Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I think you must be a good man, Miguel de Ruyter, to have left your family and come out here for me.’

  ‘Then you think wrongly.’

  ‘You risked your life, left your loved ones, for one passenger you didn’t even know.’

  I was glad she could not see the tightness in my face. ‘I had a job to do.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Another six weeks brought me home.

  By the time I emerged from torpor, a few hours out from Michaelmas, the shuttle was already on its final deceleration burn. There was no point signalling my arrival: I would have been tracked by the Disciples all the way in, their updates alerting Sun Hollow to my imminent return. Even without the Disciples, the sensors on Michaelmas would have picked up the profile of my ship and determined that I was nothing to do with the wolves. If I had been deemed to be some other kind of threat – a thing of human origin, taking too close an interest in Michaelmas – then I would already have been shot out of the sky by our defensive railguns.

  The fact that I was alive at all, meant that I had been tracked and identified as a friendly asset.

  When the gee-load had dropped enough to permit mobility, I went back and checked that my passenger was still secure and that she remained at the same level of reefersleep as when I had gone under. The frosting beneath the window had cleared a little since I last saw her and her face loomed more discernibly. She looked bloodless: as pale as a white paper mask. Her dark-rimmed eyes were closed, her lips sealed, her demeanour one of serene repose. I thought of a painting I had once seen: a drowned woman floating in water.

  I went back to nurse the shuttle down.

  Michaelmas was a dense rock, larger than Mars but smaller than Earth. Other than this short interlude of human habitation, it was doomed to be lifeless. It had no atmosphere, seas, or icecaps. At no point in its extremely short life had any volatile materials ever rained down onto its crust. Nor would they: Michael’s bad-tempered flaring episodes had banished all the life-giving compounds from the inner planetary system, never to return. Thus, Michaelmas suited us very well as a hiding place. The constant, continuing bombardment by rocky impactors meant that its surface was a scribble of overlapping craters, providing natural concealment for our surface emplacements, launch silos and access shafts. Each impactor transferred some of its kinetic energy into the crust, warming it almost imperceptibly. Over time, that thermal background served as a camouflage for our own heat-generating activities. The crust rang like a bell, too, meaning that it would be very hard to detect human presence by remote seismography, scanning the surface with lasers or radar. Our own seismophones had to work hard to separate noise from signal, with that ever-droning undertone. Beyond Michaelmas, the dust disk in which it swam provided additional cover, and when Michael grumbled out a flare, we tried to use it to conceal a launch, thrust boost or signals burst.

  None of it was infallible; none of it was easy. We had come to Michaelmas not to found a colony, but to hide for as long as it took. Whether that was thirty years, or a hundred and thirty, was beyond the bounds of discussion. It was simply an axiom of Sun Hollow that we waited as long as necessary, always with the understanding that this place of refuge was temporary. Each day that we added to our tally was an achievement; each year a triumph. The forward planners in Sanctum were tasked with looking into our long-term survival needs, but for most of the citizenry that kind of thinking was actively discouraged. Concentrate only on the day ahead, and all the days after that will follow.

  Every few years threw us a crisis. Sometimes they were political, like the Rurik Taine affair. Sometimes they were linked to a resource shortage, a systems failure, a chain of accidents. Sometimes, as with the passenger, it was an emergency related to something picked up by the Disciples. We had come through this latest one, and been spared our ultimate fear. Although a human incomer posed a serious threat to Sun Hollow, it was within our means to neutralise. One day, the Disciples would see a more wolfish kind of shadow at the cave mouth. But not today, and perhaps not this year. We had come through again, and I had played a small part in that success.

  The shuttle fell tail first, dropping to the surface. It was always an act of nerve, waiting for the crater floor to slide aside at the last moment, allowing the shuttle to sink into the underground silo.

  Sun Hollow allowed me in. The engines throttled down. The shuttle rocked slightly on its landing legs, then settled into stillness. There was never any air in the silo unless repairs needed to be done, but a pressurised connecting bridge pushed out from one of the walls, and before long a figure sauntered along the transparent tube to meet me at the lock.

  Morgan Valois, plump in sheepskins, dangling a breather box.

  ‘You’re lucky man, de Ruyter.’

  ‘I am?’

  Valois opened the breather box and took out a small bottle. He unstoppered it and held it out. A heavy odour wafted up my nostrils, settling into the space between my eyes. Already sensing brain cells beginning to wither, I took a polite swig for friendship’s sake. I had no idea what was in the bottle, nor how Valois had come by it, but that concoction only came out on exceptionally rare occasions. ‘You get to read your own obituaries. I think you came out of them looking tolerably well.’

  ‘I’m not dead.’

  ‘We know that now. In fact we’ve known for about three weeks, once you popped back onto our tracking network. But the obituaries were already written and duplicated: too late to do anything about it now.’ His eyes narrowed to a hard, penetrating curiosity. ‘Why in Michael’s name didn’t you signal back to us?’

  ‘I didn’t believe it was necessary. The Disciples should never have lost sight of me.’

  ‘They did. You know the system’s not flawless. If the Disciples occasionally lose track of one of our ships, that’s actually a good thing. It means our stealthing measures aren’t entirely pointless.’ He waved a flustered hand near his brow. ‘Besides that. We’ve had . . . glitches . . . with the Disciples, while you were away.’

  ‘Glitches?’

  ‘Never mind. All will soon be mended. Which is better than I dare speculate about the state of your marriage.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You’ve put them through hell.’

  ‘Oh, dear God. Are you saying they thought I was dead, all those weeks?’

  Valois took back the sacred bottle and returned it to its place of sanctuary. Any trace of bonhomie was gone from his face. ‘Nicola protected Victorine to the best of her abilities. Of course, she clung to the hope that you were alive, but near the end even she was starting to lose faith.’ He shook his head, his tone turning censorious. ‘You didn’t have to inflict this on us, Miguel: if something happened out there, something that delayed your return, it would have been acceptable to signal us.’

  I stared at him. ‘What do you mean, if something happened out there? You know exactly what happened.’

  ‘We inferred. We saw the ship blow up. Either your missile had hit it, or you’d gone to protocol two. When there was a silence, we had to assume the latter.’

  ‘But the distress signal.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Is this a game, Morgan? A test to see how well I cope with post-revival disorientation?’

  ‘I assure you it’s no game at all.’

  ‘There was a distress signal. Something contacted the ship. I investigated and found a drifting casket.’

  ‘A casket,’ he repeated carefully, as if taking notes in an interrogation, seeing how carefully I kept to one version of events.

  ‘That signal was broadcasting all across the system. I had to silence it, by any means. There’s no way Sun Hollow didn’t pick it up, let alone the Disciples.’

  ‘We didn’t pick up any sort of distress signal.’

  ‘Then it must have been . . . unidirectional.’ I frowned through a headache: more than could be explained by the tiny sip I’d taken from his bottle. ‘I don’t know how it knew where to find me, but
that’s the only explanation. We can argue about this later: if you think I’m making this up, or delusional, I have all the evidence you need in the weapons bay. I found the drifter and I brought her aboard.’

  ‘Her.’

  ‘A passenger from the ship. Which, incidentally, I didn’t need to destroy. It blew up on its own, just as I was about to ram it.’

  He lifted an eyebrow: the merest trace of admiration. ‘You were that close, in the end?’

  ‘The missile veered off. No chance to return and refuel. So I put myself in the firing line.’ I lowered my voice. ‘I was ready for it, Morgan. You’d be surprised how ready I was. How good it felt, to know that I was about to make that sacrifice.’

  The admiration turned as quickly to pity.

  ‘Until something robbed you of that chance for noble self-sacrifice.’

  ‘Unless you were there, you can’t know what it was like.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘All right, I believe that much of it. I saw it in your face when you left: that need for expiation. Are you serious about this casket? You really brought something back with you?’

  ‘More than just a thing. A survivor. I’ve spoken to her. She’s not some radiation-blasted corpse in a box: her casket warmed her enough for communication. She was on a ship from Haven.’

  ‘One survivor, out of how many?’

  ‘She doesn’t remember enough to be able to say. I’m hoping she’ll remember a little more when we bring her out of reefersleep.’

  ‘And this . . . fortunate soul? She’s in hibernation now?’

  ‘Her casket was damaged, but I plumbed it back into shuttle power for the trip home. She went back under.’

  Valois nodded. ‘Good. Then she won’t feel a thing when we kill her.’

  I knocked on my own door: it only seemed polite. A long interval followed, and although it was evening, and out of school hours, I wondered if Nicola and Victorine had made themselves unavailable, delaying the point when they had to see me again. I could not blame them for that. I had been anxious to see them, and at the same time desperate to postpone our reunion because of the difficult feelings we were all going to have to face.

  I was nearly ready to turn away from my own home, to go back to Sanctum on some pretence of business, when Nicola let me in. We held each other in the hallway, but there was a tentativeness to the embrace. When I kissed Nicola, she did not pull back, but neither did she rush to reciprocate.

  ‘I am glad that you are back,’ she said quietly, as if there were a risk of Victorine overhearing from one of the adjoining rooms. ‘More glad than I may be capable of showing right now. But you put us through something terrible.’

  I closed the door behind me and shrugged off the breather box and sheepskins I had worn on my way home through the caverns. ‘Morgan says that you never lost hope that I was alive.’

  Nicola kept her voice low. There was a strain in it. ‘Not losing hope is not the same thing as knowing you’re alive, Miguel. When we saw that explosion, what else were we expected to think?’

  ‘I thought about signalling. But there’s always a risk in any sort of communication.’

  ‘You do not need to tell me these things.’

  ‘No,’ I said softly. ‘You need to understand. That ship wasn’t destroyed by my missile. Something else caused it. An engine failure, most likely. But I had to consider the other possibility: that there were wolves nearby. Maybe they hadn’t seen me until that point. But it would only have taken one stray photon to give me away. From that discovery, they’d have found the Disciples, and then they’d have found Sun Hollow.’

  ‘Don’t over-dramatise.’

  ‘I’m not. If wolves had come, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.’ I searched her face, hoping the cruelty of my words had served its purpose. ‘It wasn’t carelessness or thoughtlessness that stopped me signalling, Nicola. It was love. I’d have died out there rather than give the wolves a lead on our location.’

  Some rumination played behind her eyes. ‘Morgan says you nearly sacrificed yourself.’

  ‘The missile had failed. It was the only remaining way of stopping that ship.’

  I sensed something change in her: not forgiveness, not yet, but a step in the direction of forgiveness. It was the intention on which I pinned the first faint hope of reconciliation.

  ‘How close did it come?’

  ‘I’d made my peace.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘A burst of light. I was spared my sacrifice.’

  ‘What were you thinking of, in your last moments?’

  ‘Of you here, alone, without me. I hoped you’d think well of what I’d done.’

  ‘It is not me that needs to understand it. I protected Victorine from the word of your death for as long as I could, but I could never shield her completely.’

  I nodded my agreement. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair.’

  ‘When at last the news reached her – which we all thought was the truth – she was shocked and saddened. But as the days passed, and she had contact with her friends, she saw that in the eyes of many you had become a hero. Miguel de Ruyter: the man who gave himself to save Sun Hollow. I think, for that little while, she would have preferred to have been your daughter, not mine. But do you see what happened when you turned out not to be dead after all? You put her through another kind of grief. That figure that she had built up in her imagination died too.’

  ‘I can’t help what happened,’ I said. ‘I can’t help that I didn’t die out there, or that I’m not the heroic martyr I never set out to be. All I know is that there was a threat, and now it’s neutralised. And for a week, or a month, or however long it takes, some of us can sleep easily again.’ I stepped away from her, offering my palms. ‘That’s all I have. I had a duty to Sun Hollow; I discharged that duty.’

  ‘Did you feel you had something to atone for?’

  I started to lie, then decided Nicola deserved only the truth. ‘You were the one who said I had a guilty conscience. I’d have denied it, but part of me knew you were right.’

  ‘And now . . . has that burden lifted?’

  ‘I think it has.’

  ‘I hope so, for all our sakes.’ Her voice became stern, but beneath it was a thread of familial warmth. ‘You will not go away again, Miguel. Promise me that, and make the same promise to Victorine. Can you do that?’

  ‘I will do my best.’

  ‘Not good enough. I want a promise, here and now.’ She took my hands in hers. ‘As sacred as a marriage vow. You must not leave us. You will not leave Sun Hollow until the day we all leave. Is that understood and agreed?’

  I nodded solemnly. ‘It is. My bones ache. I’d forgotten how hard it can be, and it was just a few weeks in space. Someone else will go next time. That’s my promise.’

  ‘Good.’ Her fingers tightened. ‘You mean it.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Your hand is shaking. How is the numbness?’

  ‘It’ll get better after a few days.’

  At last there was the easing in her that I had been hoping for. ‘You will say all these things to Victorine, as well. She is waiting in the kitchen. When Morgan said that you were on your way . . . I prepared a meal. I was allowed an extra mutton ration, on account of your return. Will you eat with us?’

  My eyes began to sting: tears of gratitude and relief, to be welcomed back into the love of a family.

  ‘Nothing would make me happier.’

  It could never be a normal meal, but it was far better than no reception at all. I made the same promise to Victorine that I had given to Nicola, and when she came back at me with a hundred extra conditions, I accepted them without complaint. That settled – to her satisfaction, at least – she began to probe me for the details of what had happened since my departure. Most of it I could answer straightforwardly, but I was still in no hurry to dwell on the topic of sacrificing myself. Instead, I glided around it, mentioning that the missile had gone wrong and that shortly afterwards the s
hip had blown up on its own.

  ‘Morgan told Mother that you found someone out there.’

  ‘I did,’ I answered. ‘A woman, the only survivor of the incomer.’

  ‘No one else seems to know.’

  ‘They don’t, for the time being. Once we have a better idea of the incomer’s condition, I’ll make a public announcement.’

  Victorine picked spinach from between her front teeth. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘We don’t know. We spoke to each other out there, but she was still frozen and her memory hadn’t begun to come back properly.’

  ‘Will it?’

  ‘I very much hope so. There may be things she knows that can help us – even the simplest skill. Even if she doesn’t remember everything, and hasn’t anything unique to offer us, she’ll still be treated kindly, made welcome in our community.’

  Victorine ate on in silence for a few mouthfuls. ‘Does she know you went out there to kill her?’

  ‘Not her personally,’ Nicola put in on my behalf.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Victorine asked, lifting her face to both of us. ‘Her or one of the thousands of other people on that ship. Just because you didn’t know any of them by name, it doesn’t change the fact that the plan was to kill them all.’

  ‘The ship had to be stopped—’ Nicola began.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ I said, cutting her off gently. ‘Victorine deserves to hear the unvarnished truth. I did mean to kill the passenger: there’s no getting away from it. I meant to kill her and however many other thousands of people she travelled with. It doesn’t matter if there were fifty thousand of them, and five thousand of us. It’s not a moral calculus. They had to die, no matter how many of them were, no matter how virtuous they were, so that our survival wasn’t put in jeopardy.’

  ‘That makes us monsters,’ Victorine said.

  ‘It does,’ I agreed, undercutting her ire. ‘It also makes us alive, and able to keep being alive. This is the key, Victorine: we’ve done it. We’ve proven to ourselves that we have the means to survive in Sun Hollow, and to keep surviving. Every death, every injury, every hard lesson along the path that’s brought us here: all of that would have counted for nothing if we’d permitted them to blunder into our system and draw the wolves with them. It’s not nice, what we have to do. But until we know that we aren’t the only surviving pocket of humanity, every decision we take has to be conducted in that cold light. It’s not about us: it’s about the thread that we carry – a link between the humanity of the past, and the humanity of the future. If we break that thread; if we fail in our duty of self-preservation, we extinguish that future. Every hope, every dream: gone. It will be nothing but darkness, until the end of time.’