The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Who are you?” Moyo asked hoarsely.

  “My name’s Hugh Rosler. I used to live in Exnall.”

  “Did you follow us here?”

  “No. Although I did watch your bus leave Exnall. It’s just coincidence I’m here now.”

  “Right,” Moyo said carefully. “You’re not a spy then?”

  The question was one which Rosler apparently found quite amusing. “Not for the Kulu Kingdom, no.”

  “So how come the white fire didn’t affect you?”

  “I have a built-in resistance. It was thought we should have some protection when this time came around. And the reality dysfunction ability has proved inordinately useful over the years. I’ve been in a few tight corners in my time; completely inadvertently I might add. I’m not supposed to be obtrusive.”

  “Then you are an agent. Who do you work for?”

  “Agent implies an active role. I only observe, I’m not part of any faction.”

  “Faction?”

  “The Kingdom. The Confederation. Adamists. Edenists. The possessed. Factions.”

  “Uh huh. Are you going to shoot me, then, or something?”

  “Good heavens no. I told you, I’m here purely on observation duty.”

  What was being said, apparently in all sincerity, wasn’t helping to calm Moyo at all. “For which faction?”

  “Ah. That’s classified, I’m afraid. Technically, I shouldn’t even be telling you this much. But circumstances have changed since my mission began. These things aren’t quite so important today. I’m just trying to put you at ease.”

  “It’s not working.”

  “You really do have nothing to fear from me.”

  “You’re not human, are you?”

  “I’m ninety-nine per cent human. That’s good enough to qualify, surely?”

  Moyo thought he would have preferred it if Hugh Rosler had launched into an indignant denial. “What’s the one per cent?”

  “Sorry. Classified.”

  “Xenoc? Is that it? Some unknown race? We always had rumours of pre-technology contact, men being taken away to breed.”

  Hugh Rosler chuckled. “Oh, yes, good old Roswell. You know I’d almost forgotten about that; the papers were full of it for decades afterwards. But I don’t think it ever really happened. At least, I never detected any UFOs when I was on Earth, and I was there quite a while.”

  “You were … ? But …”

  “I’d better be going. Your friends are starting to wonder where you’ve got to. There’s a toilet in the next warehouse which the children can use. The tank is gravity fed, so it’s still working.”

  “Wait! What are you observing us for?”

  “To see what happens, of course.”

  “Happens? You mean when the Kingdom attacks?”

  “No, that’s not really important. I want to see what the outcome is for your entire race now that the beyond has been revealed to you. I must say, I’m becoming quite excited by the prospect. After all, I have been waiting for this for a very long time. It’s my designated goal function.”

  Moyo simply stared at him, astonishment and indignation taking the place of fear. “How long?” was all he managed to whisper.

  “Eighteen centuries.” Rosler raised an arm in a cheery wave and walked away into the shadows at the back of the warehouse. They seemed to lap him up.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Stephanie asked when Moyo shambled slowly out into the gloomy light of the rumbling clouds.

  “Don’t laugh, but I think I’ve just met Methuselah’s younger brother.”

  ***

  Louise heard the lounge hatch slide open, and guessed who it was. His duty watch had finished fifteen minutes ago. Just long enough to show he wasn’t in any sort of rush to see her.

  The trouble with the Jamrana, Louise thought, was its layout. Its cabin fittings were just as good as those in the Far Realm, but instead of the pyramid of four life-support capsules, the inter-orbit cargo craft had a single cylindrical life-support section riding above the cargo truss. The decks were stacked one on top of the other like the layers of a wedding cake. To find someone, all you had to do was start at the top, and climb down the central ladder. There was no escape.

  “Hello, Louise.”

  She reached for a polite smile. “Hello, Pieri.”

  Pieri Bushay had just reached twenty, the second oldest of three brothers. Like most inter-orbit ships, Jamrana was run as a family concern; all seven crew members were Bushays. The strangeness of the extended family, the looseness of its internal relationships, was one which Louise found troubling; it was more company than any family she understood. Pieri’s elder brother was away serving a commission in the Govcentral navy, which left his father, twin mothers, brother, and two cousins to run the ship.

  Small wonder that a young female passenger would be such an attraction to him. He was shy, and uncertain, which was endearing; nothing like the misplaced assurance of William Elphinstone.

  “How are you feeling?”

  His usual opening line.

  “Fine.” Louise tapped the little nanonic package behind her ear. “The wonders of Confederation technology.”

  “We’ll be flipping over in another twenty hours. Halfway there. Then we’ll be flying ass … er, I mean, bottom backwards to Earth.”

  She was impatient with the fact it was going to take longer to fly seventy million kilometres between planets than it had to fly between stars. But at least the fusion drive was scheduled to be on for a third of the trip. The medical packages didn’t have to work quite so hard to negate her sickness. “That’s good.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to datavise the O’Neill Halo to see if there’s a ship heading for Tranquillity?”

  “No.” That had been too sharp. “Thank you, Pieri, but if a ship is going, then it’s going, if not, there’s nothing I can do. Fate, you see.”

  “Oh, sure. I understand.” He smiled tentatively. “Louise, if you have to stay in the Halo till you find a starship, I’d like to show you around. I’ve visited hundreds of the rocks. I know what’s hot out there, what to see, what to miss. It would be fun.”

  “Hundreds?”

  “Fifty, at least. And all the major ones, including Nova Kong.”

  “I’m sorry, Pieri, that doesn’t mean much to me. I’ve never heard of Nova Kong.”

  “Really? Not even on Norfolk?”

  “No. The only one I know is High York, and that’s only because we’re heading to it.”

  “But Nova Kong is famous; one of the first to be flown into Earth orbit and be made habitable. Nova Kong physicists invented the ZTT drive. And Richard Saldana was the asteroid’s chairman once; he used it as his headquarters to plan the Kulu colonization.”

  “How fabulous. I can’t really imagine a time when the Kingdom didn’t exist, it seems so … substantial. In fact all of Earth’s prestarflight history reads like a fable to me. So, have you ever visited High York before?”

  “Yes, it’s where the Jamrana is registered.”

  “That’s your home, then?”

  “We mostly dock there, but the ship’s my real home. I wouldn’t swap it for anything.”

  “Just like Joshua. You space types are all the same. You’ve got wild blood.”

  “I suppose so.” His face tightened at the mention of Joshua; the guardian angel fiancé Louise managed to mention in every conversation.

  “Is High York very well organized?”

  He seemed puzzled by the question. “Yes. Of course. It has to be. Asteroids are nothing like planets, Louise. If the environment isn’t maintained properly you’d have a catastrophe on your hands. They can’t afford not to be well organized.”

  “I know that. What I meant was, the government. Does it have very strong law enforcement policies? Phobos seemed fairly easygoing.”

  “That’s the devout Communists for you; they’re very trusting, Dad says they always give people the benefit of the doubt.”
>
  It confirmed her worries. When the four of them had arrived at the Jamrana a couple of hours before its departure, Endron had handed over their passport fleks to the single Immigration Officer on duty. He had known the woman, and they’d spoken cheerfully. She’d been laughing when she slotted the fleks into her processor block, barely glancing at the images they stored. Three transient offworlders with official documentation, who were friends of Endron … She even allowed Endron to accompany them on board.

  That was when he’d taken Louise aside. “You won’t make it, you know that, don’t you?” he asked.

  “We’ve got this far,” she said shakily. Though she’d had her doubts.

  There had been so many people as they made their tortuous way to the spaceport with the cargo mechanoid concealing Faurax’s unconscious body.

  But they’d got the forger on board the Far Realm and into a zero-tau pod without incident.

  “So far you’ve had a lot of luck, and no genuine obstacle. That’s going to end as soon as the Jamrana enters Govcentral-controlled space. You don’t understand what it’s going to be like, Louise. There’s no way you’ll ever get inside High York. Look, the only reason you ever got inside Phobos was because we smuggled you in, and no one bothered to inspect the Far Realm. You got out, because no one is bothered about departing ships. And now you’re heading straight at Earth, which has the largest single population in the Confederation, and runs the greatest military force ever assembled—a military force which along with the leadership is very paranoid right now. Three forged passports are not going to get you in. They are going to run every test they can think of, Louise, and believe me, Fletcher is not going to get through High York’s spaceport.” He was almost pleading with her. “Come with me, tell our government what’s happened. They won’t hurt him, I’ll testify that he’s not a danger. Then after that we can find you a ship to Tranquillity, all above board.”

  “No. You don’t understand, they’ll send him back to the beyond. I saw it on the news; if you put a possessed in zero-tau it compels them out of the body they’re using. I can’t turn Fletcher in, not if they’re going to force him back there. He’s suffered for seven centuries. Isn’t that enough?”

  “And what about the person whose body he’s possessing?”

  “I don’t know!” she cried. “I didn’t want any of this. My whole planet’s been possessed.”

  “All right. I’m sorry. But I had to say it. You’re doing a damn sight worse than playing with fire, Louise.”

  “Yes.” She held on to his shoulder with one hand to steady herself and brushed her lips to his cheek. “Thank you. I’m sure you could have blown the whistle on us if you really wanted to.”

  His reddening cheeks were confirmation enough. “Yeah, well. Maybe I learned from you that nothing is quite black and white. Besides, that Fletcher, he’s so …”

  “Decent.”

  Louise gave Pieri the kind of look that told him she was immensely interested in every word he spoke. “So what will happen when we arrive at High York, then? I want to know everything.”

  Pieri started to access all his neural nanonic-filed memories of High York spaceport. With luck, and a surfeit of details, he could make this last for a good hour.

  ***

  The Magistrature Council was the Confederation’s ultimate court.

  Twenty-five judges sat on the Council, appointed by the Assembly to deal with the most serious violations of Confederation law. The majority of cases were the ones brought against starship crews captured by navy ships, those accused of piracy or owning antimatter. Less common were the war crimes trials, inevitably resulting from asteroid independence struggles. There were only two possible sentences for anyone found guilty by the Magistrature: death, or deportation to a penal colony.

  The full Magistrature Council also had the power to sit in judgement of sovereign governments. The last such sitting had determined, in absentia, Omuta to be guilty of genocide, and ordered the execution of its cabinet and military high command.

  The Council’s final mandate was the authority to declare a person, government, or entire people to be an Enemy of Humanity. Laton had been awarded such a condemnation, as had members of the black syndicates producing antimatter, and various terrorists and defeated warlords. Such a proclamation was essentially a death warrant which empowered a Confederation official to pursue the renegade across all national boundaries and required all local governments to cooperate.

  That was the pronouncement the Provost General was now aiming to have applied against the possessed. With that in the bag, the CNIS would be free to do whatever they wanted to Jacqueline Couteur and the other prisoners in the demon trap. But first her current status had to be legally established, if she was a hostile prisoner under the terms of the state of emergency, or a hapless victim. In either case, she was still entitled to a legal representative.

  The courtroom in Trafalgar chosen for the preliminary hearing was maximum security court three. It had none of the trimmings of the public courts, retaining only the very basic layout of docks, desks for the prosecution and defence counsels, the judge’s bench, and a small observer gallery.

  There was no permitted or designated place for the media or the public.

  Maynard Khanna arrived five minutes before the hearing was scheduled to begin, and sat at the front of the small gallery. As someone used to the order of military life, he had an intense distrust and dislike of the legal profession. Lawyers had abolished the simple concept of right and wrong, turning it into degrees of guilt. And in doing so they cut themselves in for fees which came only in large multiples of a navy captain’s salary.

  The accused were entitled to a defence, Maynard conceded, but he still never understood how their lawyers avoided feeling equally guilty when they got them off.

  Lieutenant Murphy Hewlett sat down behind Maynard, pulling unhappily at the jacket of his dress uniform. He leaned forward and murmured: “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Me neither,” Maynard grumbled back. “But the Provost General says it should be a formality. No court in the galaxy is going to let Jacqueline Couteur walk out of the door.”

  “For God’s sake, Maynard, she shouldn’t even be let out of the demon trap. You know that.”

  “This is a secure court; and we can’t give her defence lawyer an opportunity to mount an appeal on procedural grounds.”

  “Bloody lawyers!”

  “Too right. What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Provost General’s witness. I’m supposed to tell the judge how we were in a war situation on Lalonde, which makes Couteur’s capture legitimate under the Assembly’s rules of engagement. It’s in case her lawyer goes for a wrongful jurisdiction plea.”

  “You know, this is the first time I’ve ever disagreed with the First Admiral. I said we should just keep her in the demon trap, and screw all this legal crap. Gilmore is losing days of research time over this.”

  Murphy hissed in disgust and sat back. For the eighth time that morning, his hand ran over his holster. It contained a nine-millimetre semi-automatic pistol, loaded with dumdum bullets. He loosened the cover, allowing his fingers to rest on the grip. Yesterday evening he had spent two hours at the range in the officers’ mess, shooting the weapon without any aid from neural nanonics programs. Just in case.

  An eight-strong marine squad and their sergeant, each of them armed with a machine gun, marched the four prisoners into the court. Jacqueline Couteur was the first in line, dressed in a neat grey suit. If it hadn’t been for the carbotanium manacles she would have been a picture of middle-class respectability. A slim sensor bracelet had been placed around her right wrist, monitoring the flow of energy through her body.

  She looked around, noting the marine guards at each of the three doors.

  Then she saw Murphy Hewlett scowling, and grinned generously at him.

  “Bitch,” he grunted under his breath.

  The marine squad sat Jacquelin
e in the dock and fastened her manacles to a loop of chain. The other three possessed—Randall, Lennart, and Nena—were made to sit on the bench beside her. Once their manacles were secured, the marines took up position behind them. The sergeant datavised his processor block to check that the sensor bracelets were working, then gave the clerk of the court a brief nod.

  The four defence lawyers were ushered in. Jacqueline manoeuvred a polite welcoming smile into place. This was the third time she’d seen Udo DiMarco. The lawyer wasn’t entirely happy to be appointed her counsel, he’d admitted that much to her, but then went on to say he’d do his best.

  “Good morning, Jacqueline,” he said, doing his nervous best to ignore the marines behind her.

  “Hello, Udo. Did you manage to obtain the recordings?”

  “I filed a release request with the court, yes. It may take some time; the navy claims their Intelligence Service research is classified and exempt from the access act of 2503. I’ll challenge that, of course, but as I said this is all going to take some time.”

  “They tortured me, Udo. The judge has to see those recordings. I’ll walk free in seconds if the truth is ever known.”

  “Jacqueline, this is only a preliminary hearing to establish that all the required arrest procedures were followed, and clarify your legal custody status.”

  “I wasn’t arrested, I was abducted.”

  Udo DiMarco sighed and plunged on. “The Provost General’s team is going to argue that as a possessor you have committed a kidnap, and are therefore a felon. That will give them a basis for holding you in custody. They’re also arguing that your energistic power constitutes a new and dangerous weapons technology, which will validate the Intelligence Service’s investigation. Please don’t expect to walk out of court this morning.”

  “Well I’m sure you’ll do your best.” She gave him an encouraging smile.

  Udo DiMarco flexed his shoulders uncomfortably and withdrew to the defence counsel’s bench. His sole comfort was the fact that the media weren’t allowed in; no one would know he was defending a possessed. He datavised his processor block, reviewing the files he’d assembled.