Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

‘Whatever he did, whether he saved us or not, I think we can agree that he gave us time.’

  ‘I think we can.’

  ‘To live is better than not to live. Even for a few hours, in the company of friends.’

  Yellowstone was a dulling coin, nearly eclipsed. I stared at the image for long seconds, processing my own thoughts, not wanting to arrive at the inevitable conclusion.

  ‘It’s thickened,’ I said. ‘They’ve been pumping more units into the flow.’

  ‘There’s no doubt,’ Lady Arek said. ‘I think we might be looking at around a million elements, at a conservative estimate.’

  ‘Scythe was able to deal with them in small numbers. Glass even brought a single unit inside the ship, so I could watch her destroy it in person.’

  ‘But a million will be a little more than we can fight off. By a factor of about ten thousand, is my guess.’

  ‘This change in the flow happened after Omori’s death?’

  ‘No, it started before,’ Pinky said. ‘But now they can afford to fling more of themselves at us.’

  I closed my eyes, breathed in. My leg had been bothering me all the way back from the refugees, but now it had reduced to an itch, barely any trouble at all.

  ‘It seems they’ve decided we’re more than just a sensor ghost.’

  ‘It’s possible. Or else, they’re taking no chances now that the other two distractions have been neutralised.’

  ‘This ship can accelerate harder.’

  ‘But at the expense of stealth,’ Lady Arek countered. ‘Pushed much harder, the darkdrives will begin to emit detectable by-products and the cryo-arithmetic modules will struggle to keep up with heat dissipation. We will light ourselves up.’

  ‘But if we’re already lit . . .’

  ‘We don’t know that we are.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how hard we run,’ Pinky said. ‘We saw how futile it was when we swung past this system on our way to Hela. Ships tried to run. Sometimes the wolves let ’em get a little bit ahead. But it only ever ends the same way.’

  ‘I’ll countenance a small increase in our engine output,’ Lady Arek declared. ‘There are . . . measures, which can mitigate the reaction overspill, for a short while. And if we bias the cryo-arithmetic cooling to our stern and let our bows run hot, we can still keep a cold face to the wolves.’

  ‘And if there are wolves ahead of us?’ I asked.

  ‘Then have some very short, snappy prayers in hand,’ Pinky said.

  Lady Arek’s manner became businesslike. ‘Your assessment, Clavain: could the pigs withstand an increased gee-load, for a few more hours?’

  ‘Only if it’s a question of our survival. Probably Rose says some of them are barely hanging on, with the injuries they came aboard with. This may be more than they can tolerate, until we begin treating them properly.

  ‘I must consider the overall outcome.’

  ‘Split the difference, then,’ Pinky said. ‘Give us one more gee, and I’ll inform them that it’s a temporary increase.’

  ‘You’ll go to them?’ I asked.

  He was already moving. ‘Can’t have them thinking that the only one with tact and sensitivity on this ship is a human, can we.’

  The measures Lady Arek would need to instigate within the darkdrives and cryo-arithmetic systems could not have been implemented instantly even if she had complete command of the ship. She first had to formulate her desires within the narrow control protocols that the ship seemed willing to listen to, and then she had to proceed a step at a time, verifying each alteration before moving to the next. This was delicate, unorthodox work: to tinker with the reaction balances inside a Conjoiner drive, especially a darkdrive, was to risk invoking immediate catastrophe. But – as I had to understand – Lady Arek carried the secret knowledge of Conjoiners within herself, and her gifts (as I was now learning) were prodigious.

  ‘We’ll initiate in ten minutes,’ she announced, when she had done all that she could. ‘That should give Pinky time to get back from the evacuees.’

  ‘I’m sorry for what both of you have had to go through today.’

  ‘But you’ve a feeling it will be hitting him the hardest.’

  ‘Am I wrong?’

  ‘Pinky is a shot fired into the future. Tumbling, fragmenting. He ought to have slowed down by now . . . ought to have stopped. But he just keeps moving, gaining scar tissue. Sometimes I think the pain is what stops him dying. Snowdrop’s death and the loss of the stronghold will not end him, Clavain. He will be hurt by it, and it will increase the pressure behind those eyes, and add to the scars . . . but it will not be more than he can take.’

  ‘How can you know?’

  ‘Because I know a tenth of what Pinky has already been through. And that is enough.’

  ‘I’m daring to hope . . .’ I shook my head, smiling at my own conceitedness. ‘No, never mind.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That at some point he might not consider me the most contemptible thing he’s ever seen. That maybe, just maybe, I might earn about one per cent of his respect.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re nearer than you realise. But give yourself time, as well. His friendship is not easily won. Once made, though, no force in the universe can undo it. Clavain, would you . . .’ But she trailed off, her attention snagged back to the displays of Yellowstone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something may be happening. The locus is showing an elongation.’

  I frowned, unable to perform the necessary three-dimensional contortions to make sense of the changing data. ‘A pincer movement?’

  ‘Too soon to rule out a bifurcation in the flow, which would be a precursor to a pincering . . .’ Lady Arek became immobile, her attention so laser-focused that I was reminded of some ambush predator, poised in perfect stillness before springing for its prey. ‘No. Not that. At least, I do not believe so. The elongation is due to an angular deflection in the column. It’s no longer aligned exactly with our vector, so we are starting to see down the length of it . . .’ She snapped her eyes from the readouts, looking at me with a strange pleading intensity. ‘I want to believe it, Clavain, but I am not sure that I dare. They were hard on us, and now they deflect?’

  ‘Wolves don’t just give up, do they?’

  ‘Not in my experience. Unless this an attack mode I haven’t seen before, something new . . .’

  Without warning, Glass’s voice cut across the control room: ‘It’s not something new.’

  ‘You’re back,’ I said, surprised and relieved.

  ‘Careful, Clavain: you nearly sound pleased to hear me.’

  ‘Are you back?’

  ‘Only temporarily, dear friends. Scythe has raised me above a minimum consciousness threshold for one reason alone: to offer analysis and guidance in an extreme situation, one far beyond the ship’s library of past scenarios.’

  ‘Your assessment, Hourglass?’

  ‘The flow is indeed deflecting, Lady Arek. The wolves have abandoned this target and selected another.’

  Lady Arek shuffled through Scythe’s readouts, adjusting thresholds and filters accordingly.

  ‘I see it now,’ she said. ‘Hourglass is right. There’s something else drawing the flow. More fool me not to have spotted it sooner.’

  ‘Spotted what sooner?’

  ‘A radio-frequency emission, Clavain. Very strong, omnidirectional. A broadcast, unmistakably a hallmark of human intelligence . . . a lure.’ She smiled deliciously. ‘Wolf bait. We like wolf bait, don’t we, Hourglass?’

  ‘We do indeed, Lady Arek – especially when we are not the bait.’

  ‘Scythe is in receipt of a simple transmission. Audio only. Shall I play it?’

  ‘I think you should,’ Glass said. ‘I very much think you should.’

  Voices sang:

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals. />
  ‘He anticipated that there would be difficulties,’ Glass said. ‘Anticipated them, and decided that you would most definitely benefit from a larger distraction.’

  Lady Arek directed my attention to one of the displays. ‘Darkdrive emissions, hotter and noisier than our own. Easily detectable across several light-minutes. There’s only one other ship in this system that could be putting out that much energy, in addition to the radio signals.’

  ‘He’s come in, from the edge of the system,’ I said, awed and astonished in the same instant. ‘He can’t have waited for us to run into trouble: he must have made this decision days ago, perhaps as soon as we left him behind.’

  ‘He’s positioning himself at the trailing Lagrange point behind Marco’s Eye, where ships used to gather during trade stopovers,’ Lady Arek said. ‘Wolf activity will already have been intense there. They’ll have picked apart any wrecks that survived the first part of the cull. This is a taunt, a deliberate provocation.’

  ‘One that, judging by the actions of the flow, is working,’ Glass remarked.

  Lady Arek returned to the images of the Yellowstone. ‘It’s abandoning us. I can’t say that every element in the flow’s given up on the chase, but if any are left it’s a small percentage of the total.’

  ‘Will John the Revelator be able to escape?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Lady Arek said, with a weary finality. ‘No. No hope of that at all. You’ve seen that ship, Clavain. It’s forty times bigger than Scythe, and it was old and broken when it reached this system. John the Revelator knows that just as well as we do. This is only going to end one way.’

  ‘He’s becoming visible,’ Glass said. ‘He’s pushing those darkdrives far outside their safe regime. They’re glowing like stars.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to give the wolves any reason to turn around,’ I commented, keeping my voice to a near-whisper. ‘And he must know that we’re aware of his actions, and using them to our advantage. Which we must.’

  I called down to Pinky and Probably Rose.

  ‘This is Clavain. We have an opportunity to shake the wolves loose and make a clean break for interstellar space. But only if we push as hard as we can. We’ll be throwing everything into the fire, and it will be hard on the weakest of the evacuees. Once we open up the engines, you’ll be unable to move around or offer any sort of assistance to the injured.’

  ‘Is there going to be any debate about this?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘None. I just thought you should be ready.’

  There was a silence before he answered.

  ‘Spoken like the old man.’

  So we pushed harder, all the way up to four gees. Under that load, almost any movement was impractical and even speaking and concentrating became less easy. With each breath, I felt as if my ribs were heaving against a pile of books on my chest. The best we could do was remain still and observe.

  John the Revelator was now the brightest energy source anywhere in the system, with the exception of Epsilon Eridani itself. His drive emissions were two close-set beacons, two miniature suns flaring and flickering with incipient instability. But an ashen veil of wolf machines was beginning to cloud our view of them. It was not just the flow that had been assigned to us that was converging on that other ship. Ten times as many elements were oozing in from different points around Yellowstone. It was as if all the destruction that we had witnessed today was but a prelude to this greatest of conquests.

  Perhaps, in the long run, his efforts made no difference to our chances. But I wanted to believe that across those light-minutes (not so very far) some part of John the Revelator was able to detect our movements, picking up on a whisper of exotic radiation from our faint but unavoidably heightened darkdrive emissions, or seeing the heat spiking from the parts of the hull no longer blanketed by the cryo-arithmetic engines. His angle of view was different to that of the wolf flow that had been behind us, and he might have seen some trace of us and known that we were responding. We had to trust that the other flows did not have a better angle on us, or at least that they were otherwise so fixated on this new prize as to fail to notice us.

  Supposition, never to be proven or disproven. But it suited me to believe that one more noble act went knowingly recorded, that against the long ledger of questionable deeds that made up his strange, distended life, perhaps the longest, strangest life ever lived, John the Revelator, writer of the book of the seventh seal, felt absolved, if only in those last sweet moments of his existence.

  ‘If I know him,’ Lady Arek said, ‘something will happen just before he succumbs. He will try to take as many of them with him as he can.’

  We had warning, but only a little. The two close-set stars diverged. John had cut them away from himself, like two old-style chemical boosters detaching from the main core of a rocket. At a certain separation – Lady Arek said it could not have been more than a handful of kilometres – the engines detonated. We needed no magnification or image enhancement to see the consequences of that: if Scythe had possessed real windows, we would have seen the flash with our own eyes, and probably had to squint away to avoid temporary blindness. The explosion had been instantaneous and singular: so huge that it seemed to emanate from the volume between the engines, swallowing them instantly. And, in the same silent deflagration, taking every atom of the ship with it, and perhaps some useful number of wolf elements.

  The chorus had been continuing, until the moment it ceased:

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  John the Revelator wrote the book . . .

  He was gone.

  And still we fled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  We held at four gees for an hour, then reduced to three, and after six hours agreed to drop the acceleration to one gravity for as long as it took to tend to the refugees and address the worst of their ailments. Pinky, Probably Rose and I went down to them while Lady Arek kept an eye on the ship and its surroundings, all of our nerves still on edge.

  We dared to hope that we had given the wolves the slip, and perhaps we had, but it would be many days or weeks before we had any certainty. The feelings that rose in me were bitterly familiar from our time in the Salmacis. I had learned then, and was relearning now, that there was only so much worry a human being could tolerate. Never mind the next days or weeks: they were as irrelevant as the next million years. What mattered was that for the next hour I did not have to think about dying.

  When we arrived at the holding area, the refugees were still snug in their pits. There was no screaming, and the moans and grumbles of discomfort were strangely lulling to me.

  Barras looked up from his Barras-shaped enclosure.

  ‘Talk to us,’ he said.

  I looked at Pinky, thinking he ought to be the one to address the pigs, but his nod gave me permission. He was waddling off along the aisles, joining Probably Rose in seeking out those most in need of attention.

  ‘We think the wolves have lost interest in us.’

  ‘You think?’

  I smiled. ‘There’s rarely any certainty. But the indications are that the flow broke away from us, seeking another target.’

  ‘When will we know if we’re safe?’

  ‘Maybe never. But it probably won’t be the wolves that kill us today.’

  ‘Is that what counts as a morale-raising speech?’ But Barras met my eyes and nodded. ‘You got us out of Swinehouse, Clavain. Whatever else happens when we get to this waterworld, you have my gratitude for that.’

  Pinky called over to me. He was leaning over one of the refugees, knees bent, hands propped against them for support. ‘Something’s happening, Stink. The floor’s pushing her back out again.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  The pig looked at me. ‘Mira.’

  Pinky and I reached down, trying to help her as the floor oozed back towards the level, filling in the pit.

  ‘Are you hurt, Mira
?’ I noticed at a badly swollen wrist and wondered if the bones were broken beneath it.

  ‘There’s those hurt worse than me. But it doesn’t sting so much as it did before we went into these pits. Now it just tingles, mostly.’

  ‘It’ll still need treating.’

  Four of the sphere robots came into the chamber. Pinky and I watched them guardedly, conscious that we had no direct control over these machines. They were operating at the whim of the ship, beyond any authority we might possess.

  The robots swooped over to Mira. They extended their arms, reaching to lift her out of the in-filling pit. I stepped back, sensing that it would be futile to obstruct their actions. Pinky was a fraction slower – or more stubborn – and got a less-than-gentle shove in the belly, sending him stumbling backwards, arms flailing until I reached out and grabbed him by the elbow.

  ‘Doctor knows best, I think,’ I said.

  Pinky grunted something back: not quite a thanks, but close enough to pass as one.

  Mira resisted the robots, as might anyone in the same circumstances. But they had more limbs than she could kick or thrash against, and they were able to restrain her with what seemed like reasonable gentleness. They hauled her into the air, distributing their pressure points evenly.

  ‘They’re going to help you,’ I said.

  Mira quietened, becoming limp. The transition was so sudden that I could only guess that one of the robots had jabbed some sedative into her. With her body suspended between them, the robots left the chamber.

  Pinky whispered: ‘You don’t really know what they are going to do to her.’

  ‘The ship’s taken care of everyone until now. Unless it’s psychotic, I think we can assume it means to continue as it began. It’ll be taking her away to the medical suite, just as it did with Glass.’

  In time, more robots came. It appeared that pigs were emerging from the floor in the order of those most in need of treatment, the ship performing some inscrutable calculus of triage behind the scenes. Evidently it lacked the capacity to deal with them all at once, so the pigs were being spirited away in ones and twos only. By then it was clear that just being in the pits had provided some anaesthetic effect on the worst injuries, with most of the wounded reporting a numbing or reduction of pain. But the mechanisms in the floor could only do so much, and so further treatment had to be conducted somewhere else.