Peter Hamilton - Neutronium Alchemist - Consolidation

The stable doors had been all but consumed by the eerily hot fire. Their remaining planks sagged and twisted on the glowing hinges, then lurched onto the cobbles with a loud bang.

With the intensity of the flames temporarily reduced, the horses raced for the door and their chance of freedom. Louise dug her heels into the stallion’s flanks, spurring it on. There was an exhilarating burst of speed. Yellow spires of flame splashed across her left arm and leg, making her cry out. Genevieve squealed in front of her, batting frantically at her blouse. The stench of singed hair solidified in her nostrils. Thin layers of smoke stretching across the aisle whipped across her face, stinging her eyes.

Then they were through, out of the gaping door with its wreath of tiny flames scrabbling at the ruined frame, chasing after the other horses. Fresh air and low sunlight washed over them. The hefty knight in the dark mosaic armour was standing ahead of them. Streamers of bright orange smoke were still pouring from his helmet’s eye slits. Sparks of white fire danced across his raised gauntlets. He started to point a rigid forefinger at them, the white fire building.

But the posse of crazed horses couldn’t be deflected. The first one flashed past stark inches from him. Alert to the danger they presented, even to someone with energistic power, he began to jump aside. That was his mistake. The second horse might have missed him if he’d stayed still. Instead, it struck him almost head on. The screaming horse buckled on top of him, forelegs snapping with an atrocious crack as inertia sent it hurtling forwards regardless. The knight was flung out sideways, spinning in the air. He landed bonelessly, bouncing a full foot above the cobbles before coming to a final rest. His armour vanished immediately, revealing Grant Kavanagh’s body, still clad in his militia uniform. The fabric was torn in a dozen places, stained scarlet by the blood pumping from open wounds.

Louise gasped, instinctively pulling the reins to halt the stallion. Daddy was hurt!

But the flowing blood swiftly stanched itself. Ragged tears of flesh started to close up. The uniform was stitching itself together. Dusty, grazed leather shoes became metallic boots. He shook his head, grunting in what was little more than dazed annoyance.

Louise stared for a second as he started to raise himself onto his elbows, then spurred the horse away.

“Daddy!” Genevieve shouted in anguish.

“It’s not him,” Louise told her through clenched teeth. “Not now. That’s something else. The devil’s own monster.”

Rachel Handley stood in front of the arched entrance to the courtyard. Hands on hips, aroused wormlet hair threshing eagerly. “Nice try.” She laughed derisively. A hand was raised, palm towards the sisters. The awful white fire ignited around her wrist, wispy talons flaring from her fingers. Her laugh deepened at the sight of Louise’s anguish, cutting across Merlin’s miserable barking.

The bullet-bolt of white fire which caught Rachel Handley an inch above her left eye came from somewhere behind Louise. It bored straight through the maid’s skull, detonating in the centre of the brain. The back of her head blew off in a gout of charred gore and rapidly dissipating violet flame. Her body remained upright for a second, then the muscles spasmed once before losing all tension. She pitched forwards. Bright arterial blood spilled out of her ruined, smoking brainpan.

Louise twisted around. The courtyard was empty apart from the woozy figure of her father still clambering to his feet. A hundred empty windows stared down at her. Faint screams echoed over the rooftops. Long swirls of flame churned noisily out of the stable block’s wide doors.

Genevieve was shaking violently again, crying in convulsive gulps. Concern for the little girl overcame Louise’s utter confusion, and she spurred the stallion once more, guiding it around the vile corpse and out through the courtyard’s entrance.

From where he was standing beside the window of the third-floor guest suite, Quinn Dexter watched the girl riding the superb black horse hell-for-leather over the manor’s greensward and towards the wolds. Not even his awesome energistic strength could reach the fleeing sisters from this distance.

He pursed his lips in distaste. Someone had aided them. Why, he couldn’t think. The traitor must surely know they would never go unpunished. God’s Brother saw all. Every soul was accountable in the end.

“They’ll head for Colsterworth, of course,” he said. “All they’re doing is postponing the inevitable for a couple of hours. Most of that poxy little town already belongs to us.”

“Yes, Quinn,” said the boy standing behind him.

“And soon the whole world,” Quinn muttered. And then what?

He turned and smiled proudly. “It is so nice to see you again. I never thought I would. But He must have decided to reward me.”

“I love you, Quinn,” Lawrence Dillon said simply. The body of the stable lad he had possessed was completely naked, the scars from the act of possession already nothing more than faint, fading pink lines on the tanned skin.

“I had to do what I did on Lalonde. You know that. We couldn’t take you with us.”

“I know, Quinn,” Lawrence said devoutly. “I was a liability. I was weak back then.” He knelt at Quinn’s feet, and beamed up at the stern features of the black-robed figure. “But I’m not anymore. Now I can help you again. It will be like before, only better. The whole universe will bow before you, Quinn.”

“Yeah,” Quinn Dexter said slowly, savouring the thought. “The fuckers just might.”

• • •

The datavised alert woke Ralph Hiltch from a desultory sleep. As an ESA head of station, he’d been assigned some temporary quarters in the Royal Navy officers’ mess. Strange impersonal surroundings, and the emotional cold turkey from bringing Gerald Skibbow to Guyana, had left his thoughts racing as he lay on the bunk after a three-hour debrief session last night. In the end he’d wound up accessing a mild trank program to relax his body.

At least he hadn’t suffered any nightmares; though Jenny was never very far from the surface of his mind. A final frozen image of the mission: Jenny lying under a scrum of man-apes, datavising a kamikaze code into the power cell at her side. The image didn’t need storing in a neural nanonics memory cell in order to retain its clarity. She’d thought it was preferable to the alternative. But was she right? It was a question he’d asked himself a lot during the voyage to Ombey.

He swung his legs over the side of his bunk and ran fingers through hair that badly needed a wash. The room’s net processor informed him that Guyana asteroid had just gone to a code three alert status.

“Shit, now what?” As if he couldn’t guess.

His neural nanonics reported an incoming call from Ombey’s ESA office, tagged as the director, Roche Skark, himself. Ralph opened a secure channel to the net processor with a sense of grim inevitability. You didn’t have to be psychic to know it wasn’t going to be good.

“Sorry to haul you back to active status so soon after you arrived,” Roche Skark datavised. “But the shit’s just hit the fan. We need your expertise.”

“Sir?”

“It looks like three of the embassy personnel who came here on the Ekwan were sequestrated by the virus. They’ve gone down to the surface.”

“What?” Panic surged into Ralph’s mind. Not that abomination, not loose here in the Kingdom. Please God. “Are you certain?”

“Yes. I’ve just come out of a Privy Council security conference with the Princess. She authorized the code three alert because of it.”

Ralph’s shoulders slumped. “Oh, God, and I brought them here.”