The Night's Dawn Trilogy (160 page)

Reza counted twenty-one knights escaping from the small holocaust Sewell and Jalal unleashed. That was good, he had expected
it to be more. He and Pat Halahan were next. His sensors showed him the spaceplane sinking fast out of the sky a couple of
kilometres behind him.

“Five minutes, that’s all they need.”

“They’ve got it,” Pat said urbanely.

Reza fired his forearm gaussrifle. Targeting-program-controlled muscles shifted the barrel round as his sensors went into
a track-while-scan mode. All his conscious thoughts had to do was designate.

He picked off three knights with EE rounds, and brought a further two horses down before the gaussrifle malfunctioned. Some
of his processor blocks were glitched as well. Sensor resolution was falling off. He dumped the gaussrifle and switched to
a ten-millimetre automatic pistol. Chemical bullets which produced a scythe of kinetic death, and nothing the possessed could
do to stop it. Two more knights were down when he ran out of spare magazines. White fire hit his shoulder, blowing his left
arm off. A two-metre jet of blood squirted out until his neural nanonics closed artery valves.

Pat was still sluicing bullets at a pair of knights off to Reza’s left. Stimulant and suppressor programs were working hard
to eliminate shock. Reza saw a mounted knight thundering towards him, whirling a mace around. A momentum prediction program
went into primary mode. The horse was three metres away when Reza took one step back. His remaining hand came up inside the
slashing arc of the mace. He grabbed, pulled, twisted. His carbon-fibre skeleton twanged at the severe loading as the inertia
of the spiked iron club yanked him off his feet. Glossy armour shrieked a metallic protest as the knight was catapulted backwards
out of the saddle, then clanged like a bell as he landed.

They climbed to their feet together. Reza raised the mace and started to walk forwards, a locomotion auto-balance program
compensating for his lost arm.

The knight saw him coming and pointed his broadsword like a rifle. White flame raced down the blade.

“Cheat,” Reza said. He detonated the fragmentation grenades clipped to his belt. Both of them vanished inside a dense swarm
of furious black silicon micro-blades.

A hurricane squall of rain stung Kelly’s face as the spaceplane swooped fifteen metres overhead. Its compressor nozzle efflux
nearly overturned the hovercraft. She engaged the fan deflector and killed the impellers. They skidded to a rumbustious halt.

The spaceplane slipped round sideways in the air then landed hard, undercarriage struts pistoning upwards. Rain pattered loosely
on its extended wings, dribbling off the flaps.

Kelly turned around in her seat. The children were huddled together on the hard silicon deck, clothes soaked, hair straggly.
Terrified, crying, peeing in their shorts and pants. Wide eyes stared at her, brimming with incomprehension. There were no
clever words left to accompany the scene for the recording. She simply wanted to put her arms round every one of them, pour
out every scrap of comfort she owned. And that was far less than they deserved.

Three kilometres behind the hovercraft, EE explosions strobed chaotically, while antagonistic streamers of white fire curled
and thrashed above the blood-soaked grass.

We did it, she thought, the knights can’t reach us now. The children are going to live. Nothing else mattered, not the hardships,
not the pain, not the sickening fear.

“Come on,” she said to them, and the smile came so easily. “We’re leaving now.”

“Thank you, lady,” Jay said.

Kelly glanced up as a figure hiked out of the rain. “I thought you’d left,” she said.

Shaun Wallace grinned. His sodden LDC one-piece was shrunk round his body, mud and grass clung to his boots, but the humour
in his eyes couldn’t be vanquished. “Without saying goodbye? Ah now, Miss Kelly, I wouldn’t be wanting you to think the worst
of me. Not you.” He lifted the first child, a seven-year-old girl, over the gunwale. “Come along then, you rabble. You’re
all going on a long, beautiful trip to a place far away.”

The spaceplane’s outer airlock hatch slid open, and the aluminium stairs telescoped out.

“Get a move on, Kelly, please,” Ashly datavised.

She joined Shaun at the side of the hovercraft and began lifting the exhausted, bedraggled children out.

Horst stood at the bottom of the stairs, harrying his small charges along. A word here, a smile, pat on the head. They scooted
up into the cabin where Ashly cursed under his breath as he tried to work out how on earth to fit them all in.

Kelly had the last boy in her arms, a four-year-old who was virtually asleep, when Theo started up his hovercraft. “Oh no,
Theo,” she datavised. “Not you as well.”

“They need me,” he replied. “I can’t leave them. I’m a part of them.”

Great bands of sunlight were raking the savannah. The fighting was over. Kelly could see three or four knights on horseback
milling about. None of them showed any interest in the spaceplane now. “But they’re dead, Theo.”

“You don’t know that, not for sure. In any case, haven’t you heard, there’s no such thing, not any more.” He stuck his arm
up and waved.

“Hell.” She tipped her head back, letting the sweet rain wash her face.

“Come along now, Miss Kelly.” Shaun leant over and gave her cheek a platonic kiss. “Time you was leaving.”

“I don’t suppose it would do any good asking you to come?”

“Would I ask you to stay?”

She put a foot on the bottom rung, the drowsy child heavy in her arms. “Goodbye, Shaun. I wish it could have been different.”

“Aye, Miss Kelly. Me too.”

Kelly sat in the cabin with one eight-year-old boy on her lap and her arms round a pair of girls. The children squirmed round,
fidgeting, excited and nervous, asking her about the waiting starship. Lalonde was already half-forgotten, yesterday’s nightmare.

If only, she wished.

The compressor whine permeated the overcrowded cabin as Ashly fed power into the fans. Then they were airborne, the deck tilting
up, a press of acceleration. Kelly closed her eyes and accessed the spaceplane’s sensor suite. A lone figure was trudging
over the savannah, a well-built man with tousled ginger hair, wearing a thick red and blue check cotton shirt, collar up against
the rain as he headed for home.

A minute later a stentorian sonic boom broke across the vast grass plain. Fenton raised his great head at the sound, but there
was nothing in the sky apart from rain and clouds. He lowered his gaze again, and resumed his earth-bound search for his lost
masterlove.

THE
NEUTRONIUM ALCHEMIST
. Copyright © 1997 by Peter F. Hamilton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except
by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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ISBN: 978-0-7595-2122-3

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A mass market edition of this book was published in two parts in 1998 by Warner Books.

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.

CONTENTS

Copyright

Cast of Characters

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30