The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Once André agreed that they were ready for escort duties, the Organization started loading combat wasps into the launch tubes. An airlock tube slid out from the docking bay wall to connect with the Villeneuve’s Revenge.

  It was Desmond, armed with a machine pistol bought on Chaumort, who went down to the lower deck with Girardi. He made sure the tube was completely empty before opening the hatch and letting the Organization man out. Only when Girardi had swum down the length of the tube, and closed the far hatch behind him, did he give André the all-clear.

  “Send your liaison officer through,” André datavised to the spaceport.

  As arranged, the man wore nothing, towing his clothes in a small bag behind him as he came along the tube. Desmond made every test they could think of, requesting complex datavises from the liaison officer’s neural nanonics, exposing him to different processor blocks.

  “I think he’s clean,” Desmond datavised.

  Madeleine unlocked the manual latches on the hatch to the lower deck.

  The liaison officer introduced himself as Kingsley Pryor. To Erick, his subdued behaviour and quiet, stumbling voice indicated someone emerging from shock.

  “There will be a convoy of twelve cargo ships departing for Arnstadt in three hours,” Kingsley Pryor told them. “The Villeneuve’s Revenge will be one of five combat-capable ships escorting them. Your job is to defend them from any sneak attacks from Confederation Navy ships. If it does happen, they’ll probably use voidhawks against us.” He gave the bridge a thoughtful look. “I wasn’t told there would only be four of you. Is that enough to operate at full combat efficiency?”

  “Of course it is,” André responded hotly. “We have survived much worse than a voidhawk attack.”

  “Very well. There is one other thing you should know. The Organization is held together by fear and respect, obedience must be total. You have accepted our money and signed on with the fleet, we will not tolerate any disloyalty.”

  “You come on my ship, and tell me—” André blustered loudly.

  Kingsley Pryor held up a hand. Weak though the gesture was, it silenced Duchamp immediately. Something in the liaison officer’s manner put a great deal of weight behind his authority. “You signed a pact with the devil, Captain. Now I’m explaining the small print. You don’t trust us, fair enough; we don’t really trust you either. I’m sure that now you’ve seen New California firsthand you’ve realized just how powerful and dedicated the Organization is, and you’re having second thoughts about supporting us. Perfectly natural. After all, it would be very easy for a starship to disappear in the direction of the Confederation. Let me try and dissuade you. While your ship was being repaired, a nuclear explosive was included inside one of the new components. It has a seven-hour timer which must be reset by a code. I do not have that code, so you cannot use debrief nanonics to extract it from me. A liaison officer in one of the other escort ships will transmit that code at us every three hours, resetting the timer. In turn I will transmit the code I have been given at the other ships, which have been similarly modified. If all of us stay together, there will be no problem. If one ship leaves, they will be killing themselves and the crew of another ship.”

  “Remove it now!” André shouted furiously. “I will not fly under such a blackmail threat.”

  “It is not blackmail, Captain, it is enforcement, making sure you abide by the terms of your contract. I believe the argument goes along the lines of: If you intended to keep the agreement you made with us you have nothing to worry about.”

  “I will not fly with a bomb on board. That is final!”

  “Then they will come on board, and possess you. And another crew will be found. It is the ship and its capability they want, Captain, not you as an individual.”

  “This is intolerable!”

  For a moment a real anger shone in Kingsley Pryor’s eyes. He sneered at André. “So is a free man agreeing to help Capone, Captain.” Then the emotion was gone, leaving only the meek expression in its wake. “Shall we get the reporters on board now? We haven’t got too much time before we have to be at the jump coordinate.”

  ***

  Jed Hinton was still a hundred metres from the pub when he knelt down and took the red handkerchief off his ankle. Koblat’s adults were starting to get nettled by Deadnight; kids that followed the cause were being hassled. Nothing serious, some jostling in public places, arguments at home. The usual crap.

  Digger, of course, despised the recording; descending into a rage whenever it was mentioned. For once Jed enjoyed a guilty delight at the way he intimidated Miri and Navar, forbidding them to have anything to do with it. Without realizing, he’d altered the political structure of the family. Now it was Jed and Gari who were the favoured ones, the ones who could access Kiera Salter, and talk about her ideas with their friends, and know the taste of freedom.

  Jed walked into the Blue Fountain, making out like it was cool for him to be there. Normally he’d be anywhere else, it was Digger’s pub. But Digger was busy these days; not working the tunnelling units, but out at the spaceport doing maintenance on the machinery in the docking bays. There were three shifts a day now, supporting the increasing number of flights.

  Yet although everyone knew perfectly well starships were arriving and departing several times a day, there was no official log. Three times he’d accessed the net and asked the spaceport register for a list of ships docked only to be told there were none.

  Fascinated, the Deadnight kids had asked around, and together they’d pieced together the basics of the quarantine-busting operation. They had all been excited that day, starships arriving illegally was perfect for them. Beth had smiled at him and said: “Bloody hell, we might just make it to Valisk, after all.” Then she’d hugged him. She’d never done that before, not in that way.

  He asked the barman for a beer, slowly scanning the pub. A room where the images within the ten-year-old landscape holograms covering the walls were diminishing to blurred smears, their colours fading. The naked rock they covered would be less depressing. Most of the scuffed composite and aluminum tables were occupied. Groups of men sat hunched over their drinks and talked in low tones. Nearly a quarter of the customers were wearing ship-suits, bright and exotic compared to the clothes favoured by Koblat’s residents.

  Jed located the crew from the Rameses X, the starship’s name stencilled neatly on their breast pockets. Their captain was with them, a middle-aged woman with the silver star on her epaulette. He went over.

  “I wonder if I could talk to you, ma’am?”

  She glanced up at him, faintly suspicious at the respectful tone.

  “What is it?”

  “I have a friend who would like to go to Valisk.”

  The captain burst out laughing. Jed flushed as the rest of the crew groaned, trading infuriatingly superior expressions.

  “Well, son, I can certainly understand how come your friend is so interested in young Kiera.” She winked broadly.

  Jed’s embarrassment deepened, which must have been obvious to all of them. True, he had spent hours on his processor block with a graphics program, altering the image from the recording. Now the block’s small AV pillar could project her lying beside him on the bed at night, or looming over him smiling. At first he’d worried he was being disrespectful, but she would understand the need he had for her. The love. She knew all about love, in its many forms. It was all she spoke of.

  “It’s what she offers,” he stammered helplessly. “That’s what we’re interested in.”

  That just brought another round of hearty laughter from the group.

  “Please,” he said. “Can you take us there?”

  The humour sank from her face. “Listen, son, take the advice of an older woman. That recording: it’s just a big bullshit con. They want you there so they can possess you, that’s all. There’s no paradise waiting at the end of the rainbow.”

  “Have you been there?” he asked stiffly.

  “No
. No, I haven’t. So you’re right, I can’t say for certain. Let’s just put it down to a healthy dose of cynicism; everybody catches it when they get older.” She turned back to her drink.

  “Will you take me?”

  “No. Look, son, even if I was crazy enough to fly to Valisk, do you have any idea how much it would cost you to charter a starship to take you?”

  He shook his head mutely.

  “From here, about a quarter of a million fuseodollars. Do you have that kind of money?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there you are then. Now stop wasting my time.”

  “Do you know anyone who would take us, someone who believes in Kiera?”

  “Goddamnit!” She screwed around in her chair to glare at him. “Can’t you inbred morons pick up a simple hint when it’s smacked you in the face?”

  “Kiera said you’d hate us for listening to her.”

  The captain let out an astonished snort of breath. “I don’t believe this. Don’t you see how gullible you are? I’m doing you a favour.”

  “I didn’t ask you to. And why are you so blind to what she says?”

  “Blind? Fuck you, you teeny shit.”

  “Because you are. You’re scared it’s true, that she’s right.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, the rest of the crew fixing him with hostile stares. They’d probably beat him up in a minute. Jed didn’t care anymore. He hated her as much as he did Digger and all the others with closed minds and dead hearts.

  “All right,” the captain whispered. “In your case I’ll make an exception.”

  “No,” one of the crew said, his hand going out to hold her arm. “You can’t, he’s only a kid with a hard-on for the girl.”

  She shook off the restraining hand and brought out a processor block. “I was going to hand this over to the Confederation Navy, even though it would be difficult to explain away given our current flight schedule. But I think you can have it instead, now.” She took a flek from its slot in the block and slapped it into an astonished Jed’s hand. “Say hello to Kiera for me. If you aren’t too busy screaming while they possess you.”

  Chairs were pushed back noisily. The crew of the Rameses X left their unfinished drinks on the table and marched out.

  Jed stood at the centre of a now-silent pub, every eye locked on him. He didn’t even notice, he was staring raptly at the little black flek resting in his palm as if it were the key to the fountain of youth. Which in a way, he supposed, it was.

  ***

  The Levêque was orbiting fifteen thousand kilometres above Norfolk, its complete sensor suite extended to sweep the planet. Despite the Confederation Navy’s hunger for information, little data was returning.

  Slow cyclonic swirls of red cloud had mushroomed from the islands, mating then smoothing out into a placid sheet, sealing the world behind a uniform twilight nimbus. Small ivory tufts of cirrocumulus swam above the polar zones for a few hours, the last defiant speckling of alien colour; but in time even they fell to melt into the veil.

  The consolidation was five hours old when the change began. Levêque’s officers noticed the cloud’s light emission level was increasing. The frigate’s captain decided to play safe and ordered them to raise their orbit by another twenty thousand kilometres. By the time their main fusion drive ignited, the crimson canopy was blazing brighter than any firestorm. They ascended at five gees, badly worried by the glare expanding rapidly across the stars behind them. Gravitonic sensors reported discordant ripples within the planetary mass below. If the readings were truthful, then the world should be breaking apart. Heavily filtered optical-band sensors revealed the planet’s geometry remained unchanged.

  Seven gees, and the cloud’s surface was kindling to the intensity of a nuclear furnace.

  Luca Comar looked upwards in a dreamy daze. The red cloud guarding the sky above Cricklade manor’s steep roof was writhing violently, its gold and crimson underbelly caught by potent microburst vortices. Huge churning strips were being torn open, allowing a fierce white light to slam down. He flung his arms wide, howling a rapturous welcome.

  Energy stormed through him at an almost painful rate, bursting from some non-point within to vanish into the raging sky. The woman beside him was performing the same act, her features straining with effort and incredulity. In his mind he could feel the possessed all across Norfolk uniting in this final supreme sacrament.

  Boiling fragments of cloud plunged through the air at giddy velocities; corkscrew lightning bolts snapping between them. Their red tint was fading, sinking behind the flamboyant dawn irradiating the universe beyond the atmosphere.

  A thick, heavy light poured over Luca. It penetrated straight through his body. Through the mossy grass. Through the soil. The whole world surrendered to it. Luca’s thoughts were trapped by the invasion, unable to think of anything but sustaining the moment. He hung suspended from reality as the last surge of energy unwound through his cells.

  Silence.

  Luca slowly let out his breath. He opened his eyes cautiously. The clouds had calmed, reverting to rumpled white smears. Warm mellow light was shining over the wolds. There was no sun, no single source point, it came from the boundary of the enclosed universe itself. Shining equally, everywhere.

  And they’d gone. He could no longer hear the souls in the beyond. Those piercing pleas and promises had vanished. There was no way back, no treacherous chink in the folds of this fresh continuum. He was free inside his new body.

  He looked at the woman, who was glancing around in stupefaction.

  “We’ve done it,” he whispered. “We escaped.”

  She smiled tentatively.

  He held out his arms, and concentrated. Not the smoke-snorting knight again; the moment required something more dignified. Soft golden cloth settled around his skin, an imperial toga, befitting his mood.

  “Oh, yes. Yes!”

  The energistic ability was still there, the imposition of will upon matter. But now the cloth had a stronger, firmer texture to the artefacts he’d created before.

  Before … Luca Comar laughed. In another universe. Another life.

  This time it would be different. They could establish their nirvana here.

  And it would last forever.

  The cluster of five survey satellites from the Levêque gradually spread apart as they glided through the section of space where Norfolk should be. Communications links beamed a huge flow of information back to the frigate. Every sensor they had was switched to maximum sensitivity. Two distinct spectrums of sunlight fell on them. Tremulous waves of solar ions dusted their receptors. Cosmic radiation bombardment was standard.

  There was nothing else. No gravity field. No magnetosphere. No atmospheric gas. Space-time’s quantum signature was perfectly normal.

  All that remained of Norfolk was the memory.

  ***

  When it was discovered in 2125, Nyvan was immediately incorporated into the celebration of hope which was sweeping Earth in the wake of Felicity’s discovery. The second terracompatible planet to be found, a beautiful verdant virgin land, proof the first hadn’t been a fluke.

  Everybody on Earth wanted to escape out to the stars. And they wanted to go there now. That, ultimately, proved its downfall.

  By then, people had finally realized the arcologies weren’t going to be a temporary shelter from the ruined climate, somewhere to stay while Govcentral cooled the atmosphere, cleaned up the pollution, and put the weather patterns back to rights. The tainted clouds and armada storms were here to stay. Anyone who wanted to live under an open sky would have to leave and find a new one.

  In the interests of fairness and maintaining its own shaky command over individual state administrations, Govcentral agreed that everyone had the right to leave, without favouritism. It was that last worthy clause, included to pacify several vocal minorities, which in practice meant that colonists would have to be a multi-cultural, multi-racial mix fully representative of the planet’s po
pulation. No limits were placed on the numbers buying starship tickets, they just had to be balanced. For those states too poor to fill up their quota, Govcentral provided assisted placement schemes so the richer states couldn’t complain they were being unfairly limited. A typical political compromise.

  By and large, it worked for Nyvan and the other terracompatible planets being sought out by the new ZTT drive ships. The first decades of interstellar colonization were heady times, when common achievement easily outweighed the old ethnic enmities. Nyvan and its early siblings played host to a unity of purpose rarely seen before.

  It didn’t last. After the frontier had been tamed and the pioneering spirit flickered into extinction the ancient rivalries lumbered to the fore once again. Earth’s colonial governance gave way to local administrations on a dozen planets, and politicians began to adopt the worst jingoistic aspects of late twentieth-century nationalism, leading the mob behind them with absurd ease. This time there were no safeguards of seas and geographical borders between the diverse populations.

  Religions, cultures, skins, ideologies, and languages were all squeezed up tight in the pinch chamber of urban conglomeration. Civil unrest was the inevitable result, ruining lives and crippling economies.

  Overall, the problem was solved in 2156 by the Govcentral state of California, who sponsored New California, the first ethnic-streaming colony, open only to native Californians. Although initially controversial, the trend was swiftly taken up by the other states. This second wave of colonies suffered none of the strife so prevalent among the first, clearing the way for the mass immigration of the Great Dispersal.

  While the new ethnic-streaming worlds successfully absorbed Earth’s surplus population and flourished accordingly, the earlier colonies slowly lost ground both culturally and economically: a false dawn shading to a perpetual twilight.

  “What happened to the asteroids?” Lawrence Dillon asked.

  Quinn was gazing thoughtfully at the images which the Tantu’s sensors were throwing onto the hemisphere of holoscreens at the foot of his acceleration couch. In total, eleven asteroids had been manoeuvred into orbit around Nyvan, their ores mined to provide raw material for the planet’s industries. Ordinarily, they would develop into healthy mercantile settlements with a flotilla of industrial stations.