Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I am.’

  ‘We have something in common, Sir Knight. Both of us were dragged here against our will. Both of us would like to think there was some point to our being here. Go, and let Glass take you onwards in her ship. I won’t be so ungracious a host as to prevent your leaving.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Fare well, de Ruyter. If we never meet again, and I rather think we won’t, I’m not sorry our paths crossed today. Oh, and Glass?’

  Her answer came warily. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Two things. One is that the ends very rarely justify the means. You’ve made yourself into an instrument for serving one good end. But along the way, you’ve done many evil things. Reflect on those deeds.’

  Her voice contained a steely indifference. ‘And the other thing?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to leave without your little toy.’

  One of the zombie passengers jerked upright in their casket, spasming out a stiff-jointed limb, the fingers opening to fling away a dark, grenade-sized object.

  Glass caught it and pressed it tight to her chest.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We travelled back to Scythe, retracing the path my suit had taken through the corpse of the starship, then back across the void of the docking bay to the waiting shadow of her ship.

  ‘What was that thing?’

  Glass was still holding John the Revelator’s parting gift.

  ‘My inertial clock.’

  ‘I hope it was worth the trouble. Did he really hold you there for three weeks?’

  ‘It was nothing,’ Glass dismissed. ‘My suit could have kept me alive for years if necessary. And he was powerless to hurt me. Nothing in the universe can hurt me, unless I choose to allow it. Kill me, yes, but not hurt me. And I’d have got out eventually, once my suit had diagnosed his weaknesses and formulated countermeasures for those zombies.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘The last few passengers that he couldn’t save around Hela, the little ice-moon around 107 Piscium where I first found him, plus a few bodies still left lying around. He pushed his tendrils into them, made their corpses dance like puppets.’

  ‘I’m sure your suit would have found a countermeasure sooner or later. Otherwise it would have been very, very stupid to allow yourself to be trapped like that, especially after you went in alone.’

  ‘It was not your concern.’

  ‘Still, it became my concern, didn’t it?’

  After a silence, Glass said: ‘Your intervention may have accelerated the inevitable. In that regard it was . . . not unwelcome.’

  ‘At least you had the sense to set some wake-up condition in my casket. It would have been very bad for both of us if I’d stayed asleep. I’d be stuck in Scythe, and you’d be stuck in that room.’

  ‘Until my suit got me out.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, humouring her. ‘Until your suit got you out, which was only ever a matter of time. Answer me truthfully, though. Are your associates really late for the party?’

  ‘There is no party.’ We sailed on across the void for a few more seconds, until Glass added: ‘They should have returned. They had an in-system vehicle, with anti-wolf augmentations. A small ship that came all the way from Hela, in the belly of John the Revelator. Not as capable as Scythe, but adequate for the purposes of their mission. It should have let them get to Yellowstone, and then into the cover of the atmosphere.’

  ‘Something went wrong, then. They’re dead.’

  ‘Or delayed. I’ll have a better idea when I read out the inertial clock, if he didn’t scramble it.’

  At some command from Glass, Scythe opened its airlock, ready to admit us back inside. I had the strangest reaction to that door. I welcomed it and wanted to be within its shelter. I despised what she had done to me and saw her ship as a silent partner in that crime. But being inside the sanctuary of Scythe was infinitely preferable to being outside it, in the plague-ridden bowels of John the Revelator.

  We cycled through the lock and stepped out of our suits. I was hardly fresh, after the couple of hours I had spent in mine. If her story was true, Glass had been inside hers for the better part of three weeks. She stretched like a cat and arched her neck back, taking her first deep breath of shipborne air. A musty tang of sweat, fear and forced confinement reached me. For a second, I nearly pitied her. There was still something human beneath that white armour.

  ‘We take the ship to Yellowstone,’ I said.

  ‘Right answer.’

  ‘And I’ll cooperate in any attempt to find your associates. For the purposes of that operation alone, I won’t attempt to harm you or sabotage you or the ship in any way. I’ll give it my all and offer any insight I think may be advantageous.’

  ‘Presumably this is a temporary detente.’

  ‘Until we know what happened. But my cooperation comes with terms.’

  ‘Oh. Terms.’ She put on a look of intrigued amusement, as if I were a child who had come out with a big-sounding word. ‘And what would they be?’

  ‘Some candour, to begin with. Before I went into reefersleep, I think you did something to me.’

  ‘Did something?’

  ‘I had the strangest dreams.’

  She creased her lips in false sympathy. ‘Strange dreams come with the territory. All those poor little synapses shutting down, then lighting up again as you come out of the cold . . .’

  ‘These were . . . coherent. Something about a war on Mars.’

  Glass nodded sagely. ‘Well, then we’re getting somewhere. You want candour, de Ruyter? I’ll give you candour. But you won’t thank me for it.’

  John the Revelator let us leave. A huge circular door opened in the end of the docking chamber, pivoting on a single massive hinge, and Scythe slipped out into empty space. From the vantage point of the control room, where I sat in the seat to the left of Glass, I had my first view of both the system into which we had arrived, and the ship where Glass’s rendezvous had failed. The latter was as large as any lighthugger, but I saw only disconnected elements of its whole, glimpses that I was forced to assemble in my imagination, much as if I were a traveller catching hints of some forbidding, mist-wreathed castle atop a craggy pinnacle. The ship was as dark as the space around it and gave off no illumination of its own. Nor did Scythe throw any light against it as we departed: Glass was very careful in that regard. All that served to define the broken pieces of the starship’s form was the light from Epsilon Eridani, and since we were at twenty AU – four hundred light-minutes away – the star offered only a dim, emberlike illumination, picking out certain details in faint, dusky reds and browns, and throwing only a deeper funereal pall over the rest of it. All lighthuggers had a dagger-like form, the better to carve their way through the resistance of interstellar space. But this ship was a dagger that had been rusted and mangled nearly to uselessness. The hull had been ripped away in vast areas, revealing a sort of anatomy lesson on the internal structure of starships. The front part, the stabbing point of the blade, was nearly intact. But halfway to the hilt the ship withered in on itself, as if an iron-gloved fist had closed around the blade and shattered most of it away. The elements that formed the hilt – the outriggers for the Conjoiner drive – were ragged, woodwormed, see-through in places. Stars glimmered through a gristle of ship-sized bones, tendons and nerves. But the outriggers had done their work, I saw. The engines were still in place, even if they showed great and possibly crippling levels of damage.

  ‘Would the wolves know that this ship is here?’ I asked.

  ‘By now, almost certainly. But it came in quietly after crossing space from Hela and from any sort of distance it looks like any other drifting, lifeless wreck. It’s of no concern to them now. It poses no threat, and there’s nothing left of our technology that they have the slightest interest in.’

  ‘Is John the Revelator a man stuck inside that ship, or the ship itself?’

  ‘Do you think it matters?’

  ‘Whichever it is, I
think it matters that you made him live against his will.’

  ‘I needed a ship,’ Glass answered. Then, nearly under her breath, ‘John the Revelator suited my purposes. The universe owed him no mercy, Miguel – no clemency or kindness. If I started accounting the bad deeds of his life to you now, we’d be here until the wolves are dust. But that doesn’t mean I set out to be intentionally cruel. If there had been another way, or another chance . . . I might have done things differently.’

  The console chimed: it had completed its retrieval of the embedded data in the inertial clock. Numbers and curves sprung onto the displays.

  Glass stared at them in icy silence.

  ‘Well?’ I prompted.

  ‘This isn’t right. They’ve taken too long.’

  ‘We already knew that.’

  ‘To get here in the first place,’ she said, irritated. ‘The clock says they’ve taken much longer to reach this system than I expected.’

  ‘So much for expectations.’

  ‘Something happened to delay them,’ she said, muttering to herself.

  ‘How bad is it?’

  Glass breathed in heavily. ‘I zeroed the inertial clock when I left them on Hela in ’750, on my way to you. By then I’d set the repair processes in motion, so I didn’t need to oversee them until completion. I knew the condition of the lighthugger, what needed to be done to make it spaceworthy. John the Revelator resisted me initially, but I knew that he would see the ultimate righteousness of my cause and accept his place in my plans. Together with his passengers they should have been under way in a year, two years . . . but the clock is flat for another twenty years!’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Half annoyed by my question, half keen to show off the cleverness of her gadget, Glass directed my attention to a line which started at a low value and moved to the right, staying horizontal for twenty tick marks.

  ‘The clock records local acceleration: that’s all it can measure while being inside the lighthugger. After I left them, it holds at a steady quarter of a gee. That’s them sitting in the local gravity field of Hela, not going anywhere. It spikes here, after twenty years: that must be the launch event, when the lighthugger boosted itself back into space. Then it drops to zero for a few weeks – engine check-out and final repairs, in weightlessness – before it then ramps up to one gee, for the interstellar hop between 107 Piscium and Epsilon Eridani.’

  ‘So they took twenty years to fix up the ship, instead of a year or two. That . . . doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Plans rarely go to schedule.’

  ‘Based on your vast expertise of ship repairs?’

  ‘I haven’t repaired a ship,’ I admitted. ‘But I did dismantle one. It took us five years to strip the Salmacis down for useful supplies, after we landed on Michaelmas. We’d expected it to take a year, eighteen months at the longest. Plans do that.’

  Glass brooded, not quite able to dismiss my point. ‘They still took too long, even allowing for those twenty years. Look at this.’ She jabbed her finger at the diagonally rising line of the one-gee profile. ‘The clock is in the same inertial frame as the ship, so it should record one gravity all the way up to the mid-point. But something happens after a couple of months.’

  ‘The acceleration doesn’t hold. It drops down to about half a gee, then never recovers. Engine trouble, presumably. Either the C-drives couldn’t keep operating at the desired output, the shielding was worn out, or the rest of the ship couldn’t tolerate the stresses. So they throttled back: reduced the acceleration to a rate that was sustainable.’ I shrugged. ‘Half a gee will still get you to relativistic speed, it’ll just take longer to get there. But that’s not really a problem if you’re crossing tens of light-years; you’d only be adding a year or two onto a trip that was already going to take decades.’

  ‘But they never get above seventy-five per cent of the speed of light.’ Glass’s finger hovered over a part of the trace that was flat and zero, until the line dipped into negative acceleration. ‘They cruise most of the way, engines at idle, until the slowdown. A crossing that should have taken twenty years takes thirty!’

  ‘So, allowing for the delay before departure . . . that puts them about thirty years behind schedule.’

  Glass thought to herself.

  ‘They should still have had time. Our differing trajectories allowed for a significant margin of delay. Even with the delay, the lighthugger’s still been sitting in this system for twenty-eight years: enough time for them to take the in-system ship to Yellowstone and back many times over. Something else must have gone wrong.’

  ‘Can you see how long ago they left?’

  ‘No. Only the movements of the main ship. Their departure wouldn’t have created a big enough event to register on the clock.’

  ‘So they could have left twenty-eight years ago, or twenty-eight days. You have no idea which, and John the Revelator can’t be trusted to be any help either. This plan is going really well, isn’t it?’

  Glass seethed. ‘The plan is still viable. If they didn’t manage to return to the rendezvous point, that doesn’t preclude them – or someone else – still being in possession of the items I need. Can you tolerate three gees, or do I need to put you back into reefersleep?’

  ‘Whatever you can tolerate, I can tolerate.’

  Glass smiled at my naivety. Even as her plans came apart, it was good to see that she could still take some pleasure in my shortcomings. ‘It’s tragic; you aren’t even close to understanding how wrong you are.’

  Glass could move around unassisted in three gees, but it was too exhausting for me. After watching my groaning, stumbling efforts – as if she was running a book on how long it would take me to break a bone – she had the ship produce a wiry, insubstantial-looking exoskeletal frame which could be worn over or under my clothing. It was surprisingly effective, and clever enough to be able to apply its support without inducing pressure points that would soon turn to sores. It even had a padded rest for my skull, cupping under my jaw and the back of my head to alleviate the load on my spine and neck muscles. I took a few minutes to adjust to the frame, and then stopped noticing it was there. The frame was already learning my gait and gestures, anticipating my movements like a dance partner.

  Scythe’s acceleration was still arduous. My blood weighed three times as much as normal, so my heart had more work to do. But with the frame easing the load on my bones, muscles and ligaments, and with no risk of injuring myself – the frame wouldn’t allow me to trip or otherwise come to harm – I could at least move around and take care of personal hygiene without undue difficulty.

  Glass insisted that we continue to take our meals in the dining room, with food cooked and served by the on-board robots. Once I had adjusted to the heavy feeling of the cutlery in my hands, the way the wine jumped from the bottle to the glass, and the way the slimmest goblet felt like a tankard, it was surprisingly normal.

  Surprisingly normal, and almost – almost – convivial.

  ‘A confession,’ Glass said, putting a piece of bread on my plate. ‘The support unit is only temporary. Over time, it will reduce its augmentation level.’

  ‘If you want to see me suffer, there are quicker ways to go about it.’

  ‘You won’t suffer. You’ll need the unit less and less, because you’ll be getting stronger. While you were under I had the casket undertake some nanotherapeutic repairs. They’re still playing out – hard to move cells around when they’re frozen – but as the days pass you’ll start to feel the effects. Those old bones of yours are no use to me. I’m rebuilding them, stripping away the years. Nothing magical: just a suite of rejuvenation methods that we wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at three centuries ago. It’ll ache a little, while they make themselves strong again, but that will be a good sort of pain.’

  ‘There are machines inside me now?’

  ‘There you are, being a worrier again. Let me put your mind at ease. The odds of any plague spore touching you are tiny, and I
wouldn’t even take that chance, unless my medichines were already impervious.’ She lifted her goblet, unaugmented, not even a trace of a tremble in her hands. ‘Which they are.’

  ‘What are you trying to turn me into?’

  ‘Not turn you into something. Turn you back into what you used to be.’

  ‘I was never anything.’

  ‘And yet this man, who was never anything, somehow ended up running a community of five thousand people, and holding them together through thick and thin, for thirty years?’

  ‘Someone had to do it.’

  ‘Once upon a time,’ Glass said, eyeing me through the red filter of her wine. ‘You were a soldier.’

  ‘I think I’d remember.’

  ‘No. Not after you took steps to blockade and scramble your own memories.’ Glass laced her fingers, looking at me with a seriousness of expression that was all the more unnerving because I felt it to be sincere. ‘You were one of two brothers, both destined for military service. Your brother was an important man, born a long time ago. His name was Nevil Clavain and he was a soldier also. More than a soldier: a high-ranking military asset during the first Conjoiner war. He was on the side of the Coalition for Neural Purity, an organisation opposed to the Conjoiner experiments on Mars. But something happened to Nevil Clavain. He was captured by the Conjoiners, and later released. Unharmed, and untouched. The experience drove a wedge into his loyalty to the Coalition. Later, he defected wholesale to the other side. Thereafter he was closely aligned with the Conjoiners, without ever fully committing to their ethos. The perpetual outsider, doomed to never feel entirely at home.’

  ‘No,’ I said angrily. ‘I’ve nothing to do with that man; that monster.’

  And then I thought: but I have been having a strange dream of Mars, of a war from the wrong end of history.

  Glass said mildly: ‘Let me continue.’

  ‘Please do,’ I said, with a sudden defeated sense. ‘I might as well hear it to the bitter end.’

  ‘Clavain’s life spans centuries. In his later years, he became involved in the early effort against the wolves. There was factional struggle within the Conjoiners: differences of opinion over strategy. Squabbles over forbidden weapons and dangerous experiments. At some point, Clavain lost his life. That was unfortunate, because I believe him to have had strategic and tactical insights that could help us, including one very important piece of information.’