Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘The more I send in, the quicker they can search the Swinehouse. I have tamed one; I can tame a hundred more.’

  ‘The question isn’t how many you can send in,’ I said. ‘It’s how many you can keep control of.’

  ‘The answer is: as many as I deem necessary.’

  I turned to Pinky. ‘I’m not sure I like it. But I like the idea of going in there without the ninecats even less. Are you happy with this part of the plan?’

  ‘Happy’s not the first word that springs to mind, Stink.’ He lifted his snout challengingly, directing the gesture at Glass. ‘If you can make a few of these things work for you, send ’em in. But you’d better be coming in damn fast afterwards.’

  ‘I’ll fulfil my part in the exercise,’ Glass answered. She snapped her fingers at the shimmering fence and the ninecat sprung back at her, lobbing its central body into her palm and curling its legs around her wrist.

  She closed her fingers and lowered her hand to her side, the ninecat dangling limply.

  ‘How many would you need?’ Lady Arek asked. ‘I thought you might make do with twenty.’

  ‘Twenty would suffice, but the search pattern becomes more efficient if I have another ten, or even twenty. I need hardly remind you that the speed of the search correlates strongly with Clavain and Pinky’s survival probabilities.’

  ‘No, you need hardly remind me. Thirty, then. But only with the understanding that you remain in complete control.’

  ‘May I have ten more, for the purposes of destructive testing?’

  Lady Arek’s tone was grudging. ‘If you feel the need. But do not over-exert yourself, Hourglass. You have more than enough to be getting on with in preparing the haemoclast. You are more useful to me functional than exhausted.’

  ‘I know my limits. Fortunately, I can put one or other of my brain hemispheres into a sleeping state while the other remains active. You should try it sometime.’

  The demonstration complete, Glass’s audience filtered out through the open door, back into the warrens of the stronghold. Pinky shouldered past me without a word. I lingered, waiting until I was left alone with Glass.

  ‘That was very well done.’

  ‘You were impressed by the ninecat.’

  ‘No, not that part. The bit where you hid the injury it just inflicted on you. Open your hand.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Then do it anyway. Why not, if you’ve nothing to hide?’ Seizing the moment, I snatched the limp ninecat from her grasp, easily done since her palm was already slick with blood. I prised open her fingers. The blood welled out in pulses from a deep, vivid gash in the meat of her palm. ‘You fool,’ I whispered.

  ‘It was an . . . error, not a loss of control.’

  ‘I’m sure in your mind there’s a very distinct difference.’

  ‘This is nothing, Clavain – just a slip.’

  ‘You’re lucky you didn’t lose your fingers. Those legs must cut like razors and this wound needs treatment. You should go to Probably Rose.’

  ‘If Probably Rose speaks to Lady Arek, then Lady Arek will lose confidence in the operation, and revert to her original plan of waiting.’

  ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad idea?’

  ‘Except there are no other options. This must work. It will work.’ Astonished, I understood that Glass was appealing to me. For the first time in our relationship, I knew something that could be damaging to her, and no amount of coercion was going to help. ‘It won’t happen again. I’m learning the control protocols a little more each time. That’s why I want the other ninecats, so I can fully understand their limits.’

  ‘I admit there’s a part of me that wants to see this through.’ I passed the blood-lathered ninecat back to Glass, almost as if it were a peace offering. ‘I won’t mention this to Lady Arek. Or any of them. But you should get that wound looked at. If you don’t trust Probably Rose, go back to Scythe and have the ship fix it.’

  Glass held the ninecat in her uninjured hand. She stared down at the wound in the other, her face tensing in concentration. It was as if she were trying to puzzle out an equation. The pulse of blood began to slow, then stop altogether.

  ‘I’ve got it under control.’

  ‘You can break,’ I said, marvelling. ‘You’re not some indestructible mannequin after all. You have limits. And that hurt, didn’t it?’

  ‘I chose to allow it to hurt,’ Glass said defiantly. ‘Pain is information. Information is . . .’

  ‘Situational awareness,’ I said, and then frowned at myself, because the words had come from somewhere within me that I did not care to explore.

  ‘Right answer,’ Glass said.

  I tensed inside my suit, preparing for the shock of entry. The simulations had prepared me for the fact that the loads would come on suddenly, and I was ready for that. Nothing in the mission planners’ suite of training methods, though, could ever replicate the real experience of being shackled to a house-sized lump of chondrite rock as it rammed into the iron wall of the Martian atmosphere.

  Nor would that necessarily be the worst of what was to come. We were counting on the rock fragmenting a long way off the surface, but the exact timing and severity of that fragmentation was impossible to predict with any accuracy. All that could be said was that the four dropships, and the four suits inside them (and the bodies inside three of those dropships and suits) were capable of absorbing a reasonable spread of predictive stresses. The one mercy was that we would more than likely black out if the conditions were at the extreme end of the range of survivable scenarios. Beyond that range, we would be safely dead, and probably falling to Mars in several molten pieces.

  With my dropship still attached to the rock – head first, so that the gee loading would tend to send blood into my brain, rather than away from it – I waited for the first indications of the coming disintegration. There would not be much time between the rock’s first encounter with the atmosphere, and the thermal shock that eventually shattered it. But there should be enough of an interval to know when it was starting.

  Far from being an iron wall, the atmosphere was, in fact nearly, as tenuous as vacuum. But even a ghost-thin atmosphere presented a formidable obstacle to a lump of rock arriving from deep space at thirty kilometres per second. The majority of these incoming rocks never left any trace of themselves on the surface, shattering high up and leaving only a rain of hot, dusty gravel as a memento of their arrival. Once in a while, a rock stayed intact long enough to leave an impact crater. Mars was large enough that even these impactors were rarely worth the trouble of deflecting.

  I felt the first touch of atmosphere. The rock rumbled, like one iceberg grinding against another. I swivelled my view, looking either side, past the other dropships. The horizon – the edge of the rock, only a few metres away – was starting to flicker with purple light. The rumbling sensation intensified. I felt the push of gravity, as the frictional braking slowed the rock down. The purple light brightened to rose, then white. Tongues of flame bannered past, converging behind the rock. The ride was becoming rougher, heavy jolts signifying the rock’s imminent destruction. Pieces of it, fist-sized or head-sized, were already splintering. Beyond the curtaining fire, a wide arc of the day-lit Martian surface had come into view. I had trained for visual recognition of landmarks, but nothing looked familiar.

  The dropships had drilled acoustic sensors several metres into the rock to detect the exact moment of break-up. The separation needed to be timed too precisely to be left to human control. A fraction of a second too early and we would lose the camouflaging action of the explosion itself. A fraction too late and the fireball would engulf us. I had always known that the moment would come as a surprise, and so it proved. To my eyes the flames were just starting to shine more strongly, veiling Mars, and the jolts becoming more continuous . . . and then there was whiteness, and I was falling.

  The rock had blown up. I had been strapped to a megatonne warhead until the last instant, and now
I tumbled away from the expanding edge of the blast, one among hundreds of similar shards of debris surfing that bright billowing edge. It would look convincing . . . it had to look convincing. There were going to be no second chances where the operation was concerned. If luck was on our side, the Conjoiners might just be fooled by our ruse.

  Was it worth the risk, knowing we would never be able to pull off the same trick twice?

  Of course.

  Down there on Mars was the Conjoiner compound. And inside that compound was an extremely high-value prisoner. One of our own. A man like myself: another Knight of Cydonia.

  My brother, Nevil.

  We knew he was alive. We knew also – through diplomatic back-channels – that he had not undergone the usual fate of those caught by the Conjoined. He had not been converted; not had their machines pumped into his skull, eroding his humanity and turning him into another unit in their massively distributed, conscienceless hive-mind.

  They were holding back because of his status as an extremely useful bargaining chip.

  For now.

  The explosion was a fading, dirt-stained smear far above me. The dropship was falling on exactly the near-parabolic course that would be expected of any piece of fiery debris. It was even sloughing parts of its hull to mimic ablative heating. Somewhere out there were the other three ships, another trio of falling sparks, two of them containing Hope and Charity. But they were long past the point where I stood any hope of visual acquisition. If I could have acquired them – and distinguished them from the real debris – something would have been wrong.

  The ground came up hard, like a zoom in on a terrain map. One downside to our plan was that the dropships could not be seen to slow down as they approached the surface. Our mission planners had examined all feasible scenarios for getting three live bodies down onto Mars and concluded that the inhabited dropships could only commence deceleration measures when they were five hundred metres up.

  This was going to hurt.

  But pain, as I liked to tell my students in military planning, was situational awareness.

  One week slipped by, then another. Lady Arek’s stronghold swung around Yellowstone, its orbit carrying it to northerly and southerly extremes of latitude, but only occasionally coinciding with the position of Chasm City. As often as not, when it did, the atmosphere was going through one of its periodic fits of intense, colourful storms, smothering any trace of the city’s location. Even the thermal hotspot of the Chasm, where gases upwelled from deep in Yellowstone’s mantle, was smeared into obscurity. Until the day Lady Arek’s laser signal received a pinprick flash of a return pulse, signifying that someone at the other end was listening, and willing to respond.

  The transmission window closed before any meaningful dialogue could take place. But conditions remained favourable on the next pass and the Swine Queen joined the communication circuit from inside her lair.

  It was voice only, and the window would close in four and a half minutes. There would not be another opportunity for dialogue for three weeks. If the ransom exchange were to happen soon, all negotiations would have to be concluded within this window.

  Lady Arek knew it. So did the Swine Queen.

  ‘What’ve we to say to each other, lovely?’ asked the rough-edged voice coming out of the walls of the Overlook. ‘You haven’t called, you haven’t asked after me. I thought we was done talking, despite my nice offer.’

  ‘Concerning that offer. Would it still be open?’

  ‘Well, if we’re talking about the same offer . . . didn’t you say I could shove it down my pork-hole? That you’d never agree to it in a million years? Had a change of heart, have you, lovely?’

  ‘Everyone is entitled to alter their opinion, Your Swineness.’

  ‘That they are. But that really don’t sound like you. No. Don’t sound like you at all.’

  ‘You know how much I want the Gideon stones.’

  ‘That, I do. I also know how little you want to send your piggy pal down to me. What’s changed?’

  ‘That is between me and Pinky. Suffice it to say that I no longer have any objections to the terms of the exchange.’

  ‘Oh, but you’re going to have to do better than that. You don’t just wake up one day and decide to sacrifice your loyalest deputy. You wasn’t willing to think about it six years ago, so why now?’

  Aware as she was of the clock ticking down, Lady Arek still risked a few seconds of silence. I admired how she held her nerve for the sake of a convincing performance.

  ‘A development has occurred. I thought I could count on that loyalty through thick and thin, but it seems I was wrong. Pinky always agitated for taking more decisive action against you. Immediate, forceful action.’

  ‘Whereas you saw the benefits of waiting me out, knowing there’s one or two who wouldn’t mind sticking a knife in, moment my back’s turned.’

  ‘Heavy is the head that wears the crown, as a great man once said.’

  ‘And you felt the same itch when you had your back to him, did you?’

  ‘I cannot blame him for acting in accordance with his nature.’ Lady Arek shuddered to say those words in front of Pinky. Doubtless he had heard worse, but they would have a particular sting coming from the mouth of his friend, even as she meant no harm by them. ‘His kind cannot see the longer game. Waiting is inimical to them. They are creatures of impulse, driven by the need for immediate gratification. In all matters.’

  The Swine Queen made an appreciative noise. ‘So the scales’ve fallen from your eyes after all. Should have listened to me when I told you what him and his sort were about, lovely.’

  ‘I admit I saw more in him than was warranted. Until he organised a move against me, and showed his true colours.’

  ‘Yet you’re still speaking.’

  ‘He gathered a small number to his side, but not enough to make a difference. I suppressed his rebellion and came to an arrangement with him. His life, in return for the others being spared.’

  ‘That’s nicer than I’d’ve been. One turns against me, I gut and skin ten. Nosh on them in front of their pals. Keeps ’em in line.’

  ‘Sage advice, your Swineness. Unfortunately, I don’t have the benefit of your numbers. Those men and women disappointed me, but they are indispensable. I prefer to make one concrete example and give the others a chance to redeem themselves.’

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ the Swine Queen said, with a sort of distant concern, as if they were two business leaders discussing opposing views of managerial strategy. ‘But it’s yours to make, not mine. All the same . . . I still can’t quite believe you’ve turned against Pinky. Not that I want to talk myself out of some noshing, but you were as thick as thieves.’

  ‘I saw a side of him that was hidden before. An animal side, the beast behind the mask. I can’t trust him, or be comfortable with his presence now. He is . . . less than I imagined.’

  ‘Can’t’ve been easy. I hate to say this, lovely, but you’ve nearly got my sympathy.’

  ‘And you nearly have my thanks. But I must be honest with you about Pinky. Consider him damaged goods.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He was hurt quite badly during the failed rebellion. It makes my decision simpler. I know that I am not condemning him to an early death.’

  ‘But . . . just so we’re clear . . . you still know what I mean to do with him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lady Arek said earnestly. ‘And that will be on my conscience, such as it is. But that is part of the arrangement he and I came to. He accepts this price, for the lives of his co-conspirators.’ Lady Arek drew breath. She looked around at the rest of the gathering, each of us conscious that she had reached the critical point in the negotiation. ‘May I . . . presume . . . your Swineness, that the terms of the ransom are still . . . applicable?’

  ‘I’ve still got the stones.’

  ‘And I have the pig.’

  ‘Then we’ll do business. How soon can you get down here, presuming you’ve stil
l got a ship?’

  ‘We are monitoring heightened wolf activity. A sub-aggregate flow is passing between us and Yellowstone at the moment, but it should disperse in about twenty-six hours. If all is well, we would be able to make a rapid, stealthy insertion at any point thereafter.’

  ‘Well, give us a day to dust off the landing stage and put some ammo in our guns. Not that I’m assuming any naughtiness, but . . .’

  ‘You would only be taking all sensible precautions.’

  ‘Glad we’re of one mind. You remember how to find us, don’t you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Good. We’ll roll out the carpet.’ The signal crackled as the lasers lost their optimum lock. ‘And don’t forget to bring the bacon. We’ll have the spits turning, the griddles warmed. The culinary offerings’ve been a little on the tasteless side lately: this’ll perk us up nicely.’

  A silence fell, once the transmission was finally curtailed. Lady Arek placed a hand over the microphone, as if there was still a measurable risk of her words drifting down to Yellowstone. ‘I am sorry, friend.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ he growled. ‘You only said what she needed to hear.’

  ‘I want you to know that I don’t—’

  ‘The only insulting thing would be for you to think I didn’t already know how you really feel.’ He softened his tone minutely. ‘It’s all right. Shit needed to be said.’

  Lady Arek had not been lying when she mentioned the wolf flow passing between her stronghold and Yellowstone. Snowdrop was monitoring the flow’s attenuation, collating whispers of intelligence from the dwindling assortment of sensors sprinkled in orbit around the planet. Some of these devices had been dispersed from the shuttle as it came in from John the Revelator, but others were native to the Rust Belt: beacons, traffic monitors, surveillance nodes and so on, that had been coaxed back into some kind of life and programmed to make stealthy observations in the wavebands and modalities most likely to permit detection of Inhibitor movements. Mostly it was impossible to see individual cubes going about their business, but when larger numbers of the units coalesced into a structural aggregate or an organised flow, there was a chance of detecting mass ripples or the occlusion of background radiation. The second hard part was relaying any of this hard-won data back to the stronghold, in a way that avoided being sniffed out by the wolves themselves. As on Michaelmas, Snowdrop’s network relied on ultra-low energy and frequency burst transmissions, disguised as random noise. It meant that the updates arrived sporadically, sometimes with many hours between them.