The Night's Dawn Trilogy
Page 248
At its highest setting the Alchemist would become such a cosmological entity; its surface concealed by an event horizon into which everything can fall and nothing return. Once inside the event horizon, electromagnetic energy and atoms alike would be drawn to the core’s surface and compress to phenomenal densities. The effect is cumulative and exponential. The more mass which the black hole swallows, the heavier and stronger it becomes, increasing its surface area and allowing its consumption rate to rise accordingly.
If the Alchemist was fired into a star, every gram of matter would eventually plunge below the invincible barrier which gravity erected. That was Alkad Mzu’s humane solution. Omuta’s sun would not flare and rupture, would never endanger life on the planet with waves of heat and radiation. Instead the sun would shrink and collapse into a small black sphere, with every erg of its fusing nuclei lost to the universe for ever. Omuta would be left circling a non-radiative husk, its warmth slowly leaking away into the now permanent night. Ultimately, the air itself would become cold enough to condense and fall as snow.
But there was the second setting, the aggressive one. Paradoxically, it actually produced a weaker gravity field.
* * *
The Alchemist turned black as zero-tau claimed it. However, the gravity it generated wasn’t strong enough to produce a singularity with an event horizon. However, it was easily capable of overcoming the internal forces which designate an atom’s structure. The combat wasp immediately flashed into plasma and enfolded it. All electrons and protons within the envelope were crushed together, producing a massive pulse of gamma radiation. The emission faded rapidly, leaving the Alchemist cloaked in a uniform angstrom-deep ocean of superfluid neutrons.
When it struck the outer fringes of the atmosphere a searing white light flooded out to soak hundreds of square kilometres of the upper cloud bands. Seconds later the deeper cloud layers were fluorescing rosy pink while internal shadows surged through torn cyclones like mountain-sized fish. Then the light vanished altogether.
The Alchemist had reached the semisolid layers of the gas giant’s interior, and was punching through with almost no resistance. Matter under tremendous pressure was crushed against the device, which absorbed it greedily. Every impacting atom was squeezed directly into a cluster of neutrons that plated themselves around the core. The Alchemist was swiftly buried under a mantle of pure neutronium, which boasted a density that exceeded that of atomic nuclei.
As the particles were compressed by the device’s extraordinary gravity field, they liberated colossal quantities of energy, a reaction far more potent than mere fusion. The surrounding semisolid material was heated to temperatures which destroyed every atomic bond. A vast cavity of nuclear instability inflated around the Alchemist as it soared ever deeper into the gas giant. Ordinary convection currents were wholly inadequate to syphon off the heat at the same rate it was being produced, so the energy abscess simply had to keep on expanding. Something had to give.
Lady Mac’s sensors detected the first upwelling while the ship was still seven minutes from perigee. A smooth-domed tumour of cloud, three thousand kilometres in diameter, glowing like gaseous magma as it swelled up through the storm bands. Unlike the ordinary great spots infesting gas giants it didn’t spiral, its sole purpose was to elevate planetary masses of tortuously heated hydrogen up from the interior. Hurricanes and cyclones which had blasted their way through the upper atmosphere for centuries were thrust aside to allow the thermal monster its bid for freedom. Its apex distended over a thousand kilometres above the tropopause, casting a pernicious copper light over a third of the nightside.
Right at the centre, the glow had become unbearably bright. A spire of solid white light punctured the top of the cloud dome, streaking out into space.
“Holy Christ,” Liol datavised. “Was that it? Did it just detonate?”
“Nothing like,” Joshua replied. “This is only the start. Things are going to get a little nasty from now on.”
Lady Mac was already far ahead of the fountaining plasma stream, racing around the gas giant’s curvature for the dawn terminator. Even so, thermal circuits issued a grade three alarm as the plasma’s radiance washed over the hull. Emergency cryogenic exchangers vented hundreds of litres of inflamed fluid to shunt the heat out. Processors were failing at a worrying rate in the immense emp backlash of the wavering plasma stream; even the military-grade electronics were suffering. On top of that, electric currents started to eddy through the fuselage stress structure as the planetary flux lines trembled.
Dahybi had withdrawn into zero-tau, leaving Joshua and Liol to datavise instructions into the flight computer, bringing backups on-line, isolating leakages, stabilizing power surges. They worked perfectly together, keeping the flight systems on-line; each intuitively knowing what was required to support the other.
“Something very odd is happening to the planetary magnetosphere,” Beaulieu reported. “Sensors are registering extraordinary oscillations within the flux lines.”
“Irrelevant,” Joshua replied. “Concentrate on keeping our primary systems stable. Four minutes more, that’s all, we’ll be on the other side of the planet then.”
On board the Urschel, Ikela watched the lightstorm eruption on one of the bridge screens. “Holy Mary, it works,” he whispered. “It actually bloody works.” A perverse sense of pride mingled with fatalistic dismay. If only . . . But then, fruitless wishes were ever the province of the damned.
He ignored Oscar Kearn’s semi-hysterical (and totally impossible) orders to turn the ship around and get them the hell away from this badass planet. Twentieth-century man simply didn’t understand orbital mechanics. They had been accelerating along their present course for twenty-two minutes now, their trajectory effectively committed them to a slingshot flyby. Their best hope was to stay on track, and pray they got past perigee before another upwell exploded out of the atmosphere. That was what the Lady Macbeth was attempting. Good tactic, Ikela acknowledged grudgingly.
Somehow, he didn’t think the Urschel would make it. He didn’t know exactly how the Alchemist worked, but he doubted one eruption was the end of it.
With a sense of inevitability that curiously neutralized any regret or gloom, he settled back passively in his acceleration couch and watched the screens. The original spout of plasma was dying away, the cloud dome flattening out to dissipate into a thousand new hypervelocity storms. But underneath the frothing upper atmosphere a fresh stain of light was spreading, and it was an order of magnitude larger than the first.
He smiled contentedly at his god’s-eye view of what promised to be a truly dazzling Armageddon.
The Alchemist was slowing, it had passed through the semisolid layers into the true core of the planet. Now the density of surrounding matter was intense enough to affect its flight. That meant matter was being pressed against it in ever-greater quantities, and with it the rate of neutronium conversion was accelerating fast. The energy abscess which it generated stretched out back along its course through the planet’s interior like a comet’s tail. Sections of it were breaking apart; ten-thousand-kilometre lengths pinching into elongated bubbles which rose up through the disrupted tiers of the planet’s internal structure. Each one greater than the last.
The second upwelling rampaged out of the upper atmosphere; its tremendous scale making it appear absurdly ponderous. Vast fonts of ions cascaded from its edges as the centre broke open, twisting into scarlet arches which fell gracefully back towards the boiling cloudscape. A coronal fireball spat out of the central funnel, bigger than a moon, its surface slippery with webs of magnetic energy which condensed the plasma into deeper purple curlicues. Ghost gases flowered around it, translucent gold petal wings unfurling to beat with the harmonic of the planetary flux lines.
Lost somewhere among the rising glory of light were two tiny sparkles produced by antimatter detonating inside both Organization frigates.
Lady Mac swept triumphantly across the terminator and into daylight,
surfing at a hundred and fifty kilometres per second over the hurricane rivers of phosphorescence which flowed through the troposphere. An arrogant saffron dawn waxed behind her, far outshining the natural one ahead.
“Time to leave,” Joshua datavised. “You ready?”
“All yours, Josh.”
Joshua datavised his order into the flight computer. Zero-tau claimed the last three acceleration couches on the bridge. Lady Mac’s antimatter drive ignited.
The starship accelerated away from the gas giant at forty-two gees.
* * *
Finally, the Alchemist had come to rest at the centre of the gas giant. Here was a universe of pressure unglimpsed except through speculative mathematical models. The heart of the gas giant was only slightly less dense than the neutronium itself. Yet the difference was there, permitting the inflow of matter to continue. The conversion reaction burned unabated. Pure alchemy.
Energy blazed outwards from the Alchemist, unable to escape. The abscess was spherical now, nature’s preferred geometry. A sphere at the heart of a sphere; dangerously tormented matter confined by the perfectly symmetrical pressure exerted by the mass of seventy-five thousand kilometres of hydrogen piled on top of it. This time there was no escape valve up through the weak, nonsymmetrical, semisolid layers. This time, all it could do was grow.
* * *
For six hundred seconds Lady Macbeth accelerated away from the mortally wounded gas giant. Behind her, the Alchemist’s trail of fragmented energy abscesses pumped up out of the darkside clouds, transient volcanoes of feculent gas rising higher than worlds. The planet began to develop its own billowing photosphere; a dark burgundy orb enclosed by a glowing azure halo. Its ebony moons sailed on indomitably through their new sea of lightning.
The starship’s multiple drive tubes cut out. Joshua’s zero-tau switched off, depositing him abruptly into free fall. Sensor images and flight data flashed straight into his brain. The planet’s death convulsions were as fascinating as they were deadly. It didn’t matter, they were over a hundred and eighty thousand kilometres from the disintegrating storm bands. Far enough to jump.
Deep beneath the benighted clouds, the central energy abscess had swollen to an intolerable size. The pressure it was exerting against the confining mass of the planet had almost reached equilibrium. Titanic fissures began to tear open.
An event horizon engulfed Lady Macbeth’s fuselage.
With a timing that was the ultimate tribute to the precision of Mzu’s decades-old equations, the gas giant went nova.
* * *
The singularity surged into existence five hundred and eighty thousand kilometres above Mirchusko’s pale jade blizzards of ammonia-sulphur cirrus. Its event horizon blinked off to reveal the Lady Macbeth’s dull silicon fuselage. Omnidirectional antennae were already broadcasting her CAB identification code. Given the reception they got on returning from Lalonde, Joshua wasn’t going to take any chances this time.
Sensor clusters telescoped outwards, passive elements scanning around, radars pulsing. The flight computer datavised a class three proximity alert.
“Charge the nodes,” Joshua ordered automatically. His mistake, he never expected to jump into trouble here. Now that might cost them badly.
The bridge lights dimmed fractionally as Dahybi initiated an emergency power up sequence. “Eight seconds,” he said.
The external sensor image flashed up in Joshua’s mind. At first he thought they were being targeted by electronic warfare pods. Space was flecked with small white motes. But the electronic sensors were the only ones not being taxed, the whole electromagnetic environment was eerily silent. The flight computer reported its radar track-while-scan function was approaching capacity overload as it designated multiple targets. Each of the white motes was being tagged by purple icons to indicate position and trajectory. Three were flashing red, approaching fast.
It wasn’t interference. Lady Mac had emerged just outside a massive particle storm unlike anything Joshua had ever seen before. The motes weren’t ice, nor rock.
“Jesus, what is this stuff?” He datavised a set of instructions into the flight computer. The standard sensor booms began to retreat, replaced by the smaller, tougher combat sensors. Discrimination and analysis programs went primary.
The debris was mostly metallic, melted and fused scraps no bigger than snowflakes. They were all radioactive.
“There’s been one brute of a fight here,” Sarha said. “This is all combat wasp wreckage. And there’s a lot of it. I think the swarm is about forty thousand kilometres in diameter. It’s dissipating, clearing from the centre.”
“No response to our identification signal,” Beaulieu said. “Tranquillity’s beacons are off air, I cannot locate a single artificial electromagnetic transmission. There isn’t even a ship’s beacon active.”
The centre of the debris storm had a coordinate Joshua didn’t even have to run a memory check on. Tranquillity’s orbital vector. Lady Mac’s sensor suite revealed it to be a large empty zone. “It’s gone,” he said numbly. “They blew it up. Oh, Jesus, no. Ione. My kid. My kid was in there!”
“No, Joshua,” Sarha said firmly. “It hasn’t been destroyed. There isn’t nearly enough mass in the swarm to account for that.”
“Then where is it? Where the hell did it go?”
“I don’t know. There’s no trace of it, none at all.”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
THE NAKED GOD. Copyright © 2000 by Peter F. Hamilton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. For information address Warner Books, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
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A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by Warner Books. A mass market edition was published in two volumes in 2000 by Warner Books.
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The Naked God
Contents
Cast of Characters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
SHIPS
LADY MACBETH
Joshua Calvert
Captain
Liol Calvert
Fusion specialist
Ashly Hanson
Pilot
Sarha Mitcham
Systems specialist
Dahybi Yadev
Node specialist
Beaulieu
Cosmonik
Peter Adul
Mission specialist
Alkad Mzu
Mission specialist
Oski Katsura
Mission specialist
Samuel
Edenist Intelligence agent
OENONE
Sy
rinx
Captain
Ruben
Fusion systems
Oxley
Pilot
Cacus
Life support
Edwin
Toroid systems
Serina
Toroid systems
Tyla
Cargo officer
Kempster Getchell
Mission specialist
Renato Vella
Mission specialist
Parker Higgens
Mission specialist
Monica Foulkes
ESA agent
VILLENEUVE’S REVENGE
André Duchamp