the gospel of the Night to the whole motherfucking world! And you fucked with me, shithead. You!”

  Mauer’s ship-suit caught light. In free fall the flame was a bright indigo fluid, slithering smoothly across his torso and along his limbs.

  Scraps of charred fabric peeled off, exposing the charcoaled skin below.

  Fans whirred loudly behind the bridge’s duct grilles as they attempted to suck the awful stench from the compartment’s air.

  Quinn ignored the agonized wailing muted by the captain’s clamped mouth.

  He let his mind lovingly undress Lawrence.

  The slight lad drifted idly in the centre of the bridge, smiling dreamily down at his naked body. He allowed Quinn to shape him, the young stable boy’s skinny figure developing thick sinuous muscles, the width of his shoulders increasing. Clad only in a barbarian warrior garb of shiny leather strips, he began to resemble a dwarf addicted to bodybuilding.

  The blue flame cloaking Mauer dribbled away as the last of the ship-suit was consumed. With a simple wave of his hand, Quinn healed the captain’s burns, restoring skin, nails, hair to their former state. Mauer became a picture of vitality.

  “Your turn,” Quinn told Lawrence with a deviant laugh.

  The pain-shocked, imprisoned captain could only stare upwards in terror as the freakishly hulking boy grinned broadly and glided in towards him.

  ***

  Alkad Mzu accessed the Samaku’s sensor suite via the flight computer, allowing the picture to share her mind with a sense of benevolent dismay.

  This is what we fought over? This was what a planet died for? This? Dear Mary!

  Like all starships jumping insystem, the Samaku had emerged a safe half-million kilometres above the plane of the elliptic. The star known as Tunja was an M4-type, a red dwarf. Bright enough from the starship’s forty million kilometres distance, but hardly dazzling like a G-type, the primary of most terracompatible planets. From Alkad’s excellent vantage point it hung at the centre of a vast disk of grizzled particles, extending over two hundred million kilometres in diameter.

  The inner (annulet), surrounding Tunja out to about three million kilometres, was a sparsely populated region where the constant gale of solar wind had stripped away the smaller particles, leaving only tide-locked boulders and asteroid fragments. With their surfaces smoothed to a crystalline gloss by the incessant red heat, they twinkled scarlet and crimson as if they were a swarm of embers flung off by the dwarf’s arching typhonic prominences. Further out, the disk’s opacity began to build, graduating into a sheet of what looked like dense grainy fog; bright carmine at the inner fringe, shading away to a deep cardinal-red ninety million kilometres later. A trillion spiky shadows speckled the uniformity, cast by the larger chunks of rock and metal bobbing among the dust and slushy gravel.

  No terracompatible planet was conceivable in such an environment. The star was barren except for a single gas giant, Duida, orbiting a hundred and twenty-eight million kilometres out. A couple of young Edenist habitats circled above it, but the main focus of human life was scattered across the disk.

  A disk of such density was usually the companion of a newborn star, but Tunja was estimated to be over three billion years old. Confederation planetologists suspected the red dwarf’s disk had its genesis in a spectacularly violent collision between a planet and a very large interstellar meteor. It was a theory which could certainly explain the existence of the Dorados themselves: three hundred and eighty-seven large asteroids with a near-pure metal content. Two-thirds of them were roughly spherical, permitting the strong conclusion that they were molten core magma material when the hypothetical collision took place. Whatever their origin, such abundant ore was an immensely valuable economic resource for the controlling government. Valuable enough to go to war over.

  “Ayacucho’s civil traffic control is refusing us docking permission,” Captain Randol said. “They say all the Dorados are closed to civil starflight and we have to return to our port of origin.”

  Alkad exited the sensor visualization and stared across the Samaku’s bridge. Randol was wearing a diplomatically apologetic expression.

  “Has this ever happened before?” she asked.

  “No. Not that we’ve been to the Dorados before, but I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

  I have not waited this long, nor come so far, to be turned away by some bloody bureaucrat, Alkad thought. “Let me talk to them,” she said.

  Randol waved a hand, signalling permission. The Samaku’s flight computer opened a channel to Ayacucho asteroid’s traffic control office.

  “This is Immigration Service Officer Mabaki, how can I help you?”

  “My name is Daphine Kigano,” Alkad datavised back—she ignored the speculative gaze from Randol at the name on one of her passports. “I’m a Dorado resident, and I wish to dock. I don’t see why that should be a problem.”

  “It isn’t a problem, not under normal circumstances. I take it you haven’t heard of the warning from the Confederation Assembly?”

  “No.”

  “I see. One moment, I’ll datavise the file over.”

  Alkad and the rest of the crew fell silent as they accessed the report.

  More than surprise, more than disbelief, she felt anger. Anger that this should happen now. Anger at the threat it posed to her mission, her life’s duty. Mother Mary must have deserted the Garissan people long ago, leaving the universe to place so much heartbreak and malicious catastrophe in their path.

  “I would still like to come home,” she datavised when it was over.

  “Impossible,” Mabaki replied. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m the only one who will enter the asteroid. Even if I were possessed I would present no threat. And I’m quite willing to be tested for possession, the Assembly warning says electronics malfunction in their presence. It should be simple enough.”

  “I’m sorry, we simply can’t take the risk.”

  “How old are you, Officer Mabaki?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your age?”

  “Is there some relevance to this?”

  “Indeed there is.”

  “I’m twenty-six.”

  “Indeed? Well, Officer Mabaki, I am sixty-three.”

  “Yes?”

  Alkad sighed quietly. Exactly what was included in the Dorados’ basic history didactic courses? Did today’s youth know nothing of their tragic past? “That means I was evacuated from Garissa. I survived the genocide, Officer Mabaki. If our Mother Mary had wanted me harmed, she would have done it then. Now, I am just an old woman who wishes to come home. Is that really so hard?”

  “I’m sorry, really. But no civil starships can dock.”

  Suppose I really can’t get in? The intelligence services will be waiting ba
ck at Narok, I can’t return there. Maybe the Lord of Ruin would take me back. That would circumvent any personal disaster, not to mention personality debrief, but it would all be over then: the Alchemist, our justice.

  She could see Peter’s face that last time, still covered in a medical nanonic, but with his eyes full of trust. And that was the crux; too many people were relying on her; those treasured few who knew, and the blissfully ignorant masses who didn’t.

  “Officer Mabaki.”

  “Yes?”

  “When this crisis is over, I will return home, will I not?”

  “I shall look forward to issuing your ship docking permission personally.”

  “Good, because it will be the last docking authorization you ever do issue. The first thing I intend to do on my return will be to visit my close personal friend Ikela and tell him about this ordeal you have put me through.” She held her breath, seemingly immersed in zero-tau. It was one lone name from the past flung desperately into the unknown. Mother Mary please let it strike its target.

  Captain Randol gave a bass chuckle. “I don’t know what you did, Alkad,” he said loudly. “But they just datavised our docking authority and an approach vector.”

  ***

  André Duchamp had long since come to the bitter realization that the lounge compartment would never be the same again. Between them, Erick and the possessed had wrought an appalling amount of damage, not just to the fittings, but the cabin systems as well.

  The small utility deck beneath the lounge was in a similar deplorable state. And the spaceplane was damaged beyond repair. The loading clamps hadn’t engaged, allowing it to twist about while the Villeneuve’s Revenge was under acceleration. Structural spars had snapped and bent all along its sleek fuselage.