The Neutronium Alchemist

  “Someone else fire at it for Christ’s sake,” Dean yelled frantically.

  Another rifle opened up; the second stream of bullets catching the creature on the side of its lycanthrope head. It let go of Radford, to be flung against the storage frame. The rampant wail from its gaping fangs redoubled.

  Dean boosted the communications block’s volume to its highest level.

  “Surrender or die,” he told it.

  It might have had a beast’s form, but the look of absolute hatred came from an all-too-human eye.

  “Grenade,” Dean ordered.

  A small grey cylinder thumped into the bloody body.

  Dean’s armour suit froze for a second. His collar sensors picked up the detonation: explosion followed by implosion. The outline of the beast collapsed into a middle-aged man, colour draining away. For a millisecond the man’s frame was captured perfectly, sprawled against the storage frame. Then the bullets resumed their attack. This time, he had no defence.

  Dean had seen worse carnage, though the limited space between the storage frames made it appear terrible. Several of the AT Squad obviously didn’t have his experience, or phlegmatism.

  Radford was helped to his feet and mumbled a subdued thanks. The sound of other teams from the AT Squad shooting somewhere in the building echoed tinnily down the corridors.

  Dean gave them another minute to gather their composure, then resumed the sweep. Ninety seconds after they started, Alexandria Noakes was calling for him.

  She’d discovered a man hunched up in a gap between two crates. Dean rushed up to find her prodding the captive out of his hiding place with nervous thrusts of her rifle. He levelled his own rifle squarely on the man’s head. “Surrender or die,” he said.

  The man gave a frail little laugh. “But I am dead, señor.”

  Eight police department hypersonics had landed in the park outside Moyce’s of Pasto. Ralph limped wearily towards the one which doubled as a mobile command centre for the AT Squad. There wasn’t that much difference from the rest, except it had more sensors and communications gear.

  It could have been worse, he told himself. At least Admiral Farquar and Deborah Unwin had stood down the SD platforms, for now.

  Stretchers with injured AT Squad members were arranged in a row below a couple of the hypersonics. Medics were moving among them, applying nanonic packages. One woman had been shoved into a zero-tau capsule, her wounds requiring immediate hospital treatment.

  A big crowd of curious citizens had materialized, milling about in the park and spilling out across the roads. Police officers had thrown up barricades, keeping them well away.

  Nine bulky fire department vehicles were parked outside Moyce’s of Pasto.

  Mechanoids trailing hoses had clambered up the walls with spiderlike tenacity, pumping foam and chemical inhibitors into smashed windows. A quarter of the roof was missing. Long flames were soaring up into the night sky out of the gap. Heat from the inferno was shattering the few remaining panes, creating more oxygen inflows.

  It was going to be a long time before Moyce’s would be open for business again.

  Nelson Akroid was waiting for him at the foot of the command hypersonic’s airstairs. His shell helmet was off, revealing a haggard face; a man who has seen the ungodly at play. “Seventeen wounded, three fatalities, sir,” he said in a voice close to breaking. His right hand was covered by a medical nanonic package. Scorch marks were visible on his armour suit.

  “And the hostiles?”

  “Twenty-three killed, six captured.” He twisted his head around to stare at the blazing building. “My teams, they did all right. We train to cope with nutters. But they beat those things. Christ—”

  “They did good,” Ralph said quickly. “But, Nelson, this was only round one.”

  “Yes, sir.” He straightened up. “The final sweep through the building was negative. I had to pull them out when the fire took hold. I’ve still got three teams covering it in case there are any hostiles still in there. They’ll do another sweep when the fire’s out.”

  “Good man. Let’s go see the prisoners.”

  The AT Squad was taking no chances; they were holding the six captives out on the park, keeping them a hundred metres apart. Each one stood in the centre of five squad members, five rifles trained on them.

  Ralph walked over to the one Dean Folan and Cathal Fitzgerald were guarding. He datavised his communications block to open a channel to Roche Skark. “You might like to see this, sir.”

  “I accessed the sensors around Moyce’s when the AT Squad went in,” the ESA director datavised. “They put up a lot of resistance.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If that happens each time we locate a nest of them, you’ll wind up razing half the city.”

  “The prospects for decontaminating them aren’t too good, either. They fight like mechanoids. Subduing them is tricky. These six are the exception.”

  “I’ll bring the rest of the committee in on the questioning. Can we have a visual please.”

  Ralph’s neural nanonics informed him that other people were coming on-line to observe the interview: the Privy Council security committee over in Atherstone, and the civil authorities in Pasto’s police headquarters. He instructed his communications block to widen the channel’s bandwidth to a full sensevise, allowing them to access what he could see and hear.

  Cathal Fitzgerald acknowledged him with the briefest nod as he approached. The man he was guarding was sitting on the grass, pointedly ignoring the semi-automatics directed at him. There was a slim white tube in his mouth. Its end was alight, glowing dully. As Ralph watched, the man sucked his cheeks in, and the coal glow brightened. He removed the tube from his mouth and exhaled a thin jet of smoke.

  Ralph exchanged a puzzled frown with Cathal, who merely shrugged.

  “Don’t ask me, boss,” Cathal said.

  Ralph ran a search program through his neural nanonics memory cells. The general encyclopedia section produced a file headed: Nicotine Inhalation.

  “Hey, you,” he said.

  The man looked up and took another drag. “Sí, señor.”

  “That’s a bad habit, which is why no one has done it for five centuries. Govcentral even refused an export licence for nicotine DNA.”

  A sly, sulky smile. “After my time, señor.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Santiago Vargas.”

  “Lying little bastard,” Cathal Fitzgerald said. “We ran an ident check. He’s Hank Doyle, distribution supervisor for Moyce’s.”

  “Interesting,” Ralph said. “Skibbow claimed to be someone else when he was caught: Kingsford Garrigan. Is that what the virus is programmed to do?”

  “Don’t know, señor. Don’t know any virus.”

  “Where does it come from? Where do you come from?”

  “Me, señor? I come from Barcelona. A beautiful city. I show you around sometime. I lived there many years. Some happy years, and some with my wife. I died there.”

  The cigarette glow lit up watery eyes which watched Ralph shrewdly.

  “You died there?”

  “Sí, señor.”

  “This is bullshit. We need information, and fast. What’s the maximum range of that white fire weapon?”

  “Don’t know, señor.”

  “Then I suggest you run a quick memory check,” Ralph said coldly.

  “Because you’re no use to me otherwise. It’ll be straight into zero-tau with you.”

  Santiago Vargas stubbed his cigarette out on the grass. “You want me to see how far I can throw it for you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay.” He climbed to his feet with indolent slowness.

  Ralph gestured out over the deserted reaches of the park. Santiago Vargas closed his eyes and extended his arm. His hand blazed with light, and a bolt of white fire sizzled away. It streaked over the grass flinging out a multitude of tiny sparks as it went. At a hundred metres it started to expand and dim, slowin
g down. At a hundred and twenty metres it was a tenuous luminescent haze. It never reached a hundred and thirty metres, evaporating in midair.

  Santiago Vargas wore a happy smile. “All right! Pretty good, eh, señor? I practice, I maybe get better.”

  “Believe me, you won’t have the opportunity,” Ralph told him.

  “Okay.” He seemed unconcerned.

  “How do you generate it?”

  “Don’t know, señor. I just think about it, and it happens.”

  “Then let’s try another tack. Why do you fire it?”

  “I don’t. That was the first time.”

  “Your friends didn’t have any of your inhibitions.”

  “No.”

  “So why didn’t you join them? Why didn’t you fight us?”

  “I have no quarrel with you, señor. It is the ones with passion, they fight your soldiers. They bring back many more souls so they can be strong together.”

  “They’ve infected others?”

  “Sí.”

  “How many?”

  Santiago Vargas offered up his hands, palms upwards. “I don’t think anyone in the shop escaped possession. Sorry, señor.”

  “Shit.” Ralph glanced back at the burning building, just in time to see another section of roof collapse. “Landon?” he datavised. “We’ll need a full list of staff on the nighttime shift. How many there were. Where they live.”

  “Coming up,” the commissioner replied.

  “How many of the infected left before we arrived?” he asked Santiago Vargas.

  “Not sure, señor. There were many trucks.”

  “They left on the delivery lorries?”

  “Sí. They sit in the back. You don’t have no driver’s seat these days. All mechanical. Very clever.”

  Ralph stared in dismay at the sullen man.

  “We’ve been concentrating on stopping passenger vehicles,” Diana Tiernan datavised. “Cargo traffic was only a secondary concern.”

  “Oh, Christ, if they got on to the motorways they could be halfway across the continent by now,” Ralph said.

  “I’ll reassign the AI vehicle search priority now.”

  “If you find any of Moyce’s lorries that are still moving, target them with the SD platforms. We don’t have any other choice.”

  “I agree,” Admiral Farquar datavised.

  “Ralph, ask him which of the embassy pair was in Moyce’s, please,” Roche Skark datavised.

  Ralph pulled a processor block from his belt, and ordered it to display pictures of Jacob Tremarco and Angeline Gallagher. He thrust it towards Vargas. “Did you see either of these people in the shop?”

  The man took his time. “Him. I think.”

  “So we’ve still got to find Angeline Gallagher,” Ralph said. “Any more city traffic with glitched processors?”

  “Three possibles,” Diana datavised. “We’ve already got two of them located. Both taxis from the spaceport.”

  “Okay, assign an AT Squad to each taxi. And make sure there are experienced personnel in both of them. What was the third trace?”

  “A Longhound bus which left the airport ten minutes after the embassy trio landed; it was a scheduled southern route, right down to the tip of Mortonridge. We’re working on its current location.”

  “Right, I’m coming back to the police headquarters. We’re finished here.”

  “What about him?” Nelson Akroid asked, jerking a thumb at the captive.

  Ralph glanced back. Santiago Vargas had found another cigarette from somewhere and was smoking it quietly. He smiled. “Can I go now, señor?” he asked hopefully.

  Ralph returned the smile with equal honesty. “Have the zero-tau pods from Ekwan arrived yet?” he datavised.

  “The first batch are due to arrive at Pasto spaceport in twelve minutes,” Vicky Keogh replied.

  “Cathal,” Ralph said out loud. “See if Mr. Vargas here will cooperate with us for just a little longer. I’d like to know the limits of the electronic warfare field, and that illusion effect of theirs.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “After that, take him and the others on a sightseeing trip to the spaceport. No exceptions.”

  “My pleasure.”

  ***

  The Loyola Hall was one of San Angeles’s more prestigious live-event venues. It seated twenty-five thousand under a domed roof which could be retracted when the weather was balmy, as it so frequently was in that city. There were excellent access routes to the nearby elevated autoway; the subway station was a nexus for six of the lines which ran beneath the city; it even had seven landing pads for VIP aircraft. There were five-star restaurants and snack bars, hundreds of rest rooms. Stewards were experienced and friendly. Police and promoters handled over two hundred events a year.

  The whole site was an operation which functioned with silicon efficiency.

  Until today.

  Eager kids had been arriving since six o’clock in the morning. It was now half past seven in the evening. Around the walls they were thronging twenty deep; scrums outside the various public doors needed police mechanoids to maintain a loose kind of order, and even they were in danger of being overwhelmed. The kids had a lot of fun spraying them with soft drinks and smearing ice creams over the sensors.

  Inside the hall every seat was taken, the tickets bought months ago. The aisles were filled with people, too, though how they had got in past the processor-regulated turnstiles was anyone’s guess. Touts were becoming overnight millionaires, those that weren’t being arrested or mugged by gangs of motivated fourteen-year-olds.

  It was the last night of Jezzibella’s Moral Bankruptcy tour. The New California system had endured five weeks of relentless media saturation as she swept across the asteroid settlements and down to the planetary surface. Rumour, of AV projectors broadcasting illegal activent patterns during her concerts to stimulate orgasms in the audience (not true, said the official press release, Jezzibella has abundant sexuality of her own, she doesn’t need artificial aids to boost the Mood Fantasy she emotes).

  Hyperbole, about the President’s youngest daughter being completely infatuated after meeting her, then sneaking out of the Blue Palace to go backstage at her concert (Jezzibella was delighted and deeply honoured to meet all members of the First Family, and we are not aware of any unauthorized entry to a concert). Scandal, when two of the band, Bruno and Busch, were arrested for violating public decency laws in front of a senior citizens holiday group, their bail posted at one million New California dollars (Bruno and Busch were engaged in a very wonderful, sensitive, and private act of love; and that bunch of filthy old perverts used enhanced retinas to spy on them). Straight hype, when Jezzibella visited (as a private citizen—so no sensevises, please) a children’s ward in a poor district of town, and donated half a million fuseodollars to the hospital’s germ-line treatment fund. Editorial shock at the way she flaunted her thirteen-year-old male companion, Emmerson (Mr Emmerson is Jezzibella’s second cousin, and his passport clearly states he is sixteen). A lot of spectator fun, and official police cautions, derived from the extraordinarily violent fights between her entourage’s security team and rover reporters. The storm of libel writs issued by Leroy Octavius, her manager, every time anyone suggested she was older than twenty-eight.

  And in all those five weeks she never gave an interview, never made a single public utterance outside of her stage routine. She didn’t have to.

  In that time, the regional office of Warner Castle Entertainment datavised out thirty-seven million copies of her new MF album Life Kinetic across the planet’s communications net to worshipful fans; her back catalogue sold equally well.

  The starship crews who normally made a tidy profit from selling a copy of an MF album to a distributor in star systems where they hadn’t been officially released yet cursed their luck when they arrived on planets where Jezzibella had passed through in the last eighteen months. But then that was the point of being a touring artist. A new album every nine months,
and visit ten star systems each year; it was the only way you could beat the bootleggers. If you weren’t prepared to do that, the only money you ever got was from your home star system. Few made the transition from local wonder to galactic mega-star. It took a lot of money to travel, and entertainment companies were reluctant to invest.

  The artist had to demonstrate a colossal degree of professionalism and determination before they were worth the multimillion-fuseodollar risk.

  Once they’d breached the threshold, of course, the old adage of money making more money had never been truer.

  High above the costly props and powerful AV stacks onstage, an optical-band sensor was scanning the crowd. Faces merged into a monotonous procession as it swept along the tiers and balconies. Fans came in distinct categories: the eager exhilarated ones, mostly young; boisterous and expectant, late teens; impatient, already stimmed-out, nervous, fearfully worshipful, even a few who obviously wanted to be somewhere else but had come along to please their partner. Every costume Jezzibella had ever worn in an MF track was out there somewhere, from the simple to the peacock bizarre.

  The sensor focused on a couple in matching leathers. The boy was nineteen or twenty, the girl at his side a bit younger. They had their arms around each other, very much in love. Both tall, healthy, vital.

  Jezzibella cancelled the datavise from the sensor. “Those two,” she told Leroy Octavius. “I like them.”

  The unpleasantly overweight manager glanced at the short AV pillar sticking out of his processor block, checking the two blithesome faces.

  “Roger dodger. I’ll get on it.”

  There was no quibbling, not the faintest hint of disapproval. Jezzibella liked that; it was what made him such a good manager. He understood how it was for her, the things she required in order to function. She needed kids like those two. Needed what they’d got, the naïveté, the uncertainty, the delight at life. She had none of that left, now, not the sweet side of human nature. The eternal tour had drained it all away, somewhere out among the stars; one energy which could leak out of a zero-tau field. Everything became secondary to the tour, feelings weren’t allowed to interfere. And feelings suppressed long enough simply vanished. But she couldn’t have that, because she needed an understanding of feelings in order to work. Circles. Her life was all circles.