The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Lawrence took the cap from Quinn, acting as jester to the king. A little mad giggle escaped from the boy’s lips as he held it in front of the stricken gang lord, its mirror surface ensuring he witnessed his own reduction to impotent vassal.

  Quinn’s hands descended again. This time the noise was louder as the bone creaked and split. He lifted the top of the skull high, smiling at the bloody trophy. Twelve-T’s naked brain glistened below him, wrapped in delicate membranes, small beads of fluid weeping up from the tightly packed ribbons of tissue.

  “Now I can keep a real close eye on what you’re thinking,” Quinn said.

  Chapter 04

  “So your group has no organized structure, as such?” Alkad asked.

  “We’re organized, all right,” Lodi Shalasha insisted. “But nothing formal. We’re just like-minded people who keep in touch and help each other out.”

  Alkad pushed her legs down into the chameleon suit trousers. There was still a residue of cold sweat smearing the fabric from when she’d worn the suit last night. Her nose wrinkled up in distaste, but she kept on working the trousers up her shins. “You said you had junior cadres, the ones clearing the spiders away. That sounds like a regular underground movement hierarchy to me.”

  “Not really. Some of us work in day clubs, that way we help to keep the memory of the genocide alive for the children. Nobody should be allowed to forget what was done to us.”

  “I approve.”

  “You do?” He sounded surprised.

  “Yes. The original refugees seem to have forgotten. That’s why I’m in this mess right now.”

  “Don’t worry, Doctor; Voi will get you off Ayacucho.”

  “Perhaps.” Alkad prided herself that the somnolence program had been for the best. When the girl had woken this morning she’d been subdued, but still functional. The grief for her father was still there, as it should be, but it hadn’t debilitated her.

  Over breakfast, Alkad had explained what her priorities were: to get away from the Dorados as fast as possible now her location was blown to the intelligence agencies, and the remaining principal requirement for a combat-capable starship (she still couldn’t bring herself to mention the Alchemist). It would be too much to hope for the ship to be crewed by Garissan patriot types; a mercenary crew would just have to do now. The three of them had discussed possible options, and Voi and Lodi had started arguing over names, who to contact for what.

  Voi had left by herself to secure a starship. It would be inviting disaster for Alkad to be seen with her again. As a pair they were too distinctive, however adroit the chameleon suits were at hiding their peripheral features.

  “Hey, you’ve made the news.” Lodi waved his communications block enthusiastically. He’d entered a reference search program to monitor the media output. “Access the Cabral NewsGalactic studio.”

  Alkad struggled the suit on over her shoulders, then datavised the room’s net processor for a channel to the studio.

  Cabral NewsGalactic was showing a recording of a holomorph sticker which had a young cheerleader shouting: “Run, Alkad, run!”

  “Mother Mary,” Alkad muttered. “Is this the work of your people?”

  “No. I swear. I’ve never seen one before. Besides, only Voi and I know your name. None of the others even know you exist.”

  Alkad went back to the studio. A rover reporter was walking down one of Ayacucho’s main public halls. The stickers were everywhere. A cleaner mechanoid was trying to spray one off the wall, but its solvent wasn’t strong enough. Smears of black semi-dissolved plastic dribbled down the metallic wall panel.

  “It is as if a plague has visited Ayacucho,” the rover reporter said cheerfully. “The first of these stickers appeared about six hours ago. And if I didn’t know better I’d say they’ve been breeding like bacteria.

  Police say that the stickers are being handed out to children; and detectives are currently correlating security monitor recordings to see if they can identify the main distributors. Though sources inside the public prosecutor’s office tell me they’re not sure exactly what charges could be brought.

  “The question everyone is asking is: Exactly who is Alkad, and what is she running from?”

  The image went back to the studio anchorman. “Our company’s investigations have uncovered one possible answer to the mystery,” he said in a sombre bass voice. “At the time of the genocide, the Garissan navy employed a Dr Alkad Mzu to work on advanced defence projects. Mzu is said to have survived the genocide and spent the last thirty years under an assumed name teaching physics at the Dorados university. But now foreign intelligence agencies, acting in response to Omutan propaganda, have started hunting her under the pretext of illegal technology violations. A senior member of the Dorados governing council, who asked not to be named, said today: ‘Such an action by these foreign agents is a gross violation of our sovereignty. I find it obscene that the Omutans can lay these unfounded allegations against one of our citizens who has dedicated her life to educating our brightest youngsters. If this is their behaviour after thirty years of sanctions, then we must ask why the Confederation ever lifted those sanctions in the first place. They certainly do not seem to have had the desired effect in remedying the aggressive nature of the Omutan government. Their current cabinet is just a new collar on the same dog.’

  “The council member went on to say that if Alkad Mzu turned up at his apartment he would certainly offer her sanctuary, and that every true Dorados citizen would do the same. He said he would not rest until all suspected foreign agents had been expelled from the asteroids.”

  “Holy Mother Mary,” Alkad groaned.

  She cancelled the channel and slumped down onto the bed, the suit’s hood hanging flaccidly over her shoulder. “I don’t believe this is happening. Mother Mary, they’re turning me into a media celebrity.”

  “That’s my uncle for you,” Lodi said. “Did you check out the positive bias in those reports? Mary, you’d be elected president tomorrow if we were ever allowed to vote around here.”

  “Your uncle?”

  He flinched. “Yeah, sure. Cabral’s my uncle. He’s made a mint out of exploiting the little-Garissan attitude. I mean, just look at the kind of people living here, they lap it up.”

  “He’s insane. What does he think he’s doing giving me this kind of public profile?”

  “Whipping up public support in your favour. This kind of propaganda is going to make life ten times harder for the agencies chasing you. Anyone tries to take you out of Ayacucho against your will today, they’ll wind up getting lynched.”

  She stared at him. That eager face which permitted so much inner anger to show without ever dimming the natural innocence. Child of the failed revolutionaries. “You’re probably right. But this isn’t happening the way I ever expected it to.”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor.” He pulled a worn shoulder bag out of the cupboard.

  “Do you want to try some of these clothes now?”

  He was proffering some long sports shorts and an Ayacucho Junior Curveball Team sweatshirt. With a short cut wig and the chameleon suit reprogrammed, they intended her to walk out of the room as an average sports-mad teenager. A male one.

  “Why not?”

  “Voi will call soon. We ought to be ready.”

  “You really believe she can get us off this asteroid in a starship, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lodi, do you have any idea how difficult that is to arrange, now of all times? Underground movements need to have contacts infiltrated right through the local administrative structure; dedicated, devoted people who will risk everything for the cause. What have you got? You’re rich kids who’ve found a new way to rebel against their parents.”

  “Yes, and we can use that money to help you, if you’d just let us. Voi taught us that. If we need something, we buy it. That way there’s no network for the agencies to discover and penetrate. We’ve never been compromised. That’s why you stayed in this
room all night without anyone storming the door with an assault mechanoid.”

  “You may have a point there. I have to admit the old partizans didn’t do too well, did they.” She gave the chameleon suit hood a reluctant grimace, then started to smooth back her hair ready to slip it on.

  Joshua held the petri dish up to the cabin’s light panel, squinting at the clear glass. It looked completely empty; his enhanced retinas couldn’t even find dust motes. But lurking inside the optically pure dish were thirteen nanonic monitor bugs which the medical packages had extracted from Lady Mac’s crew and the serjeants. They were subcutaneous implants, agents stinging them by casually brushing up against an unsuspecting victim.

  “How come I rated three?” Ashly complained.

  “Obvious subversive type,” Sarha said. “Bound to be up to no good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re all in the clear,” she said. “The medical analysis program can’t spot any unusual infections or viruses. Looks like they weren’t playing nasty.”

  “This time,” Joshua said. As soon as the scanners in the starship’s surgery had located the first of the monitor bugs he’d ordered Sarha to run a full biochemical analysis on everyone. Microbes and viruses were far easier to introduce in a target than nanonics.

  Fortunately, the agencies had been curious rather than hostile. But this was the sharpest reminder to date of the stakes involved. They’d been lucky thus far. It wouldn’t last, he thought. And he wasn’t the only one who realized that. The cabin had a kind of after-game locker-room atmosphere, with a team that was very relieved to have scraped a draw.

  “Let’s start from the beginning,” he said. “Sarha, are we secure now?”

  “Yes. These bugs can’t datavise through Lady Mac’s screening. They’re only a problem outside.”

  “But you don’t know when we got stung?”

  “There’s no way of knowing, sorry.”

  “Your friend Mrs. Nateghi,” Melvyn suggested. “It was rather odd.”

  “You’re probably right,” Joshua said reluctantly. “Okay, assume everything we’ve done up until now has been compromised. First off, is there any point in continuing? Jesus, it’s not as if we don’t know she’s here. The bloody news studios have been broadcasting nothing else. Our problem is how difficult it’s going to be to contact her without anyone else tagging along. They’re bound to try and sting us again. Sarha, will our electronic warfare blocks work against these monitor bugs?”

  “They should be able to scramble them; we picked up top-of-the-range systems before we left Tranquillity.”

  “Fine. From now on, nobody goes into Ayacucho without one. We also take a serjeant each when we venture out. Ione, I want you to carry those chemical projectile guns we brought.”

  “Certainly, Joshua,” said one of the four serjeants in the cabin.

  He couldn’t tell if it was the one who’d accompanied him earlier. “Right, what kind of data have we pulled in so far? Melvyn?”

  “Ashly and I got around to the five major defence contractors, Captain. The only orders coming in are for upgrades to the asteroid’s SD platforms, and there’s precious few of them. We got offered some magnificent discounts when we asked about supplying Lady Mac with new systems. They’re absolutely desperate for work. Mzu hasn’t ordered any equipment from anybody. And nobody is refitting starships.”

  “Okay. Beaulieu?”

  “Nothing, Captain. Daphine Kigano disappeared within fifteen minutes of arriving here. There’s no eddress for her, no credit records, no hotel booking, no citizenship register, no public record file.”

  “All right. That just leaves us with Ikela.”

  “He’s dead, Joshua,” Dahybi said. “Hardly the best lead.”

  “Pauline Webb was very keen to stop me having any contact with T’Opingtu’s management. Which means that’s the direction to take. I’ve been reviewing every byte I can find on Ikela and T’Opingtu. He came to the Dorados with a lot of money to start up that company. There’s no mention of where it came from; according to his biography he used to work for a Garissan engineering company as a junior manager. Which doesn’t add up.

  “Now if you were Alkad Mzu, on the run and in need of a starship that can deploy the Alchemist, who are you going to go to when you get here? Ikela fits the search program perfectly: the owner of a company which manufactures specialist astroengineering components. Remember she fooled the intelligence agencies for close on thirty years. Whatever plan she formatted with her colleagues after the genocide, it was well thought out.”

  “Not perfect, though,” Ashly said. “If it was, Omuta’s star would be turning nova right now.”

  “The possessed glitched it for them, that’s all,” Sarha said. “Who could anticipate this quarantine?”

  “Whatever,” Joshua said. “The point is, T’Opingtu was probably set up to provide Mzu with the means to deploy the Alchemist. Ikela would have made sure that policy continued in the event he didn’t live long enough to see her arrive.”

  “Which he did, but only just,” Ashly said. “It must have been the agencies who snuffed him.”

  “But not Mzu,” Melvyn said. “This media campaign backing her sprang up too quickly after the murder. Somebody knows she’s out there. Somebody with a shitload of influence, but not in contact with her. It’s going to be almost impossible for us to snatch her with public opinion being whipped up like this, Captain.”

  “Which is exactly the intention,” Dahybi said. “Though it’s more likely aimed at the intelligence agencies rather than us.”

  “We’ll deal with that problem if we ever get to it,” Joshua said. “Right now our priority is to establish a trace on Mzu.”

  “How?” Sarha asked.

  “Ikela has a daughter; according to his public record file she’s the only family he’s got.”

  “She’ll inherit,” Beaulieu said bluntly.

  “You got it. Her name’s Voi, and she’s twenty-one. She’s our way in to whatever organization her daddy built up in preparation for Mzu.”

  “Oh, come on, Joshua,” Ashly protested. “Her father’s just been murdered, she’s not going to make appointments with perfect strangers, let alone tell us anything about the Garissan underground, even if she has any data. Which is questionable. I wouldn’t involve my daughter in anything like that. And the agencies will be wanting to question her, too.”

  Joshua wasn’t going to argue. As soon as he reviewed Ikela’s public record file he’d known Voi was the link. Ione would call it his intuition. She might even have been right. The old burn of conviction was there. “If we can just get close to her, we stand a chance,” he said firmly. “Mzu can’t afford to remain here now. She’s going to have to make a break for it, and sooner rather than later. One way or another, Voi will be involved. It’s our best shot.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with you,” Dahybi said. “It’s as good a chance as any. But how the hell are you going to get near her?”

  “Weren’t you listening?” asked one of the serjeants. “Voi is female and twenty-one.”

  Joshua grinned evilly at Dahybi.

  “You have got to be joking,” the stupefied node specialist insisted.

  “I’ll just lie back and think of the Confederation.”

  “Joshua …”

  Joshua burst out laughing. “Your faces! Don’t worry, Dahybi, I’m not that conceited. But she will have friends. There are quite a lot of rich entrepreneurs in the Dorados, their kids will cling together in their own little social clique. And I am a starship owner captain, after all. One of them will get us in. All I have to do now is find her.” He smiled broadly at his crew, who were regarding him with a mixture of umbrage and resignation. “Time to party.”

  Prince Lambert sealed the straps around the lanky girl’s wrists, then activated the sensenviron program. His bedroom dissolved into a circular stone-walled chamber at the top of a castle tower, its bed at the centre of the flagstone floor. His male sla
ves began to file through the iron-bound door. Ten of them stood around the bed, looking down dispassionately at the spread-eagled figure.

  He took the remote response collar from under the pillow and fastened it around her neck.

  “What is it?” the girl asked, anxiety rising into her voice. She was very young; it was highly probable she’d never heard of the device before.

  He kissed her silent, and datavised the collar’s activation sequence. The technology was a bastardization of medical nanonic packages, sending filaments to merge with her spinal cord. He could use it to manipulate her body into reacting exactly how he wanted, fulfilling each of the fantasies in turn.

  “Do hope I’m not interrupting,” one of the slaves said in a sharp female voice.

  Prince Lambert gave a start, jumping up from the bed. The girl wailed in dismay as the collar began to knit smoothly with her skin.

  He cancelled the sensenviron program, retrieving the reality of his darkened bedroom, and stared at the tall skinny figure which replaced the muscle-bound slave. “For Mary’s sake, Voi! I’m going to change this bloody apartment’s door code, I should never have let you have it.” He squinted at the figure. “Voi?”

  She was pulling her chameleon suit hood off, allowing her little crown of dreadlocks to wriggle free. A wig of unkempt gingerish hair was held carelessly in her hand. Her clothes were standard-issue biosphere agronomist overalls. “I want to talk to you.”

  His jaw dropped. One hand gestured ineffectually at the girl on the bed, who was tugging at the straps. “Voi!”

  “Now.” She went back out into the living room.

  He swore, then datavised a shutdown order at the collar and started to open the strap seals.

  “How old is she?” Voi asked when he emerged into the living room.

  “Does it matter?”

  “It might to Shea. Has she found out about your little kinks yet?”

  “Why the sudden interest in my sex life? Do you miss it?”