The Neutronium Alchemist

  “Yes, Captain. Take care.”

  A datavise couldn’t convey emotional nuances, but he knew Dahybi well enough to guess at the amused approval.

  “You accept his claim, then?” Ione asked.

  “The DNA profile seems similar to mine,” Joshua said grudgingly.

  “Yes, I’d say ninety-seven per cent compatibility is roughly in the target area. It’s not unusual for starship crews to have extended families spread over several star systems.”

  “Thank you for reminding me.”

  “If your father was ever anything like you, then it’s possible Liol isn’t your only sibling.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m just preparing you for the eventuality. Kelly Tirrel’s recording has enhanced your public visibility rating by a considerable factor. Others may seek you out in the same way.”

  He pulled an ironic face. “Wouldn’t that be something? The gathering of the Calverts. I wonder if there are more of us than there are Saldanas?”

  “I very much doubt it, not if you include our illegitimates.”

  “And black sheep.”

  “Quite. What do you intend to do about Liol?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. He’s not touching the Lady Mac, though. Can you imagine having board meetings every time to decide her next destination? It’s the opposite of everything I am, not to mention the old girl herself.”

  “He’ll probably come to realize this. I’m sure you can come to some arrangement. He appears to be quite smart.”

  “The word is smarmy.”

  “There’s very little difference between you.”

  The lift dropped him off in a public hall a couple of hundred metres from the Terminal Terminus club where the benefit gig was being played. Not everyone was obeying the governing council’s request to stay put at home.

  Kids filled the hall with laughter and shouts. Everyone was wearing a red handkerchief on their ankle.

  For a moment Joshua felt disconnected from his own generation. He had formidable responsibilities (not to mention problems); they were just stimheads sliding around their perpetual circuit from one empty good time to the next. They didn’t understand the universe at all.

  Then a couple of them recognized Lagrange Calvert and wanted to know what it was like rescuing the children from Lalonde, and had there really been possessed in Bar KF-T? They were peppy, and the girls in the group were giving him the eye. He began to loosen up; the barriers weren’t so solid after all.

  The Terminal Terminus looked like some kind of chasmal junction between tunnels. Big, old mining machines were parked in arching recesses, their conical, worn-down drill mechanisms jutting out into the main chamber.

  Obsolete mechanoids clung to the ceiling, spider-leg waldos dangling down inertly. Drinks were served over a long section of heavy-duty caterpillar track.

  A fantasy wormhole squatted in the centre, a rippling gloss-black column five metres wide stretching between floor and ceiling. Things were trapped inside, undefined creatures who clawed at the distortion effect in desperate attempts to escape; the black surface bent and distended, but never broke.

  “Very tasteful, under the circumstances,” Joshua muttered to a serjeant.

  A stage had been set up between two of the mining machines. AV projectors powerful enough to cover a stadium stood on each side.

  One of the serjeants went off to guard an emergency exit. The remaining two stuck by Joshua.

  He found Kole standing with a group of her friends under one of the mining machines. Her hair had been woven through with silver and chrome-scarlet threads, which every now and then made it fan open like a peacock tail.

  He paused for a moment. She was so phony; rich without Dominique’s cosmopolitan verve, and absolute trash compared to Louise’s simple honesty.

  Louise.

  Kole caught sight of him and squealed happily, kissed him, rubbed against him. “Are you all right? I accessed what happened after I left.”

  He grinned brashly, the legend in the flesh. “I’m fine. My … er, cosmoniks here are a tough bunch. We’ve seen worse.”

  “Really?” She cast a respectful eye over the two serjeants. “Are you male?”

  “No.”

  Joshua couldn’t tell if Ione was annoyed, amused, or plain didn’t care.

  On second thought, he doubted the latter.

  Kole kissed him again. “Come and meet the gang. They didn’t believe I’d hooked you. Mother, I can’t believe I hooked you.”

  He braced himself for the worst.

  From her vantage point lounging casually on a coolant feed duct a third of the way up the side of a mining machine, Monica Foulkes watched Joshua greeting Kole’s posse of friends. He knew exactly the attitude to take to be accepted within seconds. She took a gulp of iced mineral water as her enhanced retinas scanned the young faces below. It was hot wearing the chameleon suit, but it gave her the skin tone of Ayacucho’s Kenyan-ethnic population; “foreign agents” were about as popular as the possessed right now. Except Calvert, of course, she thought sorely, he was being greeted like a bloody hero. Her characterization recognition program ran a comparison against the youngsters she was scanning, and signalled a ninety-five per cent probable match.

  “Damn!”

  Samuel (now black-skinned, twenty-five years old, and wearing jazzy purple sports gear) looked up from the base of the mining machine. “What?”

  “You were right. Kole has just introduced him to Adok Dala.”

  “Ah. I knew it. He was Voi’s boyfriend up until she dumped him eighteen months ago.”

  “Yes yes, I can access the file for myself, thank you.”

  “Can you hear what’s being said?”

  She glanced down contemptuously. “Not a chance. This place is really filling up now. My audio discrimination programs can’t filter over that distance.”

  “Come down please, Monica.”

  Something in his tone halted any protest. She slithered down the pitted yellow-painted titanium bodywork of the mining machine.

  “We have to decide what to do. Now.”

  She flinched. “Oh, God.”

  “Do you believe Adok Dala will know where Voi is?”

  “I don’t think so, but there’s no guarantee. And if we snatch Dala now, it isn’t going to make a whole lot of difference as far as official repercussions are concerned. He’s hardly going to complain about being taken off Ayacucho, is he?”

  “You’re right. And it will prevent Calvert from learning anything.”

  Joshua’s neural nanonics reported a call from Dahybi. “Two voidhawks from the defence delegation have just left the docking ledge, Captain. Our sensors can’t see much from inside the bay, but we think they’re keeping station five kilometres off the spaceport.”

  “Okay, keep monitoring them.”

  “No problem. But you should know that Ayacucho is suffering localized power failures. They’re completely random, and the supervisor programs can’t locate any physical problem in the supply system. One of the news studios has gone off-line, as well.”

  “Jesus. Start flight prepping Lady Mac; I’ll wind things up here and get back to you within thirty minutes.”

  “Aye, Captain. Oh, and Liol has arrived. He’s not possessed.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Kole was still clinging magnetically to his side. No one she’d introduced him to had mentioned Voi. His original idea had been to ask them about Ikela’s murder and see what was said. But now time was running out. He looked around to find out where the serjeants were, hoping Ione wasn’t going to make an issue of pulling out. Hell, we gave it our best.

  The compere was striding out on the stage, holding her arms out for silence as the rowdy crowd cheered and started catcalling. She started into her spiel about the Fuckmasters.

  “This is Shea,” Kole told him.

  It was hard for Joshua to smile; Shea was tall and skinny, almost identical to Voi’s size and height. He datavised his el
ectronic warfare block to scan her, but she was clean. What he saw was real, not a chameleon suit. It wasn’t Voi.

  “This is Joshua Calvert,” Kole boasted, raising her voice against the rising whistle of the giant AV projectors. “He’s my starship captain.”

  Shea’s melancholia became outright distress. She started crying.

  Kole gave her an astonished look. “What’s the matter?”

  Shea shook her head, lips sealed together.

  “I’m sorry,” Joshua said, earnestly sympathetic. “What did I do?”

  Shea smiled bravely. “It’s not you. It’s just … my boyfriend left this afternoon. He’s captaining a starship, too, and that reminded me. I don’t know when I’m going to see him again. He wouldn’t say.”

  Intuition was starting a major-league riot in Joshua’s skull. The first MF band was strolling onstage. He put a protective arm around Shea’s shoulders, ignoring Kole’s flash of ire. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink. You can tell me about it. You never know, I might be able to help. Stranger things happen in space.”

  He signalled the two serjeants frantically, and turned away from the stage just as the AV projectors burst into life. A thick haze of coherent light filled the Terminal Terminus. Even though he was looking away, sensations spirited down his nerves; fragmented signals saturated with crude activant sequences. He felt good. He felt hot. He felt randy. He felt slippery.

  A glance back over his shoulder had him sitting on a saddle astride a giant penis, urging it forwards.

  Honestly, kids today. When he was younger MF was about the giddy pursuit, how it felt when your partner adored you in return, or spurned you without reason. Making up and breaking up. The infinite states of the heart, not the dick.

  The kids around him were laughing and giggling, joyous expressions on their incredulous faces as the AV dazzle poured down their irises. They all swayed from side to side in unison.

  “Joshua, four Edenists are coming this way,” a serjeant warned.

  Joshua could see them in the sparkling light cloud which pervaded the audience. Taller than everyone else, some kind of visor over their eyes, moving intently through the swinging throng.

  He grabbed Shea’s hand tightly. “This way,” he hissed urgently, and veered off towards the mock wormhole in the centre of the club. One of the serjeants cleared a path, forcing people aside. Frowns and snarls lined his route.

  “Dahybi,” he datavised. “Get the rest of the serjeants out of zero-tau, fast. Secure a route through the spaceport from the axial chamber to Lady Mac. I might be needing it.”

  “It’s being done, Captain. Parts of the asteroid’s net are crashing.”

  “Jesus. Okay, we’ve got the serjeants’ affinity to keep communications open if it goes completely. You’d better keep one in the bridge with you.”

  He reached the writhing black column and looked back. Shea was breathless and confused, but not protesting. The Edenists weren’t chasing after him.

  “What … ?” Some sort of struggle had broken out over where he’d left Kole’s friends. Two of the tall agents were pulling an inert body between them. It was Adok Dala, unconscious and shaking, victim of a nervejam shot. The other pair of agents and someone else were holding back some irate kids. A nervejam stick was raised and fired.

  Joshua turned his head a little too far, and he was tasting nipple while he slid over dark pigmentation as if he were snowboard slaloming, leaving a huge trail of glistening saliva behind him. His neck muscles flicked back a couple of degrees, and the Edenists were retreating, completely unnoticed by the entranced euphoric audience they were shoving their way through. Behind them, Kole’s friends clung together; those still standing wept uncomprehendingly over those felled by the violence which had stabbed so unexpectedly into their moment of erotic rapture.

  Shea gasped at the scene and made to rush over.

  “No,” Joshua shouted. He pulled her back, and she recoiled, as frightened by him as the agents. “Listen to me, we have to get out of here. It’s only going to get worse.”

  “Is it the possessed?”

  “Yeah. Now come on.”

  Still keeping hold of her hand he slid around the wormhole. It felt like dry rubber against his side, flexing in queasy movements.

  “Nearest exit,” he told the serjeant in front of him. “Go.” It began to plough through tightly packed bodies at an alarming speed. Blissfully unaware people were sent tumbling. Joshua followed on grimly. The Edenists must have wanted Adok Dala for the same reason he wanted Shea.

  Had he got the wrong friend? Oh, hell.

  The cavern wall was only ten metres ahead of him now, a red circle shining above an exit. His electronic warfare block datavised an alarm.

  Jesus! “Ione.”

  “I know,” the lead serjeant shouted. It drew its machine gun.

  “No,” he cried. “You can’t, not in here.”

  “I’m not inhuman, Joshua,” the burly figure retorted.

  They reached the wall and hurried along to the exit. That was when he realized Kole was still with them.

  “Stay here,” he told her. “You’ll be safe with all these people.”

  “You can’t leave me here,” she gasped imploringly. “Joshua! I know what’s happening. You can’t. I don’t want that to happen to me. You can’t let them. Take me with you, for Mary’s sake!”

  And she was just a stricken young girl whose broken hair was flapping wildly.

  The first serjeant slammed the door open and went through. “I’ll stay here,” the second said. The machine gun was held ready in one hand. It took out an automatic pistol and held it in the other. “That’s a bonus, these things are ambidextrous. Don’t worry, Joshua. They’ll suffer if they try and get past me.”

  “Thanks, Ione.” Then he was out in the corridor, urging the two girls along. “Dahybi,” he datavised. His neural nanonics reported they couldn’t acquire a net processor. “Bugger.”

  “The other serjeants are securing the spaceport,” the serjeant told him.

  “And the Lady Mac is flight prepped. Everything is ready.”

  “Great.” His electronic warfare block was still datavising its alarm. He took his own nine-millimetre pistol out of its holster. Its operating procedure program went primary.

  They came to a crossroads in the corridor. And Joshua wasted a second querying the net on the direction he wanted. Cursing, he requested the Ayacucho layout he’d stored in a memory cell. There would be too much risk using a lift now; power supplies were dubious, transport management processors more so. His neural nanonics devised the shortest route to the axial chamber, it seemed depressingly far.

  “This way.” He pointed down the left hand corridor.

  “Excuse me,” someone said.

  Joshua’s electronic warfare block gave out one final warning, then shut down. He whirled around. Standing ten metres down the other corridor were a man and a woman, dressed in heavy black leather jackets and trousers with an improbable number of shiny zips and buckles.

  “Run,” the serjeant ordered. It stepped squarely into the middle of the corridor and levelled its compact machine gun.

  Joshua didn’t hesitate. Shoving at the girls, he started running. He heard a few heated words being shouted behind him. Then the machine gun fired.

  He took the first turning, desperate to escape from the line of sight.

  His neural nanonics immediately revised his route. The corridors were all identical, three metres high, three metres wide, and apparently endless.

  Joshua hated that, trapped in a maze and utterly reliant on a guidance program susceptible to the possessed. He wanted to know exactly where he was, and be able to prove it. Being unaware of his exact location was an alien experience. Human doubt was superseding technological prowess.

  He was looking over his shoulder as he took the next turning, making sure the girls were keeping up and there was no sign of any pursuit. His peripheral vision monitor program indexed the figure stridin
g down the corridor towards him milliseconds before his neural nanonics crashed.

  It was a man in white Arab robes. He smiled in simple gratitude as Joshua and the girls stumbled to a halt in front of him.

  Joshua swung his pistol around, but the lack of any procedural program meant he misjudged its weight. The arc was too great. Before he could bring it back to line up on the target, a ball of white fire struck his hand.

  Joshua howled at the flare of terrible pain as the pistol fell from his grip. No matter how vigorously he waved his arm the deadly white flame could not be dislodged from its grip around his fingers. Oily stinking smoke spouted out.

  “Time to say goodbye to your life,” the smiling possessed said.

  “Fuck you.”

  He could hear the girls crying out behind him, the wails of their revulsion and horror. Shock was diminishing the pain in his hand slightly. He could feel the puke rising in his throat as more and more of his flesh charred. His whole right arm was stiffening. Somewhere behind his assailant a vast crowd of invisible people were whispering all at once. “No.” It wasn’t a coherent word, just a defiant grunt mangled by his contorted throat muscles. I will not submit to that. Never.

  A cascade of water burst out of the corridor’s ceiling to the accompanying sound of a high-pitched siren. The edge of the lighting panels turned red and started to flash.

  Shea was laughing with brittle hysteria as she withdrew her fist from the fire alarm panel. Dots of blood oozed up from her grazed knuckles. Joshua punched his own hand upwards, straight underneath a nozzle. He roared triumphantly. The white flame vanished in a gust of steam, and he collapsed down onto his knees, his whole body shaking violently.

  The Arab regarded the three of them with a degree of aristocratic annoyance, as if any hint of defiance was unprecedented. Water splattered on his dark headgear, turning his robe translucent as it clung to his body.

  Joshua raised his head against the icy torrent to snarl at his enemy. His right hand was dead now; a supreme crush of coldness had devoured his wrist. A few spittles of vomit emerged from his mouth before he managed to growl: “Okay, shithead, my turn.”