Neutronium Alchemist - Consolidation

“And we haven’t finished yet. If you weren’t so thick you’d know that.”

Gari appealed to Jed, chubby face quivering on the threshold of tears.

Miri and Navar were Digger’s daughters (by different mothers), so if Jed lifted a finger to them Digger would hit him. He’d found that out months ago. They knew it too, and used the knowledge with tactical skill.

“Come on,” he told Gari, “we’ll go down to the day club.”

Miri and Navar laughed jeeringly as Gari shut down her processor block and glared at them. Jed shoved the door open and faced his tiny worldlet.

“It’s not any quieter at the club,” Gari said as the door shut behind them.

Jed nodded dispiritedly. “I know. But you can ask Mrs Yandell if you can use her office. She’ll understand.”

“Suppose,” Gari acknowledged brokenly. Not long ago her brother had been capable of putting the whole universe to rights. A time before Digger.

Jed set off down the tunnel. Only the floor had been covered in composite tiling, the walls and ceiling were naked rock lined with power cables, data ducts, and fat environmental tubes. He took the left turning at the first junction, not even thinking. His life consisted of walking the hexagonal weave of tunnels which circled the asteroid’s interior; that entire topographic web existed only to connect two places: the apartment and the day club. There was nowhere else.

Tunnels with gloomy lighting, hidden machines that made every wall in Koblat thrum quietly; that was his environment now, a worldlet without a single horizon. Never fresh air and open spaces and plants, never room , not for his body or his mind. The first biosphere cavern was still being bored out (that was where Digger worked), but it was years behind schedule and ruinously over budget. At one time Jed had lived with the faith that it would provide him an outlet for all his crushed-up feelings of confinement and anger, allowing him to run wild over fresh-planted grass meadows. Not now. His mum and Digger along with all the rest of the adults were too stupid to appreciate what possession really meant. But he knew. Nothing mattered now, nothing you did, nothing you said, nothing you thought, nothing you wished for. Die now or die in a hundred years time, you still spent eternity with a sprained mind which was unable to extinguish itself. The final, absolute horror.

No, they didn’t think about that. They were as trapped in this existence as the souls were in the beyond. Both of them trekking after the low income jobs, going where the companies assigned them. No choice, and no escape, not even for their children. Building a better future wasn’t a concept which could run in their thought routines, they were frozen in the present.

For once the dreary tunnel outside the day club centre was enlivened with bustle. Kids hurried up and down, others clumped together to talk in bursts of high-velocity chatter. Jed frowned: this was wrong. Koblat’s kids never had so much energy or enthusiasm. They came here to hang out, or access the AV projections which the company provided to absorb and negate unfocused teenage aggression. Travelling the same loop of hopelessness as their parents.

Jed and Gari gave each other a puzzled look, both of them sensitive to the abnormal atmosphere. Then Jed saw Beth winding through the press towards them, a huge smile on her narrow face. Beth was his maybe- girlfriend; the same age, and always trading raucous insults. He couldn’t quite work out if that was affection or not. It did seem a solid enough friendship of some kind, though.

“Have you accessed it yet?” Beth demanded.

“What?”

“The sensevise from the hellhawk, cretin.” She grinned and pointed to her foot. A red handkerchief was tied above her ankle.

“No.”

“Come on then, mate, you’re in for a swish-ride treat.” She grabbed his hand and tugged him through the kids milling around the door. “The council tried to erase it, of course, but it was coded for open access. It got into every memory core in the asteroid. Nothing they could do about it.”

There were three AV players in the day club centre, the ones Jed always used to access vistas of wild landscapes, his one taste of freedom. Even so he could only see and hear the wonderful xenoc planets; the AV projectors weren’t sophisticated (i.e. expensive) enough to transmit activent patterns which stimulated corresponding tactile and olfactory sensations.

A dense sparkle-mist filled most of the room. Twenty people were standing inside it, their arms hanging limply by their sides, faces entranced as they were interacted with the recording. Curious now, Jed turned to face one of the pillars square on.

Marie Skibbow’s tanned, vibrant body lounged back over a boulder five metres in front of him, all flimsy clothes and pronounced curves. It was a perfectly natural pose; such a Venus could only possibly belong in this paradisiacal setting with its warmth and light and rich vegetation. Jed fell in love, forgetting all about skinny, angular Beth with her hard-edge attitude. Until now girls such as Marie had existed only in adverts or AV dramas; they weren’t real, natural , not like this. The fact that such a person actually lived and breathed somewhere in the Confederation gave him a kick higher than any of the floaters he scored.

Kiera Salter smiled at him, and him alone. “You know, they’re going to tell you that you shouldn’t be accessing this recording,” she told him.

. . .

When it ended Jed stood perfectly still, feeling as though a piece of his own body had been stolen from him; certainly something was missing, and he was the poorer for it. Gari was at his side, her face forlorn.

“We have to go there,” Jed said. “We have to get to Valisk and join them.”

Chapter 12

The hotel sat on its own plateau halfway up the mountainside, looking out across the deep bay. The only buildings to share the rocky amphitheatre with it were half a dozen weekend retreat villas belonging to old-money families.

Al could appreciate why the owners had made strenuous efforts to keep the developers out. It was a hell of a sight, an unspoilt beach which went on for miles, tiny fang rocks at the front of the headlands stirring up founts of spray, long lazy breakers rolling onto the sands. The only thing wrong about it was that he couldn’t get down there to enjoy it. There was a lot of time pressure building up at the top of the Organization, dangerous amounts of work and too-tight schedules. Back in Brooklyn when he was a kid he’d sit on the docks and watch gulls pecking at dead things in the muddy shallows. One thing about those gulls, their necks never stayed still, peck peck peck all day long. Now he’d surrounded himself with people that took after them. Never ever did his senior lieutenants give him a break. Peck peck peck. “Al, we need you to settle a beef.” Peck peck. “Al, what do we do with the navy rebels?” Peck peck. “Al, Arcata is pulling in the red cloud again, you want we should zap the bastards?” Peck peck.

Je-zus. In Chicago he had days off, months on holiday. Everyone knew what to do, things ran smoothly— well, kind of. Not here. Here, he didn’t have a fucking minute to himself. His head was buzzing like a fucking hornets’ nest he had to think so hard on the hoof.

“But you’re loving it,” Jezzibella said.

“Huh?” Al turned back from the window. She was lying across the bed, wrapped in a huge fluffy white robe, her hair lost beneath a towel turban. One hand held a slim book, the other was plucking Turkish delights out of a box.

“You’re Alexander the Great and Jimi Hendrix all in one, you’re having a ball.”

“Dozy dame, who the hell is Jimi Hendrix?”

Jezzibella pouted crossly at the book. “Oh, he was the sixties, sorry. A real wildcat musician, everybody loved him. The thing I’m trying to say here is, don’t knock what you’ve got, especially when you’ve got so much. Sure, things are a little rough at the start, they’re bound to be. It just makes winning all the sweeter. Besides, what else have you got to do? If you don’t give orders, you take orders. You told me that.”

He grinned down at her. “Yeah. You’re right.” But how come she’d known what he was thinking? “You