The Neutronium Alchemist

  Ralph shivered. His Christian belief had never been that strongly rooted, but like a good Kingdom subject, it was always there. “Our immediate concern is what do we do about the bus. You might manage to land AT Squad teams on the thing if they were equipped with airpack flight suits, but they can hardly jump down from the hypersonic.”

  “Use the SD platforms to chop up the motorway ahead of it,” Admiral Farquar suggested. “Force it to stop that way.”

  “Do we know how many people were on board?” Landon McCullock asked.

  “Full complement when it left Pasto spaceport, I’m afraid,” Diana reported.

  “Damn. Sixty people. We have to make at least an effort to halt it.”

  “We’d have to reinforce the AT Squads first,” Ralph said. “Three hypersonics isn’t enough. And you’d have to stop the bus precisely in the centre of a cordon. With sixty possible hostiles riding on it, we’d have to be very certain no one broke through. That’s wild-looking countryside out there.”

  “We can have reinforcements there in another seven minutes,” Bernard Gibson said.

  “Shit—” It was a datavise from the pilot. A big javelin of white fire streaked up from the bus, punching the hypersonic’s belly. The plane quaked, then peeled away rapidly, almost rolling through ninety degrees.

  Bright sparkling droplets of molten ceramic sprayed out from the gaping hole in its fuselage to splash and burn on the motorway’s surface. Its aerodynamics wounded, it started juddering continuously, losing height.

  The pilot tried desperately to right it, but he was already too low. He came to the same conclusion as the flight computer and activated the crash protection system.

  Foam under enormous pressure fired into the cabin, swamping the AT Squad members. Valency generators turned it solid within a second.

  The plane hit the ground, ploughing a huge gash through the vegetation and soft black loam. Nose, wings, and tailplane crumpled and tore, barbed fragments spinning off into the night. The bulky cylinder which was the cabin carried on for another seventy metres, flinging off structural spars and smashed ancillary modules. It came to a jarring halt, thudding into a steep earthen bluff.

  The valency generators cut off, and foam sluiced out of the wreckage, mingling with the mud. Figures stirred weakly inside.

  Bernard Gibson let out a painful breath. “I think they’re all okay.”

  One of the other two hypersonics was circling back towards the crash. The second took up position a respectful kilometre behind the bus.

  “Oh, Christ,” Vicky Keogh groaned. “The bus is slowing. They’re going to get off.”

  “Now what?” the Prime Minister demanded. He sounded frightened and angry.

  “One AT Squad can’t possibly contain them,” Ralph said. It was like speaking treason. I betrayed those people. My failure.

  “There are sixty people on that bus,” an aghast Warren Aspinal exclaimed.

  “We might be able to cure them.”

  “Yes, sir, I know that.” Ralph hardened his expression, disguising how worthless he felt, and looked at Landon McCullock. The police chief obviously wanted to argue; he glanced at his deputy, who shrugged helplessly.

  “Admiral Farquar?” Landon McCullock datavised.

  “Yes.”

  “Eliminate the bus.”

  Ralph watched through the hypersonic’s sensor suite as the laser blast from low orbit struck the fantasm vehicle. Just for an instant he saw the silhouette of the real Longhound inside the illusory cloak, as if the purpose of the weapon was really to expose truths. Then the energy barrage incinerated the bus along with a thirty-metre-diameter circle of road.

  When he looked around the faces of everyone sitting at Hub One, he saw his own dismay and horror bounced right back at him.

  It was Diana Tiernan who held his gaze, her kindly old face crumpled up with tragic sympathy. “I’m sorry, Ralph,” she said. “We weren’t quick enough. The AIs have just told me the bus stopped at the first four towns on its scheduled route.”

  Chapter 03

  Al Capone dressed as Al Capone had always dressed: with style. He wore a double-breasted blue serge suit, a paisley pattern silk tie, black patent leather shoes, and a pearl-grey fedora, rakishly aslant. Gold rings set with a rainbow array of deep precious stones glinted on every finger, a duck-egg diamond on his pinkie.

  It hadn’t taken him long to decide that the people in this future world didn’t have much in the way of fashion sense. The suits he could see all followed the same loose silk design, although their colourful slimline patterns made them appear more like flappy Japanese pyjamas. Those not in suits wore variants on vests and sports shirts. Tight-fitting, too, at least for people under thirty-five. Al had stared at the dolls to start with, convinced they were all hookers. What kind of decent gal would dress like that, with so much showing? Skirts which almost didn’t cover their ass, shorts that weren’t much better. But no. They were just ordinary, smiling, happy, everyday girls. The people living in this city weren’t so strung up on morality and decency. What would have given a Catholic priest apoplexy back home didn’t raise an eyebrow here.

  “I think I’m gonna like this life,” Al declared.

  Strange life that it was. He seemed to have been reincarnated as a magician: a real magician, not like the fancy tricksters he’d booked for his clubs back in Chicago. Here, whatever he wanted appeared out of nowhere.

  That had taken a long while to get used to. Think and … pow. There it was, everything from a working Thompson to a silver dollar glinting in the hot sun. Goddamn useful for clothes, though. Brad Lovegrove had worn overalls of shiny dark red fabric like some kind of pissant garbage collector.

  Al could hear Lovegrove whimpering away inside him, like having a leprechaun nesting at the centre of his brain. He was bawling like a complete bozo, and making about as much sense. But there was some gold among the dross, twenty-four-karat nuggets. Like—when he first got his marbles together Al had thought this world was maybe Mars or Venus. Not so. New California didn’t even orbit the same sun as Earth. And it wasn’t the twentieth century no more.

  Je-zus, but a guy needed a drink to help keep that from blowing his head apart.

  And where to get a drink? Al imagined the little leprechaun being squeezed, as if his brain were one giant muscle. Slowly contracting.

  A macromall on the intersection between Longwalk and Sunrise, Lovegrove squealed silently. There’s a specialist store there with liquor from every Confederation planet, probably even got Earth bourbon.

  Drinks from clear across the galaxy! How about that?

  So Al started walking. It was a lovely day.

  The sidewalk was so wide it was more like a boulevard in itself; there were no paving slabs, instead the whole strip had been made from a seamless sheet, a material which was a cross between marble and concrete.

  Luxuriant trees sprouted up through craters in the surface every forty yards or so, their two-foot sprays of floppy oval flowers an impossible shade of metallic purple.

  He spotted a few trashcan-sized trucks trundling sedately among the walkers enjoying the late-morning sunshine, machinery smoother than Henry Ford had ever dreamed of. Utility mechanoids, Lovegrove told him, cleaning the sidewalk, picking up litter and fallen leaves.

  The base of each skyscraper was given over to classy delis and bars and restaurants and coffee shops; tables spilled out onto the sidewalk, just like a European city. Arcades pierced deep into the buildings.

  From what Al could see, it was the same kind of rich man’s playground setup on the other side of the street, maybe a hundred and fifty yards away. Not that you could walk over to be sure, there was no way past the eight-foot-high glass and metal barrier which lined the road.

  Al stood with his face pressed to the glass for some time, watching the silent cars zoom past. Big bullets on wheels. All of them shiny, like coloured chrome. You didn’t even have to steer them no more, Lovegrove told him, they did it themselves. Some
kind of fancy electrical engine, no gas. And the speed, over two hundred kilometres an hour.

  Al knew all about kilometres; they were what the French called miles.

  But he wasn’t too sure about using a car that he couldn’t drive himself, not when it travelled that fast. And anyway, his presence seemed to mommick up electricity. So he stuck to walking.

  The skyscrapers gave him vertigo they were so tall, and all you could see when you looked up at them was reflections of more skyscrapers. They seemed to bend over the street, imprisoning the world below. Lovegrove told him they were so high that their tops were designed to sway in the wind, rocking twenty–thirty metres backwards and forwards in slow motion.

  “Shut up,” Al growled.

  The leprechaun curled up tighter, like a knotted snake.

  People looked at Al—his clothes. Al looked at people, fascinated and jubilant. It was a jolt seeing blacks and whites mixing free, other types too, light-skinned Mediterranean like his own, Chinese, Indian. Some seemed to have dyed their hair completely the wrong colour. Amazing.

  And they all appeared so much at ease with themselves, owning a uniform inner smile. They had a nonchalance and surety which he’d never seen before. The devil which drove so many people back in the twenties was missing, as if the city elders had abolished worry altogether.

  They also had astonishingly good health. After a block and a half Al still hadn’t seen anyone remotely overweight. No wonder they wore short clothes. A world where everyone was in permanent training for the big game, even the seventy-year-olds.

  “You still got baseball, ain’t you?” Al muttered under his breath.

  Yes, Lovegrove confirmed.

  Yep, paradise all right.

  After a while he took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. He’d been walking for a quarter of an hour, and it didn’t look as if he’d got anywhere. The massive avenue of skyscrapers hadn’t changed at all.

  “Hey, buddy,” he called.

  The black guy—who looked like a prizefighter—turned and gave an amused grin as he took in Al’s clothes. His arm was around a girl: Indian skin, baby blonde hair. Her long legs were shown off by a pair of baggy culottes.

  Cutie pie, Al thought, and grinned at her. A real sweater girl. It suddenly struck him that he hadn’t hit the sack with a woman for six centuries.

  She smiled back.

  “How do I call a cab around here?”

  “Datavise the freeway processors, my man,” the black guy said expansively. “City runs a million cabs. Don’t make a profit. But then that’s what us dumb taxpayers are for, to make up the shortfall, right?”

  “I can’t do the data thing, I ain’t from around here.”

  The girl giggled. “You just get off a starship?”

  Al tipped the rim of his fedora with two fingers. “Kind of, lady. Kind of.”

  “Neat. Where you from?”

  “Chicago. On Earth.”

  “Hey, wow. I never met anyone from Earth before. What’s it like?”

  Al’s grin lost its lustre. Je-zus, but the women here were forward. And the black guy’s thick arm was still draped over her shoulder. He didn’t seem to mind his girl making conversation with a total stranger. “One city’s just like another,” Al said; he gestured lamely at the silver skyscrapers, as if that was explanation enough.

  “City? I thought you only had arcologies on Earth?”

  “Look, you going to tell me how to get a fucking cab, or what?”

  He’d blown it. The moment he saw the man’s expression harden, he knew.

  “You want us to call one for you, buddy?” The man was taking a longer, slower look at Al’s clothes.

  “Sure,” Al bluffed.

  “Okay. No problem. It’s done.” A phony smile.

  Al wondered exactly what it was the man had actually done. He didn’t have no Dick Tracy wrist radio to call for a cab or anything. Just stood there, smiling, playing Al for a sucker.

  Lovegrove was filling Al’s head with crap about miniature telephones in the brain. He had one fitted himself, he said, but it had packed up when Al possessed him.

  “Going to tell me about Chicago now?” the girl asked.

  Al could see how worried she was. Her voice, mannerisms, the way she had merged into her man’s encircling arm. They all telegraphed it, and he knew how to read the signs. Fear in other people was wholly familiar.

  He thrust his face forwards toward the black guy, snarling at the wiseass bastard. Just for an instant three long scars pulsed hotly on his left cheek. “Gonna remember you, cocksucker. Gonna find you again. Gonna teach you respect, and, buddy, it’s gonna be the real hard way to learn.” The old rage was burning in his body now, limbs trembling, voice rising to a thunderous roar. “Nobody shits on Al Capone! You got that? Nobody treats me like some dog turd you stepped in. I fucking ruled Chicago. I owned that city. I am not some asswipe street punk you can take for a ride. I. Deserve. RESPECT.”

  “Bastard Retro!” The man swung a punch.

  Even if Lovegrove’s body hadn’t been enhanced with the energistic power which possessing souls exuded in the natural universe Al would probably have beaten him. His years in Brooklyn had pitched him into countless brawls, and people had quickly learned to steer clear of his awesome temper.

  Al ducked instinctively, his right fist already coming up. The blow was focused, mentally and physically. He struck the man perfectly, catching him on the side of his jaw.

  There was an ugly sound of bone shattering. Dead silence. The man flew backwards five yards through the air, hitting the sidewalk in a crumpled sprawl. He slid along the carbon concrete composite for another couple of yards before coming to rest, completely inert. Blood began to splatter from his mouth where serrated bone had punctured his cheek and lip.

  Al stared, surprised. “Goddamn!” He started to laugh delightedly.

  The girl screamed. She screamed and screamed.

  Al glanced around, suddenly apprehensive. Everyone on the broad sidewalk was looking at him, at the injured black guy. “Shut up,” he hissed at the loopy broad. “Shut up!” But she wouldn’t. Just: scream, and scream, and scream. Like it was her profession.

  Then there was another sound, cutting through her bawling, rising every time she took a breath. And Al Capone realized it wasn’t just handguns he could recognize after six hundred years. Police sirens hadn’t changed much either.

  He started to run. People scattered ahead of him the way kittens ran from a pit bull. Cries and yells broke out all around.

  “Stop him!”

  “Move!”

  “Stinking Retro.”

  “He killed that dude. One punch.”

  “No! Don’t try to—”

  A man was going for him. Beefy and hard-set, crouched low for a pro football tackle. Al waved a hand, almost casually, and white fire squirted into the hero’s face. Black petals of flesh peeled back from the bone, sizzling. Thick chestnut hair flamed to ash. A dull agonized grunt, cutting off as pain overloaded his consciousness, and the man collapsed.

  Then all hell really did hit the fan. Anxious people became a terrified mob. Stampeding away from him. Fringe onlookers got caught and bowled over by thudding feet.

  Al glanced back over his shoulder to see a section of the road barrier fold down. The squad car glided over it towards him. An evil-looking black and blue javelin-head, airplane-smooth fuselage. Dazzlingly bright lights flashed on top of it.

  “Hold it, Retro,” a voice boomed from the car.

  Al’s pace slackened. There was an arcade ahead of him, but its arching entrance was wide enough to take the squad car. Goddamn! Alive again for forty minutes and already running from the cops.

  What else is new?

  He stopped, and turned full square to face them, silver-plated Thompson gripped in his hands. And—oh, shit—another two squad cars were coming off the road, lining up directly towards him. Big slablike flaps were opening like wings at their rear, and thin
gs came running out. They weren’t human, they weren’t animal. Machine animals? Whatever, they sure didn’t look healthy. Fat dull-metal bodies with stumpy gun barrels protruding.

  Far too many legs, and all of those rubber, no knees or ankles.

  Assault mechanoids, Lovegrove said. And there was a tinge of excitement in the mental voice. Lovegrove expected the things to beat him.

  “They electric?” Al demanded.

  Yes.

  “Good.” He glared at the one taking point, and cast his first sorcerer’s spell.

  Police patrol Sergeant Alson Loemer was already anticipating his promotion when he arrived at the scene. Loemer had been delighted as his neural nanonics received the updates from the precinct house. With his outlandish clothes, the man certainly looked like a Retro. The gang of history-costumed terrorists had been running the police department ragged for three days, sabotaging city systems with some new style of plasma weapon and electronic warfare field. Other acts too. Most officers had picked up strong rumours of snatches going down, people being lifted at random from the streets at night. And not one Retro had been brought to book. The news companies were datavising hive loads of untamed speculation across the communications net: a religious group, a band of offplanet mercenaries, even wackier notions. The mayor was going apeshit, and leaning on the police commissioner. Smooth people from an unnamed government intelligence agency had been walking around the corridors at the precinct house. But they didn’t know anything more than the patrol officers.

  Now he, Sergeant Loemer, was going to nail one of those suckers.

  He guided the patrol car over the folded barrier and onto the sidewalk.

  The crim was dead ahead, running for the base of the Uorestone Tower. Two more precinct cars were riding with Loemer, closing on the crim, hemming him in. Loemer deployed both of his patrol car’s assault mechanoids, and datavised in their isolate and securement instructions.

  That was when the patrol car started to glitch, picking up speed. The sensors showed him frightened citizens in front, racing to escape; one of the assault mechanoids wobbled past, shooting wildly. He fired shutdown orders into the drive processor. Not that it made much difference.