The Neutronium Alchemist
Page 93
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***
Erick was sure that the explosion, followed by the capsule’s equally violent stabilization manoeuvre, had torn loose some of his medical nanonic packages. He could feel peculiar lines of pressure building up under the SII suit, and convinced himself it was fluid leakage. Blood or artificial tissue nutrient from the packages and their supplements, he wasn’t sure which. Over half of them no longer responded to his datavises.
At least it meant they couldn’t contribute to the medical program’s dire pronouncements of his current physiological state. His right arm wouldn’t respond to any nerve impulses at all, nor was he receiving any sensation from it. The only positive factor was a confirmation that blood was still circulating inside the new muscles and artificial tissue.
There wasn’t much he could do to rectify the situation. The capsule’s reserve electron matrices didn’t have enough power to activate the internal life-support system. The thin atmosphere was already ten degrees below zero, and falling rapidly. Which meant he was unable to take the suit off and replace the nanonic packages. And just to twist the knife, an emergency survival gear locker containing fresh medical nanonic packages had popped open in the ceiling above him.
Backup lighting had come on, casting a weak pale blue glow across the compartment. Frost was forming on most of the surfaces, gradually obscuring the few remaining active holoscreen displays. Various pieces of refuse had been jolted loose from their nesting places to twirl whimsically through the air, throwing avian-style shadows across the acceleration couches.
Potentially the most troubling problem was the intermittent dropouts from which the flight computer’s datavises were suffering. Erick wasn’t entirely sure he could trust its status display. It still responded to simple commands, though.
With his personal situation stable for a moment, he instructed the capsule’s sensors to deploy. Three of the five responded, pistonlike tubes sliding up out of the nultherm foam coating. They began to scan around.
Astrogation programs slowly correlated the surrounding starfield. If they were working correctly, then the Tigara had emerged approximately fifty million kilometres from the coordinate he was aiming for. Ngeuni was only an unremarkable blue-green star to one side of the glaring A2 primary.
He wasn’t sure if they would pick up the capsule’s distress beacon. Stage one colonies did not have the most sophisticated communications satellites. When he instructed the capsule’s phased array antenna to focus on the distant planet, it didn’t acknowledge. He repeated the instruction, and there was still no activity.
The flight computer ran a diagnostic, which gave him a System Inviable code. Without actually going outside to examine it, there was no way of telling what was wrong.
Alone.
Cut off.
Fifty million kilometres from possible rescue.
Light-years from where he desperately needed to be.
All that was left for him now was to wait. He began switching off every piece of equipment apart from the attitude rockets, the guidance system which drove them, and the computer itself. Judging by the frequency of the thruster firings, the capsule was venting something. The last diagnostic sweep before he shut down the internal sensors couldn’t pinpoint what it was.
After he’d reduced the power drain to a minimum, he pressed the deactivation switch for his restraint webbing. Even that seemed reluctant to work, taking a long time to fold back below the side of the cushioning. At this movement, levering himself up from the couch, fluid stirred across his abdomen. He found that by moving very slowly, the effect (and perhaps the harm) was moderated.
Training took over, and he began to index the emergency gear which had deployed from the ceiling. That was when the emotional shock hammered him. He suddenly found himself shaking badly as he clung to a four person programmable silicon dinghy.
Indexing his position! Like a good little first-year cadet.
A broken laugh bubbled around the SII suit’s respirator tube. The glossy black silicon covering his eyes turned permeable to vent the salty fluid burning his squeezed up eyelids.
Never in his life had he felt so utterly helpless. Even when the possessed were boarding the Villeneuve’s Revenge he’d been able to do something. Fight back, hit them. Orbiting above New California with the Organization poised to obliterate them at the first false move, he’d been able to store most of the sensor images. There had always been something, some way of being positive.
Now he was humiliatingly aware of his mind crumbling away in mimicry of his tattered old body. Fear had risen to consume him, flowing swiftly out of the dark corners of the bridge. It produced a pain in his head far worse than any physical injury ever could.
Those muscles which still functioned disobeyed any lingering wishes he might have, leaving him ignominiously barnacled to the dinghy. Every last reserve of determination and resolve had been exhausted. Not even the ubiquitous programs could shore up his mentality anymore.
Too weak to continue living, too frightened to die: Erick Thakrar had come to the end of the line.
***
Eight kilometres west of Stonygate, Cochrane tooted the horn on the Karmic Crusader bus and turned off the road. The other three vehicles in the convoy jounced over the grass verge and came to a halt behind it.
“Yo, dudettes,” Cochrane yelled back to the juvenile rioters clambering over the seats. “Time out for like the big darkness.” He pressed the red button on the dash, and the doors hissed open. Kids poured out like a dam burst.
Cochrane put his purple glasses back on and climbed down out of the cab.
Stephanie and Moyo walked over to him, arm in arm. “Good place,” she said. The convoy had halted at the head of a gentle valley which was completely roofed over by the rumbling blanket of crimson cloud, rendering the mountain peaks invisible.
“This whole righteous road trip is one major groove.”
“Right.”
He materialized a fat reefer. “Hit?”
“No thanks. I’d better see about cooking them some supper.”
“That’s cool. I can’t psyche out any hostile vibes in this locale. I’ll like keep watch, make sure the nazgul aren’t circling overhead.”
“You do that.” Stephanie smiled fondly at him and went to the back of the bus, where the big luggage hold was. Moyo started pulling out the cooking gear.
“We should manage to reach Chainbridge by tomorrow evening,” he said.
“Yes. This isn’t quite what I expected when we started out, you know.”
“Predictability is boring.” He put a big electric camping grille on the ground, adjusting the aluminum legs to make it level. “Besides, I think it’s worked out for the best.”
Stephanie glanced around the improvised campsite, nodding approval; nearly sixty children were scampering around the parked vehicles. What had started off as a private mission to help a handful of lost children had rapidly snowballed.
Four times during the first day they had been stopped by residents who had told them where non-possessed children were lurking. On the second day there were over twenty children packed on board; that was when Tina Sudol had volunteered to come with them. Rana and McPhee joined up on the third day, adding another bus.
Now there were four vehicles, and eight possessed adults. They were no longer making a straight dash for the border at the top of Mortonridge.
It was more of a zigzag route, visiting as many towns as they could to pick up children. Ekelund’s people,
who had evolved into the closest thing to a government on Mortonridge, maintained the communications net between the larger towns, albeit with a considerably reduced bit capacity than previously. News of Stephanie’s progress had spread widely. Children were already waiting for the buses when they reached some towns; on a couple of occasions dressed smartly and given packed lunches by the possessed who had taken care of them. They had borne witness to some very tearful partings.
After the children had eaten and washed and been settled in their tents, Cochrane and Franklin Quigley sliced branches off a tree and piled them up to form a proper campfire. The adults came to sit around it, enjoying the yellow light flaring out to repel the clouds’ incessant claret illumination.
“I think we should forget going back to a town when we’re done with the kids,” McPhee said. “All of us get along okay, we should try a farm. The towns are starting to run out of food, now. We could grow some and sell it to them. That would give us something to do.”
“He’s been back a whole week, and he’s already bored,” Franklin Quigley grunted.
“Bore-ing,” Cochrane said. He blew twin streams of smoke out of his nostrils. They spiralled through the air to jab at McPhee’s nose like a cobra.
The giant Scot made a pass of his hand, and the smoke wilted, turning to tar and splattering on the ground. “I’m not bored, but we have to do something. It makes sense to think ahead.”
“You might be right,” Stephanie said. “I don’t think I’d like to live in any of the towns we’ve passed through so far.”
“The way I see it,” said Moyo, “is that the possessed are developing into two groups.”
“Please don’t use that word,” Rana said. Sitting cross-legged next to the flamboyantly feminine Tina Sudol, Rana appeared fastidiously androgynous with her short hair and baggy blue sweater.
“What word?” Moyo asked.
“Possession. I find it offensive and prejudicial.”
“That’s right, babe,” Cochrane chortled. “We’re not possessors, we’re just like dimensionally disadvantaged.”
“Call our cross-continuum placement situation whatever you wish,” she snapped back. “You cannot alter the fact that the term is wholly derogatory. The Confederation’s military-industrial complex is using it to demonize us so they can justify increased spending on their armaments programs.”
Stephanie pressed her face into Moyo’s arm to smother her giggles.
“Come on, we’re not exactly on the side of the saints,” Franklin observed.
“The perception of common morality is enforced entirely by the circumstances of male-dominated society. Our new and unique circumstances require us to re-evaluate that original morality. As there are clearly not enough living bodies to go around the human race, sensory ownership should be distributed on an equitable basis. It’s no good the living protesting about us. We have as much right to sensory input as they do.”
Cochrane took the reefer from his mouth and gave it a sad stare. “Man, I wish I could manifest your trips.”
“You ignore him, darling,” Tina Sudol said to Rana. “He’s a perfect example of male brutality.”
“I suppose a fuck is out of the question tonight, then?”
Tina sucked in her cheeks theatrically as she glowered at the unrepentant hippie. “I’m only interested in men.”
“And always have been,” McPhee said, in an unsubtle whisper.
Tina flounced her glossy, highlighted hair back with a manicured hand.
“You men are animals, all of you, simply rancid with hormones. No wonder I wanted to escape that prison of flesh I was in.”
“The two groups,” Moyo said, “seem to be divided into those that stay put, like the café proprietors, and the restless ones—like us I suppose, though we’re an exception. They complement each other perfectly. The wanderers go around playing tourist, drinking down the sights and experiences. And wherever they go, they meet the stayers and tell them about their journeys. That way both types get what they want. Both of us exist to relish experience; some like to go out and find it, others like it brought to them.”
“You think that’s what it’s going to be like from now on?” McPhee asked.
“Yes. That’s what we’ll settle down into.”
“But for how long? Wanting to see and feel is just a reaction from the beyond. Once we’ve had our fill, human nature will come back. People want to settle down, have a family. Procreation is our biological imperative. And that’s one thing we never can do. We will always be frustrated.”
“I’ll like give it a try,” Cochrane said. “Me and Tina can make babies in my tepee anytime.”
Tina gave him a single disgusted look, and shuddered.
“But they wouldn’t be yours,” McPhee said. “That isn’t your body, and it certainly isn’t your DNA. You will never have a child again, not one of your own. That phase of our lives is over, it cannot be regained no matter how much of our energistic ability we expend.”
“You’re also forgetting the third type walking among us,” Franklin said. “The Ekelund type. And I do know her. I signed up with her for the first couple of days. She seemed to know what she was doing. We had ‘objectives’ and ‘target assignments,’ and ‘command structures’—and God help anyone who disobeyed those fascists. She’s a straight power nut with a Napoleonic complex. She’s got her little army of wannabe toughs running around in combat fatigues thinking they’re reborn special forces brigades. And they’re going to keep sniping away at the Royal Marines over the border until the Princess gets so pissed with us she nukes Mortonridge down to the bedrock.”
“That situation won’t last,” McPhee said. “Give it a month, or a year, and the Confederation will fall. Don’t you listen to the whispers in the beyond? Capone is getting his act together out there. It won’t be long before the Organization fleet jumps to Ombey. Then there will be nobody left for Ekelund to fight, and her command structure will simply fade away. Nobody is going to do what she tells them for the rest of time.”
“I don’t want to live for the rest of time,” Stephanie said. “I really don’t. That’s almost as frightening as being trapped in the beyond. We’re not made to live forever, we can’t handle it.”
“Lighten up, babe,” Cochrane said. “I don’t mind giving eternity a try; it’s the flipside which is the real bummer.”
“We’ve been back a week, and Mortonridge is already falling apart. There’s hardly any food left, nothing works properly.”
“Give it a chance,” Moyo said. “We’re all badly shocked, we don’t know how to control this new power we’ve got, and the non-possessed want to hunt us down and fling us back. You can hardly expect instant civilization under those circumstances. We’ll find a way to adjust. As soon as the rest of Ombey is possessed we’ll take it out of this universe altogether. Once that happens, things will be different. You’ll see; this is just an interim stage.” He put his arm around her as she leaned into him. She kissed him lightly, mind shining with appreciation.
“Yo, love machines,” Cochrane said. “So while you two screw like hot bunnies for the rest of the night, who’s going into town to track down some food?”
***
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Around Oenone’s bridge, the communal tension level reduced with a strong mental sigh. They had arrived above Ngeuni twenty minutes ago. Every sensor extended. The crew in alert status one. Weapons powered up. Ready for anything. To retrieve Thakrar. To fight possessed starships that had captured Thakrar.
And there had been nothing. No ships in orbit. No response from the small development company advance camp on the planet.
Oenone accelerated into a high polar orbit, and Edwin activated every sensor they had.
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he was aware of the astrogation data from the sensors flooding into the bitek processor array. From that, she and Oenone understood exactly where the signal was in relation to themselves.
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The voidhawk swallowed through a wormhole that barely had any internal length at all. Starlight blue-shifted slightly as it twisted into a tight rosette, kissing the hull, then expanding. A life-support capsule was spinning idly ten kilometres in front of the terminus as Oenone shot out.
Local space was smeared with scraps of debris from the Tigara’s violent end. Syrinx could feel the capsule’s mass in her mind as it hung in Oenone’s distortion field. Sensors and communications dishes in the lower hull pods swung around to point at the dingy sphere.
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Oenone’s crew watched through Serina’s armour suit sensors as she crept through the decks of the life-support capsule, searching for Captain Thakrar. It was a shambles inside, with equipment torn off bulkheads, hatches jammed, lockers broken open to send junk and old clothes floating free. The air had gone, allowing several pipes to burst and release globules of fluid, which had subsequently frozen solid. She had to use a high-powered fission cutter on the latches around the final hatch before she could worm her way into the bridge. At first she didn’t even recognize the SII-suited figure clutching at one of the emergency supply cases on the ceiling. Granules of frost had solidified on him as they had on every surface, glinting a dusty grey in the beams thrown out by her helmet lights. In his fetal position he looked like some kind of giant mummified larva.
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