Neutronium Alchemist - Consolidation

“Yet if our preparations are to mean anything,” Landon McCullock said, “we have to catch the embassy duo tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest. And not just them, but anyone they’ve come into contact with. This situation could escalate beyond our ability to contain. We must have a policy ready for dealing with them. So far the only thing we know that works is overwhelming firepower.”

“I’ve got two things to offer,” Ralph said. He looked at Bernard Gibson, and gave him a penitent smile. “Your squads are going to have to take the brunt of this, especially to start with.”

The police AT Squad commander grinned. “What we get paid for.”

“Okay, here it is then. First off, contact with someone who is carrying the energy virus doesn’t necessarily mean you contract it yourself. Will and Dean are excellent proof of that. They captured Skibbow, they manhandled him, they were in very close proximity to him for hours, and they’re both fine. Also, I was on the Ekwan with the embassy trio for a week, and I wasn’t infected.

“Secondly, despite their power they can be intimidated into submission. But you have to be prepared to use ultraviolence against them, and they have to know that. One hint of weakness, one hesitation, and they’ll hit you with everything they’ve got. So when we do find the first one, it’ll be me and my team which heads the actual assault. Okay?”

“I’m not arguing so far,” Bernard Gibson said.

“Good. What I envisage is spreading the experience of an assault in the same fashion the virus is spread. Everyone who is with me on the first assault will be able to familiarise themselves with what has to be done. After that you assign them to head their own squads for the next round of captures, and so on. That way we have your whole division brought up to speed as swiftly as possible.”

“Fine. And what do we do with them once we’ve subdued them?”

“Shove them into zero-tau.”

“You think that’s what got rid of Skibbow’s virus?” Admiral Farquar asked sharply.

“I believe it’s a good possibility, sir. He was extremely reluctant to enter the pod in Ekwan . Right up until then he was quite docile. When he found out we were going to put him in the pod, he became almost hysterical. I think he was frightened. And certainly when he came out of the pod at this end the virus was gone.”

“Excellent.” Warren Aspinal smiled at Ralph. “That course of action is certainly more palatable than lining them all up against a wall and shooting them.”

“Even if zero-tau isn’t responsible for erasing the virus, we know it can contain them the same way it holds ordinary people,” Ralph said. “We can keep them in stasis until we do find a permanent solution.”

“How many zero-tau pods have we got available?” Landon asked Diana.

The technology division chief had a long blink while her neural nanonics chased down the relevant files. “Here in the building there are three. Probably another ten or fifteen in the city in total. They tend to be used almost exclusively by the space industry.”

“There’s five thousand unused pods in the Ekwan right now,” Ralph pointed out. “That ought to be enough if this AI correlation program works. Frankly, if we need more than that, we’ve lost.”

“I’ll get some maintenance crews to start disconnecting them straight away,” Admiral Farquar said. “We can send them down to you in cargo flyers on automatic pilot.”

“That just leaves us with forcing infected people into them,” Ralph said. He caught Bernard’s gaze. “Which is going to be even worse than capturing them.”

“Possible trace,” Diana announced without warning as she received a datavise from one of the AIs. Everyone sitting at Hub One turned their attention on her. “It’s a taxi which left the spaceport twenty minutes after the embassy trio’s spaceplane arrived. The vehicle’s processor array started suffering some strange glitches five minutes later. Contact was lost after a further two minutes. But it can’t have been a total shutdown, because traffic control has no record of a breakdown in that sector this afternoon. It simply dropped out of the route and flow control loop.”

The warehouse which housed Mahalia Engineering Supplies was sealed up tight, one of twenty identical buildings lined up along the southern perimeter of the industrial park, separated from its neighbour by strips of ancient concrete and ranks of spindly trees planted to break the area’s harshness. It was seventy metres long by twenty-five wide, fifteen high; dark grey composite panels without a single window. From outside it looked inert; innocuous if somewhat spurned of late. Furry tufts of Ombey’s aboriginal vegetation were rooting in the gutters. Denuded chassis of ancient farm vehicles were stacked three or four deep along one wall, sleeting rust onto the concrete.

Ralph focused his shell helmet’s sensors on the broad roll-up door in the centre of the end-wall fifty meters in front of him. It had taken him and his team four minutes to get here from police headquarters in one of the force’s hypersonics, following the city-wide trail of route and flow processor dropouts located by Diana and the AIs. Three police Armed Tactical Squads had also been dispatched to the industrial park, under orders from Bernard Gibson. In total, eight of the little planes had landed, encircling the warehouse at a five-hundred-metre distance.

There wasn’t a single crack of light leaking around the door. No sign of life. Infrared didn’t reveal much, either. He scanned along the side of the building again.

“The conditioning unit is on,” Ralph observed. “I can see the motor’s heat, and the grille’s venting. Someone’s in there.”

“Do you want us to infiltrate a nanonic sensor?” Nelson Akroid asked. He was the AT Squad’s captain, a stocky man in his late thirties, barely coming up to Ralph’s shoulder. Not quite the image one expected from someone in his profession, but then Ralph was used to the more bulky G66 troops. Ralph suspected Nelson Akroid would be a healthy opponent in any hand-to-hand fighting, though; he had the right kind of subdued competence.

“It’s a big building, plenty of opportunities for ambush,” Nelson Akroid said. “We’d benefit from positioning them exactly. And my technical operators are good. The hostiles would never know they’d been infiltrated.” He sounded eager, which could be a flaw given this situation. Ralph couldn’t imagine him and his squad seeing much active duty on Ombey. Their lot was more likely endless drills and exercises, the curse of any specialist field.

“No nanonics,” Ralph said. “We could never depend on them anyway. I want the penetration team to deploy using standard search and seizure procedures. We can’t believe any information from a sensor, so I want them going in fully alert.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Diana?” he datavised. “What can the AIs tell me?”

“No change. There are no detectable glitches in the warehouse processors it can access. But there’s very little electronic activity in there anyway, the office and administration systems are all switched off, so that doesn’t mean much.”

“What’s the taxi’s maximum capacity?”

“Six. And the Industry Department says Mahalia employs fifteen staff. They service and distribute parts for agricultural machinery right across the continent.”

“Okay, we’ll assume the worst case. A minimum of twenty-one possible hostiles. Thanks, Diana.”

“Ralph, the AIs have discovered another two possible glitch traces in the city’s route and flow network. I instructed them to concentrate on vehicle traffic around the spaceport in the period after the embassy trio arrived. Another taxi suffered a lot of problems, and the other’s a freight vehicle.”

“Shit! Where are they now?”

“The AIs are running search routines; but these two are proving harder to find than the first taxi. I’ll keep you updated.”

The channel closed. Ralph reviewed the AT Squad as they closed in on the warehouse, black figures who seemed more mobile shadows than solid people. They know their job, he admitted grudgingly.

“Everyone’s in place, sir,” Nelson Akroid datavised. “And the AIs have taken command of the security