The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “I’m serious, Joshua. The Organization has tampered with one of the ironbergs. They altered its aerobrake trajectory so that it will land on the foundry yard. If they can’t get Mzu offplanet with them, they want her dead so she’ll have to join the Organization that way. It’s timed to crash after the spaceplane pickup was scheduled, so that if anything went wrong they’d still win.”

  The canal opened up ahead of Joshua, a rigid gully stretching away to the foundry building three kilometres distant. Water rampaged along it, a thundering white-water torrent which propelled him along helplessly. He wasn’t alone. Voi came close enough for him to touch if the pounding water hadn’t been so strong, snatching her away again immediately.

  “Jesus, Sarha, this is after the spaceplanes were scheduled.”

  “I know. We’re tracking the ironberg, it’s going to hit you in seven minutes.”

  “What? Nuke the bastard, now, Sarha.”

  The leading edge of the water reached the first section of scaffolding, a lattice of heavy walkways, cage lifts, and machinery platforms. It swept the lower members away, toppling the rest of the structure. The stronger segments held together for a few seconds as the spume rolled them along, then after a few revolutions they began to break apart, metal poles sinking to the bottom.

  “We can’t, Joshua. It’s already in the lower atmosphere. The combat wasps can’t reach it.”

  The water reached the second stretch of scaffolding. This was larger than the first, supporting big construction mechanoids and concrete hoppers.

  Their weight lent a degree of stability to the edifice as the water seethed around it; several members broke free, but it managed to remain relatively intact against the initial onrush.

  “Don’t worry, Joshua,” Ashly datavised. “I’m on my way. Fifty seconds and I’ll be there. We’ll be airborne long before the ironberg crashes. I can see the sheds already.”

  “No, Ashly, stay back, there are possessed here; a lot of them. They’ll hit the spaceplane if they see you.”

  “Target them for me; I’ve got the masers.”

  “Impossible.” He saw the scaffolding up ahead and knew this was his one chance. The physiological monitor program had been issuing cautions for some time: the cold was killing him. His muscles were already badly debilitated, slow to respond. He had to get out of the water while he had some strength left. “Everybody,” he datavised, “grab the scaffolding or just crash into it if that’s all you can manage. But make sure you don’t go past. We have to get out.”

  The first rusty poles were coming up very fast. He reached out a hand.

  None of his fingers worked inside the medical package glove, not even when his neural nanonics commanded them. “Mzu?” he datavised. “Get to the scaffolding.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  It wasn’t much practical use to him, but the relief that she was still alive kept that small core flame of hope flickering. The mission wasn’t an utter disaster, he still had purpose. Surprisingly important right now.

  Dahybi had already reached the scaffolding, hugging a post as the water stormed past. Then Joshua was there, trying to hook his arm around a V-junction and shift his head out of the way at the same time to avoid a crack on the temple. The metal banged against his chest, and he never even felt it.

  “You okay?” Dahybi datavised.

  “Fucking wonderful.”

  Voi was flashing past, just succeeding in jamming an arm on a pole.

  Joshua inched himself further into the shaking structure. There was a ladder two metres away, and he flopped against it. The water wasn’t quite so strong now, but it was rising fast.

  Mzu came thumping into the end of the scaffolding. “Mother Mary, my ribs,” she datavised. Samuel landed beside her, and wrapped a protective arm around her.

  Joshua clambered up the ladder, thankful it was at a low angle. Dahybi followed him. Two more operatives caught the scaffolding, then Monica snagged herself. Gelai and Ngong swam quite normally across the canal, the cold having no effect on them at all. They grabbed the scaffolding and started shoving the numb survivors up out of the water.

  “Melvyn?” Joshua datavised. “Where are you, Melvyn?” He’d been one of the first to reach the canal after Ione blew the lock gate. “Melvyn?” There wasn’t even a carrier band from the fusion specialist’s neural nanonics.

  “What’s happening?” Ashly datavised. “I can’t acquire any of you on the sensors.”

  “Stay back, that’s an order,” Joshua replied. “Melvyn?”

  One of the ESA operatives floated past, facedown.

  “Melvyn?”

  “I’m sorry, Captain Calvert,” Dick Keaton datavised. “He went under.”

  “Where are you?”

  “End of the scaffolding.”

  Joshua looked over his shoulder, seeing the limp figure suspended in the crisscross of poles thirty metres away. He was alone.

  Jesus no. Another friend condemned to the beyond. Looking back at reality and begging to return.

  “That’s all of us, now,” Monica datavised.

  Altogether six of the operatives from the combined Edenist/ESA team had survived along with her and Samuel. Eriba’s corpse was swirling past amid a scum of brown foam. Fifteen people, out of the twenty-three who had entered Disassembly Shed Four, more if you counted the two serjeants.

  “What now?” Dahybi asked.

  “Climb,” Joshua told him. “We’ve got to get up to the top of the scaffolding. Our spaceplane is on its way.”

  “So is a bloody ironberg.”

  “Gelai, where are the possessed?” Joshua croaked.

  “Coming,” she said. “Baranovich is already out of the shed. He won’t let the spaceplane land.”

  “I don’t have a weapon,” Monica said. “There’s only two machine guns left between all of us. We can’t hold them back.” Her body was trembling violently as she crawled along a narrow conveyer belt connected to one of the concrete hoppers.

  Joshua went up another three rungs on the ladder, then sagged from the effort.

  “Captain Calvert,” Mzu datavised. “I won’t give anybody the Alchemist no matter what. I want you to know that. And thank you for your efforts.”

  She’d given up, sitting huddled limply in a junction. Ngong was holding her, concentrating hard. Steam began to spout out of her suit. Joshua looked around at the rest of them, defeated and tortured by the cold. If he was going to do anything to salvage this, it would have to be extreme.

  “Sarha, give me fire support,” he datavised.

  “Our sensor returns are being corrupted,” she replied. “I can’t resolve the foundry yard properly. It’s the same effect we encountered on Lalonde.”

  “Jesus. Okay, target me.”

  “Joshua!”

  “Don’t argue. Activate the designator laser and target my communications block. Do it. Ashly, stand by. The rest of you: come on, move, we have to be ready.” He took another couple of steps up the ladder.

  Lady Macbeth’s designator laser pierced the wispy residue of snow clouds.

  A slim shaft of emerald light congested with hazy sparkles as gusting snowflakes evaporated inside it. It was aligned on a road three hundred metres away.

  “Is that on you?” Sarha asked.

  “No, track north-east, two-fifty metres.”

  The beam shifted fast enough to produce a blurred sheet of green light across the sky.

  “East eighty metres,” Joshua instructed. “North twenty-five.”

  His retinal implants had to bring their strongest filters on line as the scaffolding was swamped by brilliant green light.

  “Lock coordinate—mark. Preclude one-five-zero metres. Switch to ground-strike cannon. Spiral one kilometre. Scorch it, Sarha.”

  The beam moved away, its colour blooming through the spectrum until it was a deep ruby-red. Then its intensity grew; snowflakes drifting into it no longer evaporated, they burst apart. Thick brown fumes and smoking pumice gravel jette
d up from the disintegrating carbon concrete at its base. It changed direction, curving around to gouge a half-metre groove in the ground. A perfect circle three hundred metres in diameter was etched out in polluted flame, with the canal scaffolding at the centre.

  Then the beam began to speed up, creating a hollow cylinder of vivid red light which expanded inexorably. The ground underneath it ignited, vaporizing the cloak of snow into a rolling cloud which broiled the land ahead of the beam.

  It slashed across the corner of Disassembly Shed Four. Cherry-red embers flew out of the panels up the entire height of the wall. A thin sliver of composite and metal began to peel away from the bulk of the shed. Then the laser struck it again. It cut a deeper chunk this time, which started to pitch over in pursuit of the first. Both of them were surrounded by a cascade of embers. The beam continued around on its spiral.

  Disassembly Shed Four died badly, chopped into thin curving slices by the relentless laser. The individual wedges collapsed and crumpled against each other, softened and sagging from the immense thermal input to descend in slippery serpentine riots. When almost a fifth of it had gone, the remaining framework could no longer sustain itself. The walls and roof buckled groggily, twisting and imploding. Its final convulsions were illuminated by the laser, which continued to chop the falling wreckage into ribbons of slag. Steam geysers roared upwards as pyrexic debris slithered into the basin, flattening out to obscure the bubbling ruin in a virgin-white funeral shroud.

  Nothing could survive the ground strike. The security police raced for their cars as soon as it began, only to be overtaken by the outwards spiral. Baranovich and his fellow possessed took refuge back in the Disassembly Shed under the assumption that anything that massive was bound to be safe. When that folly was revealed, some of them dived into the canal, only to be parboiled. A couple of hapless foundry yard staff on their way to investigate the noises and light coming from the mothballed shed were caught and reduced to a fog of granular ash.

  The laser beam vanished.

  Secure at the vestal centre of the remorseless sterilization he had unleashed, Joshua datavised the all-clear to Ashly. The spaceplane streaked out of the roiling sky to land beside the canal. Joshua and the others waited at the top of the scaffolding, hunched up as the warm wind created by the laser’s passage blew against them.

  “Hanson evac service,” Ashly datavised as the airstairs slid out from the airlock. “Close shaves a speciality. Shift your arses, we’ve only got two minutes till it hits.”

  Alkad Mzu was first up the airstairs, followed by Voi.

  “I won’t take you as you are,” Joshua told Gelai and Ngong. “I can’t, you know that.” Monica and Samuel were standing behind the two ex-Garissans, machine guns cradled ready.

  “We know,” Gelai said. “But do you know you will be in our position one day?”

  “Please,” Joshua said. “We don’t have time for this. None of us are going to jeopardize Mzu now, not after what we’ve been through to get her. Not even me. They’ll shoot you, and I won’t try to stop them.”

  Gelai nodded morosely. Her black skin faded to a pasty white as the possessing soul relinquished control, ruffled ginger hair tumbled down over her shoulders. The girl sank to her knees, jaw open to wail silently.

  Joshua put his arms under her shoulders to carry her into the spaceplane.

  Samuel was doing the same for the old man who had been possessed by Ngong.

  “Dick, give me a hand,” Joshua grunted as he reached the bottom of the airstairs.

  “Sorry, Captain,” Dick Keaton said. “But this is where necessity dictates we part company. I have to say, though, it’s been quite an experience. Wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

  “Jesus, there’s an ironberg falling on us!”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be perfectly safe. And I can hardly come with you now my cover’s been blown, now can I?”

  “What the fuck are you?”

  “Closer, Captain.” He grinned. “Much closer, this time. Goodbye, and good luck.”

  Joshua glared at the man—if that’s what he really was—and hauled the semi-conscious girl up the airstairs.

  Keaton stood back as the spaceplane took off, its compressor efflux whipping his ice-speckled hair about. He waved solemnly as it pitched up and accelerated away over the ruined smoking land.

  High in the western sky, a red dot glimmered malevolently, growing larger by the second.

  The spaceplane cabin canted up sharply, slinging Joshua back into a chair. Acceleration was two gees and rising fast. “What’s our status, Ashly?”

  “Good. We’ve got an easy twenty seconds left. Not even a real race against the clock. Did I tell you about the time when I was flying covert landings for the Marseilles Militia?”

  “You told me. Pump the cabin temperature up, please, we’re freezing back here.” He accessed the spaceplane’s sensor suite. They were already two kilometres high, well out over the lacklustre grey sea. The ironberg was level with them, and sinking rapidly.

  Joshua, who had grown up in a bitek habitat and captained a faster-than-light starship for a living, regarded it in dismayed awe.

  Something that big simply did not belong in the air. It was falling at barely subsonic velocity, spinning with slow elegance to maintain its trajectory. A thick braided vapour trail streaked away from its rounded tip, creating a perfectly straight line through the sky before rupturing two hundred metres higher up when the massive horizontal shock waves created by its turbulence crashed back together. Aerobrake friction made its scalloped base shine a baleful topaz at the centre, grading down to bright coral pink at the rim.

  For the doomed staff left in the yard the strangest aspect of its drop was the silence. It was unreal, looking up at the devil’s fist as it descended upon you, and hearing nothing but the lazy squawking of seabirds.

  The energy burst from seventy-five thousand tonnes of steel striking the ground at three hundred metres per second was cataclysmic. The blast wave razed the remaining Disassembly Sheds, sending hundreds of thousands of shattered composite panels ripping through the air. They were instantly ignited by the accompanying thermal release, crowning the maelstrom with a raging halo of flame. Last came the ground shock, a mini-quake which rippled out for several kilometres through the boggy soil, plucking the huge smelters from the skeletal remains of their furnace buildings and flinging them across the marshy wasteland at the rear of the yard. The sea retreated hastily from the catastrophe, deserting the shoreline in a series of huge breakers which fought against the incoming tide for several minutes. But in the end, the tremors ceased, and the water came rushing back to obliterate any last sign that the yard had ever existed.

  “Ho, man, that is just orgasmic,” Quinn said. The bridge’s holoscreens were pumping out a blaze of white light as the first of the antimatter explosions blossomed above Nyvan. So much destruction excited him; he could see hundreds of combat wasps in flight above the nightside continents. “God’s Brother is helping us, Dwyer. This is His signal to start. Just look at those mothers go at it. There won’t be a single nuke left on the planet to fight off the fall of Night.”

  “Quinn, the other nations are firing combat wasps at Jesup. We’re naked out here, we’ve got to jump.”

  “How long till they arrive?”

  “Three, four minutes.”

  “Plenty of time,” Quinn said smoothly. He checked the communications displays to ensure the starship’s secure lasers were still linked with Jesup and the three abandoned asteroids. “An occasion like this, I ought to say something, but fuck it, I’m not in the dignity business.” He typed in the arming code and watched as the display symbology turned a beautiful dangerous red. His finger went straight to the execute command key and tapped it eagerly.

  Ninety-seven fusion bombs detonated; the majority of them one-hundred-megaton blasts.

  The sensors which were protruding above the fuselage of Mount’s Delta observed Jesup wobble. Quinn had ordered hi
s trusted disciples to place the bombs in a line below the biosphere cavern where the rock was thinnest. Huge flakes of rock fell away from the asteroid’s crinkled outer surface, allowing jets of raw plasma to stab out. It was a precision application of force, splitting the rock clean open. The biosphere cavern was ruined instantly as nuclear volcanoes erupted out of the floor to exterminate all the life it sustained. Shock waves hurtled through the rock, opening up immense fracture patterns and shattering vast sections already weakened from centuries of mining.

  Centrifugal force took over from the bombs to complete the destruction, applying intolerable torque stresses on the remaining sections of rock.

  Hill-sized chunks of regolith crumbled away, rotation flinging them clear. Tornadoes of hot, radioactive air poured into space, forming a thin cyclone around the fragmenting asteroid.

  Quinn slammed a fist into his console. “Fucked!” he yelled victoriously. “Totally fucking fucked. I did it. Now they’ll know His might is for real. The Night is going to fall, Dwyer, sure as shit floats to the top.”

  Sensors aligned on the three abandoned asteroids revealed similar scenes of devastation.

  “But—Why? Why, Quinn?”

  Quinn laughed joyfully. “Back on Earth we learned everything there was to know about climate, all those doomsdays waiting to bite our arses if we aren’t good obedient little Govcentral mechanoids. Don’t violate the environmental laws else you’ll wind up drowning in your own crap. Garbage like that. Everybody knows the entire flekload, the whole arcology from the tower nerds to the subtown kids. I heard about nuclear winters and dinosaur killers before I could walk.” He banged a finger on the holoscreen’s surface. “And this is it. Earth’s nightmare out of the box.

  Those rocks are going to pulverize Nyvan. Doesn’t matter if they smash down on land or water; they’re going to blast gigatonnes of shit up into the atmosphere. I’m not talking some crappy little smog layer up in the sky, it’s going to be the fucking sky. Wet black soot stretching from the ground to the stratosphere, so thick it’ll give you cancer just breathing it for five minutes. They’ll never see sunlight again, never. And when the possessed take over the whole fucking ball game down there, it still ain’t going to help them. They can shunt Nyvan out of the universe, but they haven’t got the power to clean the air. Only He can do that. God’s Brother will bring them light.” Quinn hugged Dwyer energetically.