The Night's Dawn Trilogy (326 page)

By rights the expectancy should have reduced his brain to a small knot of psychoses by now. Instead he had the oldest excuse
of being too busy to worry. That and a wonderful burn of pure arrogance. It
can
work. After all, it was only marginally more crazy than the Lagrange point stunt.

Too bad I’ll never be able to brag about this one in Harkey’s Bar.

Which was actually more of a concern than the manoeuvre itself. I can’t stay in Tranquillity for the rest of my life. I should
never have mentioned it to the agents.

He saw Ashly extract the waldo from the combat wasp, leaving the Alchemist behind. Beaulieu reached forwards to hold a hose
over the top of the submunitions chamber. A frayed jet of treacly topaz-coloured foam shot out of the nozzle, surging all
around the Alchemist. It was a duopoxy sealant, used by the astronautics industry for quick, temporary repairs. The cosmonik
moved the nozzle in smooth assured motions, making sure the foam completely encapsulated the Alchemist, cementing it into
the combat wasp.

“Ashly, take the MSV around to the main airlock and transfer over in your suit,” Joshua datavised.

“What about the MSV?”

“I’m dumping it here. It was never designed to withstand the kind of acceleration we’ll be undergoing. That makes it a hazard,
especially with all the reaction thruster volatiles it has in its tanks.”

“You’re the captain. But what about the spaceplane?”

“I know. You just get back in; we’ve only got sixteen minutes left before the Organization ships get here.”

“Acknowledged, Captain.”

“Liol.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Jettison the spaceplane, please. Beaulieu, how’s it going?”

“Fine, Captain. I’ve got it covered. The sealant is bonding, should be set in another fifty seconds.”

“Excellent work. Get back inside.” Joshua datavised the flight computer for a secure channel to the combat wasp. The drone
came on-line, and he started its launch sequence program. Once its internal processors were operative he loaded in the flight
vector he’d formatted. “Doc, it’s time to find out how good you are.”

“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.”

• •  •

Gravity at its strongest is capable of bending light itself, pulling at individual photons with the same tenacity as it once
did Newton’s apple. In nature, the only mass dense enough to produce this kind of gravity is formed at the heart of a stellar
implosion. A singularity whose gravity permits nothing to escape: no matter, no energy.

At its highest setting the Alchemist would become such a cosmological entity; its surface concealed by an event horizon into
which everything can fall and nothing return. Once inside the event horizon, electromagnetic energy and atoms alike would
be drawn to the core’s surface and compress to phenomenal densities. The effect is cumulative and exponential. The more mass
which the black hole swallows, the heavier and stronger it becomes, increasing its surface area and allowing its consumption
rate to rise accordingly.

If the Alchemist was fired into a star, every gram of matter would eventually plunge below the invincible barrier which gravity
erected. That was Alkad Mzu’s humane solution. Omuta’s sun would not flare and rupture, would never endanger life on the planet
with waves of heat and radiation. Instead the sun would shrink and collapse into a small black sphere, with every erg of its
fusing nuclei lost to the universe for ever. Omuta would be left circling a non-radiative husk, its warmth slowly leaking
away into the now permanent night. Ultimately, the air itself would become cold enough to condense and fall as snow.

But there was the second setting, the aggressive one. Paradoxically, it actually produced a weaker gravity field.

•  •  •

The Alchemist turned black as zero-tau claimed it. However, the gravity it generated wasn’t strong enough to produce a singularity
with an event horizon. However, it was easily capable of overcoming the internal forces which designate an atom’s structure.
The combat wasp immediately flashed into plasma and enfolded it. All electrons and protons within the envelope were crushed
together, producing a massive pulse of gamma radiation. The emission faded rapidly, leaving the Alchemist cloaked in a uniform
angstrom-deep ocean of superfluid neutrons.

When it struck the outer fringes of the atmosphere a searing white light flooded out to soak hundreds of square kilometres
of the upper cloud bands. Seconds later the deeper cloud layers were fluorescing rosy pink while internal shadows surged through
torn cyclones like mountain-sized fish. Then the light vanished altogether.

The Alchemist had reached the semisolid layers of the gas giant’s interior, and was punching through with almost no resistance.
Matter under tremendous pressure was crushed against the device, which absorbed it greedily. Every impacting atom was squeezed
directly into a cluster of neutrons that plated themselves around the core. The Alchemist was swiftly buried under a mantle
of pure neutronium, which boasted a density that exceeded that of atomic nuclei.

As the particles were compressed by the device’s extraordinary gravity field, they liberated colossal quantities of energy,
a reaction far more potent than mere fusion. The surrounding semisolid material was heated to temperatures which destroyed
every atomic bond. Avast cavity of nuclear instability inflated around the Alchemist as it soared ever deeper into the gas
giant. Ordinary convection currents were wholly inadequate to syphon off the heat at the same rate it was being produced,
so the energy abscess simply had to keep on expanding. Something had to give.

Lady Mac
’s sensors detected the first upwelling while the ship was still seven minutes from perigee. A smooth-domed tumour of cloud,
three thousand kilometres in diameter, glowing like gaseous magma as it swelled up through the storm bands. Unlike the ordinary
great spots infesting gas giants it didn’t spiral, its sole purpose was to elevate planetary masses of tortuously heated hydrogen
up from the interior. Hurricanes and cyclones which had blasted their way through the upper atmosphere for centuries were
thrust aside to allow the thermal monster its bid for freedom. Its apex distended over a thousand kilometres above the tropopause,
casting a pernicious copper light over a third of the nightside.