The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Within seconds of the possessed establishing their new SD command channels he was in the system. A delicious irony, he felt, a ghost in the ghosts’ machinery. The devious interface circuits he’d established to gain entry couldn’t support anything like the data traffic necessary to give him full control of the platforms once more, but he could certainly do unto others what they’d done to him.

  On the ready signal from the Kohistan Consensus, Rubra immediately sent a squall of orders out to the SD platforms. Command codes were wiped and replaced, safety limiters were taken off line, fusion generator management programs were reformatted.

  In the commandeered spaceport management office used to run the habitat’s SD network, every single alarm tripped at once. The whole room was flooded with red light from AV projectors and holoscreens. Then the power went off, plunging the crew into darkness.

  “What the holy fuck is happening?” the recently appointed network captain shouted. A bright candle flame ignited at the tip of his index finger, revealing equally confounded faces all around him. He reached for his communications block to call Kiera Salter, dreading what she would say.

  But his hand never made it.

  “Oh, shit, look,” someone cried.

  Severe white light began to flood in through the office’s single port.

  In forty-five fusion generators the plasma jet had become unstable, perturbed by rogue manipulations in the magnetic confinement field.

  Burnthrough occurred, plasma striking the confinement chamber walls, vaporizing the material, which increased the pressure a thousandfold.

  Forty-five fusion generators ruptured almost simultaneously, tearing apart the SD platforms in a burst of five million degree shrapnel and irradiated gas.

  <> Rubra told the waiting fleet.

  Three hundred wormhole termini opened, englobing the habitat. Voidhawks shot out. Two hundred were designated to eradicate the industrial stations, depriving Kiera of their enormous armament manufacturing base.

  The bitek starships immediately swooped around onto their assault vectors. Kinetic missiles flashed out of their launch cradles, closing on the stations at sixteen gees. Each salvo was aimed so that the impact blast would kick the debris shower away from the habitat, minimizing the possibility of collision damage to the polyp shell.

  The remaining hundred voidhawks were given suppression duties. Flying in ten-strong formations they broadcast affinity warnings to the thoroughly disconcerted hellhawks sitting on the docking ledges, ordering them to remain where they were. Sharp ribbons of ruby-red light from targeting lasers made the ledge polyp shimmer like black ice speared by an early morning sun. Refracted beams twisted around the alien shapes perched on the pedestals as the voidhawks strove to match their discordant vectors with the habitat’s rotation.

  Closer to the habitat, cyclones of shiny debris were churning out from the ruined industrial stations. Victorious voidhawks dived and spun above the metallic constellations, racing away ahead of the perilous wavefront of sharp high-velocity slivers. The hellhawks sat on their pedestals, observing the carnage with mute impotence.

  <> Rubra told the Kohistan Consensus. <>

  Three hundred wormhole interstices opened. The voidhawks vanished in an extraordinary display of synchronization. Elapsed time of the attack was ninety-three seconds.

  Even in the heat of passion Kiera Salter could sense nearby minds starting to flare in alarm. She tried to dislodge Stanyon from her back and rise to her feet. When he resisted, tightening his grip, she simply smacked an energistic bolt into his chest. He grunted, the impact shoving him backwards.

  “What the fuck are you playing at, bitch?” he growled.

  “Be silent.” She stood up, her wishes banishing the soreness and rising bruises. Sweat vanished, her hair returned to a neatly brushed mane. A simple, scarlet summer dress materialized over her skin.

  On the other side of the endcap, the hellhawks were seething with resentment and anger. Beyond them was a haze of life which gave off a scent of icy determination. And Rubra, the ever-present mental background whisper, was radiating satisfaction. “Damn it!”

  Her desktop processor block started shrilling. Data scrawled over its screen. A Strategic Defence alert, and red systems failure symbols were flashing all over the network schematic.

  The high-pitched sound started to cut off intermittently, and the screen blanked out. The more she glared at the block, the worse the glitches became.

  “What’s happening?” Erdal Kilcady asked. Her other bedroom fancy—a gormless twenty-year-old who as far as she could determine had only one use.

  “We’re being attacked, you fool,” she snapped. “It’s those fucking Edenists.” Shit, and her schemes had been progressing beautifully up until now. The idiot kids believed her recording; they were starting to arrive. Another couple of months would have seen the habitat population rise to a decent level.

  Now this. The constant hellhawk flights must have frightened the Edenists into taking action.

  The burn mark on Stanyon’s chest healed over. Clothes sprang up to conceal his body. “We’d better get along to the SD control centre and kick some butt,” he said.

  Kiera hesitated. The SD centre was in the counter-rotating spaceport. She was certain the habitat itself would be safe from attack. Rubra would never allow that, but the spaceport might be a legitimate target.

  Just as she took a reluctant first step towards the door the black bakelite telephone on her bedside table started to ring. The primitive communications instrument was one which worked almost infallibly in the energistic environment exuded by the possessed. She picked it up and pressed the handset to her ear. “Yes?”

  “This is Rubra.”

  Kiera stiffened. She’d thought this room was outside of his surveillance.

  Exactly how many of their systems were exposed to him? “What do you want?”

  “I want nothing. I’m simply delivering a warning. The voidhawks from Kohistan are currently eliminating the habitat’s industrial production capability. There will be no more combat wasps to arm the hellhawks. We don’t like the threat they present. Do not attempt to resupply from other sources or it will go hard on you.”

  “You can do nothing to us,” she said, squeezing some swagger into her voice.

  “Wrong. The Edenists respect life, which is why no hellhawks were destroyed this time. However, I can guarantee you the next voidhawk strike will not be so generous. I have eliminated the habitat’s SD platforms so that in future it won’t even be as difficult for them as today’s strike. You and the hellhawks will sit out the rest of the conflict here. Is that understood?” The phone went dead.

  Kiera stood still, her whitened fingers tightening around the handset.

  Little chips of bakelite sprinkled down onto the carpet. “Find Dariat,” she told Stanyon. “I don’t care where he is, find him and bring him to me. Now!”

  ***

  Chaumort asteroid in the Châlons star system. Not a settlement which attracted many starships; it had little foreign exchange to purchase their cargoes of exotica, and few opportunities for export charters.

  Attendant industrial stations were old, lacking investment, their products a generation out-of-date; their poor sales added to the downwards cycle of the asteroid’s economy. Ten per cent of the adult population was unemployed, making qualified workers Chaumort’s largest (and irreplaceable) export. The fault lay in its leadership of fifteen years ago, who had been far too quick to claim independence from the founding company. Decline had been a steady constant from that carnival day onwards. Even as a refuge for undesirables, it was close to the bottom of the list.

  But it was French-ethnic, and it allowed certain starships to dock despite the Confederation’s quarantine edict. Life could have been worse, André Duchamp told himself, though admittedly not by much. He sat out at a table in wh
at qualified as a pavement café, watching what there was of the worldlet passing by. The sheer rock cliff of the biosphere cavern wall rose vertically behind him, riddled with windows and balconies for its first hundred metres. Out in the cavern the usual yellow-green fields and orchards of spindly trees glimmered under the motley light of the solartubes which studded the axis gantry.

  The view was acceptable, the wine passable, his situation if not tolerable then stable—for a couple of days. André took another sip and tried to relax. It was a pity his initial thought of selling combat wasps (post-Lalonde, fifteen were still languishing in the starship’s launch tubes) to Chaumort’s government had come to nothing. The asteroid’s treasury didn’t have the funds, and three inter-planetary ships had already been placed on defence contract retainers. Not that the money would have been much use here; the two local service companies which operated the spaceport had a very limited stock of spare parts. Of course, it would have come in useful to pay his crew. Madeleine and Desmond hadn’t actually said anything, but André knew the mood well enough. And that bloody anglo Erick—as soon as they’d docked Madeleine had hauled him off to the local hospital. Well, those thieving doctors would have to wait.

  He couldn’t actually remember a time when there had been so few options available. In fact, he was down to one slender possibility now. He’d found that out as soon as he’d arrived (this time checking the spaceport’s register for ships he knew). An unusually large number of starships were docked, all of them arriving recently. In other words, after the quarantine had been ratified and instituted by the Châlons system congress.

  The Confederation Assembly had demonstrated a laudable goal in trying to stop the spread of the possessed, no one disputed that. However, the new colony planets and smaller asteroids suffered disproportionately from the lack of scheduled flights; they needed imported high-technology products to maintain their economies. Asteroid settlements like Chaumort, whose financial situation was none too strong to start with, were going to shoulder a heavy cost for the crisis not of their making. What most of these backwater communities shared was their remoteness; so if say an essential cargo were to arrive on a starship, then it was not inconceivable that said starship would be given docking permission. The local system congress wouldn’t know, and therefore wouldn’t be able to prevent it. That cargo could then (for a modest charter fee) be distributed to help other small disadvantaged communities by inter-planetary ships, whose movements were not subject to any Confederation proscription.

  Chaumort was quietly establishing itself as an important node in a whole new market. The kind of market starships such as the Villeneuve’s Revenge were uniquely qualified to exploit.

  André had spoken to several people in the bars frequented by space industry crews and local merchants, voicing his approval for this turn of events, expressing an interest in being able to help Chaumort and its people in these difficult times. In short, becoming known. It was a game of contacts, and André had been playing it for decades.

  Which was why he was currently sitting at a table waiting for a man he’d never seen before to show up. A bunch of teenagers hurried past, one of the lads snatching a basket of bread rolls from the café’s table. His comrades laughed and cheered his bravado, and then ran off before the patron discovered the theft. André no longer smiled at the reckless antics of youth. Adolescents were a carefree breed; a state to which he had long aspired, and which his chosen profession had singularly failed to deliver. It seemed altogether unfair that happiness should exist only at one end of life, and the wrong end at that. It should be something you came in to, not left further and further behind.

  A flash of colour caught his eye. All the delinquents had tied red handkerchiefs around their ankles. What a stupid fashion.

  “Captain Duchamp?”

  André looked up to see a middle-aged Asian-ethnic man dressed in a smart black silk suit with flapping sleeves. The tone and the easy body posture indicated an experienced negotiator; too smooth for a lawyer, lacking the confidence of the truly wealthy. A middleman.

  André tried not to smile too broadly. The bait had been swallowed. Now for the price.

  The medical nanonic around Erick’s left leg split open from crotch to ankle, sounding as though someone were ripping strong fabric. Dr Steibel and the young female nurse slowly teased the package free.

  “Looks fine,” Dr Steibel decided.

  Madeleine grinned at Erick and pulled a disgusted face. The leg was coated in a thin layer of sticky fluid, residue of the package unknitting from his flesh. Below the goo, his skin was swan-white, threaded with a complicated lacework of blue veins. Scars from the burns and vacuum ruptures were patches of thicker translucent skin.

  Now the package covering his face and neck had been removed, Erick sucked in a startled breath as cool air gusted over the raw skin. His cheeks and forehead were still tingling from the same effect, and they’d been uncovered two hours ago.

  He didn’t bother looking at the exposed limb. Why bother? All it contained was memories.

  “Give me nerve channel access, please,” Dr Steibel asked. He was looking into an AV pillar, disregarding Erick completely.

  Erick complied, his neural nanonics opening a channel directly into his spinal cord. A series of instructions were datavised over, and his leg rose to the horizontal before flexing his foot about.

  “Okay.” The doctor nodded happily, still lost in the information the pillar was directing at him. “Nerve junctions are fine, and the new tissue is thick enough. I’m not going to put the package back on, but I do want you to apply the moisturizing cream I’ll prescribe. It’s important the new skin doesn’t dry out.”

  “Yes, Doc,” Erick said meekly. “What about … ?” He gestured at the packages enveloping his upper torso and right arm.

  Dr Steibel flashed a quick smile, slightly concerned at his patient’s listless nature. “ ‘Fraid not. Your AT implants are integrating nicely, but the process isn’t anywhere near complete yet.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ll give you some refills for those support modules you’re dragging around with you. These deep invasion packages you’re using consume a lot of nutrients. Make sure the reserves don’t get depleted.”

  He picked up the support module which Madeleine had repaired and glanced at the pair of them. “I’d strongly advise no further exposure to antagonistic environments for a while, as well. You can function at a reasonably normal level now, Erick, but only if you don’t stress your metabolism. Do not ignore warnings from your metabolic monitor program. Nanonic packages are not to be regarded as some kind of infallible safety net.”

  “Understood.”

  “I take it you’re not flying away for a while.”

  “No. All starship flights are cancelled.”

  “Good. I want you to keep out of free fall as much as possible, it’s a dreadful medium for a body to heal in. Check in to a hotel in the high gravity section while you’re here.” He datavised a file over. “That’s the exercise regime for your legs. Stick to it, and I’ll see you again in a week.”

  “Thanks.”

  Dr Steibel nodded benevolently at Madeleine as he left the treatment room. “You can pay the receptionist on your way out.”

  The nurse began to spray a soapy solution over Erick’s legs, flushing away the mucus. He used a neural nanonic override to stop a flinch when she reached his genitals. Thank God they hadn’t been badly injured, just superficial skin damage from the vacuum.

  Madeleine gave him an anxious glance over the nurse’s back. “Have you got much cash in your card?” she datavised.

  “About a hundred and fifty fuseodollars, that’s all,” he datavised back.

  “André hasn’t transferred this month’s salary over yet.”

  “I’ve got a couple of hundred, and Desmond should have some left. I think we can pay.”

  “Why should we? Where the hell is Duchamp? He should be paying for this. And my AT implants
were only the first phase.”

  “Busy with some cargo agent, so he claimed. Leave it with me, I’ll find out how much we owe the hospital.”

  Erick waited until she’d left, then datavised the hospital’s net processor for the Confederation Navy Bureau. The net management computer informed him there was no such eddress. He swore silently, and accessed the computer’s directory, loading a search order for any resident Confederation official. There wasn’t one, not even a CAB inspector, too few ships used the spaceport to warrant the expense.

  The net processor opened a channel to his neural nanonics. “Report back to the ship, please, mon enfant Erick,” André datavised. “I have won us a charter.”

  If his neck hadn’t been so stiff, Erick would have shaken his head in wonder. A charter! In the middle of a Confederation quarantine. Duchamp was utterly unbelievable. His trial would be the shortest formality on record.

  Erick swung his legs off the examination table, ignoring the nurse’s martyrdom as her spray hoses were dislodged. “Sorry, duty calls,” he said. “Now go and find me some trousers, I haven’t got all day.”

  The middleman’s name was Iain Girardi. André envied him his temperament; nothing could throw him, no insult, no threat. His cool remained in place throughout the most heated of exchanges. It was just as well; André’s patience had long since been exhausted by his ungrateful crew.

  They were assembled in the day lounge of the Villeneuve’s Revenge, the only place André considered secure enough to discuss Girardi’s proposition. Madeleine and Desmond had their feet snagged by a stikpad on the decking, while Erick was hanging on to the central ladder, his medical support modules clipped on to the composite rungs. André floated at Iain Girardi’s side, glowering at the three of them.

  “You’ve got to be fucking joking!” Madeleine shouted. “You’ve gone too far this time, Captain. Too bloody far. How can you even listen to this bastard’s offer? God in Heaven, after all we went through at Lalonde. After all Erick did. Look at this ship! They did that to it, to you.”