Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘And you think I have it?’

  ‘Actually, I’m as sure as I can be that you don’t.’

  I raised my glass and drank to the futility of her mission. ‘Then I’m sorry you’ve wasted all these years.’

  ‘Nothing’s been wasted.’ Glass stopped while the robots bustled in with food, all of it predictably appetising. She watched as they set out the meal, smiling slightly, and no doubt sparing part of that smile for my discomfort. ‘Because of the manner and location of Clavain’s death, there’s a chance that the mission-critical information is still retrievable: Charybdis. I tried to retrieve it myself, and failed. But the odds would be better if someone with a blood connection to Nevil tried.’

  ‘Even if some part of this were true . . . I’m no use to you. I’m not the man you think you’ve found.’

  ‘On the contrary, Warren, you are exactly the man.’

  ‘Who is Warren?’

  ‘You are,’ Glass said. ‘That’s your real name. Warren Clavain. You were one of the elite strategists in the Coalition for Neural Purity. A thinker and a warrior in the same cold package. You had a name for yourselves, you and your little gang of super-soldiers: suitably self-aggrandising.’

  A nervousness stirred in me as I asked: ‘Which was?’

  ‘The Knights of Cydonia.’ Glass made an encouraging gesture towards the meal, even as the last certain part of myself collapsed into immense, sucking hollowness. ‘Tuck in, Sir Knight. We’ve work ahead of us.’

  When I returned to my room aboard Scythe, I found something new in there. It was resting on the bedside table, secured against sudden shifts in local gravity by a friction pad. It was an ornament of sorts, and heavy as a bludgeon when I lifted it in my hand. A thick wooden base sprouted an upright metal rod which, in turn, formed the support for a chunk of rough, semi-translucent material.

  I fingered the material. It was a crudely finished rectangle, about twenty centimetres from side to side, a little wider than it was tall. It was buckled along two gentle curves: side to side and top to bottom, as if what the rod supported was only a section cut from a larger, approximately spherical form. The material was about half as thick as my little finger and ragged around the edges. The surface was pitted and scoured to the point where I could make out an impression of shapes and colours through it, but nothing sharp. Notably, there was a small hole in the middle of the material. It went all the way through it, and radiated a fine network of cracks.

  I rolled the ornament in my hands, certain of two things: that it meant something to me – that I had seen it before, in some context – and that nothing about its appearance here was accidental. Glass had left it deliberately, in the sure knowledge that I would find it troubling.

  The ornament drew something from my lips, unbidden.

  ‘Faith,’ I whispered. ‘And Hope.’

  Then finally:

  ‘And Charity.’

  In a fit of rage and denial I slammed the ornament down against the table. But no part of it broke.

  Part Three

  SWINEHOUSE

  CHAPTER NINE

  I fell into Mars on the back of a rock.

  There were two other soldiers next to me. Each was squeezed onto a single-person dropship that was not much larger than the surface-suits we had on underneath. The chrysalis-shaped dropships were attached to the rock at the head end only, with their tapering tails projecting into space. They were black on black, sheltering on the rear face of the rock as its leading side approached Mars. There was a fourth dropship beside the ones we wore, empty for now.

  I looked around, wriggling against the tight binding of my acceleration restraints. The sun was in my eyes, dimmed to a tolerable brightness by my visor’s filters. Even in the full blaze of it, though, our dropships were chunks of featureless black, nearly devoid of detail or defined form.

  A spray of status graphics framed my visor as systems woke up or rebooted from the long sleep. I reviewed them with a quick, thorough eye. All was well with my body, suit and dropship. The status update from our mission planners showed that the second phase of the operation had been executed without incident. A Defection Capsule had come in ahead of the rock’s trajectory, and instead of shooting it down we had allowed that one to slip through, quite deliberately, by arranging our own orbital guns to fail in their interception.

  Heartbeat analysis of the Defection Capsule indicated six recruits. They were already down on Mars; had been so for just under a week. Our thermal scans showed that the capsule had survived its re-entry and touchdown and appeared to be keeping its occupants alive. But there had been no movement from them; no attempt to leave, and no attempt by any other Conjoiner forces to reach them from the mother nest.

  They would come, though. I was perfectly sure of that. Galiana would find that capsule far too tempting a prize to ignore.

  My suit established a short-range comms web with the two occupied dropships. From their biomedical feeds I saw that the other two soldiers were also emerging from hibernation.

  I sipped on a drinking tube, wetting my lips and throat, then tried to speak.

  ‘Hope? Charity?’

  Their answers came back a moment later: groggy but clear.

  ‘I’m here, Faith,’ Hope said.

  ‘Me too,’ Charity said.

  ‘Good. Welcome back.’ I omitted to add: to a mission that will likely kill us all. No reminder was needed. The exact probabilities of our individual deaths might not be known to any of us, but none of us were under any illusions. This was an extremely high-risk endeavour, with no possibility of cover or reinforcements if anything went wrong. ‘You’ll have the same status update as me, even if you haven’t yet digested it. I’ll summarise: a DC lander’s gone in, six up. Dust-down eight hundred klicks north of our projected LZ. Been sitting there for six days. Spiders haven’t made a move on it.’

  ‘Think they’ve sniffed a trap?’ Hope asked.

  ‘No. Why should they? It’s a legitimate defection bid that only just made it through our screens. It doesn’t become a trap until we touch it. Until then, it’s all that it seems – and they will move on it eventually. The only reason they haven’t gone in already is instinctive caution and an understanding that they don’t need to rush. But we’ll give them an incentive.’

  ‘Do we have a reference for our rendezvous point?’ Charity asked.

  ‘Most favoured location is a Muskie camp two hundred klicks south of the capsule. One of us is likely to arrive several hours ahead of the others. Whoever it is, secure the hideout and begin systems inventory, after sweeping for spider traps.’

  ‘As if we’d forget,’ Hope said.

  ‘You’ll be battered and bruised from the impact, and strung-out and sleep-deprived from seventy-two hours hard marching. Nothing in the simulations will feel as bad as the real thing.’

  Hope laughed. ‘Well, that’s encouraging.’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ I answered. ‘Between then and now, all you have to do is survive riding down to the planet on the back of an exploding asteroid.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ Charity said.

  She sounded as if she meant it, too. I admired her for that. She was a prime asset to the Coalition: brave, single-minded, resourceful, selfless in her adherence to the anti-Conjoiner cause. No one knew what went on in the heads of spiders better than this gifted young woman from Pyschosurgical Ops. It was to her credit that she had been so willing to volunteer for the operation.

  Or, to put it more bluntly, not to de-volunteer herself once her suitability had been identified.

  I almost wished I knew her actual name.

  Glass disengaged the darkdrive, then slipped into the cover of the procession of corpses still orbiting Yellowstone.

  Ten thousand habitats, thousands of larger ships, tens of thousands of smaller ones, had been turned into a garland of ashes. There were about three thousand more or less recognisable habitats, but even so they were blasted, airless and tumbling out of contr
ol. The rest was rubble: the rubble of miniature worlds, lighthugger hulls, in-system vehicles, people.

  Glass was attentive. Traces kept appearing on her displays: spikes and waveforms and gabbling eruptions of binary code.

  I shifted in my acceleration couch, trying to find a position where my bones ached a little less.

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Something with a pulse,’ she answered in a low voice, as if there was a risk of being overheard. ‘Ideally, something with a pulse that talks back.’

  ‘I thought we’d passed the point of being cryptic with each other.’

  Glass gave a small shrug. ‘There are things here that aren’t totally dead. Bits of ship that still have some residual functionality left in them. Habitats with housekeeping devices that are still running on minimal power, even though the rest of the habitat is a shell. Space traffic beacons, still putting out transponder codes.’

  ‘And this helps us . . . how, exactly?’

  ‘Some of these things are still sending out localisation pulses, just as if it’s business as usual. Range-finding sweeps, requests for identification, approach authorisation and so on. It’s like the last few flashes of electricity in a dying brain. Machine senility. But it’s still activity of a kind.’

  ‘You think one of these signals may be from the ship that was meant to meet us inside John the Revelator?’

  ‘Not necessarily. But if they were here at all, they may have been picked up on a tracking system, and their movements logged. If I can find a tracking device and interrogate its memory, I’ll be able to tell when they arrived.’ She paused, biting her lower lip. ‘But so far these systems aren’t responding in kind.’

  ‘You’re talking back to them? After all the trouble we’ve gone to not to be noticed, isn’t that a little risky?’

  ‘My, you really are a worrier, aren’t you?’ Her look veered between admiration and the faint, developing disappointment of the remorseful buyer. ‘How a man like you ever got anything done in wartime . . .’

  ‘I’m not a soldier.’

  ‘Your very name says otherwise. When you were small, your brother – when he and you used to play games in the sand dunes near your home – your brother called you War for short. It’s mentioned in one of the military biographic files: a puff piece about both of you being promoted to Sky Marshall. Isn’t that sweet? He saw what you were to become!’

  ‘You’re insane.’

  She considered. ‘Well, it’s possible, if by “sane” we mean operating in the functionally predictable attractor volume of mental phase space. I’m definitely not that.’ Glass gave a kitten-like shudder, as if the idea of being normal was almost viscerally repulsive. ‘But what I’m also not is reckless, dear War. Those comms we were discussing are all minimal energy, extreme tight-beam. Since I’m mimicking the same signals protocols, any back-scatter will just look like accidental leakage from the same conversation that’s been going on here for decades. The trouble is, nothing is showing signs of . . .’ Glass slowed, narrowing the black pools of her eyes at one of the readouts.

  ‘You were about to say?’

  ‘Until now, nothing’s answered my requests for an internal data inventory. Probably means most of these transmitters are useless to us, incapable of logging an event history. But this one is more promising. It’s faint, but its output pulses aren’t nearly so garbled as the others, and the way it’s responded is in keeping with my return pulse.’

  ‘It’s sent you the record of movements?’

  ‘No . . . it may need some further persuasion. But at least it seems to understand the nature of my enquiry. I won’t risk further comms until we’re right on top of it, though. We have to work our way further along the orbital stream.’

  Our course was a forced orbit: using thrust to maintain a fixed altitude above Yellowstone, while moving faster than the blasted remnants which still circled the planet at the same elevation. Glass fired the engines in sparing bursts, never for too long, and when she had the opportunity she used any large, relatively solid-looking mass as a cover for our course changes.

  After twenty nervous minutes, Scythe chimed with an alert: a warning that the concentration of masses ahead of us was denser than anything we had been picking through so far. Glass slowed our approach, reducing our relative speed to no more than a kilometre per second compared with the average motion of the orbital flow.

  ‘I don’t know how big the largest structures were,’ Glass said, in a rare admission of ignorance. ‘But several of them seem to be moving in a fixed formation, rather than following independent orbits. I don’t know why. We’ll have to push into that concentration, one way or the other. The beacon I’m looking for seems to be embedded in the same group of ruins.’

  ‘We could look for another beacon.’

  ‘We have already searched quite thoroughly. This is the only promising candidate.’

  We drifted between the black icebergs of gored and disembowelled habitats, the spaces between them slowly narrowing. From a range of ten kilometres the structures remained distant, abstract forms, with only traces of their former shapes. Here was a ruptured cylinder, blown wide at one end like a stoppered cannon. Here was the arc of a space wheel, severed along its rim. Here was a half-shattered globe, its guts long since spilled. I thought of the millions who might have called these worlds home, the lives that had been spent within their warm, comfortable cores.

  Scythe put out another alert: a different tone this time.

  ‘What is it?’

  Glass studied a readout, bit her lower lip in concentration, wore the glazed look that told me she was in intense dialogue with her ship, then undid her seat restraint. ‘Wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  ‘Not the ideal time for a toilet break, Glass. Couldn’t you try holding it in?’

  ‘If you knew the things I am holding in, you’d be a little more circumspect with your attempts at humour.’

  When she returned a minute or two later she had an object clutched between her hands. It was a blunt-ended cylinder, about the size of a small oxygen tank. The two bevelled ends were thick metal plugs, flickering with lights. In between was a glass-walled container giving off a pale violet glow.

  Something floated in the centre of that glow: a black dot.

  ‘Know thy enemy. You’ll have seen their actions from afar, I imagine. But it’s quite a different thing to hold extinction between your hands.’

  Glass passed the cylinder to me as if it were haunted or cursed and I the gift’s hapless, doomed beneficiary.

  ‘Of course we saw their actions,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Before or after you left human civilisation?’

  ‘A little of both.’

  Though the cylinder was weightless, I still felt the mass of its armoured sides and powerful containment mechanisms. I had understood without asking that the black dot was an Inhibitor machine: a piece of wolf, or in some sense a wolf entire. Magnified, I would have seen a cube of perfect blackness. More accurately: I would have seen either a square or a hexagon, depending on the viewing angle, since the three-dimensional nature of Inhibitor cubes was impossible to perceive. Those surfaces and edges were as slippery to light as an event horizon.

  ‘What happened on the Salmacis, to make you choose AU Microscopii as your destination? That can’t ever have been the intended destination when the ship set out.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ I said guardedly. ‘When we left, the rumours of war were already about. But it was confined to a relatively small number of worlds and systems, and many believed it would burn out soon enough: that some revenant alien machines could never defeat the civilisation that had already survived the Melding Plague and numerous wars of its own. So some of us thought there was hope; that all we had to do was regroup and fight back, and we could do that from one of the worlds where there was already a human presence.’

  ‘And yet, the plan was abandoned.’

  ‘Mid-voyage, the captain and cre
w thawed a quarter of the passenger complement and raised the others to baseline consciousness. We were polled, like good Demarchists. By then, the Salmacis had been running into a blizzard of emergency signals, an ever-rising chorus of alarm and panic. Other ships, other worlds. The only commonality was that sooner or later all those signals got snuffed out. The wolves were emerging everywhere we looked, around every settled star. In many cases it was perfectly clear that they had been with us all along, undetected, dormant, waiting for their moment of activation. All thoughts of a safe haven in the known systems were thrown out. We had to plot a new course to some world where humans had never trodden, and where the wolves would be least likely to look. There were many suggestions, but most of them were deemed unworkable for one reason or other.

  ‘I . . . advocated for Michael. There was resistance, at first. Who wants to spend the rest of their life sheltering inside an airless, radiation-blasted lump of rock orbiting inside a rubble cloud? But one by one the objections fell away. We could reach the system without straying too close to any of the wolf hotspots, and the circumstellar cloud and radiation environment would provide perfect cover, especially early on, as we worked to dismantle the ship.’

  ‘Good then, that you were so persuasive. That your one voice triumphed where others did not.’

  ‘If we’d gone somewhere else, then perhaps we’d have made that work as well.’

  ‘But you do not know.’

  ‘I know that no part of Sun Hollow came easily, and that there were plenty who wanted my neck on the block for ever advocating it.’

  ‘And yet, by then, you had become the de facto leader.’ Glass looked at me with the sort of cold admiration one reserved for a well-tempered blade. ‘Just one voice out of all those passengers, yet the one that prevailed.’