The Night's Dawn Trilogy (327 page)

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Dahybi had withdrawn into zero-tau, leaving Joshua and Liol to datavise instructions into the flight computer, bringing backups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.

Deep beneath the benighted clouds, the central energy abscess had swollen to an intolerable size. The pressure it was exerting
against the confining mass of the planet had almost reached equilibrium. Titanic fissures began to tear open.

An event horizon engulfed
Lady Macbeth
’s fuselage.

With a timing that was the ultimate tribute to the precision of Mzu’s decades-old equations, the gas giant went nova.

•  •  •

The singularity surged into existence five hundred and eighty thousand kilometres above Mirchusko’s pale jade blizzards of
ammonia-sulphur cirrus. Its event horizon blinked off to reveal the
Lady Macbeth
’s dull silicon fuselage. Omnidirectional antennae were already broadcasting her CAB identification code. Given the reception
they got on returning from Lalonde, Joshua wasn’t going to take any chances this time.

Sensor clusters telescoped outwards, passive elements scanning around, radars pulsing. The flight computer datavised a class
three proximity alert.

“Charge the nodes,” Joshua ordered automatically. His mistake, he never expected to jump into trouble here. Now that might
cost them badly.

The bridge lights dimmed fractionally as Dahybi initiated an emergency power up sequence. “Eight seconds,” he said.

The external sensor image flashed up in Joshua’s mind. At first he thought they were being targeted by electronic warfare
pods. Space was flecked with small white motes. But the electronic sensors were the only ones not being taxed, the whole electromagnetic
environment was eerily silent. The flight computer reported its radar track-while-scan function was approaching capacity overload
as it designated multiple targets. Each of the white motes was being tagged by purple icons to indicate position and trajectory.
Three were flashing red, approaching fast.

It wasn’t interference.
Lady Mac
had emerged just outside a massive particle storm unlike anything Joshua had ever seen before. The motes weren’t ice, nor
rock.

“Jesus, what is this stuff?” He datavised a set of instructions into the flight computer. The standard sensor booms began
to retreat, replaced by the smaller, tougher combat sensors. Discrimination and analysis programs went primary.

The debris was mostly metallic, melted and fused scraps no bigger than snowflakes. They were all radioactive.

“There’s been one brute of a fight here,” Sarha said. “This is all combat wasp wreckage. And there’s a lot of it. I think
the swarm is about forty thousand kilometres in diameter. It’s dissipating, clearing from the centre.”

“No response to our identification signal,” Beaulieu said. “Tranquillity’s beacons are off air, I cannot locate a single artificial
electromagnetic transmission. There isn’t even a ship’s beacon active.”

The centre of the debris storm had a coordinate Joshua didn’t even have to run a memory check on. Tranquillity’s orbital vector.
Lady Mac’s
sensor suite revealed it to be a large empty zone. “It’s gone,” he said numbly. “They blew it up. Oh, Jesus, no. Ione. My
kid. My kid was in there!”

“No, Joshua,” Sarha said firmly. “It hasn’t been destroyed. There isn’t nearly enough mass in the swarm to account for that.”

“Then where is it? Where the hell did it go?”

“I don’t know. There’s no trace of it, none at all.”

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

THE NAKED GOD
. Copyright © 2000 by Peter F. Hamilton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Warner Books,

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

ISBN: 978-0-7595-2122-3

Aspect® name and logo are registered trademark of Warner Books, Inc.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by Warner Books. A mass market edition was published in two volumes
in 2000 by Warner Books.

First eBook Edition: November 2000

Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.

Contents

Copyright

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

Epilogue