Neutronium Alchemist - Conflict

“I understand, Captain.”

She accessed the processor governing the combat wasp’s chamber which the Alchemist was riding in and used it to datavise a long activation code at the device. It datavised an acknowledgement back to her. The display in Joshua’s mind opened out rapidly to accommodate the new iconic representation: parallel sheets of dark information stacked as high as Heaven. They came alive with interlocking grids of purple and yellow that shone like channelled starfire. Perspective switch, and the sheets were concentric spherical shells, coming alight from the core outwards. Information and energy arranging themselves in a precise, and very specific, pattern.

“It’s working,” Alkad datavised.

“Jesus Christ.” The neurovirtual jewel glimmered at the centre of his brain, complex beyond human comprehension. It was an outrageous irony that something so deliciously intricate and beautiful should be the harbinger of so much destruction. “Okay, Doc, set it for neutronium. I’m launching in twenty seconds—mark.”

•   •   •

Lady Mac ’s spaceplane had risen up out of her hangar as thermo-dump panels and sensor cluster booms shrank back the other way. Ashly caught one last glimpse of it as he swept down into the airlock. The circular docking ring clamped around its nose cone had just disengaged, allowing it to drift free, then Beaulieu’s shiny brass silhouette occluded the airlock hatch behind him, and that was the end of it.

Pity, he thought, it was a lovely little machine.

As soon as the airlock’s outer hatch closed the cylindrical chamber was fast-flooded with air. The flight computer’s datavised display revealed their status. Joshua was already firing the thrusters to align them on their new flight vector. Combat wasp launch tubes were opening.

Ashly and Beaulieu dived out of the airlock, racing for the bridge. There was nobody in any of the decks they passed through. Several open cabin doors showed them active zero-tau pods.

The combat wasp carrying the Alchemist completed its fusion drive ignition sequence and launched. A quick cheer from the bridge echoed through Lady Mac ’s empty compartments. Then ten more combat wasps were firing out of their tubes and chasing after the first. The whole salvo headed down towards the gas giant at twenty-five gees.

Ashly flew through the bridge’s floor hatch just behind Beaulieu.

“Stations, please,” Joshua said. He triggered Lady Mac ’s three fusion tubes, giving Ashly barely enough time to roll onto his acceleration couch before gravity pushed down. Restraint webbing closed over him.

“Signal from the Organization ships,” Sarha said. “They know who we are, they’re asking for you by name, Joshua.”

Joshua accessed the communications circuit. The image which his neural nanonics provided was shaky and stormed with static. It showed him a frigate’s bridge, with figures lying flat on acceleration couches. One of them was dressed in a double-breasted suit of chocolate-brown worsted with slim silver-grey pinstripes, a wide- brimmed black fedora was resting on the console beside him. Joshua puzzled that one for a moment, the frigate was decelerating at seven gees. The fedora should have been squashed flat.

“Captain Calvert?”

“You got me.”

“I’m Oscar Kearn, and Al put me in charge around here.”

“Joshua,” Liol datavised. “The frigates are flipping over again. They’re starting to chase us.”

“Acknowledged.” He increased the Lady Mac ’s acceleration, taking her up to seven gees.

Ashly groaned in chagrin before activating his acceleration couch’s zero-tau field. Black stasis closed around him, ending the punishing force. Alkad Mzu and Peter Adul joined him.

“Glad to meet you, Oscar,” Joshua had to datavise, his jaw was far too heavy to move.

“My people, they tell me you just fired something down at the big planet. I hope you ain’t been stupid, pal, I really do. Was it what I think it was?”

“Absolutely. No more Alchemist for anybody.”

“You dumb asshole. That’s a third of your options gone. Now you listen good, sonny boy, you switch off your ship’s engines and you hand over Mzu to me and there ain’t nobody gonna get hurt. That’s your second option.”

“No shit? Let me guess what the third is.”

“Don’t be a pumpkinhead, sonny. Remember, after we waste you and your rinky-dink ship, we’re only interested in giving the Mzu dame a new body. It’s the beyond for you, pal, for the rest of time. And take a tip from someone who’s been there, it ain’t worth it. Nothing is. So you just hand her over nice and smooth, and I don’t say nothing to the boss about you deep-sixing the Alchemist.”

“Mr Kearn, go screw yourself.”

“You call that Alchemist back, sonny. I know you got a radio control on the combat wasp. You call it back or I tell my crews to open fire.”

“If you blow up the Lady Mac you’ll definitely never get it, will you? Think about it, I’ll give you as much time as you need.” Joshua closed the communications link.

“How much more of this bloody acceleration?” Monica datavised.

“Seven gees?” Joshua replied. “None at all.” He increased the thrust up to a full ten gees.

Monica couldn’t even groan; her throat was sagging under its own weight. It was ridiculous, her lungs couldn’t inhale properly, her artificial tissue muscle implants were all in her limbs, not her chest. If she tried to hang on she’d end up asphyxiating. Keeping Mzu under observation was no longer an option. She would simply have to trust Calvert and the other crew members. “Good luck,” she datavised. “See you on the other side.”

The flight computer informed Joshua she’d activated her acceleration couch’s zero-tau field. That left him with only three people who hadn’t sought refuge in stasis: Beaulieu, Dahybi, and of course Liol.

“Status report, please,” he datavised to them.

Lady Mac ’s systems and structure were both holding up well. But then Joshua knew she was capable of withstanding this acceleration, her real test was going to come later.

Seventy thousand kilometres behind her, the two Organization frigates were accelerating at eight gees, which was the limit of their afflicted drives. Their crews were hurriedly assembling situation outlines and summaries for Oscar Kearn, detailing how long it would be before the Lady Macbeth was outside the interception range of their combat wasps.

Ahead of all three ships, the salvo of eleven combat wasps were rushing towards the gas giant. There was no way any sensor could determine which was carrying the Alchemist, making any interdiction virtually impossible.

The status quo was held for over fifteen minutes before Oscar Kearn reluctantly admitted to himself that Calvert and Mzu weren’t going to hand over the device, nor surrender themselves. He ordered the Urschel and the Raimo to launch their combat wasps at Lady Macbeth .

“No good,” Joshua grunted savagely as Lady Mac ’s sensors showed him the sudden upsurge in the frigates’ infrared emission signature. “You can’t dysfunction this chunk of reality, pal.”

The Alchemist was ninety seconds away from the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. Its management programs began to orchestrate the complex energy patterns racing through its nodes into the sequence Mzu had selected. Once it was primed, activation occurred within two picoseconds. Visually it could hardly be less spectacular; the Alchemist’s surface turned infinitely black. The physics behind the change was somewhat more involved.

“What I did,” Alkad had datavised to Joshua when he asked her how it functioned, “was to work out how to combine a zero-tau field and the energy compression technique which a starship jump node utilizes. In this case, just as the energy density approaches infinite the effect is frozen. Instead of expelling the patterning node out of the universe, you get a massive and permanent space-time curvature forming around it.”

“Space-time curvature?”

“Gravity.”