The Neutronium Alchemist

  Mixi tried to clasp his hands together in prayer. It was the day which in his heart he’d always known would come, the day when King Alastair II dispatched all the forces of law and order in his Kingdom to deal with Mixi Penrice, car thief and trader in stolen parts. “Please,” he babbled weakly. He couldn’t hear his own voice; too much blood was running out of his ears. “Please, I’ll pay it all back. I promise. I’ll tell you who my fences are. I’ll give you the name of the bloke who wrote the program which screws up the road network processors. You can have it all. Just, please, don’t kill me.” He started sobbing wretchedly.

  Ralph Hiltch slowly pulled back his shell helmet’s moulded visor. “Oh, fuck!” he yelled.

  ***

  The white plaster and stone interior of Cricklade’s family chapel was comfy and sober without the exorbitant lavishness prevalent throughout the rest of the manor. Its history was cheerful, anyone walking into it for the first time was immediately aware of that; you only had to close your eyes to see the innumerable christenings, the grand marriage ceremonies of the heirs, Christmas masses, choral evenings. It was as much a part of the Kavanaghs as the rich land outside.

  Now though, its gentle sanctity had been methodically violated. Icon panels defaced, the dainty stained-glass windows broken, the statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary smashed. Every crucifix had been inverted; red and black pentagrams daubed on the walls.

  The despoiling soothed Quinn as he knelt at the altar. Before him an iron brazier had been set up on top of the thick stone slab. Avaricious flames were busy consuming the Bibles and hymn books it contained.

  His body’s lusts satiated by Lawrence, fed on gourmet food, and overindulged on the bottles of vintage Norfolk Tears from the cellar, he felt miraculously calm. Behind him, the ranks of novices stood to attention as they waited to be inducted into the sect. They would stand there, motionless, for all of eternity if necessary. They were that scared of him.

  Luca Comar stood in front of them, like some masterful drill sergeant.

  His dragon armour glinted dully in the firelight, small plumes of orange smoke snorting from his helmet’s eye slits. He had worn the guise almost continually since possessing Grant Kavanagh’s body. Compensating for some deep psychological fracture, Quinn thought. But then everyone returning from beyond was flaky to some degree.

  Quinn allowed his contempt to rise, the raw emotion bubbling into his brain. The hem of his robe gave a small flutter. Here on Norfolk such pitiful masquerades would triumph, but on few other worlds. Most Confederation planets would fight back against the incursions of the possessed, and those were the planets which counted. The planets where the real war would be fought, the universal war for belief and devotion between the two celestial brothers. Norfolk was irrelevant to that struggle, it could contribute nothing, no weapons, no starships.

  He lifted his gaze above the flames darting out of the brazier. A vermillion sky was visible through the gaping rents in the broken window.

  Less than a dozen first magnitude stars twinkled above the wolds, the rest of the universe had been washed out in the red dwarf’s sullied glow.

  The tiny blue-white lights seemed so delicate and pure.

  Quinn smiled at them. His calling was finally revealed. He would bring his divine gift of guidance to the lost armies which God’s Brother had seeded throughout the Confederation. It would be a crusade, a glorious march of the dead, folding the wings of Night around every spark of life and hope, and extinguishing it for ever.

  First he would have to raise an army, and a fleet to carry them. A frisson of his own, very personal desire kindled in his mind. The serpent beast speaking right into his heart. Banneth! Banneth was at the very core of the Confederation, where the greatest concentration of resources and weapons lay.

  The obedient novices never moved when Quinn rose to his feet and turned to face them. There was an amused sneer on his snow-white face. He jabbed a finger at Luca Comar. “Wait here, all of you,” he said, and stalked down the aisle. Dark magenta and woad moire patterns skipped across the black fabric of his robe, reflections of his newfound determination. A click of his fingers, and Lawrence Dillon scurried after him.

  They passed quickly through the ransacked manor, and down the portico’s stone steps to the farm rangers parked on the gravel. A smudge of smoke on the horizon betrayed Colsterworth’s position.

  “Get in,” Quinn said. He was on the verge of laughter.

  Lawrence clambered into the front passenger seat as Quinn switched the motor on. The vehicle sped down the drive, sending pebbles skidding onto the grass verge.

  “I wonder how long they’ll stay in there like that?” Quinn mused.

  “Aren’t we coming back?”

  “No. This crappy little world is a dead end, Lawrence. There’s nothing left for us here, no purpose. We have to get off; and there aren’t many navy starships in orbit. We’ve got to reach one before they all leave. The Confederation will be waking to the threat soon. They’ll recall their fleets to protect the important worlds.”

  “So where are we going if we do get a frigate?”

  “Back to Earth. We have allies there. There are sects in every major arcology. We can gnaw at the Confederation from within, corrupt it completely.”

  “Do you think the sects will help us?” Lawrence asked, curious.

  “Eventually. They might need a little persuading first. I’ll enjoy that.”

  ***

  The AT Squad had the exclusive shop completely surrounded. Moyce’s of Pasto occupied a more hospitable section of the city than the Mahalia warehouse. The building’s design was an indulgent neo-Napoleonic, overlooking one of the main parks. It catered to the aristocracy and the wealthy, trading mainly on snob value. The shop itself was only a fifth of the business; Moyce’s main income came from supplying goods and delicacies to estates and the upwardly mobile clear across the continent.

  There were eight separate loading bay doors at the back of the building to accommodate the fleet of lorries which were dispatched every night.

  Their feed roads merged into a single trunk road which led down into a tunnel where it joined one of the city’s three major underground ring motorways.

  At ten past midnight its distribution centre was normally busy loading lorries with the day’s orders. Nothing had emerged in the four minutes it had taken the AT Squad to deploy. However, there was one vehicle parked outside the end loading bay, obstructing the road: the taxi which the AI cores had traced from the spaceport. All its electrical circuits had been switched off.

  Fifteen assault mechanoids dashed up the slope to the loading bay doors, their movements coordinated by the Squad’s seven technical officers.

  Three of the doors were to be broken down, while the others were to be blocked and guarded. One had been assigned to the taxi.

  Six of the assault mechanoids lashed out with their electron explosive whips. Squad members were already running up the feed roads behind them.

  Not all of the whips landed on target. Several detonations chopped into support pillars and door joists. Brick-sized lumps of stone came flying back down the feed roads. Two of the assault mechanoids were hit by the chunks, sending them cartwheeling backwards. The entire central loading bay collapsed, bringing with it a large section of the first-storey floor. An avalanche of crates and cylindrical storage pods tumbled down onto the road, burying a further three assault mechanoids. They started to fire their sense-overload ordnance at random; flares and sonic shells punching out from the wreckage amid huge fountains of white packaging chips. Crumpled kitchen units and patio furniture skittered down the mound.

  The AT Squad members dived for cover as another two mechanoids started to gyrate in a wild dance. Their ordnance sprayed out, slamming into walls and arching away over the park. Only three of the remaining assault mechanoids were actually firing ordnance into the two loading bays which had been broken open.

  “Pull them back!” Ralph datavised to the technical
officers. “Get those bloody mechanoids out of there.”

  Nothing happened. Sense-overload ordnance was squirting out everywhere.

  The assault mechanoids continued their lunatic dance. One pirouetted, twining its seven legs together, and promptly fell over. Ralph watched a dozen flares shoot straight upwards, illuminating the whole area. Black figures were lying prone on the feed roads, horribly exposed. A sense-overload flare speared straight into one of them; then it expanded strangely, creating a web of rippling white light. The suited figure thrashed about.

  “Shit,” Ralph grunted. It wasn’t a flare, it was the white fire. They were in the distribution centre! “Shut down those mechanoids now,” he datavised. His neural nanonics reported that several of his suit systems were degrading.

  “No response, sir,” a technical officer replied. “We’ve lost them completely, even their fallback routine has failed. How did they do that? The mechanoids are equipped with military-grade electronics, a megaton emp couldn’t glitch their processors.”

  Ralph could imagine the officer’s surprise. He’d undergone it himself back on Lalonde as the awful realization struck. He stood up from behind the parapet on top of the tunnel entrance, and lifted the heavy-calibre recoilless rifle. Targeting graphics flipped up over his helmet’s sensor image. He fired at an assault mechanoid.

  It exploded energetically, its power cells and ordnance detonating as soon as the armour-piercing round penetrated its flexing body. The blast wave shifted half of the precariously tangled wreckage in front of the collapsed loading bay. More crates thumped down from the sagging first-storey floor. Three assault mechanoids were sent lurching back down the feed roads, plasmatic legs juddering in fast undulations. Ralph shifted his aim and took out another one just as it started to lumber upright.

  “Squad, shoot out the mechanoids,” he ordered. His communications block informed him that half of the command channels had shut down. He switched on the block’s external speaker and repeated the order, bellowing it out across the feed roads at a volume which could be heard above the detonating mechanoids.

  A streak of white fire lanced down from one of Moyce’s upper windows. The threat response program in Ralph’s neural nanonics bullied his leg muscles with nerve impulse overrides. He was flinging himself aside before his conscious mind had registered the attack.

  Two more mechanoids exploded as he hit the concrete behind the parapet.

  He thought he recognized the heavy-calibre gaussrifle which the G66 troops used. Then an insidious serpent of white fire was coiling around his knee. His neural nanonics instantly erected analgesic blocks across his nerves, blanking out the pain. A medical display showed him skin and bone being eaten away by the white fire. The whole knee joint would be ruined in a matter of seconds if he couldn’t extinguish it. Yet both Dean and Will said smothering it like natural flames made hardly any difference.

  Ralph assigned his neural nanonics full control of his musculature, and simply designated the window which the white fire had emerged from. With detached interest he observed his body swivelling, the rifle barrel swinging round. His retinal target graphics locked over a window.

  Thirty-five rounds pummelled the black rectangle, a mixed barrage of high explosive (chemical), shrapnel, and incendiary.

  Within two seconds the room had ceased to exist, its carved stone frontage disintegrating behind a vast gout of flame and showering down on the melee below.

  The white fire around Ralph’s knee vanished. He pulled a medical nanonic package from his belt and slapped it on the charred wound.

  Down on the feed roads most of the AT Squad had switched to their communications block speakers. Orders, warnings, and cries for help reverberated over the sound of multiple explosions. A vast fusillade of heavy-calibre rifle fire was pounding into the loading bays. Comets of white fire poured out in retaliation.

  “Nelson,” Ralph datavised. “For Christ’s sake, make sure the troops out front don’t let anyone escape. They’re to hold position and shoot to kill now. Forget the capture mission; we’ll try it back here, but nobody else is to attempt anything fancy.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nelson Akroid answered.

  Ralph went back to the speaker. “Cathal, let’s try and get in there. Isolation procedure. Separate them, and nuke them.”

  “Sir.” The cry came back over the parapet.

  At least he’s still alive, Ralph thought.

  “Do you want stage two yet?” Admiral Farquar datavised.

  “No, sir. They’re still contained. Our perimeter is holding.”

  “Okay, Ralph. But the second there’s a status change, I need to know.”

  “Sir.”

  His neural nanonics reported the medical package had finished knitting to his knee. The weight load it could take was down forty percent. It would have to do. Ralph tucked the heavy-calibre rifle under his arm, then bending low, he ran for the end of the parapet and the steps down to the trunk road.

  Dean Folan signalled his team members forward, scurrying around the side of the big mound of crates and into the loading bay area. Flames had taken hold amid the fragments piled outside.

  It was dark inside the loading bays. Projectile impacts had etched deep pocks into the bare carbon-concrete walls. Rattail tangles of wire and fibre-optic cable hung down from the fissured ceiling, swaying gently.

  Through the helmet’s goggle lenses he could see very little, even with enhanced retinas on full sensitivity. He switched his shell helmet sensors to low light and infrared. Green and red images merged to form a pallid picture of the rear of the loading bay. Annoying glare spots flickered as small flames licked at the storage frames which lined the walls. Discrimination programs worked at eliminating them.

  There were three corridors leading off straight back from the rear of the bay, formed by the storage frames. Metal grids containing crates and pods ready for the lorries, they looked like solid walls of huge bricks.

  Cargo-handling mechanoids had stalled on their rails which ran along the side of the frames, plasmatic arms dangling inertly. Water was pouring out of five or six broken ceiling pipes, spilling down the crates to pool on the floor.

  Nothing moved in the corridors.

  Dean left his gaussrifle at the head of the middle corridor, knowing it would be useless at close range, the electronic warfare field would simply switch it off. Instead, he drew a semi-automatic rifle; it had a feed loop connected to his backpack, but the rounds were all chemical.

  The AT Squad had grumbled about that at the start, questioning the wisdom of abandoning their power weapons. Nobody had complained much after the mechanoids went berserk, and their suit systems suffered innumerable dropouts.

  Three of the team followed him as he advanced down the corridor, also carrying semi-automatics. The rest of them spread out around the bay and edged down the other two corridors.

  A figure zipped across the end of the corridor. Dean fired, the roar of the semi-automatic impressively loud in the confined space. Plastic splinters from the crates ricocheted through the air as the bullets chiselled into them.

  Dean started running forwards. There was no corpse on the floor.

  “Radford, did you see him?” Dean demanded. “He was heading towards your corridor.”

  “No, Chief.”

  “Anybody?”

  All he got was a series of negatives, some shouted, some datavised. No doubt the hostiles were about, his suit blocks were still badly affected by the electronic warfare field. His injured arm was itchy, too.

  He reached the end of the corridor. It was a junction to another three.

  “Hell, it’s a sodding maze back here.”

  Radford arrived at the end of his corridor, semi-automatic sweeping the storage frames.

  “Okay, we fan out here,” Dean announced. “All of you: keep two other squad members in visual range at all times. If you lose sight of your partners, then stop immediately and reestablish contact.”

  He picked one of the
corridors leading deeper into the shop and beckoned a couple of the Squad to follow him.

  A creature landed on top of Radford; half man, half black lion, features merged grotesquely. Its weight carried him effortlessly to the floor.

  Dagger claws scraped at Radford’s armour suit. But the integral valency generators had stiffened the fabric right from the moment of impact, protecting the vulnerable human skin inside. The creature howled in fury, thwarted at the very moment of triumph.

  Radford’s suit systems as well as his neural nanonics began to fail. Even his shocked yell was cut off as the communications block speaker died.

  The suit’s fabric started to give way, slowly softening. One of the claw tips screwed inwards, hungry for flesh.

  Even amid his frantic twisting and bucking to throw off the creature Radford was aware of a whisper which bordered on the subliminal. It had surely been there all his life, but only now with the prospect of death sharpening his perception was he fully conscious of it. It began to expand, not in volume, but in harmony. A whole chorus of whispers.

  Promising love. Promising sympathy. Promising to help, if he would just—

  Bullets smashed into the flanks of the creature, mauling the fur and long muscle bands. Dean kept his semi-automatic steady as the thing clung to Radford’s body. He could see the armour suit fabric hardening again, the claws slipping and skidding.

  “Stop!” one of the team was shouting. “You’ll kill Radford.”

  “He’ll be worse than dead if we don’t,” Dean snarled back. Spent casings were hurtling out of the rifle at an astounding rate. Still the beast wouldn’t let go, its great head shaking from side to side, emitting a continual wail of pain.

  The team was rushing en masse towards Dean down the narrow corridors between the storage frames. Two more were shouting at him to stop.

  “Get back!” he ordered. “Keep watching for the rest of the bastards.” His magazine was down to eighty per cent. The rifle didn’t have the power to beat the creature, all the thing had to do was hang on. Blood was running down its hind legs, the fur where the bullets struck a pulped mass of raw flesh. Not enough damage, not nearly enough.