The Neutronium Alchemist
“There are only three possessed at large in the habitat at this moment,” he told his audience. “While they are certainly a cause for concern, they do not as yet present a threat to us. I have issued the police with the kind of heavy-calibre weapons necessary to surmount their energistic ability. And if circumstances warrant, several citizens have the kind of experience which might prove useful in a confrontation.” An ironic, knowing curl of his lip brought an appreciative smile from many watchers.
“However, their ability to alter their appearance means they are proving hard for me to track down. I’m therefore asking all of you to look out for them and inform me immediately. Don’t trust people just because they look the same as they’ve always been; these bastards are probably masquerading as friends of yours. Another effect to watch for is the way they interfere with electronic equipment; if any of your processors start glitching, inform me immediately. There’s a half-million-fuseodollar reward for the information which results in their elimination. Good hunting.”
“Thank you, Big Brother.” Ross Nash tipped his beer glass at the holoscreen over the Tacoul Tavern’s bar. He looked away from the drastically wobbly picture of Rubra, and grinned at Kiera. She was sitting in one of the wall booths, talking in low intense tones with the small cadre she’d been building up; her staff officers, people joked.
Ross was mildly bugged that she hadn’t been including him in the consultation process recently. Okay, so he didn’t have much in the way of technical knowledge, and this habitat was a far gone trip into future-world for a guy who was born in 1940 (and died in ’89—bowel cancer); he kept expecting Yul Brynner to turn up in his black gunslinger outfit. But damn it, his opinion counted for something. She hadn’t screwed with him for days either.
He glanced around the black and silver tavern, resisting the impulse to laugh. It was busier than it had been for years. Unfortunately for the owner, nobody was paying for their drinks and meals anymore. Not this particular clientele. Tatars and cyberpunks mixed happily with Roman legionaries and heavy-leather bikers, along with several rejects from the good Dr Frankenstein’s assembly lab. Music was blasting out of a magnificent 1950s Wurlitzer, allowing a flock of seraphim to strut their stuff across the neon underlit floor. It was pure sensory overload after the deprivation of the beyond, nourishment for the mind. Ross grinned engagingly at his new buddies propping up the bar. There was poor old Dariat, also cut out of Kiera’s elite command group and really pissed by that. Abraham Canaan, too, in full preacher’s ensemble, scowling at the debauchery being practised all around. One thing about the possessed, Ross thought cheerfully, they knew how to party. And they could do it in perfect safety in the Tacoul Tavern; those who were affinity-capable had turned the joint into a safe enclave, completely reformatting the subroutines which operated in the neural strata behind the walls.
He gulped down the rest of his glass, then held it up in front of his nose and wished it full once again. The liquid which appeared in it really did look like gnat’s piss. He frowned at it; a complicated process, coordinating that many facial muscles. For the last five hours he’d been delighted that possessing a body didn’t prevent you from getting utterly smashed, now it seemed there were disadvantages. He chucked the glass over his shoulder. He was sure he’d seen shops out in the vestibule, some of them would stock a bottle or two of decent booze.
Rubra knew his thought processing efficiency was lower than optimum. The malaise was his own fault. He should be reviewing the search, reformatting sub-routines yet again. Now more than ever the effort should be made, now the true nature of his predicament was known. And it was a predicament. The possessed had conquered Pernik. Bitek was not invincible. He ought to divert every mental resource towards breaking the problem; after all, the possessed were physically present, there had to be some way of detecting them. Instead he brooded—something an Edenist habitat personality couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.
Dariat. Rubra simply couldn’t forget the insignificant little shit.
Dariat was dead. But now death wasn’t the end. And he died happy. That passive half smile seemed to flitter through the cells of the neural strata like a menacing ghost. Not such a stretched metaphor, now.
But to kill yourself just to return … No. He wouldn’t.
But someone had taught the possessed how to glitch his thought routines.
Someone very competent indeed.
That smile, though. Suppose, just suppose, he was so desperate for vengeance …
Rubra became aware of a disturbance in the Diocca starscraper, the seventeenth floor, a delicatessen. Some kind of attempted holdup. A sub-routine was attempting to call for the rentcops, but it kept misdirecting the information. The new safeguard protocols he’d installed were trying to compensate, and failing. They fell back on their third-level instructions, and alerted the principal personality pattern.
And barely succeeded in that. Dozens of extremely potent subversive orders were operating within the Diocca starscraper’s neural strata, virtually isolating it from Rubra’s consciousness.
Elated and perturbed, he focused his full attention on it …
Ross Nash was leaning on the delicatessen’s counter, pressing a very large pump-action shotgun into the face of the petrified manager. He clicked the fingers of his free hand, and a thousand-dollar bill flipped out of his cuff, just like the way he’d seen a magician do it in Vegas one time. The crisp note floated down to join the small pile on the counter.
“We got enough here yet, buddy?” Ross asked.
“Sure,” the manager whispered. “That’s fine.”
“Goddamn bet your ass it is. Yankee dollar, best goddamn currency in the whole fucking world. Everybody knows that.” He snatched up a bottle of Norfolk Tears from beside the bills.
Rubra focused on the shotgun, not entirely sure the seventeenth floor’s perception interpretation routine was fully functional after all. The weapon seemed to be made of wood.
Ross grinned at the trembling manager. “I’ll be back,” he said, in a very heavy accent. He did an about-face and started to march away. The shotgun flickered erratically, competing with a broken chair leg to occupy the same space.
The manager snatched his shockrod from its clips under the counter and took a wild swing. It connected with the back of Ross’s head.
Along with the manager, Rubra was amazed at the result of the simple blow.
As soon as the shockrod sparked across Ross’s skin, his possessed body ignited with the pristine glory of a small solar flare. All colours in the shop vanished beneath the incandescent blaze, leaving only white and silver to designate rough shapes.
Nearby processors and sensors came back on-line. Thermal alerts flashed into Valisk’s net, along with a security call. Ceiling-mounted fire suppression nozzles swivelled around, and squirted retardant foam at the blaze.
The thick streams made little difference. Ross’s stolen body was dimming now, sinking to its charred knees, flakes of carbonated flesh crumbling away.
Rubra activated the audio circuit on in the shop’s net processor. “Out!” he commanded.
The manager cringed at the shout.
“Move,” Rubra said. “It’s the possessed. Get out.” He instructed all the net processors on the seventeenth floor to repeat the order. Analysis routines began correlating all the information from the starscraper’s sensitive cells. Even with his principal personality pattern directing the procedure, he couldn’t see what was happening inside the Tacoul Tavern. Then bizarre figures started to emerge from the tavern’s doorway into the vestibule.
He’d found them, the whole damnable nest.
White fireballs shot through the air, pursuing the terrorized delicatessen manager as he ran for the lifts. One of them caught him, clinging to his shoulder. He screamed as black, rancid smoke churned out of the wound.
Rubra immediately cancelled the floor’s autonomic routines and shunted himself into the operating hierarchy. The vestibule’s electrophoresc
ent cells went dead, dropping the whole area into darkness, except for the confusing strobe of white fire. A muscle membrane door leading onto the stairwell snapped open, sending out a single fan of light. The manager altered course, put his head down, and charged straight at it.
Chips of polyp rained down on the vestibule floor. All across the ceiling the atmosphere duct tubules were splitting open as Rubra contracted and flexed the flow regulator muscles in directions they were never designed for. Thick white vapour poured out of the jagged holes. Warm, dank, and oily, it was the concentrated water vapour breathed out of a thousand lungs, which the tubules were supposed to extract from the air and pump into specialist refining organs.
The possessed wished it gone. And the muggy fog obeyed, rushing aside to let them pass. But not before it reduced their fireballs to impotent wispy swirls of fluorescing mist.
The manager reached the stairwell. Rubra closed the muscle-membrane door behind him, clenching it tight as several balls of white fire slammed into the surface, burrowing in like lava worms.
Kiera Salter ran out into the vestibule just as the last of the stinking mist vanished. Red emergency lights had come on, bringing an antagonistic moonlight glow to the broad chamber. She saw the stairwell’s muscle-membrane door slap shut ahead of the vengeful mob.
“Stop!” she yelled.
Some did. Several threw white fire at the muscle membrane.
“Stop this right now,” she said, this time there was an edge in her voice.
“Fuck you, Kiera.”
“He zapped Ross, goddamnit.”
“I’m gonna make him suffer.”
“Maybe.” Kiera strode into the centre of the vestibule and stood there, hands on her hips, staring around at her precariously allied colleagues.
“But not like this.” She gestured at the smoking muscle membrane door, which was still shut. The grey surface was visibly quivering. “He knows now.” She tipped her head back, calling out at the ceiling. “Don’t you, Rubra?”
The ceiling’s electrophorescent cells slowly came back on, illuminating her upturned face. Lines of darkness flowed across them, taking shape.
YES.
“Yes. See?” She dared any of the possessed to challenge her; a couple of her more powerful new lieutenants, Bonney Lewin and Stanyon, came forward to stand beside her for emphasis. “We’re playing a different game now, no more skulking about. Now we take over the entire habitat.”
NO, printed the ceiling.
“That wasn’t a deal, Rubra,” she shouted up at him. “I’m not offering to make you a partner. Got that? If you’re real, real lucky, then you get to live on. That’s all. If you don’t piss me off. If you don’t get in my way. Then maybe we’ll have a use for your precious Valisk afterwards. But only if you behave. Because once I’ve taken over your population it’s going to be easy to fly away. Only before we go, I’ll use the starships to cut you into little pieces; I’ll split your shell open, I’ll bleed your atmosphere out, I’ll freeze your rivers solid, I’ll blast your digestive organs out of the endcap. It’ll take a long time hurting for you to die completely. Decades, maybe. Who knows. You want to find out?”
YOU ARE COMPLETELY ALONE. POLICE AND COMBAT-BOOSTED MERCENARIES ON THEIR WAY. SURRENDER NOW.
Kiera laughed brutally. “No, we’re not alone, Rubra. There are billions of us.” She looked around at the possessed in the vestibule, not seeing any dissenters (except ones like Dariat and Canaan, who really didn’t count). “Okay, people, as from now we’re going overt. I want procedure five enacted this minute.” A casual click of her fingers, designating tasks. “You three, override the lift supervisor processors, have them ready to take us up into the parkland. Bonney, track down that little shit who wiped Ross, I want him creatively hurt. We’ll set up our command centre in Magellanic Itg’s boardroom.”
The first lift arrived at the seventeenth floor. Five of the possessed hurried in, anxious to show Kiera their eagerness to obey, anxious to reap the rewards. The doors slid shut. Rubra overrode the starscraper’s power circuit safeguards, and routed eighty thousand volts through the metal tracks which lined the lift shaft.
Kiera could hear the screams from inside the lift, feel the agony of forced banishment. The silicon rubber seal between the doors melted and burned, allowing the fearsome light of the bodies’ internecine flame to spew out of the crack.
NOT SO EASY, IS IT?
For about twenty seconds she stood absolutely still, face a perfect cage around any emotion. Then her finger lined up on a spindly youth in a baggy white suit. “You, open the muscle membrane; we’ll use the stairs.”
“Told you so,” the youth said. “We should have gone for him first.”
“Do it,” Kiera snapped. “And the rest of you, Rubra’s demonstrated what he can do. It’s not much compared to our ability, but it’s an irritant. We’ll cut through the neural strata’s connections with the starscrapers eventually, but until then, proceed with caution.”
The muscle-membrane door parted smoothly, allowing the now slightly subdued possessed to troop up the seventeen flights of stairs to the parkland above.
> Rubra told the Kohistan Consensus. >
> the Consensus replied. >
>
>
> Rubra admitted reluctantly. >
>
>
Chapter 08
Culey asteroid was an almost instinctive choice for André Duchamp.
Located in the Dzamin Ude star system, a healthy sixty light-years from Lalonde, it acted as a ready haven for certain types of ships in certain circumstances. As if in reaction to its Chinese-ethnic ancestry, and all the clutter of authoritarian tradition which came with that, the asteroid was notoriously lax when it came to enforcing CAB regulations and scrutinizing the legitimacy of cargo manifests. Such an attitude hadn’t done its economy any harm. Starships came for the ease of trading, and the astroengineering conglomerates came to maintain and support the ships, and where the majors went there followed a plethora of smaller service and finance companies. The Confederation Assembly subcommittee on smuggling and piracy might routinely condemn Culey’s government and its policies, but nothing ever altered. Certainly in the fifteen years he’d been using it, André never had any trouble selling cargo or picking up dubious charters. The asteroid was virtually a second home.
This time, though, when the Villeneuve’s Revenge performed its ZTT jump into the designated emergence zone, Culey spaceport was unusually reticent in granting docking permission. During the last three days the system had received first the reports of Laton’s re-emergence, and secondly the warning from Trafalgar
about possible energy virus contamination. Both designated Lalonde as the focus of the trouble.
“But I have a severely injured man on board,” André protested as his third request to be allocated a docking bay was refused.
“Sorry, Duchamp,” the port control officer replied. “We have no bays available.”
“There’s very little traffic movement around the port,” Madeleine Collum observed; she’d accessed the starship’s sensor suite, and was viewing the asteroid. “And most of that is personnel commuters and MSVs, no starships.”
“I am declaring a first-degree emergency,” André datavised to the port officer. “They have to take us now,” he muttered to Madeleine. She simply grunted.
“Emergency declaration acknowledged, Villeneuve’s Revenge,” the port control officer datavised back. “We would advise you set a vector for the Yaxi asteroid. Their facilities are more appropriate to your status.”
André glared at the almost featureless communications console. “Very well. Please open a channel to Commissioner Ri Drak for me.”
Ri Drak was André’s last card, the one he hadn’t quite envisioned playing in a situation such as this, not over the fate of a crew member; the likes of Ri Drak were to be held in reserve until André’s own neck was well and truly on the line.
“Hello, Captain,” Ri Drak datavised. “We would seem to have a problem evolving here.”
“Not for me,” André answered. “No problems. Not like in the past, eh?”
The two of them switched to a high-order encryption program. Much to Madeleine’s annoyance, she couldn’t access the rest of the conversation.
Whatever was said took nearly fifteen minutes to discuss. The only giveaway was André’s clumsy face, registering a sneaky grin, intermingled with the sporadic indignant frown.
“Very well, Captain,” Ri Drak said at last. “The Villeneuve’s Revenge is cleared to dock, but at your own risk should you prove to be contaminated. I will alert the security forces to your arrival.”