The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Commander Kroeber, squadron to combat status. Rhoecus, recall the voidhawks. Can someone get me a visual identification?”

  “Coming, sir,” Lieutenant Grese datavised. “Two of the intruders are close to an SD sensor satellite.”

  More wormhole termini were opening. Arikara’s thermo-dump panels and long-range sensor clusters sank back into their fuselage recesses. The warship’s acceleration increased as it sped out to its englobement coordinate.

  “Got it, Admiral. Oh, Lord, definitely hostile.”

  The image relayed into Meredith’s neural nanonics showed him a charcoal-grey eagle with a wingspan of nearly two hundred metres; its eyes gleamed yellow above a long chrome-silver beak. His body tensed in reflex, pushing him deeper into the acceleration couch. That was one massively evil-looking creature.

  “Hellhawk, sir. Must be from Valisk.”

  “Thank you, Grese. Confirm the other intruder identities, please.”

  The tactical situation display showed him twenty-seven bitek starships had now emerged from their wormholes. Another fifteen termini were opening. It was only seven seconds since the first had appeared.

  “All of them are hellhawks, sir; eight bird types, four bogus starships, the rest conform to standard blackhawk profile.”

  “Admiral, the voidhawks have all swallowed back to Tranquillity,” Rhoecus said. “Moving out to reinforce the englobement formation.”

  Meredith watched their purple vector lines slice across the tactical situation display, twisting around to reach the other squadron ships. No use, Meredith thought, no use at all. Fifty-eight hellhawks were ranged against them now, forming a loose ring around the habitat. Tactical analysis programs were giving him an extremely small probability of a successful defensive engagement, even with the squadron backed up by Tranquillity’s SD platforms. And that was reducing still further as more hellhawks continued to swallow in.

  “Commander Kroeber, get those blackhawks Tranquillity was using as patrol ships out here as fast as possible.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Sir!” Grese shouted. “We’re registering more gravitonic distortions. Adamist ships, this time. Multiple emergence patterns.”

  The tactical situation display showed Meredith two small constellations of red dots lighting up. The first was fifteen thousand kilometres ahead of Tranquillity, while the second trailed it by roughly the same amount.

  Dear God, and I thought Lalonde was bad. “Lieutenant Rhoecus.”

  “Yes, Admiral?”

  “The Ilex and the Myoho are to disengage. They are ordered to fly to Avon immediately and warn Trafalgar what has happened here. Under no circumstances is Admiral Kolhammer to bring his task force to Mirchusko.”

  “But, sir …”

  “That was an order, Lieutenant.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Grese, can you identify the new intruders?”

  “I think so, sir. I think it’s the Organization fleet. Visual sensors show front-line warships; I’ve got frigates, some battle cruisers, several destroyers, and plenty of combat-capable commercial vehicles.”

  Large sections of the tactical situation display dissolved into yellow and purple hash as electronic warfare pods spun away from the hellhawks, coming on line as soon as they were clear of the energistic effect. The voidhawks continued to supply information on emerging starships. There were now seventy hellhawks ringing Tranquillity; with a hundred and thirty Adamist ships holding station on either side of it.

  Arikara’s bridge had fallen completely silent.

  “Sir,” Rhoecus said. “Ilex and Myoho have swallowed out.”

  Meredith nodded. “Good.” There wasn’t a hell of a lot more he could say.

  “Commander Kroeber, please signal the enemy fleet. Ask them … Ask them what they want.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The tactical situation computer datavised an alarm.

  “Combat wasp launch!” Lowie shouted. “The hellhawks have fired.”

  At such close range, there was nothing the electronic warfare barrage could do to hide the burst of yellow solid rocket exhausts from Meredith’s squadron. Each of the hellhawks had launched fifteen combat wasps. Spent solid rocket casings separated as the dazzling plumes of fusion fire sprang out, and they began to accelerate in towards the habitat at twenty-five gees. Over a thousand drones forming an immense noose of light which was swiftly contracting.

  Tactical programs went primary in Meredith’s neural nanonics. In theory, they had the capacity to fight off this assault, which would leave them with practically zero reserves. And he had to decide now.

  It was a hopeless situation, one where instinct fought against duty. But Confederation citizens were being attacked; and to a Saldana duty was instinct.

  “Full defensive salvo,” Meredith ordered. “Fire.”

  Combat wasps leapt out of their launch tubes in every squadron ship.

  Tranquillity’s SD platforms launched simultaneously. For a short while, space around the habitat’s shell ceased to be an absolute vacuum. Hot streams of energized vapour from the exhausts of four thousand combats wasps sprayed in towards Tranquillity, creating a faint iridescent nebula beset with giddy squalls of turquoise and amber ions. Jagged petals of lightning flared out from the tip of every starscraper, ripping away into the chaotically unstable vortex.

  Blackhawks were rising from Tranquillity’s docking ledges, over fifty of them sliding out under heavy acceleration to join the fight. Meredith’s tactical analysis program began revising the odds. Then he saw several swallow away. In his heart he didn’t blame them.

  “Message coming in, Admiral,” the communications officer reported.

  “Someone called Luigi Balsmao, he claims he’s the Organization fleet’s commander. He says: Surrender and join us, or die and join us.”

  “What a melodramatic arsehole,” Meredith grunted. “Please advise the Lord of Ruin, it’s as much her decision as it is mine. After all, it’s her people who will suffer.”

  “Oh, fuck! Sir! Another combat wasp launch. It’s the Adamist ships this time.”

  Under Luigi’s command, all one hundred and eighty Organization starships fired a salvo of twenty-five combat wasps apiece. Their antimatter drives accelerated them in towards Tranquillity at forty gees.

  Chapter 14

  The star wasn’t important enough to have a name. The Confederation Navy’s almanac office simply listed it as DRL0755-09-BG. It was an average K-type, with a gloomy emission in the lower end of the orange spectrum.

  The first scoutship to explore its planets, back in 2396, took less than a fortnight to complete a survey. There were only three unremarkable inner, solid planets for it to investigate, none of which were terracompatible. Of the two outer gas giants, the one furthest from the star had an equatorial diameter of forty-three thousand kilometres, its outer cloud layer a pale green with none of the usual blustery atmospheric conditions. As worthless as the solid planets. The innermost gas giant did raise the interest of the scoutship’s crew for a short while. Its equatorial diameter was a hundred and fifty-three thousand kilometres, making it larger than Jupiter, and coloured by a multitude of ferocious storm bands. Eighteen moons orbited around it, two of which had high-pressure atmospheres of nitrogen and methane. The complex interaction of their gravity fields prohibited any major ring system from forming, but all of the larger moons shepherded substantial quantities of asteroidal rubble.

  The scoutship crew thought that such abundant resources of easily accessible minerals and ores would make it an ideal location for Edenist habitats. Their line company even managed to sell the survey’s preliminary results to Jupiter. But once again, DRL0755-09-BG’s mediocrity acted against it. The gas giant was a good location for habitats, but not exceptional; without a terracompatible planet the Edenists weren’t interested. DRL0755-09-BG was ignored for the next two hundred and fifteen years, apart from intermittent visits from Confederation Navy patrol ships to check that it wasn�
��t being used by an antimatter production station.

  As the Lady Mac’s sensor clusters gave him a visual sweep of the penurious star system, Joshua wondered why the navy wasted its time.

  He cancelled the image and looked around the bridge. Alkad Mzu was lying prone on one of the spare acceleration couches, her eyes tight shut as she absorbed the external panorama. Monica and Samuel were hovering in the background, as always. Joshua really didn’t want them on the bridge, but the agencies weren’t prepared to allow Mzu out of their sight now.

  “Okay, Doc, now what?” he asked. He’d followed Mzu’s directions so that Lady Mac emerged half a million kilometres above the inner gas giant’s southern pole, near the undulating boundaries of the planet’s enormous magnetosphere. It gave them an excellent viewpoint across the entire moon system.

  Alkad stirred on her couch, not opening her eyes. “Please configure the ship’s antenna to broadcast the strongest signal it can at the one-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-kilometre equatorial orbital band. I will give you the code to transmit when you’re ready.”

  “That was the Beezling’s parking orbit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Sarha, get the dish ready for that, please. I think you’d better allow for a twenty-thousand-kilometre error when you designate the beam.

  No telling what state they were in when they got here. If they don’t respond, we’ll have to widen the sweep pattern out to the furthest moon.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “How many people left on this old warship of yours, Doc?” Joshua asked.

  Alkad broke away from the image feeding into her neural nanonics. She didn’t want to. This was it, the star represented by that stupid little alphanumeric she had carried with her like a talisman for thirty years.

  Always expecting him to be waiting here for her; there had been a million first lines rehearsed in those decades, a million loving looks. But now she’d arrived, seen that pale amber star with her own eyes, doubt was gripping her like frostbite. Every other aspect of their desperate plan had fallen to dust thanks to fate and human fallibility. Would this part of it really be any different? A sublight voyage of two and a half light-years. What had the young captain called it? Impossible. “Nine,” she said faintly. “There should be nine of them. Is that a problem?”

  “No. Lady Mac can take that many.”

  “Good.”

  “Have you thought what you’re going to tell them?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Jesus, Doc; their home planet has been wiped out, you can’t use the Alchemist for revenge, the dead are busy conquering the universe, and they are going to have to spend the rest of their lives locked up in Tranquillity. You’ve had thirty years to get used to the genocide, and a couple of weeks to square up to the possessed. To them it’s still good old 2581, and they’re on a navy combat mission. You think they’re going to take all this calmly?”

  “Oh, Mother Mary.” Another problem, before she even knew if they’d survived.

  “The dish is ready,” Sarha said.

  “Thanks,” Joshua said. “Right, Doc, datavise the code into the flight computer. Then start thinking what you’re going to say. And think good, because I’m not taking Lady Mac anywhere near a ship armed with antimatter that isn’t extremely pleased to see me.”

  Mzu’s code was beamed out by the Lady Macbeth in a slim fan of microwave radiation. Sarha monitored the operation as it tracked slowly around the designated orbital path. There was no immediate response—she hadn’t been expecting one. She allowed the beam another two sweeps, then shifted the focus to cover a new circle just outside the first.

  It took five hours to get a response. The tension and expectation which had so dominated the bridge for the first thirty minutes had expired long ago. Ashly, Monica, and Voi were all in the galley preparing food sachets when a small artificial green star appeared in the display which the flight computer was feeding Sarha’s neural nanonics. Analysis and discrimination programs came on-line, filtering out the gas giant’s constant radio screech to concentrate on the signal. Two ancillary booms slid up out of Lady Macbeth’s hull, unfolding wide broad-spectrum multi-element receiver meshes to complement the main communications dish.

  “Somebody’s there, all right,” Sarha said. “Weak signal, but steady. Standard CAB transponder response code, but no ship registration number.

  They’re in an elliptical orbit, ninety-one thousand kilometres by one hundred and seventy thousand four-degree inclination. Right now they’re ninety-five thousand kilometres out from the upper atmosphere.” A strangely muffled gulp made her abandon the flight computer’s display to check the bridge.

  Alkad Mzu was lying flat on her acceleration couch, with every muscle unnaturally stiff. Neural nanonics were busy censoring her body language with nerve overrides. But Sarha could see a film of liquid over her red-rimmed eyes which was growing progressively thicker. When she blinked, tiny droplets spun away across the compartment.

  Joshua whistled. “Impressive, Doc. Your old crewmates have got balls, I’ll say that for them.”

  “They’re alive,” Alkad cried. “Oh, Mother Mary, they’re really alive.”

  “The Beezling made it here, Doc,” Joshua said, deliberately curt. “Let’s not jump to conclusions without facts. All we’ve got so far is a transponder beacon. What is supposed to happen next, does the captain come out of zero-tau?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Sarha, keep monitoring the Beezling. Beaulieu, Liol, let’s get back to flight status, please. Dahybi, charge up the nodes, I want to be ready to jump clear if things turn out bad.” He started plotting a vector which would take them over to the Beezling.

  Lady Mac’s triple fusion drive came on, quickly building up to three gees. She followed a shallow arc above the gas giant, sinking towards the penumbra.

  “Signal change,” Sarha announced. “Much stronger now, but it’s still an omnidirectional broadcast, they’re not focusing on us. Message coming in, AV only.”

  “Okay, Doc,” Joshua said. “You’re on. Be convincing.” They were still four hundred and fifty thousand kilometres away from the Beezling, which produced an awkward time delay. Pressed back into her couch, Alkad could only move her eyes to one side, glancing up at a holoscreen which angled out of the ceiling above her. A magenta haze slowly cleared to show her the Beezling’s bridge compartment. It looked as though some kind of salvage team had ransacked the place, consoles had been broken open to show electronic stacks with their circuit cards missing, wall panels had been removed exposing chunks of machinery which were half dismantled. To add to the disorder, every surface was dusted with grubby frost. Over the years, chunks of packaging, latch pins, small tools, items of clothing, and other shipboard debris had all stuck where they’d drifted to rest, giving the impression of inorganic chrysalides frozen in the act of metamorphosis. Awkward, angular shadows overlapped right around the compartment, completing the image of gothic anarchy. There was only one source of illumination, a slender emergency light tube carried by someone in an SII spacesuit.

  “This is Captain Kyle Prager here. The flight computer reports we’ve picked up our activation trigger code. Alkad, I want this to be you. Are you receiving this? I’ve got very little left in the way of working sensors. Hell, I’ve got little in the way of anything that works anymore.”

  “I’m receiving you, Kyle,” Alkad said. “And it is me, it’s Alkad. I came back for you. I promised I would.”

  “Mother Mary, is that really you, Alkad? I’m getting a poor image here, you look … different.”

  “I’m old, Kyle. Very very old now.”

  “Only thirty years, unless relativity is weirder than we thought.”

  “Kyle, please, is Peter there? Did he make it?”

  “He’s here, he’s fine.”

  “Almighty Mary. You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I just checked his zero-tau pod. Six of us made it.”

  “Only six? What
happened?”

  “We lost Tane Ogilie a couple of years ago after he went outside to work on the drive tube. It had to be repaired before we could decelerate into this orbit; there was a lot of systems decay over twenty-eight years. Trouble is, the whole antimatter unit is badly radioactive now. Not even armour could save him from receiving a lethal dose.”

  “Oh, Mother Mary, I’m sorry. What about the other two?”

  “Like I said, we’ve had a lot of systems decay. Zero-tau can keep you in perfect stasis, but its own components wear out. They went sometime during the voyage, we only found out when we came out to start the deceleration. Both of them suicided.”

  “I see,” she said shakily.

  “What happened, Alkad? You’re not in any Garissan navy uniform I remember.”

  “The Omutans did it, Kyle. Just like we thought they would. The bastards went ahead and did it.”

  “How bad?”

  “The worst. Six planet-busters.”

  Joshua cancelled his link to the communications circuit, turning to the more mundane details of the flight. Some things he just didn’t want to hear: the reaction of a man being told his home planet has died.

  Lady Mac’s sensors were slowly gathering more information on the Beezling, allowing the flight computer to refine the warship’s location beyond Sarha’s initial rough estimate. The gas giant’s violent magnetic and electromagnetic emissions were making it difficult. Even this far above the outer atmosphere space was a thick ionic soup, congested with severe energy currents which degraded sensor efficiency.

  Joshua altered their flight vector several times as the new figures came in. Lady Mac was well over the nightside now, the swirl of particles around her forward fuselage glowing a faint pink as they were buffeted through the planetary magnetosphere. It played havoc with the support circuitry.

  Beaulieu and Liol would datavise flurries of instructions to contain the dropouts, returning the systems to operational status. Joshua monitored Liol’s performance, unable to find fault. He’d make a good crewman. Maybe I could offer him Melvyn’s slot, except his ego would never allow him to accept. There has to be a way we can settle this.