Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  But not yet. Not yet.

  Grand maroon doors, inset with portholes and elaborate chromed pipework, opened at the Swine Queen’s approach. We swept into the Carvery. If I had begun to calibrate the numbers of men and women in her cult, now I had to discard my sums and start again. I knew what a thousand faces looked like from the community meetings in Sun Hollow. This was closer to two thousand: two thousand stomping, hammering, whooping lunatics dressed in scraps of pig-flesh, gathered into two steep tiered galleries set either side of a spectacle of pure horror.

  The central floor of the Carvery was a rectangular area about twenty metres wide and sixty long. It was made of metal, extensively perforated, and arranged with subtle slopes and numerous interconnecting drainage channels. I understood its function immediately: to gather and contain such blood and fluids as were likely to be spilled during the course of the Swine Queen’s ministrations.

  Occupying the floor were twelve wheeled plinths. Ten were occupied; the two nearest us conspicuously empty. Pigs lay bound to each of the others, all in different degrees of consumption. They were flat on their backs, strapped to the hard upper surfaces of the plinths, which in turn mirrored some of the floor’s design considerations, being as well equipped with drainage runnels. The plinths had something in common with operating tables, or life-support couches. Wheeled alongside each of them was a makeshift arrangement of wheezing, huffing and glugging machines, all pistons, fluid bags, slow-dripping glassware, connected in turn by thick snaking cables which trailed across the floor, off into ducts in the wall. The pigs were all alive, but all of them would have been better off dead. I did not want to look, but when I considered averting my eyes I thought how much worse it had to be for Pinky, and by some force of will I held my gaze, determined to record the crime in its fullness.

  The least badly affected of the pigs had had oblongs of flesh removed, but not yet to the point of losing limbs or extremities. What was the most vile was not that these injuries had been done to them, but that there had obviously been time for the wounds to heal over. Probably Rose might have been the agent of some of these repairs, certainly the oldest of them, and I could only begin to guess at the psychological toll such work had taken on her. She would have been doing a healer’s duty in the sure and certain knowledge that it was only to facilitate the furtherance of pain. Whoever had been responsible, there had been no lack of skill in their handiwork. There were careful stitch-lines; scar tissue sagging over absences. Now new areas had been marked for excision, delineated by drawn-on boxes in hatched tattoos. The life-support machines would stop the pigs from bleeding out or dying too quickly from shock. I would say that these were the luckiest of the ten, since they might have walked away once the restraints were undone. But another way of looking at it was that these pigs were only at the start of a journey, and the lucky ones were those near its culmination. The ones near the end were the hardest of all to look at. Almost everything had been cut away except a limb or part of a limb, and yet they remained living and, I believed, conscious.

  The Swine Queen strode around these tables, banging her own staff against the metal floor, sometimes against the sides of the tables. She jiggled the fluid lines, made the glassware rattle. She bellowed to her audience, raising her arms, waving the staff above her head. The whooping reached its culmination and the Swine Queen called her acolytes to order, or its nearest approximation. They settled down, never becoming entirely still or entirely silent. The anticipation was too great for that.

  ‘Let it never be said that we lack the gift of patience, my flock! We’ve waited many years for this moment, but never with any lack of faith that it would arrive. We asked for this day, and it was given! The one we sought, the rarest and most precious of them all, has been granted unto us!’ The Swine Queen paused, lifting her staff to encourage a whoop of approbation. ‘Yes, rejoice – all of you! Very soon you’ll have your reward! Prize noshing: the flesh of the Old One! I’ve tasted a little of him, just enough to want more, but now there will be ample meat for sharing! Even the least of you will have your scrap! And as his squeals ring out – as I broadcast them into the city – he’ll send a message to others of his kind, and they’ll know that I’ve taken their champion!’

  Pinky angled his head to mine. We had been parked upright and near enough to each other to be able to speak.

  ‘You still sure you want to work for this lunatic, de Ruyter? You think that’s going to work out for you, in the long run?’

  ‘It’s not my time just yet,’ I said.

  ‘It might be mine.’

  ‘No, I think you can hold on a little longer. You heard what she said: you’re the one who’s outlasted all the others. She’ll keep you going as long as she can because she knows you’re one of a kind. So now isn’t your time.’

  The Swine Queen sidled back around to us. ‘A little chat between old pals, is it? Passing the time, trading reminiscences?’

  ‘Whatever you mean to do to us,’ I said, ‘just get on with it.’

  ‘Oh, I shall!’ This drew a roaring whoop, but rather than encourage it, the queen gave an angry jab of her staff, bringing down a sudden tense silence. ‘A little consideration for our guests, please, my flock! They can hardly hear themselves think over your din-dinner-din!’

  It was only a silence in so far as the audience had quietened for a moment. The life-support machines were still making their whirring and gurgling noises. I tried to listen out for something coming up below us, shouts or gunfire, some hint that Glass had made her entry and would be with us soon, but there was nothing to be heard. Pinky wanted to start the havoc, and every part of me agreed with him: except for one last rational shred that said we had to wait a little longer.

  ‘He’s more use to you alive than dead,’ I said.

  The Swine Queen leaned in. ‘Friends again, is it?’

  ‘I’m just being pragmatic. You see a pig, your Swineness. I see a survivor. He hasn’t made his way through all these years because he’s lucky. He’s a force of nature. A ruthlessly adaptable tactician and strategist who Lady Arek valued for a reason. He understands pigs, but he understands you and me just as capably. Cut him open, and you’ll get to taste his meat. But you’d be wasting something far more valuable.’

  ‘I can have my nosh and eat it, you know.’ The Swine Queen swivelled her attention onto Pinky. ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to cut too many bits off you just now. Just a little appetiser or two. Nothing you’ll miss.’

  Pinky writhed against his upright restraints. He had his fists clenched, so there was no way to tell what was going on with his sharpened nails.

  The pain hit me suddenly. The fire in my blood – the fire that was my blood – had begun to rage again. There had been no warning, no transition when the pain-relieving drug wore off. I tensed, crunching my teeth against each other.

  The Swine Queen moved to the side of one of the occupied tables, one where the pig was still in the early stages of consumption. An aide took her staff, then she delved among her tools and came out with a little whirring circular saw. She tested its sparking edge against the plinth’s side, then began to excise a sliver of tissue from the area of the pig’s thigh. The pig was still for a moment, as if drugged beyond any immediate effects of the cutting, but that was only temporary. The pig thrashed against the restraints. The pig squealed and bled, and still the Swine Queen continued. What she was removing was only the finest-possible slice of flesh, yet it was impossible to imagine the pig being afflicted by any higher pain. The Swine Queen finished her work with a sense of unhurried professionalism, refusing to be put off by the thrashing and the squealing. Finally she removed the circular saw, holding it aloft, still whirring, and with her other hand she peeled away a portion of flesh about as large as an eye-patch.

  She tossed it into the audience: an offering to the greedy, grateful, masses. They were snared by her, like iron filaments in a magnetic field. Hands strained to grab at the morsel, or to wrestle it from one r
ecipient to another. The Swine Queen watched this commotion for a second or two, pleased or appalled by it, and then returned her attention to the pig. She selected another area of flesh then dug down with the rotary cutter. Then, with her free hand, snapped her fingers at the fully masked men who had come down with us from the examination room. ‘Get our prizes on the bleeding slabs. A little taster won’t ruin the main course, and I’m keen to see if the Old One’s meat is as salty as his conversation.’

  Two of them moved around to the backs of our trolleys and began to fuss with the restraints. The other two remained in front, long-bladed knives drawn and ready. Human eyes moved behind the sagging, ragged-edged holes cut into their pig faces, but there was no humanity left in those eyes to appeal to.

  ‘She’s here,’ I said, not in a whisper, but quietly enough not to be overheard by the Swine Queen, preoccupied with her buzzing saw.

  ‘I don’t hear her,’ Pinky said.

  ‘I don’t either. But I trust that she’s here and won’t be long.’

  ‘Are you saying it’s time?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s time.’

  ‘Good. Couldn’t come a second sooner. This blood hurts so badly I’m starting to think I’ll take the Swine Queen’s knives instead.’

  The guard in front of me had been troubled by this exchange and jabbed the tip of the blade under my chin, cocking his head questioningly. The tip had not touched my skin, but it would only need to jerk up a little more to do me harm.

  ‘What’s time?’ the pig mask asked.

  ‘An abstract concept,’ I said.

  This earned me a jab from the blade, drawing blood beneath my jaw. I flinched but did not cry out. Meanwhile, I continued to work the barbed nail into my palm, gouging open my own flesh. Until the haemoclast began to spill out from me.

  There were two points of exit: my hand and my jaw. Neither was a large wound, but that was good. We could only cope with a partial loss of the haemoclast: it might be a weapon, but it still had to do the work of blood. The haemoclastic flow would staunch itself at intervals of about one litre, but it was up to each of us to manage the restarting of that process, until we were too weakened to continue.

  I couldn’t see the flow from my jaw, except as a spreading redness on my upper chest, but I had a much better view of my hand. The blood was lathering out, behaving in not quite the way blood was supposed to behave. It was a continuous spreading tide, and by the time it engulfed my fingertips, it had begun to self-organise. The lathering became granular rather than smooth, like a sea of red suddenly wind-ruffled into little domains. And those domains then separated from each other, leaving margins of clear, clean, bloodless flesh between them. The haemoclast was forming itself into several hundred sub-elements, each about the size of a small insect.

  Small, red, gloss-coated insects.

  The guards could see it happening. They understood that it was wrong, they knew this was not what blood was supposed to do, and they all had a long and excellent understanding of blood, its mechanisms of leakage, flow and coagulation. What they were seeing was a violation of those (literally) sacred principles. But as if in some dream paralysis, they were struggling to articulate the wrongness they saw before them, the Swine Queen was still sawing, and the pig still shrieking.

  The flow from my palm was abating, but already I felt some small but welcome easing in the fire that the blood had lit within me. The haemoclast spilling from my jaw had formed into a column, joining the primary mass gathered around my hand. For a moment, it was as if I had covered my flesh in honey and dipped my hand into an ants’ nest.

  Until they lifted off me. It was an eruption, a sudden busy exodus of tiny red forms. They swarmed into the air, dithered for a moment or two – target selecting – and then exploded in about two dozen directions, multiple elements following each vector. They were as fast as darts, and within a second they had reached all their chosen objectives, in every corner of the Carvery.

  The havoc came . . . but before mine struck, Pinky released his own haemoclast too. It was just the one wound in his case, but the effect was comparable. The swarms might not have looked like they were coordinating, but they were in fact acting as a single aggregate weapon, ready to be augmented by the haemoclastic load still within us. The bleeding from my palm had stopped: the weapon detecting that it had expelled about a litre of itself. I jabbed myself again, reopening the gash, and again the red tide surged willingly forth.

  Out among the guards and Swine Queen acolytes, the little red forms were inflicting no end of chaos. They searched for orifices, sense organs, wounds and weaknesses. Where none could be identified, they impaled and drilled and corkscrewed in anyway. The masks and partial masks were no impediment. They went in fast and sought out neural tissue. Then they exploded, with a pop of stored energy like a tiny firework. In ones and twos it was enough to knock out specific areas of brain function, incapacitating the host almost instantly. When dozens of haemoclastic units had drilled in at once, the effect was more like a small demolition charge going off behind the eyes. A sort of grey and pink smoke came out of them in a pulse. Mostly, that was not survivable. But the afflicted bodies still jerked and spasmed as they went down.

  The Swine Queen was still alive, still upright and able to walk and talk. The haemoclastic units would not have spared her intentionally, but it seemed that she had been lucky or that her mask and armour were offering some additional defence.

  She made the circular saw whirr again and pushed the blade up against my forehead, in a top-to-bottom orientation. She let it skim against my skin, but did not depress it any further.

  ‘Make this stop,’ she said.

  She pressed down, beginning to cut into my face. I reached up with my left hand and wrenched the saw from her grip. My arms had been free from the moment her guards released our restraints, but my legs were still bound. Before the Swine Queen could react, I chewed through the remaining bindings with her saw, then tossed it to Pinky. He was nearly free as well. I hoped that, like me, he was starting to feel better as the haemoclast left his body.

  The second pulse of units had finished leaving my body from the gash in my hand. Already I felt the giddy, light-headed absence of those two litres. Perhaps a little more was spilling from the wound in my face, but it was hard to tell how deeply she had cut. The first wave was nearing the end of its effectiveness, having taken down as many victims as it could, but leaving many still unharmed. The second wave – combining with units sent out by Pinky – was organising and target-selecting. It was a fuzzy, nervous ball of red, which suddenly dispersed to go after multiple targets.

  The Swine Queen dug a long-bladed knife from her personal arsenal. I jerked aside as she swung it, surprising myself with the instinctive speed of my reaction, the ease with which it had by-passed any conscious processing. Pinky, free now, ducked behind the Swine Queen and retrieved something from one of her fallen guards. It was a stubby pistol with an oversized barrel and a short, fussy haft. Pinky’s hands were not made for it. He tossed it my way and I caught it deftly, my fingers sliding around the haft and finding the trigger. My hand had been blood-lathered a few seconds ago, but when the haemoclasts detached they left the skin completely unmarred, with no stickiness or slickness. I pointed the barrel at the Swine Queen’s mask and aimed between her eyes. The gun coughed and kicked. She dropped, a finger-sized hole bored into her pig-skinned brow. She made to say something, gurgling and thrashing. Haemoclasts swarmed in, finding the wound and piling over themselves to fight their way into her. The Swine Queen screamed as they did their work, and kept on screaming until the detonations which ended her life.

  We were free, but in no sense safe. There were still too many swineherds. They were scrambling down from the viewing galleries, almost tumbling over each other in their fear and rage. They might not have understood what had happened, but they had seen enough to realise that it had come from within our bodies. I pressed the barb back into my flesh, hoping I could tolerate
the loss of another litre. Pinky and I backed against each other. He had the Swine Queen’s knife, and I had the gun. It was enough to hold back the advancing swineherds temporarily, but we would need something more to survive.

  It came. There was a new sound rising from the mob now: wild shrieks, somehow more urgent and terrified than anything we had heard so far. Accompanying this sound was a fast metallic lashing. A flicker of silver caught my eye: a dancing, gyring whirlwind working its way through a field of standing and fallen bodies, chopping into them as it proceeded. I watched in numb recognition. It was one of the ninecats. I had already seen something of what it could do when Glass gave her demonstration, but nothing had prepared me for this moving vortex of carnage. The ninecat had become a demonic entity, a whirling quicksilver abomination, moving through our enemies like a razor-edged propeller blade.

  There was more than one. A second had found its way into the Carvery, and then a third. There was no defence against these weapons. They went through armour as easily as air, flicked blood and flesh up in their wake, and they gave every impression of never stopping. A storm of body parts rained down on us, and my eyes stung against the blood haze. They would not touch us, I told myself. They had been conditioned to recognise our forensic and biometric traces. I had wanted them to find us. But now that they were here, now that I was seeing their grisly work, my certainties collapsed.

  Then I spied a fourth, and a fifth.

  The destruction continued. Pinky and I were now incidental to it. The swineherds had stopped trying to kill us; all any of them were interested in was getting out of that room, fleeing to some imagined sanctuary where the whirling horrors might not reach them. Nor were the pigs entirely safe: the ninecats were not attacking them directly, but as the tide of destruction lapped around and past the plinths, some incidental injuries were all but guaranteed. The pigs shrieked as the edges of the blades nicked their already sensitised flesh. The equipment that had been wheeled in to keep some of them alive, or sufficiently buffered from shock, was being toppled and ripped apart without discrimination. Still more of the ninecats were finding their way into the Carvery, springing out of ducts and grilles. Now that the advance forces had located us, the other units were being signalled to converge on this room.