Neutronium Alchemist - Consolidation

stare. “Well, you know how it is, Al. That’s a last resort, sure. But shit, we can do like Bernhard says and fight some first. I ain’t afraid of fighting.”

“Sure you ain’t afraid. I didn’t say you were afraid. I didn’t insult you, Mickey, you rube goof. I’m saying you ain’t thinking level. The Confederation Navy, they’re gonna turn up here with a thousand, ten thousand starships, and you’re gonna do the smartest thing you can do, and hide. Right? I would if they came at me with all pieces shooting.”

The left side of Mickey’s face began to tic alarmingly. “Sure, boss,” he said numbly.

“So you think that’s gonna make them give up?” Al asked. “Come on, all of you. I want to know. Who in this room believes the big government boys are just gonna give up if you make New California disappear? Huh? Tell me. They lose a planet with eight hundred million people on it, and the admiral in charge, he’s just gonna shrug and say: Well fuck it, you can’t win them all. And go home.” Al stabbed a finger at the little purple stars of light representing the voidhawks on the tactical display screen. A slim bolt of white fire lashed out, striking the glass. Glowing droplets sprinkled out. A crater bowed inwards, distorting and magnifying the graphics below. “Is he FUCK,” Al bellowed. “Open your goddamn eyes, shitheads! These people can fly among the stars for Christ’s sake. They know everything there is to know about how energy works, they know all about quantum dimensions, hell they can even switch off time if they feel like it. And what they don’t know, they can find out pretty fucking quick. They’ll see what you’ve done, they’ll follow where you take the planet. And they’ll bring it back. Those cruddy longhairs will look at what happened, and they’ll work on it, and they’ll work on it. And they ain’t never going to stop until they’ve solved the problem. I know the feds, the governments. Believe me, of all people, I fucking know. You ain’t never safe from them. They don’t ever fucking stop. Never! And it won’t matter diddly how much you scream, and how much you cuss and rage. They’ll bring you back. Oh, yeah, right back here under the stars and emptiness where you started from. Staring death and beyond in the face.” He had them now, he could see the doubt blossoming, the concern. And the fear. Always the fear. The way right into a man’s heart. The way a general jerked his soldiers’ strings.

Al Capone grinned like the devil himself into the daunted silence. “There’s only one fucking way to stop that from ever happening. Any of you cretins figured that out yet? No? Big surprise. Well, it’s simple, assholes. You stop running scared like you have been all your life. You stop, you turn around to face what’s scaring you, and you bite its fucking dick off.”

•   •   •

For five centuries after the first successful ZTT jump, governments, universities, companies, and military laboratories throughout the Confederation had been researching methods of direct supralight communication. And for all the billions of fuseodollars poured into the various projects, no one had ever produced a valid theory let alone a practical system to surmount the problem. Starships remained the only method of carrying data between star systems.

Because of this, waves of information would spread out like ripples through the inhabited star systems within the Confederation. And as the stars were not arranged in a tidy geometrical lattice, such wavefronts became more and more distorted as time went on. News companies had long since refined a set of equations defining the most effective distribution procedure between their offices. On receiving a hot item (such as the appearance of Ione Saldana), an office would typically charter eight to twelve starships to relay the flek depending on when and where the story originated. Towards the end of the distribution coverage, the information could well arrive in one system from several directions over the course of a fortnight. The nature of the starships employed also had a strong influence on the timing, depending on the marque of ship used, how good the captain was, component malfunctions, a hundred diverse circumstances all contributing to the uncertainty.

Laton’s appearance had naturally received an overriding precedence from all the Time Universe offices receiving Graeme Nicholson’s flek. But Srinagar was over four hundred light-years away from Tranquillity. News of the Yaku ’s existence, and who it was carrying, arrived several days after the Yaku itself had departed from Valisk.

Laton!

Rubra was astonished. They might have been fellow Serpents, but that hardly made them allies. So for the first time in a hundred and thirty years he expanded his affinity and grudgingly contacted the Edenist habitats orbiting Kohistan to tell them the starship had docked briefly.

But Laton did not come inside,he assured them. Only three crew came through immigration: Marie Skibbow, Alicia Cochrane, and Manza Balyuzi.

Skibbow was definitely sequestrated, and the other two are likely recipients,the kohistan consensus replied. Where are they?

I don’t know.it was a humiliating, dismaying admission, especially to make to his former peers. But Rubra had immediately made the connection between Marie Skibbow and Anders Bospoort, in whose apartment Dariat’s corpse had been found. Such a chain of events worried him enormously. But his supposedly infallible memory storage facility had failed him utterly. After Marie and Anders had gone down the starscraper that first time they had simply vanished from his perception; and the sub-routine in the starscraper hadn’t noticed their absence. Nor could he locate them now, not even with his perception sub-routines expanded and upgraded with a new batch of safeguards.

Do you require our assistance?the kohistan consensus asked. Our neuropathologists may be able to analyse the nature of the distortion in your sub-routines.

No! You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Getting into my mind again. Poking around to see what makes me pulse.

Rubra—

You shits don’t ever give up, don’t ever stop.

Given the circumstances, do you not think it would be sensible to put old antagonisms behind us?

I’ll deal with it. By myself. They can only fuck with my peripheral routines. They can’t touch me.

As far as you know.

I know! Believe me, I know. I’m me; same as I ever was.

Rubra, this is only the beginning. They will try to infiltrate your higher-order thought routines.

They won’t succeed, not now I know what to watch for.

Very well. But we must recommend to the Srinagar system assembly that starships are prohibited from docking with you. We cannot risk the prospect of any contamination spreading.

Suits me fine.

Will you at least cooperate with us on that?

Yes, yes. But only until I’ve tracked down the three Yaku crew and exterminated them.

Please be careful, Rubra. Laton’s proteanic virus is extremely dangerous.

So that’s what you think I’ve got, why my routines are failing. Bastards!

It took several minutes for his anger to sink back into more rational, passive thought currents. By the time he was thinking logically again, Valisk’s SD sensor network alerted him to five voidhawks emerging from their wormhole termini to take up station half a million kilometres away. Spies! They didn’t trust him.

He had to find the three people from the Yaku , and those members of his family whose monitor routines had been tampered with.

While the rest of the Srinagar system went to an agitated stage one military alert status, he tried again and again to scan his own interior for the renegades. Standard visual pattern recognition routines were useless. He upgraded and changed the perception interpretation routines several times. To no avail. He tried loading similar search orders into the servitors, hoping that they might succeed where the sensitive cells woven into every polyp surface had failed. He swept through entire starscrapers with his principal consciousness, certain that they still hadn’t managed to infiltrate and corrupt his identity core. He found nothing.

After ten hours, the watching voidhawks were joined by three Srinagar navy frigates.