The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “That park would make a handy landing spot for Ashly,” Melvyn commented.

  “Acknowledged,” Joshua said. He squinted through the windscreen as the car turned onto the loop of road which led to the hotel’s broad portico.

  There was a car already parked in front of the doors.

  Joshua datavised a halt order into their car’s control processor, then directed it to one of the parking slots outside the portico. Tyres crunched on the virgin snow as they pulled in.

  The two police cars stopped on the road outside.

  “What is it?” Dick Keaton asked, he was almost whispering.

  Joshua pointed a forefinger at the car under the portico. Several people were climbing in.

  “That’s Mzu,” one of the serjeants said.

  After so long on the trail, so much endured, Joshua felt something akin to awe now he could finally see her. Mzu hadn’t changed much from the visual file stored in his neural nanonics during their one brief encounter. Features and hair the same, and she was wrapped up well in a thick navy-blue coat, but the flaky professor act had been dumped. This woman carried a deadly confidence.

  If he’d ever doubted the Alchemist and Mzu’s connection to it, that ended now.

  “What do you want to do?” Dahybi asked. “We can stop her car. Make our pitch now.”

  Joshua held up a hand for silence. He’d just noticed the last two people getting into the car with Mzu. It wasn’t a premonition he got from them, more like fear hot-wired direct into his brain. “Oh, Jesus.”

  Melvyn’s electronic warfare blocks datavised a warning. He accessed the display. “What the hell?”

  “I don’t want to alarm you guys,” Dick Keaton said. “But the people in the next car are giving us a real unfriendly look.”

  “Huh?” Joshua glanced over.

  “And they’re aiming a multiband sensor at us, too,” Melvyn said.

  Joshua returned the hostile stare from the two ESA agents in the car parked beside them. “Oh, fucking wonderful.”

  “She’s leaving,” one of the serjeants called.

  “Jesus,” Joshua grumbled. “Melvyn, are you blocking that sensor?”

  “Absolutely.” He gave the agents a broad toothy smile.

  “Okay, we follow her. Let’s just hope she’s going somewhere I can have a civilized chat.”

  The five embassy cars carrying Monica, Samuel, and a mixed crew of ESA and Edenist operatives disregarded the city’s new speed limit altogether as they raced for the hotel. All the security police did was follow and observe; they were anxious to see where this was all leading.

  They were still a kilometre from the Mercedes Hotel when Adrian Redway datavised Monica to advise her that Mzu was on the move again. “There’s definitely only four people with her this time. The observation team launched a skyspy outside the hotel. It looks like there’s been some sort of fight in the penthouse. Do you want access?”

  “Please.”

  The image from the small synthetic bird hovering above the park filled her brain. Its artificial tissue wings were flapping constantly to hold it steady in the middle of the snowstorm, producing an awkward juddering.

  A visual-wavelength optical sensor was scanning across the penthouse’s broad windows. One of them had a large jagged hole in the middle.

  “I can see a lot of glass on the carpet,” Monica datavised. “Something came in through that window, not out.”

  “But what?” Adrian asked. “That’s the twenty-fifth floor.”

  Monica continued her review. The living-room doors had been smashed open.

  Long black scorch marks were chiselled deep into the one lying on the floor.

  Then she switched focus to a settee. There was a foot dangling over the armrest.

  “No wonder Mzu was in a hurry to leave again,” she said out loud. “The possessed have tracked her down.”

  “Her car isn’t heading for the spaceport,” Samuel said. “Could the two locals with her be possessed?”

  “Possible,” Monica agreed hesitantly. “But the observation team said she seemed to be leading the others. They didn’t think she was being coerced.”

  “Calvert has started following her,” Adrian datavised.

  “Okay. Let’s see where they’re all so eager to get to.” She datavised the car’s control processor to catch up with the observation team’s vehicles.

  “Someone else has now joined us,” Ngong said. His voice was split between amusement and surprise. “That makes over a dozen cars now.”

  “And poor old Baranovich said to come alone,” Alkad said. “Is he in one of them?”

  “I don’t know. One car certainly has some possessed in it.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” Voi asked.

  Alkad sank down deeper into her seat, getting herself comfortable. “Not really. This is like old times for me.”

  “What if they stop us?”

  “Gelai, what are the police thinking?”

  “They’re curious, Doctor. Make that very curious.”

  “That’s okay then; as long as they aren’t going to stop us we’re all right. I know the agencies, they will want to know where we’re going first before they make their move.”

  “But Baranovich—”

  “They’re his problem, not ours. If he doesn’t want me followed then it’s up to him to do something about it.”

  Alkad’s car navigated itself along Harrisburg’s abandoned streets at a doggedly legal speed. Despite that, they made good progress, leaving the closely packed buildings of the city centre behind to venture out into the more industrial suburbs. Thirty minutes into the journey, the last of the urban clutter was discarded behind them. The slightly elevated roadway cut straight across a flat alluvial plain that was open all the way to the sea eighty kilometres away. It was a vast expanse of huge fallow fields from which tractor mechanoids and tailored bugs had eradicated any unauthorized vegetation. Trees were stunted and bent by the wind that blew in from the shore, standing hunched along the line of the drainage canals which had been dug to tame the rich black soil.

  Nothing moved off the road, no animals or vehicles. They were driving across a snow desert. Large, stiff flakes were hurled horizontally against the car by the wind, taxing the guarantee of the lofriction windshield to stay clear. Even so, that didn’t prevent them from seeing the fifteen cars which were now following them, a convoy that made no attempt to hide itself.

  Adrian Redway had settled himself into one of the chairs in the ESA’s operation centre and datavised his desktop processor for a filter program to access the station’s incoming information streams. Even with the filter he was almost overwhelmed by the quantity of data available.

  Neural nanonics assigned priority gradings. Sub-routines took over from his mind’s natural cross-indexing ability, leaving his consciousness free to absorb relevant details.

  He focused on Mzu, principally through the observation team, then defined a peripheral activity key to alert him of any incoming factors which would affect her situation. The rate at which external events were developing on Nyvan made it unlikely he would be able to secure Monica much advance warning, but as a veteran of twenty-eight years ESA service he knew even seconds could change the entire outcome of a field operation.

  “It has to be the ironberg foundry yard,” he datavised to Monica after they had been driving over the farmland for twenty uneventful minutes.

  “We think so, too,” Monica replied. “Are the foundry’s landing pads equipped with beacon guidance? If she’s looking for a spaceplane pickup, they’ll need a controlled approach in this weather.”

  “Unless they have military-grade sensors. But yes, the foundry’s pads have beacons. I wouldn’t like to vouch for their reliability, mind. I doubt they’ve been serviced since the day they were installed.”

  “Okay, can you run a data sweep of the foundry? And if you can access it, a security sensor review would be helpful. I’d like to know if there’s anyone the
re waiting for her.”

  “I don’t think you quite understand what you’re asking for, that foundry is big. But I’ll put a couple of my analysts on it. Just don’t expect too much.”

  “Thanks.” She gave Samuel a forlorn look. “Something wrong?”

  The Edenist had been accessing their exchange via his bitek processor block. “I am reminded of the time she left Tranquillity. We were all following after her rather like this, and look what happened that time.

  Possibly we should be the ones taking the initiative. If the foundry is her intended destination, she may well have a method of eluding us already in place.”

  “Could be. But the only way of stopping her now is to shoot the car. That would bring the police storming in.”

  Samuel accessed the ESA operations centre computer and reviewed the security police deployment status. “We are a long way from their designated reinforcements; and we can have the flyers here in minutes.

  Hurting the feelings of the Tonala government is an irrelevance compared to securing the Alchemist. Mzu has done us a favour by coming to such a remote place.”

  “Yeah. Well, if you’re willing to bring your flyers in to evac us, I’m certainly prepared to commit our people. We’ve got enough firepower to stomp on the police if—” She broke off as Adrian datavised again.

  “The city air defence network has just located those missing Organization spaceplanes,” he told her. “They’re heading right at you, Monica; three of them coming in over the sea at Mach five. Looks like you were right about the foundry being a pickup zone.”

  “My God, she is selling out to Capone. What a bitch.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Can you direct the city network to shoot the spaceplanes?”

  “Yes, if they get closer, but at the moment they’re out of range.”

  “Will they be in range at the foundry?” Samuel asked.

  “No. The network doesn’t have any missiles, it’s all beam weapons. Tonala relies on its SD platforms to kill any threat approaching from outside its boundaries.”

  “The flyers,” Monica asked Samuel. “Can they intercept?”

  “Yes.” <> he instructed the pilots.

  Monica datavised her armour suit management processor to run a readiness diagnostic, then pulled her shell helmet on and sealed it. The other agents began checking their own weapons.

  “Joshua, the flyers are all leaving,” Ashly datavised.

  “I was wondering about that,” Joshua replied. “We’re only about ten kilometres from the ironberg foundry now. Mzu must have arranged some kind of rendezvous there. Dick’s been running some checks for us; he says that sections of the foundry electronics are glitched. There could be some possessed up ahead.”

  “Do you need an evac?”

  Joshua glanced around the car. Melvyn and Dahybi weren’t giving anything away, while Dick Keaton was merely curious. “We’re not in any danger yet,” one of the serjeants said.

  “No. But if it happens, it’s going to happen fast; and we’re not in the strongest position.”

  “You can’t pull out now. We’re too close.”

  “You’re telling me,” he muttered. “All right, we’ll keep on her for now. If we can get close enough to make our offer, well and good. But if the agencies start getting aggressive, then we back off. Understood, Ione?”

  “Understood.”

  “I may be able to offer some assistance,” Dick Keaton said.

  “Oh?”

  “The cars in this convoy are all local models. I have some program commands which could cause trouble in their control processors. It might help us get closer to your target.”

  “If we start doing that to the agencies, they’ll use their own electronic warfare capability on us,” Melvyn said. “That’s if they don’t just use a TIP carbine. Everybody knows what’s at stake.”

  “They won’t know it’s us,” Dick Keaton said.

  “You hope,” Melvyn said. “They’re good, Joshua. No offence to Dick, but the agencies have entire departments of computer science professors writing black software for them.”

  Joshua enjoyed the idea of screwing up the other cars, but the way they were driving further and further into isolation was a big mitigating factor. Normal agency rules of minimum visibility wouldn’t apply out here. If he upset the status quo, Melvyn was probably right about the reaction he’d get. What he really wanted was Lady Mac above the horizon to give them some fire support, although even her sensors would struggle to resolve anything through this snowstorm, and she wasn’t due up for another forty minutes. “Dick, see what you can do to strengthen our car processors against agency software. I’ll use your idea if it looks like she’s getting away from us.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Ashly, can you launch without causing undue attention?”

  “I think so. There has to be someone observing me, but I’m not picking up any active sensor activity.”

  “Okay, launch and fly a low-visibility holding pattern ten kilometres from the yard. We’ll shout for you.”

  The four Edenist flyers picked up velocity as they curved around the outskirts of Harrisburg, hitting Mach two thirty kilometres from the coast. Their smoothly rounded noses lined up on the ironberg foundry.

  Snowflakes flowing through their coherent magnetic fields sparkled a vivid blue around the forward fuselages, then vaporised to fluorescent purple streamers. To anyone under their path, it appeared as though four sunburst comets were rumbling through the atmosphere.

  It was the one failing of Kulu’s ion field technology that it could never be successfully hidden from sensors. The three Organization spaceplanes streaking in from the sea spotted them as soon as they lifted from the spaceport. Electronic warfare arrays were activated, seeking to blind the flyers with a full-spectrum barrage. Air-to-air missiles dropped out of their wing recesses and shot ahead at Mach ten.

  The Edenist flyers saw them coming through the electronic hash. They peeled away from each other, arcing through the sky in complex evasion manoeuvres. Chaff and signature decoys spewed out of the flyers. Masers locked on and fired continuous pulses at the incoming drones.

  Explosions thundered unseen above the farmland. Some of the missiles succumbed to the masers, while others followed their programs to detonate in preloaded patterns. Clouds of kinetic shrapnel threw up lethal blockades along the trajectories they predicted the flyers would use. But there were too few missiles left to create an effective kill zone.

  The flyers stormed through.

  It should have ended then, a duel between energy beam weapons and fuselage shielding, the two opponents so far away that in all probability they would never even see each other. But the snow forbade that; absorbing maser and thermal induction energy, cutting the effective strike range of both sides to less than five hundred metres. Flyers and spaceplanes had to get close to each other, spiralling around and around, looping, twisting, diving, climbing. Aggressors desperate to keep their beams on one point of their target’s fuselage; targets frantic to keep moving, spinning to disperse the energy input. A genuine dogfight developed. Pilots blinded by the snow and clouds, dependent on sensors harassed by unremitting electronic warfare impulses. Given that both the flyers and the spaceplanes were multi-role craft, the manoeuvres lacked any real acrobatic innovation. Predication programs were the true knights of the sky, allowing pilots to keep a steady lock on their opponents. The flyers’ superior agility began to pay dividends. The spaceplanes were limited by the ancient laws of aerodynamic lift and stability, restricting their tactics to classical aerial manoeuvres. While the flyers could move in any direction they wanted to providing their fusion generators had enough power.

  The Organization was always going to lose.

  One by one, the crippled spaceplanes tumbled out of the sky. Two of them smashed into the frozen soil outside the foundry yard, the third into the sea.

  Overhead, the flyers closed formation and began to
circle the vast foundry yard in anticipation of claiming their prize.

  Urschel and Pinzola slid up over the horizon. Warned by the screams of souls torn back into the beyond, they knew what to look for. X-ray lasers stabbed down four times, their power unchecked by gravid clouds or swirling ice crystals.

  The docking cradle rose out of the spaceport bay, exposing the fuselage of the Mount’s Delta to a blaze of sunlight. At this juncture of a normal departure, a starship would spread its thermo-dump panels before it disengaged. Quinn told Dwyer to switch their heat exchange circuits to an internal store. Umbilical feeds withdrew from their couplings in the lower hull, then the hold-down latches retracted.

  “Fly us fifty kilometres along Jesup’s spin axis,” Quinn said. “Then hold us there.”

  Dwyer flicked a throat mike down from his headset and muttered instructions to the flight computer. Ion thrusters lifted the clipper-class ship clear of the bay, then the secondary drive came on.

  Mount’s Delta accelerated away at a fifteenth of a gee, following a clean arc above the surface of the counter-rotating spaceport.

  Quinn used the holoscreens surrounding his acceleration couch to display images from the external sensor suite. Nothing else moved around the gigantic asteroid. The surrounding industrial stations had been shut down for days and were now drifting out of alignment. An inert fleet of personnel commuters, MSVs, inter-orbit cargo craft, and tankers were all docked to Jesup’s counter-rotating spaceport, filling nearly every bay.

  As soon as the starship rose away from the apex of the spaceport, Quinn switched the optical sensors to track the other asteroids. Dwyer watched the screens in silence as the three deserted asteroids appeared. This time there was movement visible, tiny stars were closing on the dark rocks at high velocity.

  “Looks like we’re just in time,” Quinn said. “The nations are getting upset about losing their ships.” He spoke briefly into his mike, instructing the flight computer.

  Four secure military-grade laser communicators deployed from the starship’s fuselage. One pointed back at Jesup, while the other three acquired a lock on the abandoned asteroids. Each one fired an ultraviolet beam at their target, its encrypted code requesting a response. In answer, four similar ultraviolet beams transfixed the Mount’s Delta.