The Neutronium Alchemist

  He couldn’t afford to rectify half of the damage, let alone replace the spaceplane. Not unless he took on another mercenary contract. That prospect did not appeal, not after Lalonde. I am too old for such antics, he thought, by rights I should have made a fortune to retire on by now.

  If it wasn’t for those bastard anglo shipping cartels I would have the money.

  Anger gave him the strength to snap the last clip off the circulation fan unit he was working on; the little plastic star shattered from the pressure, chips spinning off in all directions. Bombarded by heat from a possessed’s fireball, then subjected to hard vacuum for a week, the plastic had turned dismayingly brittle.

  “Give me a hand, Desmond,” he datavised. They had turned off the lounge’s environmental circuit in order to dismantle it, which meant wearing his SII suit for the task. Without air circulating at a decent rate the smell in the compartment was unbearable. The bodies had been removed, but a certain amount of grisly diffusion had occurred during their flight from Lalonde.

  Desmond left the thermal regulator power circuit he was testing and drifted over. They hauled the cylindrical fan unit out of the duct. It was clogged solid with scraps of cloth and spiral shavings of nultherm foam. André prodded at the grille with an anti-torque keydriver, loosening some of the mangled cloth. Tiny flakes of dried blood swirled out like listless moths.

  “Merde. It’ll have to be broken down and purged.”

  “Oh, come on, André, you can’t use this again. The motor overloaded when Erick dumped the atmosphere. There’s no telling what internal damage the voltage spike caused.”

  “Ship systems all have absurdly high performance margins. The motor can withstand a hundred spikes.”

  “Yeah, but the CAB …”

  “To hell with them, data-constipated bureaucrats. They know nothing of operational flying.”

  “Some systems you don’t take chances with.”

  “You forget, Desmond, this is my ship, my livelihood. Do you think I would risk that?”

  “You mean, what’s left of your ship, don’t you?”

  “What are you implying, that I am responsible for the souls of humanity returning to invade us? Perhaps also it is my fault that the Earth is ruined, and the Meridian fleet never returned.”

  “You’re the captain, you took us to Lalonde.”

  “On a legitimate government contract. It was honest money.”

  “Have you never heard of fool’s gold?”

  André’s answer was lost as Madeleine opened the ceiling hatch and used the crumbling composite ladder to pull herself down into the lounge.

  “Listen, you two, I’ve seen … Yek!” She slapped a hand over her mouth and nose, eyes smarting from the unwholesome scents layering the atmosphere. In the deck above, an air contamination warning sounded. The ceiling hatch started to hinge down. “Christ, haven’t the pair of you got this cycled yet?”

  “Non,” André datavised.

  “It doesn’t matter. Listen, I’ve just seen Harry Levine. He was in a bar on the second residence level. I got out fast, I’m pretty sure he didn’t see me.”

  “Merde!” André datavised the flight computer for a link into the spaceport’s civil register, loading a search order. Two seconds later it confirmed the Dechal was docked, and had been for ten days. His SII suit’s permeability expanded, allowing a sudden outbreak of sweat to expire. “We must leave. Immediately.”

  “No chance,” Madeleine said. “The port office wouldn’t even let us disengage the umbilicals, let alone launch, not with that civil starflight proscription order still in force.”

  “The captain’s right, Madeleine,” Desmond datavised. “There are only three of us left. We can’t go up against Rawand’s crew like this. We have to fly outsystem.”

  “Four!” she said through clenched teeth. “There are four of us left … Oh, mother of God, they’ll go for Erick.”

  The fluid in Erick’s inner ears began to stir, sending a volley of mild nerve impulses into his sleeping brain. The movement was so slight and smooth it made no impression on his quiescent mind. It did, however, register within his neural nanonics; the ever-vigilant basic monitor program noted the movement was consistent with a constant acceleration.

  Erick’s body was being moved. The monitor program triggered a stimulant program.

  Erick’s hazy dream snuffed out, replaced by the hard-edged schematics of a personal situation display. Second-level constraint blocks were erected across his nerves, preventing any give-away twitches. His eyes stayed closed as he assessed what the hell was happening.

  Quiet, easy hum of a motor. Tap tap tap of feet on a hard floor—an audio discrimination program went primary—two sets of feet, plus the level breathing of two people. Constant pulse of light pressure on the enhanced retinas below closed eyelids indicated linear movement, backed up by inner ear fluid motion; estimated at a fast walking pace. Posture was level: he was still lying on his bed.

  He datavised a general query/response code, and received an immediate reply from a communications net processor. Its location was a corridor on the third storey of the hospital, already fifteen metres from the implant surgery care ward. Erick requested a file of the local net architecture, and found a security observation camera in the corridor. He accessed it to find himself with a fish-eye vantage point along a corridor where his own bed was sliding underneath the lens. Madeleine and Desmond were at either end of the bed, straining to supplement the motor as they hauled it along. A lift door was sliding open ahead of them.

  Erick cancelled the constraint blocks and opened his eyes. “What the fuck’s going on?” he datavised to Desmond.

  Desmond glanced around to see a pair of furious eyes staring at him out of the green medical nanonic mask covering Erick’s face. He managed a snatched, semi-embarrassed grin. “Sorry, Erick, we didn’t dare wake you up in case someone heard the commotion. We had to get you out of there.”

  “Why?”

  “The Dechal is docked here. But don’t worry, we don’t think Hasan Rawand knows about us. And we intend to keep it that way. André is working on his political contact to get us a departure authorization.”

  “For once he might make a decent job of it,” Madeleine muttered as they steered Erick’s bulky bed into the lift. “After all, it’s his own neck on the block this time, not just ours.”

  Erick tried to rise, but the medical packages were too restrictive, he could only just get his head off the pillows, and that simple motion was tiring beyond endurance. “No. Leave me. You go.”

  Madeleine pushed him down gently as the lift started upwards. “Don’t be silly. They’ll kill you if they catch up with you.”

  “We’ll see this through together,” Desmond said, his voice full of sympathy and reassurance. “We won’t desert you, Erick.”

  Encased in the protective, nurturing packages, Erick couldn’t even groan in frustration. He opened a secure encrypted channel to the Confederation Navy Bureau. Lieutenant Li Chang responded immediately.

  “You have to intercept us,” Erick datavised. “These imbeciles are going to take me off Culey if no one stops them.”

  “Okay, don’t panic, I’m calling in the covert duty squad. We can reach the spaceport in time.”

  “Do we have any assets in the flight control centre?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Activate one; make sure whatever departure authorization Duchamp gets is invalidated. I want the Villeneuve’s Revenge to stay locked tight in that bloody docking bay.”

  “I’m on it. And don’t worry.”

  Desmond and Madeleine had obviously devoted considerable attention to planning their route in order to avoid casual observation. They took Erick straight up through the rock honeycomb which was Culey’s habitation section, switching between a series of public utility lifts. When they were in the upper levels, where gravity had dropped to less than ten per cent standard, they left the bed behind and tugged him along a maze of simple passages b
ored straight through the rock. It was some kind of ancient maintenance or inspection grid, with few functional net processors. Lieutenant Li Chang had trouble tracking their progress.

  Eighteen minutes after leaving the hospital they arrived at the base of the spaceport’s spindle. Several intrigued sets of eyes followed their course as they floated across the big axial chamber to a vacant transit capsule.

  “We’re two minutes behind you,” Li Chang datavised. “Thank heavens they chose a devious route, it slowed you up.”

  “What about the departure authorization?”

  “God knows how Duchamp did it, but Commissioner Ri Drak has cleared the Villeneuve’s Revenge for departure. The Navy Bureau has lodged a formal protest with Culey’s governing council. It should earn us a delay if not outright cancellation; Ri Drak’s political opponents will use the complaint to make as much capital as they can.”

  The transit capsule took them to the bay containing the Villeneuve’s Revenge. It was a tedious journey; like the rest of the structure the transit tubes were in need of refurbishment, if not outright replacement.

  The capsule juddered frequently as it ran through lengths of rail with no power, the light panels dimming, then brightening in sympathy. It paused at several junctions, as if the spaceport route management computer was unsure of the direction.

  “Can you manoeuvre a bit now?” Madeleine asked Erick, hopeful that free fall would grant them some relief from straining at his mass. She was carrying two of the ancillary medical modules which were hooked up to his dermal armour of packages, feeding in a whole pharmacopoeia of nutrients to the new implants. The tubes were forever tangling around her limbs or snagging on awkward fixtures.

  “Sorry. Tricky,” he datavised back. It might earn them thirty seconds.

  Madeleine and Desmond swapped a martyred glance, and bundled Erick out of the transit capsule. The hexagonal cross-section corridors that encircled the docking bay were white-walled composite, scuffed to a rusty grey by the boots of countless generations of crews and maintenance staff. The neat rows of grab hoops running along the walls had snapped off long ago, leaving only stumps. It didn’t matter, the kind of people frequenting Culey spaceport were hardly novices. Madeleine and Desmond simply kept Erick in the middle of the corridor, imparting the odd gentle nudge to prevent him touching the walls as inertia slid him along.

  Once the transit capsule door closed behind him, Erick lost his communications channel to Lieutenant Li Chang. He wished the packages didn’t prevent him from sighing. Did nothing in this rat’s arsehole of a settlement ever work? One of his medical support units emitted a cautionary bleep.

  “Soon be over,” Madeleine soothed, misinterpreting the electronic tone.

  Erick blinked rapidly, the sole method of expression left to him. They were risking themselves to save him, while he would be turning them over to the authorities as soon as they docked at a civilized port. Yet he’d killed to protect them, leaving them free to commit murder and piracy in turn. Applying for a CNIS post had seemed such a prestigious step forwards at the time. How stupid his vanity appeared with hindsight.

  His eye focused on a two-centimetre burn mark scoring the composite wall.

  Instinct or a well-written extended sensory analysis program, it was the result which mattered. That burn mark was on the cover of a net conduit inspection panel, and it was fresh. When he switched to infrared it still glowed a faint pink. With the spectrum active, other burns became apparent, a small ruddy constellation sprayed around the corridor walls, every glimmer corresponding to an inspection panel.

  “Madeleine, Desmond, stop,” he datavised. “Someone’s deliberately screwed the net here.”

  Desmond halted his ponderous glide with a semi-automatic slap at the stump of a grab hoop. He reached out to brake Erick. “I can’t even establish a channel to the ship,” he complained.

  “Do you think they got into the life-support capsules?” Madeleine asked.

  Her own enhanced retinas were scanning around the fateful inspection panels.

  “They wouldn’t get past Duchamp, not while his paranoia’s roused. We’ll be lucky if he even opens the airlock for us.”

  “They’re armed, though; they could have cut their way in. And they’re in front of us.”

  Desmond peered down the slightly curving corridor, alarmed and uncertain.

  There was a four-way junction ten metres in front of him, one of its branches leading directly to the docking bay’s airlock. The only sounds he could hear were the rattly fans of the environmental maintenance system.

  “Go back to the transit capsule,” Erick datavised. “That has a working net processor, we can open a channel to the ship from there, even if we have to route it through the external antenna.”

  “Good idea.” Madeleine braced her feet on a grab hoop stump, and gave Erick’s shoulders a steady push, starting him off back down the corridor.

  Desmond was already slithering around them, lithe as a fish. When she looked back she could see shadows fluctuating within the junction.

  “Desmond!” She scrambled inside her jacket for the TIP pistol she was carrying. An elbow hit the corridor wall, setting her tumbling. She tried to damp her momentum with one hand clawing at the coarse composite, while still fumbling at the obstinate holster. Her feet caught Erick, sending him thudding against the wall. He bounced, trailing long confused spirals of tubing, ancillary modules flying free.

  Shane Brandes, the Dechal’s fusion engineer, slid out of the corridor which led to the airlock; he was wearing the copper one-piece overall of the local spaceport services company. It took him a couple of seconds to recognize the frenetic woman four metres in front of him who was grappling with a gun caught up in her jacket. He gagged in astonishment.

  “Don’t move, ballhead!” Madeleine screeched, half in panic, half in exhilaration. She brought the TIP pistol around to point at the terrified man. Her body was still rebounding, which meant she had to keep tracking.

  Five separate combat programs went into primary mode; her thoughts were so churned up she’d simply designated the classification rather than individual files. Various options for combat wasp salvo attack formations skipped through her mind. She focused through the sleet of data and looping problematical high-gee vector lines to keep the nozzle trained on Brandes, who was doing a credible imitation of raising his hands in the air even though they were visually inverted.

  “What do I do?” Madeleine yelled to Desmond. He was wrestling with Erick, trying to halt the injured man’s cumbersome oscillations.

  “Just keep him covered,” Desmond shouted back.

  “Okay.” She squeezed the pistol grip in an effort to stop it shaking so much; her legs forked wide, stabilizing her against the corridor. “How many with you?” she asked Brandes.

  “None.”

  Madeleine finally tamed her wayward programs. A blue neon targeting grid slid into place over her vision and locked. She aimed at a point ten centimetres to the side of Brandes’s head and fired. Composite snapped and boiled, sending out a puff of unhealthy black smoke.

  “Jesus. Nobody, I swear! I’m supposed to disable the starship’s umbilical feeds, and smash this bay’s net before …”

  “Before what?”

  Everybody had shunted an audio discrimination program into primary mode, so everybody heard the transit capsule door opening.

  Desmond immediately activated a tactics program, and opened an encrypted channel to Madeleine. Their respective programs interfaced, coordinating their threat response. He turned to face the bright fan of light emerging from the door, his TIP pistol sliding around in a smooth program-controlled motion.

  When Hasan Rawand came out of the commuter lift the exhilaration he was burning was hotter than any black-market stimulant program. He fancied himself as a hunting bird, power-diving on its unsuspecting prey.

  The sharp reality of the corridor hurt. It was a situation so abrupt he was still smiling confidently as Desmond’
s TIP pistol nozzle was locked directly on his head. Stafford Charlton and Harry Levine almost cannoned into his back as they left the commuter lift; the four mercenaries hired to provide overwhelming firepower were considerably more controlled, reaching for their own weapons.

  “Rawand, I’ve programmed in a dead man’s trigger,” Desmond said loudly.

  “If you shoot me, you still die.”

  The Dechal’s captain swore murderously. Behind him the mercenaries were having a lot of trouble deploying in the cramped corridor. Fast encrypted datavises assured him three of them were targeting the crewman from the Villeneuve’s Revenge. Give the word, we can vaporize his pistol first.

  We’re sure.

  They weren’t exactly the kind of odds Hasan Rawand was keen on. His eyes swept over the figure encased in medical nanonic packages. “Is that who I think it is?” he inquired.

  “Not relevant,” Desmond replied. “Now listen, nobody makes any sudden movements at all. Clear? That way no real untimely tragic accidents occur. This is what we have here: a standoff. With me so far? Nobody’s going to win today, especially not if anyone starts shooting in here. So I’m calling time out, and we can both regroup and conspire to stab each other in the back some other happy time.”

  “I don’t think so,” Hasan said. “I don’t have a quarrel with you, Lafoe, nor you, Madeleine. It’s your captain I want, and that murdering bastard Thakrar. You two can leave anytime. Nobody’s going to shoot you.”

  “You don’t know shit about what we’ve been through,” Desmond said, an anger which surprised him powering his voice. “I don’t know about your ship, Rawand, but this isn’t a crew which deserts each other the first second it hits the fan.”

  “Very noble,” Hasan sneered.

  “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen next. The three of us are going to back up into the Villeneuve’s Revenge, and we’ll take Brandes with us for insurance. One mistake on your part, and Madeleine fries him.”

  Hasan grinned rakishly. “So? He never was much use as a fusion engineer anyway.”