The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “They’ll pray to Him to come and liberate them. They can’t do anything else. He is their only salvation now. And I did it for Him. Me! I’ve brought Him a whole fucking planet to join His legions. Now I know it works, I’m going to do it to every planet in the Confederation. Every single one, that’s my crusade now. Starting with Earth.”

  Secure communications lasers slid back down inside the fuselage, along with the sensors; and the Mount’s Delta vanished inside an event horizon.

  Behind it, the low-orbit battle ran its course, the protagonists unaware of the true holocaust growing above them. The four tremendous clouds of rocky detritus were expanding at a constant rate, watched by the horrified surviving asteroids. Seventy per cent of the mass would miss the planet. But that still left thousands of fragments which would rain down through the atmosphere over the next two days. Each one would have a destructive potential hundreds of times greater than the ironberg. And with their planet’s electronics reduced to trash, its spaceships smashed, its SD platforms vaporized, and its astroengineering stations in ruins, there was absolutely nothing Nyvan’s population could do to prevent the onrush. Only pray.

  Just as Quinn prophesied.

  Chapter 12

  The Leonora Cephei’s radar was switched to long-range scanning mode, searching for any sign of another ship. After five hours gliding inertly along its orbital path, there hadn’t been a single contact.

  “How much longer do you expect me to muck in with this charade of yours?” Captain Knox asked scathingly. He indicated the holoscreen which was displaying the ship’s radar return. “I’ve seen Pommy cricket teams with more life in them than this bugger.”

  Jed looked at the console; its symbology meant nothing to him, for all he knew the flight computer could be displaying schematics for Leonora Cephei’s waste cycling equipment. He felt shamed by his own technological ignorance. He only ever came into the compartment when he was summoned by Knox; and the only summonses he got was when the captain found something new to complain about. He now made damn sure he brought Beth and Skibbow with him each time; it made the whole experience a little less like being humiliated by Digger.

  “If this is the coordinate, they’ll be here,” Jed insisted. This was the right time for the rendezvous. So where was the starship? He didn’t want to look at Beth again. She didn’t appear entirely sympathetic to his plight.

  “Another hour,” Knox said. “That’s what I’ll give you, then we head for Tanami. There are some cargoes for me there. Real ones.”

  “We’ll wait a damn sight more than one hour, matey,” Beth said.

  “You get what you paid for.”

  “In that case we’ll be here for six months; that’s how much cash we bloody well shelled out.”

  “One hour.” Knox’s pale skin was reddening again; he wasn’t used to his command decisions being questioned on his own bridge.

  “Balls. We’re here for as long as it takes, pal. Right, Jed?”

  “Er. Yes. We should wait a bit longer.” Beth’s silent contempt made him want to cringe.

  Knox gestured broadly in mock-reasonableness. “Long enough for the oxygen to run out, or can we head for port before that?”

  “You regenerate the atmosphere,” Beth said. “Stop being such a pain. We wait until our transport turns up. That’s final.”

  “You flaming kids, you’re all crazy. You don’t see my children becoming Deadnights. Deadheads more like. What do you think is going to happen to you if you ever reach Valisk? That Kiera is bullshitting you.”

  “No she’s not!” Jed said heatedly.

  Knox was surprised at his resentment. “Okay, kid. I understand, I used to let my balls think for me when I was your age.” He winked at Beth.

  She glowered back at him.

  “We wait as long at it takes,” Gerald said quietly. “We are going to Valisk. All of us. That’s what I paid you for, Captain.” It was hard for him to be silent when people talked about Marie, especially the way they talked about her, as if she were some kind of communal girlfriend. Since the voyage started he had managed to hold his tongue. He found life a lot easier on board the small ship; the simple daily routine in which everything was laid out for him in advance was quite a comfort. So what they said about Marie, their idolization of the demon who controlled her, didn’t snarl him up with anguish. They spoke from ignorance. He was wise to that. Loren would be proud of him for exercising such control.

  “All right, we’ll wait awhile,” Knox said. “It’s your charter.” It always embarrassed him when Skibbow spoke. The man had episodes, you never knew how he was going to behave. So far there had been no anger or violence.

  So far.

  Fifteen minutes later, Captain Knox’s little quandaries and problems were banished as the radar detected a small object three kilometres away which hadn’t been there a millisecond before. There was the usual weird peripheral fuzz indicating a wormhole terminus, and the object was expanding rapidly. He accessed the Leonora Cephei’s sensors to watch the bitek starship emerging.

  “Oh, sweet Christ Almighty,” he groaned. “You crazy bastards. We’re dead meat now. Bloody dead!”

  Mindor slipped out of the wormhole terminus and stretched its wings wide.

  Its head swung around so that one eye could fix the Leonora Cephei with a daunting stare.

  Jed looked into one of the bridge’s AV pillars, seeing the huge hellhawk flap its wings in slow sweeps, closing the distance with deceptive speed.

  Disquiet gave way to a kind of reverence. He whooped enthusiastically and hugged Beth. She grinned indulgently back at him.

  “That’s something, huh?”

  “Sure is.”

  “We did it, we bloody did it.”

  A terrified Captain Knox ignored the babbling, insane kids and ordered the main communications dish to point at Pinjarra so he could call the Trojan cluster capital for help. Not, he guessed, that it would do the slightest good.

  Rocio Condra was ready for it. After several dozen clandestine pickups he knew exactly how the captains reacted to his appearance. Out of the eight short-range defence lasers secured to his hull, only three were still functioning, and that was only because they utilized bitek processor control circuitry. The rest had succumbed to the vagaries of his energistic power, which he could never quite contain. He targeted the dish as it started to track around, and sent a half-second pulse into its central transmission module.

  “Do not attempt to contact anyone,” he broadcast.

  “I understand,” a shaken Knox datavised.

  “Good. Are you carrying Deadnights for transfer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stand by for rendezvous and docking. Tell them to be ready.”

  The monster bird folded its wings as it manoeuvred closer to the spindly inter-orbit craft. Its outline began to waver as it rolled around its long axis; feathers giving way to dull green polyp, avian shape reverting to the earlier compressed-cone hull. There were changes, though: the scattered purple rings were now long ovals, mimicking its feather pattern. Of the three rear fins, the central one had shrunk, while the two outer ones had elongated and flattened back.

  With the roll manoeuvre complete, Mindor’s life-support module lay parallel to the Leonora Cephei. Rocio Condra extended the airlock tube.

  Now, he could sense the minds inside the inter-orbit ship’s life-support capsule. It contained the usual split between trepidatious crew and ridiculously exuberant Deadnights. This time there was an addition, a strange mind, dulled yet happy, with thoughts moving in erratic rhythms.

  He watched with idle curiosity through the internal optical sensors as the Deadnights came aboard. The interior of the life-support module had come to resemble a nineteenth-century steamship, with a profusion of polished rosewood surfaces and brass fittings. According to the pair of possessed, Choi-Ho and Maxim Payne, who served as maintenance crew, there was also a fairly realistic smell of salt water. Rocio was pleased with the realism, whi
ch was far more detailed and solid than the possessed usually achieved. That was due to the nature of the hellhawk’s neuron cell structure which contained hundreds of subnodes arranged in processorlike lattices. They were intended to act as semi-autonomic regulators for his technological modules. Once he had conjured up the image he wanted and loaded it into a subnode it was maintained without conscious thought, and with an energistic strength unavailable to an ordinary human brain.

  The last few weeks had been a revelation to Rocio Condra. After the initial bitter resentment, he had discovered that life as a hellhawk was about as rich as it was possible to have, although he did miss sex. And he’d been talking to some of the others about that; theoretically they could simply grow the appropriate genitalia (those that didn’t insist on imagining themselves as techno starships). If they accomplished that, there was no real reason to go back into human bodies. Which of course would make them independent of Kiera. For an entity that lived forever, the variety which would come from trying out a new creature’s body and life cycle every few millennia might just be the final answer to terminal ennui.

  Accompanying the revelation was a growing resentment at the way Kiera was using them—to which the prospect of fighting for Capone was a worrying development. Even if he was offered a human body now, Rocio was doubtful he wanted to go with the habitat. He wasn’t frightened of space like the rest of the returned souls, not anymore, not possessing this magnificent creature. Space and all its emptiness was to be loved for its freedom.

  Gravity returned slowly as Gerald drifted through the airlock tube, his shoulder bag in tow. The airlock compartment he landed in was almost identical to the one he had left behind. But it was larger, its technology more discreet, and outside the hatch Choi-Ho and Maxim Payne greeted him with smiles and comforting words where behind Knox and his eldest son had stood guard over their hatch with TIP carbines and scowls.

  “There are several cabins available,” Choi-Ho said. “Not enough for everyone, so you’ll probably have to double up.”

  Gerald smiled blankly, which came over more as a frightened grimace.

  “Pick any one,” she told him kindly.

  “When will we get there?” Gerald asked.

  “We have a rendezvous in the Kabwe system in eight hours, after that we’ll be going back to Valisk. It should be about twenty hours.”

  “Twenty? Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Twenty.” It was said with deference. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, quite sure.” People were starting to bunch up in the airlock behind him; all of them curiously reluctant to push past. “A cabin,” she suggested hopefully.

  “Come on, Gerald, mate,” Beth said breezily. She took his arm and pulled gently. He walked obediently down the corridor with her. He only stopped once, and that was to look over his shoulder and say an earnest, “Thank you,” to an oddly intrigued Choi-Ho.

  Beth kept going right to the end of the U-shaped corridor. She thought it would be best to get Gerald a cabin away from the rest of the Deadnights.

  “Can you believe this place?” she said. She was walking on a deep red carpet past portholes that shone brilliant beams of sunlight into the corridor (although she couldn’t see out through them). The doors were all golden wood. In her usual sweatshirt, two jackets, and baggy jeans she felt uncomfortably out of place.

  She peered around a door and found an empty cabin. There were two bunk beds clipped to a wall, and a small sliding door to the bathroom. The plumbing was similar to the toilet in the Leonora Cephei, except this was all heavy brass with small white glazed ceramic buttons.

  “This ought to do you,” she said confidently. A quiet pule made her turn around. Gerald was standing just inside the door, his knuckles pressed into his mouth.

  “What’s the matter, Gerald?”

  “Twenty hours.”

  “I know. But that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure. I want to be there, to see her again. But she’s not her anymore, not my Marie.”

  He was quaking. Beth put an arm around his shoulders and eased him down onto the bottom bunk. “Easy there, Gerald. Once we’re at Valisk, all this is going to seem like a bad dream; honestly, mate.”

  “It doesn’t end there, it starts there. And I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to save her. I can’t put her in zero-tau by myself. They’re so strong, and evil.”

  “Who, Gerald? Who are you talking about? Who’s Marie?”

  “My baby.”

  He was crying now, his head pressed into her shoulder. She patted the back of his neck instinctively.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he gasped out. “She’s not here to help me.”

  “Marie’s not here?”

  “No. Loren. She’s the only one that can help me. She’s the only one who can help any of us.”

  “It’s all right, Gerald, really, you’ll see.”

  The reaction wasn’t what she expected at all. Gerald started a hysterical laugh which was half screams. Beth wanted to let go and get out of the cabin fast. He’d flipped, totally flipped now. The only reason she kept hold of him was because she didn’t know what would happen if she didn’t.

  He might get worse.

  “Please, Gerald,” she begged. “You’re frightening me.”

  He grabbed both of her shoulders, squeezing hard enough to make her flinch. “Good!” His face had reddened with anger. “You should be frightened, you stupid, stupid little girl. Don’t you understand where we’re going?”

  “We’re going to Valisk,” Beth whispered.

  “Yes, Valisk. That doesn’t frighten me, I’m bloody terrified. They’re going to torture us, hurt you so bad you’ll beg a soul to possess you and stop them. I know they will. That’s all they ever do. They did it to me before, and then Dr Dobbs made me go through it again, and again and again just so he could know what it was like.” The anger drained out of him, and he sagged forwards into her awkward embrace. “I’ll kill myself. Yes. Maybe that’s it. I can help Marie that way. I’m sure I can.

  Anything’s better than possession again.”

  Beth started rocking him as best she could, soothing him as she would any five-year-old who’d woken from a nightmare. The things he was saying plagued her badly. After all, they only had Kiera’s word that she was building a fresh society for them. One recording that promised she was different from the rest. “Gerald?” she asked after a while. “Who’s this Marie you want to help?”

  “My daughter.”

  “Oh. I see. Well how do you know she’s at Valisk?”

  “Because she’s the one Kiera’s possessing.”

  Rocio Condra parted his beak in what passed for a smile. The sensor in Skibbow’s cabin wasn’t the best, and his affinity link with its bitek processor suffered annoying dropouts. But what had been said was plain enough.

  He wasn’t entirely sure how he could use the knowledge, but it was the first sign of any possible chink in Kiera’s armour. That was a start.

  ***

  Stephanie could finally see the end of the red cloud cover. The heavy ceiling had been dropping closer to the ground for some time now as the convoy drove unimpeded along the M6. Individual clumps and streamers churned against each other in a motion reminiscent of waves crashing on rocks, bright slivers of pink and gold rippled among the distorted underbelly. They acted like a conductor for a current of pure agitation.

  The will of the possessed was being thwarted, their shield against the sky arrested by the Kingdom’s firebreak.

  The cliff of white light sleeting down along the boisterous edge appeared almost solid. Certainly it took her eyes a while to acclimatize, slowly resolving the grainy shadows which crouched at the end of the road.

  “I think it might be a good idea to slow down now,” Moyo said in her ear.

  She applied the brakes, reducing their speed to a crawl. The other three buses behind matched her caution. Two hundred metres from the flexing curtain
of sunlight she stopped altogether. The cloud base was only four or five hundred metres high here, hammering on the invisible boundary in perpetual ferment.

  Two sets of bright orange barriers had been erected across the road. The first was under the edge of the cloud, sometimes bathed in red light, sometimes in white; the second was three hundred metres north, guarded by a squad of Royal Marines. Behind them, several dozen military vehicles were drawn up on the hard shoulder, armoured troop transports, ground tanks, general communications vehicles, lorries, a canteen, and several field headquarters caravans.

  Stephanie opened the bus doors and stepped down onto the road. The thunder was an aggressive growl here, warning outsiders to keep back.

  “What did they do to the grass?” Moyo shouted. Just inside the line of sunlight, the grass was dead, its blades blackened and desiccated.

  Already it was crumbling into dust. The dead zone lay parallel to the border of the red cloud as far as the eye could see, forming a rigid stripe that cut cleanly across every contour.

  Stephanie looked along the broad swath of destruction, trees and bushes had been burned to charcoal stumps. “Some kind of no-man’s-land, I suppose.”

  “That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”

  She laughed, and pointed up at the glowing cloud.

  “Okay, you got a point. What do you want to do next?”

  “I’m not sure.” She resented her indecision immediately. This was the culmination of enormous emotional investment. For all that, the practicalities of the moment had been ignored. I almost wish we were still travelling, it gave me such a sense of satisfaction. What have we got after this?