Neutronium Alchemist - Conflict nd-4 Read online

  Neutronium Alchemist - Conflict

  ( Night's Dawn - 4 )

  Peter F. Hamilton

  Not every fallen angel comes from heaven...

  The ancient menace has finally escaped from Lalonde, shattering the Confederation's peaceful existence. Those who succumbed to it have acquired godlike powers, but now follow a far from divine gospel as they advance inexorably from world to world. On planets and asteroids, individuals battle for survival against the strange and brutal forces unleashed upon the universe. Governments teeter on the brink of anarchy, the Confederation Navy is dangerously over-stretched, and a dark messiah prepares to invoke his own version of the final Night. In such desperate times the last thing the galaxy needs is a new and terrifyingly powerful weapon. Yet Dr Alkad Mzu is determined to retrieve the Alchemist - so she can complete her thirty-year-old vendetta to slay a star. Which means Joshua Calvert has to find Dr Mzu and bring her back before the Alchemist can be reactivated. But he's not alone in the chase, and there are people on both sides who have their own ideas about how to use the ultimate doomsday device.

  The Neutronium Alchemist: Conflict, is the second part of the second novel of Peter F. Hamilton's space opera epic that ranges not only across interstellar space but across the boundary between life and death. (The series begins with The Reality Dysfunction: Emergence and Expansion). This book mainly revolves around Dr. Alkad Mzu, creator of a doomsday weapon so powerful it scares even the citizens of this high-tech and heavily beweaponed future. Mzu is on a decades-long quest to take vengeance against the people who destroyed her home planet, and she wields alarming cunning and ruthlessness in the pursuit. But what gives even her pause is the war against the souls of the dead who have returned from a hellish Beyond to possess the living. Both sides want her: the dead want the weapon, the living want to keep the weapon out of the dead's hands. Unfortunately for them, that means they must find and take Mzu alive, while all the dead need to do is kill her, bringing her into their realm. Rarely has science fiction produced a series as rich, satisfying, and big as this one. In addition to the action, Hamilton continues to beguile us with the greater mystery of the returned dead--new clues are discovered, only to create new enigmas.

  Neutronium Alchemist: Conflict

  Chapter 01

  Lady Macbeth slipped slowly into place above the docking cradle, her equatorial verniers sparkling briefly as Joshua compensated for drift. Optical-band sensors gave a poor return here; Tunja’s ruby glow was insipid even in clear space, and down where Ayacucho lurked among the disk particles it was an abiding roseate gloom. Laser radar guided the starship in until the cradle latches clamped home.

  The bay’s rim lights sprang up to full intensity, highlighting the hull, their reflected beams twisting about at irregular angles as the thermo-dump panels folded back into the fuselage. Then the cradle started to descend.

  In the bridge not a word was spoken. It was the mood which had haunted them all the way from Narok, an infection passed down from captain to crew.

  Sarha looked over the bridge at Joshua for some sign of . . . humanity, she supposed. He had flown them here, making excellent time as always. And apart from the kind of instructions necessary to keep the ship humming smoothly, he hadn’t put ten words together. He’d even taken his meals alone in his cabin.

  Beaulieu and Dahybi had told the rest of the crew of the Norfolk possession, and how concerned Joshua had been for Louise. So at least Sarha knew the reason for his blues, even though she found it slightly hard to believe. This was the Joshua with whom she’d had an affair for over six months last year. He was so easy about the relationship that when they did finally stop sleeping together she’d stayed on as part of the crew without any awkwardness on either side.

  Which was why she found it difficult that Joshua could be so affected by what had happened to Louise, by all accounts a fairly simple country girl. He never became that entangled. Commitment wasn’t a concept which nested in his skull. Part of the fascination was his easygoing nature. There was never any deceit with Joshua, you knew just where you stood.

  Perhaps Louise wasn’t so simple after all. Perhaps I’m just jealous.

  “Going to tell us now, Captain?” she asked.

  “Huh?” Joshua turned his head in her general direction.

  “Why we’re here? We’re not chasing Meyer anymore. So who is this Dr Mzu?”

  “Best you don’t ask.”

  A circuit of the bridge showed her how irritated everyone was getting with his attitude. “Absolutely, Joshua; I mean, you can’t be sure if we’re trustworthy, can you? Not after all this time.”

  Joshua stared at her. Fortunately, belaboured intuition finally managed to struggle through his moping thoughts to reveal the crew’s bottled-up exasperation. “Bugger,” he winced. Sarha was right, after all they’d been through together these people deserved a better style of captaincy than this. Jesus, I’m picking up Ione’s paranoia. Thank God I didn’t have to make any real command decisions. “Sorry, I just got hit by Norfolk. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Nobody expected any of this, Joshua,” Sarha said sympathetically.

  “Yeah, right. Okay, Dr Mzu is a physicist, who once worked for the Garissan navy—”

  They didn’t say much while he told them what the flight was about. Which was probably a good thing, he guessed. It was one hell of a deal he’d accepted on their behalf. How would I feel if they’d dragged me along without knowing why?

  When he finished he could see a mild smile on Ashly’s face, but then the old pilot always did claim to chase after excitement. The others took it all reasonably stoically; though Sarha was looking at him with a kind of bemused pique.

  Joshua hitched his face up into one of his old come-on grins. “Told you, you were better off not knowing.”

  She hissed at him, then relented. “Bloody hell, wasn’t there anybody else the Lord of Ruin could use?”

  “Who would you trust?”

  Sarha tried to come up with an answer, and failed hopelessly.

  “If anyone wants to bail out, let me know,” Joshua said. “This wasn’t exactly covered in my job description when you signed on.”

  “Neither was Lalonde,” Melvyn said dryly.

  “Beaulieu?” Joshua asked.

  “I have always served my captain to the best of my ability,” the shiny cosmonik said. “I see no reason to stop now.”

  “Thanks. All of you. Okay, let’s get Lady Mac powered down. Then we’ll have a quick scout around for the doctor.”

  The Dorados Customs and Immigration Service took seventy-five minutes to process the Lady Mac ’s crew. Given the quarantine, Joshua had been expecting some hassle, but these officers seemed intent on analysing every molecule in the starship. Their documentation was reviewed four separate times. Joshua wound up paying a five-thousand-fuseodollar administration fee to the chief inspector before they were confirmed to be non-possessed, had the appropriate Tranquillity government authorization to be flying, and declared suitable citizens to enter Ayacucho.

  The lawyers were waiting for him at the end of the docking bay airlock tube. Three of them, two men and a woman, their unfussy blue suits cloned from some conservative chain-store design program.

  “Captain Calvert?” the woman asked. She gave him a narrow frown, as if uncertain he could be the person she wanted.

  Joshua rotated slightly so his silver star on his epaulette was prominent. “You got me.”

  “You are the captain of the Lady Macbeth ?” Again the uncertainty.

  “Yep.”

  “I am Mrs Nateghi from Tayari, Usoro and Wang, we represent the Zaman Service and Equipment Company whic
h operates here in the spaceport.”

  “Sorry, guys, I don’t need a maintenance contract. We just got refitted.”

  She held out a flek with a gold scale of justice symbol embossed on one side. “Marcus Calvert, this is a summons for fees owing to our client since August 2586. You are required to appear before the Ayacucho civil claims court at a date to be set in order to resolve this debt.”

  The flek was pressed into Joshua’s palm. “Whaa—” he managed to grunt.

  Sarha started giggling, which drew a cool glare from Mrs Nateghi. “We have also filed a court impounding order on the Lady Macbeth ,” she said frostily. “Please do not try and leave as you did last time.”

  Joshua kissed the flek flamboyantly and beamed at the woman. “I’m Joshua Calvert. I think you should be talking to my father. He’s Marcus Calvert.”

  If the statement threw her, there was no visible sign. “Are you the Lady Macbeth ’s current owner?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you remain liable for the debt. I will have the summons revised to reflect this. The impounding order remains unaffected.”

  Joshua kept his smile in place. He datavised the flight computer for a review of all 2586 log entries. There weren’t any. “Jesus, Dad, thanks a bunch,” he muttered under his breath. No way—absolutely not—would he show the three vultures how fazed he was. “Look, this is obviously an oversight, a computer glitch, something on those lines. I have no intention of contesting the debt. And I shall be very happy to pay off any money owing on Lady Mac ’s account. I’m sure nobody wants this regrettable misunderstanding to come to court.” He jabbed a toe at Sarha whose giggles had turned to outright laughter.

  Mrs Nateghi gave a brisk nod. “It is within my brief to accept payment in full.”

  “Fine.” Joshua took his Jovian Bank credit disk out of his ship-suit’s top pocket.

  “The cost in 2586 to the Zaman Company for services rendered comes to seventy-two thousand fuseodollars. I have an invoice.”

  “I’m sure you do.” Joshua held out the credit disk, anxious to be finished.

  The lawyer consulted her processor block, a show of formality. “The interest accrued on your debt over twenty-five years comes to two hundred and eighty-nine thousand fuseodollars, as approved by the court.”

  Sarha’s laughter ended in a choke. Joshua had to use a neural nanonics nerve impulse override to stop himself from snarling at the lawyer. He was sure she was doing the same to stop her equally blank face from sneering. Bitch! “Of course,” he said faintly.

  “And our firm’s fee for dealing with the case is twenty-three thousand fuseodollars.”

  “Yes, I thought you were cheap.”

  This time, she scowled.

  Joshua shunted the money over. The lawyers hauled themselves away down the corridor.

  “Can we afford that?” Sarha asked.

  “Yes,” Joshua said. “I have an unlimited expense account for this trip. Ione’s paying.” He didn’t want to dwell on what she’d say when she saw the bill.

  I wonder why Dad left in such a hurry?

  Ashly patted Joshua’s shoulder. “Real chip off the old block, your dad, eh?”

  “I hope he hurries up and possesses someone soon,” Joshua said through gritted teeth. “There’s a few things I’d like to talk to him about.” Then he thought about what he’d just said. Maybe not as funny and cuttingly sarcastic as he’d intended. Because Dad was there in the beyond. Suffering in the beyond. That’s if he wasn’t already . . . “Come on, let’s make a start.”

  The club he wanted, according to the spaceport personnel, was the Bar KF-T; that’s where the action was. Along with the dealers, pushers, and pimps, and all the rest of the people in the know.

  The trouble was, Joshua found after a straight two-hour stint of surfing the tables, they didn’t know the one piece of information he needed. The name of Alkad Mzu had not left a heavy impression on the citizens of Ayacucho.

  At the end he gave up and went to sit with Ashly and Melvyn at a raised corner table. It gave him a good view over the dance floor, where some nice girls were moving in trim movements. He rolled his beer bottle between his palms, not much interested in the contents.

  “It was only a long shot, Captain,” Melvyn said. “We ought to start sniffing around the astroengineering companies. Right now they’re so desperate for business that even the legitimate ones would happily consider selling her a frigate.”

  “If she wants to disappear, she has to do it at the bottom of the heap,” Joshua said. “You’d think the dealers would have heard something.”

  “Maybe not,” Ashly said. “There’s definitely some kind of underground league here. It can’t be the same as the usual asteroid independence movements; the Dorados are already sovereign. I got a few hints when they thought I was offering Lady Mac ’s services, plenty of talk about revenge against Omuta. Mzu could have turned to them, after all they’re her people. Unfortunately, the likes of you and I can hardly pass ourselves off as long-lost cousins of the cause.” He held up his hand, studying it dispassionately.

  Joshua looked at his own skin. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. We’re not exactly obvious Kenyan-ethnic stock are we?”

  “Dahybi might make the grade.”

  “I doubt it.” His eyes narrowed. “Jesus, will you look at how many of those kids are wearing red handkerchiefs around their ankles.” Six or seven times that evening while he’d been scouting around teenagers had asked him to take them to Valisk.

  “We could do worse than the Deadnights,” Melvyn said broodingly. “At least there aren’t any possessed here.”

  “Don’t count on it.” Ashly leaned over the table, lowering his voice. “My neural nanonics suffered a couple of program load errors this evening. Not full glitches, but the diagnostics couldn’t pinpoint the cause.”

  “Humm.” Joshua looked at Melvyn. “You?”

  “My communications block had a five-second dropout.”

  “Some of my memory cells went off-line earlier, too. I should have paid more attention. Shit. We’ve been here barely three hours, and we’ve each been close enough to one to be affected. What does that come to in percentages of the population?”

  “Paranoia can be worse than real dangers,” Melvyn said.

  “Sure. If they are here, they’re obviously not strong enough to mount an all-out takeover campaign. Yet. That gives us a little time.”

  “So what’s out next move?” Melvyn asked.

  “Other end of the spectrum, I suppose,” Joshua said. “Contact someone in government who can run discreet checks for us. Or maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let slip the Lady Mac is for hire. If Mzu is here to get help, the only place it’ll come from is the nationalist community. They might even wind up trying to charter us to deploy the damn thing.”

  “Too late now,” Ashly said. “We’re officially here to buy defence components for Tranquillity. And we’ve been asking too many questions.”

  “Yeah. Jesus, I’m not used to thinking along these lines. I wonder if any of my fellow captains have been approached for a combat charter?”

  “Only if she’s actually in this asteroid,” Ashly said. “Nothing to stop the Samaku docking at one of the others when it arrived. That’s even if she came here in the first place. We ought to be checking that.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” Joshua moaned. “Sarha’s working on it.”

  Sarha’s smile appeared a little frayed after the third time Mabaki bumped against her. The crowd in the Bar KF-T weren’t that excitable. She could certainly thread her way through without jostling anyone.

  Mabaki waggled his eyebrows when she glanced back. “Sorry.” He grinned.

  It wasn’t so much that he bumped her, as where. And how the touch tarried. She told herself a pathetic middle-aged letch was probably going to be one of the smaller tribulations they would encounter on this crazy course Joshua had set.

  Just before she gave in and tried a datavise,
she located Joshua standing over by the bar (where else, she asked herself). “That’s him,” she told Mabaki.

  Sarha tapped Joshua on the shoulder as he was accepting a beer bottle from the barmaid. “Joshua, I found someone I think can . . .” She trailed off in confusion. It wasn’t Joshua. That she of all people could be mistaken was astonishing. But he did look remarkably similar, especially in the treacherously shimmering light thrown out by the dance floor’s holographic spray. Same broad chest to accommodate a metabolism geneered for free fall, identical prominent jaw folding back into flat cheeks. But this man’s skin was darker, though nothing like the ebony of most Dorado Kenyan-ethnics, and his glossy hair was jet-black rather than Joshua’s nondescript brown.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammered.

  “I’m not.” He could certainly manage the Joshua charm-grin, too. Possibly even better than Joshua.

  “I was looking for someone else.”

  “I hate him already.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Oh, please, I’m too young for my life to end. And it will when you leave. At least have a drink with me first. He can wait.”

  “No he can’t.” She began to move away. Some erratic impulse made her look back in perplexity. Damn, the likeness was extraordinary.

  His smile widened. “That’s it. You’re making the right choice.”

  “No. No, I’m not.”

  “At least let me give you my eddress.”

  “Thank you, but we’re not staying.” Sarha forced her legs to work. She just knew her face would be red. How stupidly embarrassing.

  “I’m Liol,” he called out after her. “Just ask for Liol. Everybody knows me.”

  I’ll bet they do, she thought, especially the girls. The crowd closed around her again, Mabaki tagging along faithfully.

  Second time lucky. Joshua was sitting at a table in a shadowy corner, and he was with Ashly and Melvyn, so there was no mistake this time.