The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The frigate’s sensors showed that eight of them were more-or-less standard knots of electromagnetic activity, giving off a strong infrared emission. The remaining three were cold and dark. Tantu’s high-resolution optical sensors focused on the closest of the defunct rocks, revealing wrecked machinery clinging to the crumpled grey surface. One of them even had a counter-rotating spaceport disk, though it no longer revolved; the spindle was bent, and the gloomy structure punctured with holes.

  “They had a lot of national wars here,” Quinn said.

  Lawrence frowned at him, thoughts cloudy with incomprehension.

  “There’s a lot of different people live here,” Quinn explained. “They don’t get on too good, so they fight a lot.”

  “If they hate each other, why don’t they all leave?”

  “I don’t know. Ask them.”

  “Who?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Lawrence, I’m trying to think. Dwyer, has anyone seen us yet?”

  “Yes, the detector satellites picked us up straightaway. We’ve had three separate transponder interrogations so far; they were from different defence network command centres. Everyone seemed satisfied with our identification code this time.”

  “Good. Graper, I want you to be our communications officer.”

  “Yes, Quinn.” Graper let the eagerness show in his voice, anxious to prove his worth.

  “Stick with the cover we decided. Call each of those military centres and tell the bastards we’ve been assigned a monitor mission in this system by the Confederation Navy. We’ll be staying in high orbit until further notice, and if any of them want fire support against possessed targets we’ll be happy to provide it.”

  “I’m on it, Quinn.” He began issuing orders to the flight computer.

  “Dwyer,” Quinn said. “Get me a channel into Nyvan’s communications net.” He floated away from his velvet acceleration couch and used a stikpad to steady himself in front of his big command console.

  “Er, Quinn, this is weird, the sensors are showing me like fifty communications platforms in geosync,” Dwyer said nervously. He was using grab hoops to hold himself in front of his flight station, his face centimetres from a glowing holoscreen, as though the closer he could get the more understanding of its data he would have. “The computer says they’ve got nineteen separate nets on this world, some of them don’t even hook together.”

  “Yeah, so? I told you, dickbrain, they got a shitload of different nations here.”

  “Which one do you want?”

  Quinn thought back, picturing the man, his mannerisms, voice, accent. “Is there a North American-ethnic nation?”

  Dwyer consulted the information on the holoscreen. “I got five. There’s Tonala, New Dominica, New Georgia, Quebec, and the Islamic Texas Republic.”

  “Gimmie the New Georgia one.” Information began to scroll up on his own holoscreen. He studied it for a minute, then requested a directory function and loaded in a search program.

  “Who is this guy, Quinn?” Lawrence asked.

  “Name’s Twelve-T. He’s one mean fucker, a gang lord, runs a big operation down there. Any badass shit you want, you go to him for it.”

  The search program finished its run. Quinn loaded the eddress it had found for him.

  “Yeah?” a voice asked.

  “I want to talk to Twelve-T.”

  “Crazy ass mother, ain’t no fucker got that handle living here.”

  “Listen, shitbrain, this is his public eddress. He’s there.”

  “Yeah, so you know him, datavise him.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Yeah? Then he don’t know you. Any mother he need to rap with knows his private code.”

  “Okay, the magic word is Banneth. And if you don’t think that’s magic, trace where this call is coming from. Now tell the man, because if I come calling, you’re going out hurting.”

  Dwyer gave another myopic squint at his displays. “He’s tracing the call. Back to the satellite already. Hot program.”

  “I expect they use it a lot,” Quinn muttered.

  “You got a problem up there, motherfucker?” a new voice asked. It was almost as Quinn remembered it, a low purr, too damaged to be smooth.

  Quinn had seen the throat scar which made it that way.

  “No problem at all. What I got up here is a proposition.”

  “Where you at, man? What is this monk shit? You ain’t Banneth.”

  “No.” Quinn swayed forwards slowly towards the camera lens in the centre of the console and pulled his hood right back. “Run your visual file search program.”

  “Oh, yeah. You used to be Banneth’s little rat runner; her whore, too. I remember. So what you want here, ratty?”

  “A deal.”

  “What you got to trade?”

  “You know what I’m riding in?”

  “Sure. Lucky Vin ran a trace, he’s pissin’ liquid nitrogen right now.”

  “It could be yours.”

  “No shit?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’ve I gotta do for it, hump you?”

  “No, I just want to trade it in. That’s all.”

  The whisper lost its cool. “You want to trade in a fucking Confederation Navy frigate? What the fuck for?”

  “I need to talk to you about that. But there’s some good quality hardware on board. You’ll come out ahead.”

  “Talk, motherfucker? If your hardware’s so shit-hot, how come you wanna dump it?”

  “God’s Brother doesn’t always ride to war. There are other ways to bring His word to the faithless.”

  “Cut that voodoo shit, man. Damn, I hate that sect shit you arcology freaks use. Ain’t no God, so he sure as shit can’t have no Brother.”

  “Try telling that to the possessed.”

  “Motherfuck! Smartass motherfucker! That’s what you are, that’s all you are.”

  “Do you want to deal or not?” Quinn knew he would; what gang lord could resist a frigate?

  “I ain’t promising shit up front.”

  “That’s cool. Now I need to know which asteroid to dock with. And it’s going to have to be one which doesn’t ask too many questions. Have you got any weight in orbit?”

  “You know it, man, that’s why you come to me. You might talk like you the King of Kulu’s brother, but here it’s me who’s got the juice. And stink this, I don’t trust you, rat runner.”

  “With this much firepower behind me, think how much I care. Start fixing things.”

  “Fuck you. A strike like this is gonna take a few days to set up, man.”

  “You have forty-eight hours; then I want a docking bay number flashing in front of me. If not, I will smite you from the face of the world.”

  “Will you cut that freaky crap—”

  Quinn cancelled the circuit and threw his head back laughing.

  ***

  It had only taken a few hours for the screen of red cloud to engulf the sky above Exnall. The tenuous beginnings of the early morning had been supplanted by billowing masses of solid vapour sweeping up from the south. Thunder arrived in accompaniment, bass grumbles which seemed to circle and swoop around the town like jittery birds. There was no telling where the sun was now, but its light still seemed to slip through the covering to illuminate the streets in natural tones.

  Moyo marched down Maingreen on his mission to find some kind of transport for Stephanie’s children. The more he thought about the prospect, the happier it made him. She was right, as always, it did give him something positive to do. And no, he didn’t want to spend eternity in Exnall.

  He passed the doughnut café and the baseball game in the park, oblivious to either. If he searched with his mind, he could perceive the buildings around him like foggy shadows; all space was dark, while matter was amended to a translucent white gauze. Individual objects were hard to distinguish, and small ones almost impossible; but he thought he stood a good chance of recognizing something like a bus.

&
nbsp; The street sweeper was busy again. A man in a grey jacket and cloth cap, pushing his broom in front of him as he made his way slowly along the pavement. Every day he had appeared. He never did anything else but sweep the pavements, never talked to anybody, never responded to any attempts at conversation.

  Moyo was slowly coming to learn that not all of Exnall’s possessed were adapting readily to their new circumstances. Some, like the sports nuts and café owners were obsessively filling every moment of their day with activity no matter how spurious, while others would amble around in a listless mockery of their earlier existence. That assessment put his own labours perilously close to the apathetic ones.

  A dense collection of shadows at the rear of one of the larger stores caught his attention. When he walked around the building there was a long van parked in the loading bay. It had suffered some damage in the riot; struck by white fire the front two tyres had melted into puddles of sticky plastic, the navy-blue bodywork was blackened, and in some places cracked open, the windshield was smashed. But it was certainly big enough.

  He stared at the first tyre, visualizing it whole and functional. Not an illusion, but how the solid matter should actually be structured. The hardened plastic puddle started to flow, amoebic buds swelling up to engulf the naked hub.

  “Yo there, man. Having some fun?”

  Moyo had been so involved with the tyre he hadn’t noticed the man approaching. At first sight the man looked as if he’d grown a dark brown mane; his beard came down to his waist as did the corkscrew locks of his luxuriant hair. A pair of tiny amber hexagonal glasses which were almost curtained by tresses seemed perversely prominent. The flares of his purple velvet trousers were embellished with tiny silver bells which chimed with each step, not in tune, but certainly in keeping.

  “Not exactly. Is this your van?”

  “Hey, property is theft, man.”

  “Property is what?”

  “Theft. You’re like stealing from what rightfully belongs to all people. That van is an inanimate object. Unless you’re into a metallic version of Gaia—which personally I’m not. However, just because it’s inert that doesn’t mean we can abuse its intrinsic value which is the ability to carry cats where they want to go.”

  “Cats? I just want it to ferry some children out of here.”

  “Yeah well okay that’s cool, too. But what I like mean is that it’s like community property. It was built by people, so all people should share it equally.”

  “It was built by cybersystems.”

  “Oh, no, that’s real heavy-duty corporate shit. Man, they’ve got into your skull big-time. Here, take a toot, Mr. Suit, take yourself out of yourself.” He held out a fat reefer which was already alight and sending out a pungent sweetness.

  “No thanks.”

  “Takes your mind to other realms.”

  “I’ve just got back from one, thank you. I have no intention of returning.”

  “Yeah, right, dig your point. The baddest trip of them all.”

  Moyo couldn’t quite make out what he was confronting. The man didn’t seem like one of the apathetic ones. On the other hand, he obviously hadn’t managed to adapt very well. Perhaps he came from a pre-technology age, where education was minimal and superstition ruled everyone’s life.

  “What era do you come from?”

  “Ho! The greatest one there ever was. I dug the era of peace, when we were busy fighting the establishment for all the freedom you cats just take for granted. Heck, I was at Woodstock, man. Can you dig that?”

  “Um, I’m very happy for you. So you don’t mind if I rebuild the van, then?”

  “Rebuild? What are you, some kind of anti-anarchist?”

  “I’m someone who’s got children to look after. Unless you’d rather they were tortured by Ekelund’s people.”

  The man’s body bucked as if he’d been struck a physical blow; his arms wove in strange jerky motions in front of him. Moyo didn’t think it was a dance.

  “I hate your hostility groove, but I dig your motivation. That’s cool. A square cat like you is probably having a lot of trouble adjusting to this situation.”

  Moyo’s jaw dropped open. “I’m having trouble?”

  “Thought so. So like what kind of magical mystery tour are you planning here?”

  “We’re taking the children out of Exnall. Stephanie wants to drive up to the border.”

  “Oh, man!” A wide smile prised apart layers of hair. “That is so beautiful. The border again. We’re gonna roll this old bus out and set the draft dodgers free in the land of Mounties and maple leaves. What a trip! Thank you, man, thank you.” He walked over to the battered van and stroked its front wing lovingly. A small wavy rainbow appeared on the bodywork where his hand had touched it.

  “What do you mean, we?”

  “Come on, man, lighten up. You don’t think you can handle that kind of scene alone, do you? The military mind is full of low cunning; you wouldn’t get a mile out of town without them throwing up roadblocks across the freeway. Maybe a few of us would fall down some stairs while we’re being arrested, too. It happens, man, all of the frigging time. The federal pigs don’t give a shit about our rights. But I’ve been here before, I know how to go sneaky on them.”

  “You think she’d try and stop us?”

  “Who, man?”

  “Ekelund.”

  “Hell, who knows. Chicks like that have got it real hard up their asses. Between you and me, I think they’re maybe like aliens. You know, UFO people from Venus. But I can see you’re sceptical right now, I won’t press it. So how many kids are you planning on squirrelling away in here?”

  “About seven or eight, so far.”

  Without quite understanding how it happened, Moyo found a friendly arm around his shoulder, guiding him to the van’s cab.

  “That’s worthy. I can dig that. Now you just ease yourself up in the driver’s seat, or whatever the hell they call it these days, and dream up some controls we can all handle. Once you’ve done that and I’ve given us a cool disguise we can hit the road.”

  Twinkles of light were shooting all over the van’s bodywork, sketching glowing lines of colour in the damaged composite. It was as if a flock of acidhead fairies had been let loose with spray cans. Moyo wanted to complain at this ideological hijack, but couldn’t manage to think up the correct words. He took the easy option, and sat in the driver’s seat like he’d been told.

  ***

  There was a gap between the deuterium tank’s cryostat ducts and the power feed sub-module which routed superconductor cables to nearby patterning nodes, a narrow crevice amid the boxy, nultherm foam-coated machinery. In the schematics which the flight computer provided, it was listed as a crawlway.

  For pigmy acrobats, maybe, Erick thought irascibly. He certainly couldn’t wear any protective gear over the SII suit. Sharp corners and bloated tubes jabbed and squeezed against him every time he moved. It couldn’t be doing the medical nanonic packages around his arm and torso any good.

  Thankfully the black silicon covering his skin was an effective insulator, otherwise he would have been either roasted, frozen, or electrocuted long ago.

  Along with Madeleine he’d been burrowing through the innards of the Villeneuve’s Revenge for nine hours now. It was nasty, tiring, stressful work. With his body in the state it was he had to keep a constant check on his physiological status. He was also running a mild relaxant program in primary mode; claustrophobia was a problem prowling wolfishly around the fringes of conscious thought.

  The crawlway ended a metre short of the hull, opening out into a hexagonal metallic cave bordered with stress structure girders, themselves spiralled by cables. Erick squirmed out into this cramped space and drew a sharp breath of relief, more psychological than practical given he was breathing through a respirator tube. He switched his collar sensors to scan around, seeing the fuselage plate behind his head. It appeared perfectly normal, a smooth, slightly curving silicon surface, dark grey wit
h red code strips printed around the edges.

  With his legs still jammed in the crawlway, Erick pulled the sensor block from the straps securing it to his side. It contained six separate scanner pads which he slipped out and started fixing to the hull plate and girders.

  “Plate 3-25-D is clean,” he datavised to André eight minutes later. “No electromagnetic activity; and it’s solid, too, no density anomalies.”

  “Very good, Erick. 5-12-D is next.”

  “How is Madeleine doing?”

  “She is methodical. Between you, eighteen per cent of the possible locations have now been eliminated.”

  Erick cursed. The four of them had carefully gone over the starship’s schematics, working out every possible section of the hull were the device could have been hidden by Monterey’s maintenance crews. With Pryor on board observing the bridge, they were limited to two crew searching at any one time, the two supposed to be asleep. It was going to take a long time to cover all the possible areas.

  “I still say it’s probably a combat wasp. That would be the easiest method.”

  “Oui, but we won’t know for sure until you have eliminated all the other options. Who can tell with such treacherous bastards?”

  “Great. How long to Arnstadt?”

  “We have another five jumps to go. Two of the other escort ships are manoeuvring sluggishly, which gives us additional time. They are probably searching as we are. You have perhaps another fifteen hours, twenty at the outside.”

  Not enough, Erick knew, not nearly enough. They were going to have to go to Arnstadt. After that he didn’t like to think what the Organization would require from them. Nothing as simple as escort duties, that was for certain.

  “All right, Captain, I’m on my way to 5-12-D.”

  ***

  The chamber which the Saldanas used for their Privy Council meetings was called the Fountain Room, a white marble octagon with a gold and opal mosaic ceiling. Imposing three-metre statues stood around the walls, sculpted from a dark rock which had been cut out of Nova Kong, depicting a toga-clad orator in various inspirational poses. The Fountain Room wasn’t as grandiose as some of the state function rooms added to the Apollo Palace in later centuries, but it had been built by Gerald Saldana soon after his coronation for use as his cabinet room. The continuity of power was unbroken since then; the Saldanas were nothing if not respectful for the traditions of their own history.