The MSV came to rest three metres above the launch tube’s hatch. Like the rest of the Beezling ’s fuselage it was badly scarred and mauled. But intact.

“No particle penetration,” he datavised. “It seems to be undamaged.”

“Good, get it open,” Joshua answered.

Ashly was already extending three of the MSV’s waldo arms. He shoved a clamp hand straight into the mounting hole left by a broken sensor cluster and expanded the segments, securing the MSV in place. A fission blade came on, burning a lambent saffron at the tip of the second arm. Ashly used it to slice into the fuselage at the rim of the hatch, then began to saw around.

Both the Beezling and the MSV trembled energetically. The computer datavised a series of clamp stress cautions, their grip on the mounting had shifted slightly. “Joshua, another one of those and you’re going to shake me loose.”

“Sorry. Won’t happen again, we’re docked now.”

Ashly accessed the MSV’s small sensor suite. The Lady Mac had attached herself to the rear of the Beezling , her aft hold-down latches engaging with the warship’s corresponding locks. A slim silver piston slid out of her ring of umbilical couplings, weaving around slowly as it sought out a socket on the Beezling to mate with.

Spacesuited figures wearing manoeuvring packs were flitting towards the bright circle of light which was Lady Macbeth ’s open airlock. A third of the way around her fuselage one of her combat wasp launch tubes had opened. The front section of a combat wasp had risen up out of it, a dark tapering cylinder bristling with sensors and antennae. Beaulieu was working on it, her glossy body alive with reflected streaks of salmon-pink light that rippled fluidly with every movement. She had anchored her feet in the midsection grid which contained the drone’s tanks and generators. One of the submunitions chamber covers had already been removed; now she was busy extracting the cluster of electronic warfare pods from inside.

The MSV’s waldo arm finished cutting around the Beezling ’s hatch. Ashly grabbed it with the heavy-load arm and pulled it free. A strew of dust motes and composite shavings popped out, quickly dwindling away. The MSV’s external lights swung around, and he was looking straight down into a smooth white cylinder which nested a sleek conical missile whose silver surface was polished brighter than any mirror.

“Is this the right one?” he asked, including his retinal image into the datavise.

“That is the Alchemist carrier, yes,” Mzu replied.

“There’s no response from any processors in there. Temperature is a hundred and twenty absolute.”

“It won’t have affected the Alchemist.”

Ashly said nothing, hoping her self-confidence was as justified as Joshua’s. He extended one of the MSV’s manipulator waldos into the launch tube and fastened it around the apex of the carrier vehicle’s nose cone. Triangular keys found the locking pins, and turned them. He retracted the arm carefully, bringing the nose cone with it. The base was studded with junctions for the thermal shunt circuits, which were reluctant to separate; after thirty years the vacuum and the cold had melded them together. Ashly increased the tension on the waldo, and they tore free with a judder which the arm’s inertia absorber could barely cope with.

“That’s it?” Ashly datavised when the nose cone was lifted clear.

“That’s it,” Mzu confirmed.

The Alchemist was a single globe one and a half metres in diameter, its seamless surface a neutral grey colour. It was held in place by five carbotanium spider-leg struts which encased it neatly, their inner surfaces lined with adjustable pads to maintain a perfect grip.

“You should be able to detach the entire restraint mechanism,” Mzu datavised. “Sever the data and power cables if necessary; they’re not necessary anymore.”

“Okay.” He moved the manipulator waldo down the side of the Alchemist and used its small sensors to inspect the machinery he found below it. “This shouldn’t take long, the rivets are standard. I can cut them.”

“Fast, please, Ashly,” Joshua datavised. “The Organization ships are only twenty-four minutes away.”

“Gotcha. I’ll have this with Beaulieu in three minutes.” He moved the first of the manipulator’s tools forwards. “Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Why bother with a specialist carrier vehicle if it can be deployed in an ordinary combat wasp?”

“That carrier vehicle is designed to shoot the Alchemist into a star. Admittedly that’s a large target, but we can’t take starships very close to one. The carrier has to be fully insulated from the star’s heat and radiation, and it also has to be fast enough to avoid interception from combat wasps in the event we were detected. We built it to accelerate up to sixty-five gees.”

Ashly would have liked to have called her bluff. But given their current situation, ignorance and blind faith made life altogether less stressful.

Monica didn’t leave Alkad alone in the EVA preparation compartment, but she did permit her a discreet distance. Two other operatives were with her, ready to inspect the Beezling ’s crew to make sure they brought nothing threatening with them into the Lady Macbeth .

Alkad didn’t really notice the agent’s presence, every aspect of her life had been under continual observation for so long now that intrusion meant nothing. Not even for this most precious occasion.

She anchored herself to a stikpad in front of the airlock hatch, waiting with outwards patience. When she sorted through her feelings she found the rightful edgy anticipation, but perhaps not so much of it as there should have been. Thirty years. Can you really stay in love with someone for that long? Or did I just keep the ideal of love alive? One small illusion of humanity in a personality which deliberately and methodically set about excluding any other form of emotional weakness.

Well enough, there were memories of the good times. Memories of shared ideals. And of course memories of affection, adoration, and intimacy. But shouldn’t real love require the continuing presence of the loved one in order to sustain itself and constantly renew? Has Peter really become nothing more than a concept suborned, just another excuse to retain my commitment?

The doubts tempted her to turn and flee from the moment. In any case, I’m over sixty and he’s still thirty-five. A hand started up towards her face, wanting to fork her hair back or tidy it. Silly. If she was so concerned about her appearance she should have done something about it long ago. Cosmetic packages, hormone gland implants, gene therapy. Except Peter would have hated her resorting to such untruthful indignities.

Alkad forced the delinquent hand down. The LEDs on the airlock’s control processor changed from red to green, and the circular hatch swung back.

Peter Adul was first out, the others had allowed him that civility. His SII suit’s silicon film had withdrawn from his head so she could see all the features she remembered so well. He stared back at her, a frightened smile on his lips. “White hair,” he said gently. “I never imagined that. Lots of things, but never that.”

“It’s not so bad. I imagined much worse happening to you.”

“But it didn’t. And we’re here. And you came to rescue us. After thirty years, you really came back here for us.”

“Of course I did,” she said, abruptly indignant.

Peter grinned wickedly. She laughed back, and launched herself into his arms.

Joshua was accessing the MSV’s external sensors to monitor Ashly’s and Beaulieu’s efforts to integrate the Alchemist with their combat wasp. Ashly was using a waldo arm to edge the device down into the submunitions chamber which the cosmonik had cleared. The Alchemist would fit, but the restraint arms folded around it were causing problems. Beaulieu had already sliced a couple of chunks off the carbotanium struts when they scraped against the chamber walls. This was one incredibly crude kludge-up from start to finish. But it didn’t need excessive sophistication to work, just a secure mounting.

Superimposed across the sensor image were the Lady Mac ’s systems schematics, enabling him to keep a slightly more than cursory eye on their performance. Liol and Sarha were prepping the ship for high acceleration, shutting down all redundant ancillary equipment, cycling fluids back out of weight-vulnerable pipes and into their tanks, bringing the tokamaks up to full capacity so their power would be available for the molecular-binding force generators. Dahybi was running diagnostics through all the zero-tau facilities on board.

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. A vast 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.

Right at the centre, the glow had become unbearably bright. A spire of solid white light punctured the top of the cloud dome, streaking out into space.

“Holy Christ,” Liol datavised. “Was that it? Did it just detonate?”

“Nothing like,” Joshua replied. “This is only the start. Things are going to get a little nasty from now on.”

Lady Mac was already far ahead of the fountaining plasma stream, racing around the gas giant’s curvature for the dawn terminator. Even so, thermal circuits issued a grade three alarm as the plasma’s radiance washed over the hull. Emergency cryogenic exchangers vented hundreds of litres of inflamed fluid to shunt the heat out. Processors were failing at a worrying rate in the immense emp backlash of the wavering plasma stream; even the military-grade electronics were suffering. On top of that, electric currents started to eddy through the fuselage stress structure as the planetary flux lines trembled.

Dahybi had withdrawn into zero-tau, leaving Joshua and Liol to datavise instructions into the flight computer, bringing backups on-line, isolating leakages, stabilizing power surges. They worked perfectly together, keeping the flight systems on-line; each intuitively knowing what was required to support the other.

“Something very odd is happening to the planetary magnetosphere,” Beaulieu reported. “Sensors are registering extraordinary oscillations within the flux lines.”

“Irrelevant,” Joshua replied. “Concentrate on keeping our primary systems stable. Four minutes more, that’s all, we’ll be on the other side of the planet then.”

On board the Urschel , Ikela watched the lightstorm eruption on one of the bridge screens. “Holy Mary, it works,” he whispered. “It actually bloody works.” A perverse sense of pride mingled with fatalistic dismay. If only . . . But then, fruitless wishes were ever the province of the damned.

He ignored Oscar Kearn’s semi-hysterical (and totally impossible) orders to turn the ship around and get them the hell away from this badass planet. Twentieth-century man simply didn’t understand orbital mechanics. They had been accelerating along their present course for twenty-two minutes now, their trajectory effectively committed them to a slingshot flyby. Their best hope was to stay on track, and pray they got past perigee before another upwell exploded out of the atmosphere. That was what the Lady Macbeth was attempting. Good tactic, Ikela acknowledged grudgingly.

Somehow, he didn’t think the Urschel would make it. He didn’t know exactly how the Alchemist worked, but he doubted one eruption was the end of it.

With a sense of inevitability that curiously neutralized any regret or gloom, he settled back passively in his acceleration couch and watched the screens. The original spout of plasma was dying away, the cloud dome flattening out to dissipate into a thousand new hypervelocity storms. But underneath the frothing upper atmosphere a fresh stain of light was spreading, and it was an order of magnitude larger than the first.

He smiled contentedly at his god’s-eye view of what promised to be a truly dazzling Armageddon.

The Alchemist was slowing, it had passed through the semisolid layers into the true core of the planet. Now the density of surrounding matter was intense enough to affect its flight. That meant matter was being pressed against it in ever-greater quantities, and with it the rate of neutronium conversion was accelerating fast. The energy abscess which it generated stretched out back along its course through the planet’s interior like a comet’s tail. Sections of it were breaking apart; ten-thousand-kilometre lengths pinching into elongated bubbles which rose up through the disrupted tiers of the planet’s internal structure. Each one greater than the last.

The second upwelling rampaged out of the upper atmosphere; its tremendous scale making it appear absurdly ponderous. Vast fonts of ions cascaded from its edges as the centre broke open, twisting into scarlet arches which fell gracefully back towards the boiling cloudscape. A coronal fireball spat out of the central funnel, bigger than a moon, its surface slippery with webs of magnetic energy which condensed the plasma into deeper purple curlicues. Ghost gases flowered around it, translucent gold petal wings unfurling to beat with the harmonic of the planetary flux lines.

Lost somewhere among the rising glory of light were two tiny sparkles produced by antimatter detonating inside both Organization frigates.

Lady Mac swept triumphantly across the terminator and into daylight, surfing at a hundred and fifty kilometres per second over the hurricane rivers of phosphorescence which flowed through the troposphere. An arrogant saffron dawn waxed behind her, far outshining the natural one ahead.

“Time to leave,” Joshua datavised. “You ready?”

“All yours, Josh.”

Joshua datavised his order into the flight computer. Zero-tau claimed the last three acceleration couches on the bridge. Lady Mac ’s antimatter drive ignited.

The starship accelerated away from the gas giant at forty-two gees.

Finally, the Alchemist had come to rest at the centre of the gas giant. Here was a universe of pressure unglimpsed except through speculative mathematical models. The heart of the gas giant was only slightly less dense than the neutronium itself. Yet the difference was there, permitting the inflow of matter to continue. The conversion reaction burned unabated. Pure alchemy.

Energy blazed outwards from the Alchemist, unable to escape. The abscess was spherical now, nature’s preferred geometry. A sphere at the heart of a sphere; dangerously tormented matter confined by the perfectly symmetrical pressure exerted by the mass of seventy-five thousand kilometres of hydrogen piled on top of it. This time there was no escape valve up through the weak, nonsymmetrical, semisolid layers. This time, all it could do was grow.

For six hundred seconds Lady Macbeth accelerated away from the mortally wounded gas giant. Behind her, the Alchemist’s trail of fragmented energy abscesses pumped up out of the darkside clouds, transient volcanoes of feculent gas rising higher than worlds. The planet began to develop its own billowing photosphere; a dark burgundy orb enclosed by a glowing azure halo. Its ebony moons sailed on indomitably through their new sea of lightning.

The starship’s multiple drive tubes cut out. Joshua’s zero-tau switched off, depositing him abruptly into free fall. Sensor images and flight data flashed straight into his brain. The planet’s death convulsions were as fascinating as they were deadly. It didn’t matter, they were over a hundred and eighty thousand kilometres from the disintegrating storm bands. Far enough to jump.