Peter Hamilton - Neutronium Alchemist - Consolidation

. . .

“No, she’s out in the anteroom. She went out there twenty minutes ago so we could argue about what to do. The vote was three to two for wasting Omuta’s star. Guess how I voted.”

“Laxa and Ahmad, the conference office,” Monica said. “Mzu’s in the anteroom along with the bodyguards.”

Go,samuel ordered.

The twenty Edenist agents closed on the Laxa and Ahmad offices. Floor plans were pulled from the asteroid’s civil engineering memory cores. Entry routes and tactics were formulated and finalized while they jogged towards their target, the general affinity band thick with tense exchanges.

Monica kept three paces behind Samuel the whole way. It irked her, and she wasn’t looking forwards to her debrief, either. Teaming up with Edenists! But at least this way the Alchemist would be neutered. Providing Samuel kept his part of the agreement. Which she was sure he would do. Although high politics could still screw everything up. God!

It took them four minutes to reach Laxa and Ahmad. One featureless corridor after another. Thankfully there were few people about, with only a handful of workaholics left. They barged past an old man carrying several flek cases, a man and a woman who looked so guilty they were obviously having an affair, a pair of teenage girls, one very tall and skinny and black, the other small and white, both wearing red handkerchiefs around their ankles.

When she reached Laxa and Ahmad the Edenist team was already inside. Two agents stood guard out in the corridor. Monica stepped wearily through the crumpled door, drawing her pistol.

Samuel drew his breath sharply. “Damnation.”

“What?” she asked. By then they had reached the conference office anteroom. The partizan bodyguards were all sprawled on the floor with limbs twitching erratically. Six Edenists stood over them, their TIP pistols pointing down. Three scorch lines slashed the walls where laser fire had burned the composite. A pair of spent nerve short-out grenades rolled around on the carpet.

“Where’s Mzu?” Monica asked.

Samuel beckoned her into the conference office. The partizan leadership had been caught by the nerve short-out pulses, but the door and security screening had saved them from the worst effects. They were still conscious. Four of them. The fifth was dead.

Monica grimaced when she saw the broad char mark on the side of Ikela’s skull. The beam had fractured the bone in several places, roasting the brain to a black pulp. Someone had made very sure his neural nanonics were ruined. “God, what happened here?”

Two Edenist agents were standing behind Feira Ile, their pistol muzzles pressed into his neck. His wrists had been secured in a composite zipcuff behind his back. Crumbs of vomit were sticking to his lip; he was sweating profusely from the grenade assault, but otherwise defiant. A laser pistol was lying on the table in front of him.

“He shot Ikela,” Samuel said in bewildered dismay. He squatted down beside Ikela’s chair. “Why? What was the point? He was one of yours.”

Feira Ile grinned savagely. “My last duty for the Garissan navy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ikela flew escort duty on the Alchemist. He probably knew where it is. Now he can’t tell you.”

Monica and Samuel swapped a grim glance.

“She’s gone, hasn’t she?” Monica said bitterly.

“It would seem so.”

“Fuck it!” She stamped over to Kaliua Lamu, who had an agent holding him upright in his chair. “Where did Mzu go?” Monica asked.

“Screw you.”

Monica gave an amused glance at the other partizans around the table. “Oh, come on, Kaliua,” she said sweetly. “You were eager enough to tell us this meeting’s location.”

“Liar!”

She took out a Royal Kulu Bank credit disk. “A hundred thousand pounds, wasn’t it?”

“Bitch whore! I never,” he shouted at his comrades. “It wasn’t me. For Mary’s sake, it wasn’t.”

Monica grabbed his chin, and slowly exerted her boosted grip. Kaliua Lamu gagged fearfully at the force which threatened to shatter his jawbone.

“You said I’d better be certain when I finish you. Well, I intend to be extremely thorough extinguishing your life unless I know where she went.”

“I don’t know.”

“Debrief nanonics would be the pleasant option, but we don’t have time for that. Fortunately, old-fashioned pain can still produce some pretty impressive results during field interrogation. And they trained me very well, Kaliua.” She pushed her face centimetres from his bugging eyes. “Would you like to try calling my bluff? Or perhaps you think you’re strong enough to resist me for a couple of hours after I’ve fused your neural nanonics into ash? Once they’re dead you can’t block the pain. And the field way to fuse neural nanonics is with electrodes. Crude, but it works. Guess where they’re applied.”

“No. Please! Don’t.” His eyes were watering as he started shaking.

“Where then?”

“I don’t know. I promise. She was gone when we finished. I told you she was supposed to be waiting outside for us to finish. But she wasn’t there.”

“Then who did she leave with?”

“It was a girl, my bodyguard said. Ikela’s daughter, Voi. She’s tall, young. They were talking together and never came back. Honestly , that’s all I know.”

Monica let go of his chin. He slumped back in the chair, trembling in relief.

“A tall girl,” Monica whispered. She was looking at Samuel in dawning dismay as the memory blossomed. She hurriedly accessed the neural nanonics memory cell she’d kept running to record the operation.

In the corridor on the way up. Two girls, one tall and black, the other white and small. Pressed against the wall in alarm as she and Samuel ran past. The memory cell image froze. Green neon grid lines closed around the smaller girl, calculating her height. It matched Mzu’s. So did the approximated weight.

A backpack fitted with a long shoulder strap hung at the girl’s side.

Monica had seen that backpack once before. Never in her life would she need help from neural nanonics to remember that time. The backpack had been flapping behind a small spacesuit-clad figure who was clinging desperately to a rope ladder.

“Dear God, we walked right bloody past her,” she told an aghast Samuel. “The bitch is wearing a chameleon suit.”