Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  Sweat beaded on the woman’s high, imperious forehead.

  We had expected nothing less. While it pushed the nanotherapeutic devices into the skull, the crown would be blocking neuromotor control with a multitude of electrical and chemical blockades. The subject went palsy-stiff, eyes wide, pupils dilated, restraints taut.

  ‘She’s trying to alert the other five,’ Charity said coolly. ‘But the signals are being blocked and spoofed. They’re only seeing the normal housekeeping background.’

  ‘Status,’ I said.

  ‘We’re in. Level one barricades overwhelmed. Level two beginning to lose resilience.’

  ‘She’s choking,’ Hope observed, as the woman’s eyes bulged and steam misted her mask.

  ‘Switching autonomic dominance to our control pathways,’ Charity answered. ‘She’ll hold.’

  ‘Status on level two defences?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re through. Commencing level three assimilation.’

  ‘The tricky stage,’ Hope remarked.

  I smiled behind my visor. ‘Not for us.’

  ‘She’s ours,’ Charity said.

  We still had our semi-automatic weapons drawn and ready. My hand tightened on the grip as Charity removed the crown. She examined the woman’s skin and scalp, unable to detect the puncture points with her own eyes.

  ‘It looks good,’ I observed.

  The woman was drowsy again, losing her stiffness. The drugs still in her system would ensure that she retained no recollection of this episode, even if she returned to full consciousness. Their work done, the drugs would undergo a chemical breakdown, leaving only normal metabolic products. By the time the Conjoiners were likely to be taking an interest in this woman’s biochemistry, though, it would be far too late for them to stop the takeover protocol. As soon as she came into contact with another Conjoiner, or any of their neurally linked systems, the contagion would spread.

  The paste-on monitors were only picking up routine traffic now, so it was safe to remove them. Charity did this with all but one of the six, leaving the monitor in place on the man she had selected to go out the lock. The monitor would keep him from broadcasting any distress signals while he was euthanised.

  ‘I don’t like this detail,’ she said.

  ‘None of us do,’ Hope answered. ‘But the mission planners looked at every aspect of the operation, and this was the only practical workaround.’

  I clapped a hand to her shoulder. ‘You’ve done your part.’

  Charity euthanised the subject with a drug that would closely simulate death by vacuum asphyxiation. She waited until the drugs had taken effect, then packed away her medical equipment.

  ‘Leave nothing,’ I reminded her.

  Charity performed a rigorous visual sweep of the cabin.

  ‘Clear, sir.’

  We were done. It was time to go, while we still had storm cover.

  Charity went out first, taking the man into the lock. Hope and I followed as soon as the lock had cycled. We put out our stilts and dragged him about ten paces from the capsule, then left him face down in the soil. Charity removed the monitor.

  The dead man served one purpose only: to conceal our use of the airlock. Simulations had shown that there was no way to prevent dust ingress to the lock while the outer door was open. If the Conjoiners found any such dust traces, they would realise that the lock had been operated from the outside, most likely during the visual blackout of the storm, and be more cautious about integrating their new recruits. The only solution was to contrive a scenario where it looked as if the lock had been operated from within, with one of the occupants making a confused attempt to leave the capsule without a suit. Such incidents were not unknown, according to our analysts. Early-term recruits sometimes exhibited disorientation or a sort of delirious risk-denying euphoria.

  It was all we could do. I removed the magnetic limpet, allowing the lock to close itself and, with one last glance at the fallen man, the three of us retreated into the curtaining storm.

  We came in from above the ecliptic, the world’s face turning below us with the northern pole tilted into our line of sight. It was a ball of blue-green, a humid waterworld for the most part, but with enough of an axial tilt to produce seasonal variations in climate and weather. Small, brittle-edged icecaps covered the northern and southern poles, glinting back with fierce reflectivity, as if they were little shards of mirror pressed in the planet’s flesh. These only accounted for about five per cent of the globe’s surface, with another five given over to a sprinkling of islands, mostly gathered into chainlike archipelagos, and concentrated more in the northern latitudes than the southern. The islands were produced by bouts of volcanic activity around weaknesses in the underlying crust, pushed up over relatively short intervals and then doomed to a gradual process of erosion and retreat back into the ocean. Few of them were older than ten million years, and most of them had been only sparsely colonised by living organisms. As far as we knew, these arid outcroppings were the only places that humans had ever found shelter on Ararat, albeit for a very short interval. But as we closed in, our sensors picked up none of the technological signatures that would have suggested a continuing human presence

  ‘It’s a beautiful planet,’ I remarked.

  ‘I’m glad you think so. Is there anything else that strikes you about it? Such as a certain familiarity?’

  She had touched an itch I had only just become aware of. ‘I must have seen similar waterworlds. Images, experientials. I suppose it’s even possible that I may have visited some world like this one, long ago. But I don’t remember any specifics. If there were memories, they’ve been polished away as thoroughly as my time on Mars.’

  ‘But you’d remember if you’d come to Ararat, specifically?’

  ‘I think I would.’

  ‘You were here,’ Glass stated bluntly. ‘As was I. It’s our second time, for both of us.’

  ‘You as good as told me I couldn’t have been here before.’

  Ararat grew larger, almost perceptibly so with each passing minute. Scythe made deft adjustments to its course, finessing the final approach.

  ‘It wouldn’t have helped you to know the truth. If you’d come to a full appraisal of what happened here, you would have been reluctant to return.’

  ‘And why would that be?’ I asked angrily. ‘The truth now, Glass: not your idea of which version of the truth happens to suit me right now. Start with the obvious question: why the hell would I have tried to make contact with a brother I didn’t even know about?’

  ‘Because you did know, back then. Consciously or otherwise, you knew that this was the place to find some peace with Nevil. Doubtless you were already on a journey of self-forgetting by that point, trying to put as much distance between yourself and what made you, the crimes and glory of a war on Mars. But if you still have doubts, ask yourself this question, Clavain: how did I trace you to Sun Hollow? The answer’s simple – before I attempted to reach Nevil, you had already been here. You met the Jugglers and swam with them, hoping they’d provide a conduit to your brother. In doing so, you left a fading, echoing trace of yourself. I failed to reach Nevil, but your echo was still here. It told me enough of your intentions to guide me to Michaelmas and Sun Hollow.’

  ‘I worry that this is just another of your lies.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ Glass looked at me with a thin sympathy. ‘I expect it’s coming through on some level. Those bright skies and grey-green seas. The brine in your eyes. The salty smell of all that seaweed. The sea trying to dissolve any human machine, any human tool. Surrendering yourself to the biomass, going naked into that alien sea.’

  I felt a pressure on my chest, a sharp rising terror.

  A drowning terror.

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘Your memories of Mars are one thing: you blocked them deliberately. I’ve been able to undo those blockades, just as deliberately, a piece at a time. But what happened on Ararat would have been a different order of experienc
e. Your time here may have been so traumatic that you laid down almost no lasting impression of it. The sea remembers more of your visit than you did.’

  In a broken voice I said: ‘I did something terrible to my brother, didn’t I? Something so bad that when I last tried to reach him, I nearly died.’

  ‘Let’s hope that time’s a healer,’ Glass said.

  No wolves harried us on our final approach to Ararat. They were around us, almost certainly, sprinkled through the system and most likely gathered in the fragmented remains of the moon, just as they had haunted the Rust Belt, but we were as dark and cold and silent as ever we could be, and we kissed Ararat’s atmosphere as delicately as if it were the face of a new lover, still unexplored – producing no ripples, shockwaves or thermal blooms – and we descended to the waters with the same grace and stealth.

  We skimmed the sea at an altitude of one kilometre, the hull’s surface employing chameleoflage to make itself nearly invisible to any distant watcher. Sky-coloured underneath, sea-coloured above, a rippling, hazy indeterminacy between, the ship a silent skimming chip of blue-grey-green jade or turquoise. We maintained our subsonic flight path above the patches of ocean where the Juggler concentration was at its slightest, never becoming more than an inky darkening on the horizon. We were playing the polite guests, doing nothing that might offend or aggravate our alien hosts. The Jugglers did not pose any sort of threat to us inside Scythe, but if we got on the wrong side of them we might forestall any possibility of contact for years to come.

  Gradually a landmass loomed: the western extent of one of the island chains. A low tongue of rock, a partial bay, a sprinkling of random pale structures of various sizes and spiriform shapes, standing at jumbled angles like seashells jammed into mud. Some of them were hundreds of metres tall, nearly reaching our altitude. Behind, far to the east, rose mountainous purple-browed thunderheads.

  ‘Conch structures,’ Glass identified confidently. ‘Nestbuilder ruins. Alien technology. The remains of their ships and weapons, fallen to Ararat during some engagement that must have happened thousands of years ago. Now they are inert and largely harmless. The settlers found them and repurposed them for their larger shelters and administrative offices.’

  Pinky looked on intently, saying nothing.

  We circled the remains of First Camp. From a distance it was possible to believe that it had been abandoned, but left relatively intact. Once we were near, though, all such illusions evaporated.

  Great waves and winds must have torn loose anything not firmly bedded to the ground. Scant traces remained of any human presence between the conch structures, mostly just scoured ground, barren except for a green fringing within a narrow band close to the sea, and a few dyke-like mounds where a mass of shanty-like structures had been swept up and rammed against the unyielding side of a conch structure. Some of the conch structures had themselves been uprooted or had toppled into each other. Larger shattered parts had come to rest in the relative shallows, a few hundred metres into the water.

  It was pitiful.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Glass whispered, and Pinky nodded.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘We left a settlement here, after John the Revelator departed Ararat for Hela. There was a battle in orbit . . . a big one. Human and wolf weapons.’ Pinky sniffed, holding something back. ‘We could never be sure what sort of collateral damage affected Ararat. Even a moon got blown apart. Even if none of those weapons had touched the planet directly, the debris from the battle . . .’

  ‘There would have been a bombardment episode,’ Glass said. ‘Major impact events and subsequent oceanic upheaval. Enhanced volcanism and tsunami-like episodes.’

  ‘Perhaps someone made it,’ I said.

  Pinky said nothing.

  We came lower and lower, watchful for traps. It would have been unusual for the wolves to establish a presence in the biosphere of a Juggler planet, but we dared not trust to that. Tentatively, now that it had the blanket of an atmosphere above it, Scythe risked active scanning measures. They came back negative for all indications of wolf presence. Our nerves were too shredded to take much relief from that, but it was better than the alternative.

  ‘We’ll have to find a way to cross the sea,’ Glass said. ‘We can’t make a direct approach by ship. The Jugglers will not permit contact unless we come in quietly.’

  ‘I thought you’d have made arrangements.’

  ‘I did. When I was last here I had Scythe construct me a skimmer. A high-speed, minimum-contact catamaran, mostly ceramic and capable of enduring prolonged contact with the sea without being dissolved. I anchored it to these rocks, knowing I’d be back eventually. But it’s gone. The sea must have overwhelmed the island and digested my skimmer.’

  ‘Inconvenient.’

  ‘Scythe will still have the builder templates. It should be able to spit out a new one in a few days.’

  Glass sent out her drones, snooping into openings in the conch structures. There were no survivors, no warm machines, but her mechanical spies did find evidence of prior human usage, their wreckage gathered into ungainly, rotting piles at the backs of the structures. Biological breakdown was obviously quite advanced: this close to the shore, even the atmosphere was laden with Juggler micro-organisms. But along with the dykes, some of the materials inside those debris mounds might be useful, if they could be salvaged.

  Glass identified an area of gently sloping terrain on the seaward side of the green margin, within walking distance of the main collection of conch structures. She hovered Scythe over this submerged ramp and brought the ship down very slowly, sinking into a floating carpet of seaweed, churning and boiling the waters with Scythe’s landing thrusters, until the ship was about three-fifths concealed. Once we were down, and the disturbance in the water had subdued, the seaweed closed in again, forming a green girdle that helped add to the ship’s disguise. The dissolving processes of the seaweed and other marine organisms would already be at work, Glass said, but at least in the shallows they were slow enough to be rebuffed with only mild interventions from the ship’s defences.

  Glass’s experience, and all records pertaining to Ararat, showed that the air could be breathed with relatively few complications. She opened a dorsal hatch and Glass, Pinky and I climbed out onto the back of Scythe, standing on a little railinged platform like bold submariners surveying a new continent.

  ‘Breathe,’ Glass encouraged, when it was obvious to all that I was having difficulty drawing a full-lunged breath.

  ‘I’d forgotten the taste of this place,’ Pinky said, before sneezing explosively. A prodigious quantity of bright green material splatted onto his sleeve. ‘Better out than in, I s’pose.’ He knelt, rubbing the verdant mass against Scythe. ‘Here, ship, have some practice. If you can’t deal with a little healthy pig-snot, we’re in more trouble than we think.’

  ‘Does it take you back?’ I asked cautiously.

  Pinky nodded. ‘We’re mammals, Stink. Smell and taste matter to pigs even more than humans.’ He sniffed, wrinkling his snout, as if staunching another sneeze. ‘Good and bad happened here. Mostly bad. But now that I’m smelling it again, I remember the good, too. Antoinette. Xavier. Old friends.’ He shook his head, as if ashamed where his thoughts were taking him. ‘They don’t feel like they’re long gone. More like we just missed them, and if we stick around a little they’ll be back.’ His voice turned quiet. ‘I’d like to see my friends again.’

  Glass extended a hand, causing the railings to drop away and a flattened walkway to form along the spine of the ship, running all the way back to the swollen bulge of the tail, which I now understood to contain the hypometric device. We walked the length of it, which took us in the direction of dry land, with the tail meeting the rising slope as it emerged from the water. Ladder-like handholds puckered the side of the hull, allowing us to scramble down the last ten metres onto the solid ground of First Camp. Our boots squelched onto slippery, slime-covered rock.

 
; Each of us took a faltering step, waiting for our soles to find traction. We had come with very little equipment, and only a modest addition to the clothes we wore inside the ship. It was hard to say whether we needed more or less protection. The air was sticky and humid one minute, chilly and biting the next. If we decided we needed more, we would have to go back for it, or have the servitors bring it out.

  I kept looking up at the sky, drawn to its hypnotic shimmering vastness. I knew that the atmosphere was not going to fall away into space. But it was unsettling to realise that my life depended on that thin skin of air, trapped in place by nothing more than its own heaviness. Those thunderheads had neared while we made our landing, teetering over us like curious stooping ogres, and a few drops of rain stung my cheek. Pinky sneezed again, and I watched Glass stumble, only just concealing one of her shuddering episodes.

  ‘What’s up with her?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘Something she’s been trying to hide since we came out of reefersleep.’

  ‘We need the two of you, Stink. Even more so without Lady Arek.’

  I nodded. ‘I know.’

  We picked our way through the green skirting, until we reached drier ground, overshadowed by the conch forms. They were cloud-coloured and only slightly translucent. Here and there, human-proportioned windows and doors had been cut into them by some arduous means, probably involving a great deal of energy and time. I could tell it was difficult because they had only done a few of them. The usefulness of this alien material lay in its invulnerability, but that also made it awkward to work with. I could imagine how grateful these settlers had been for anything that helped them weather the seasons of Ararat.

  We examined the mounds built up on the outside of the conches. Boxy buildings and tents had been crushed like paper toys, reduced to a collapsed, soggy mass. Perhaps there were things in there that we could use, but it would take a kind of diligent mining to extract them. Glass found the remains of a hovercraft, which would have suited us very well for travelling over water, but it was crushed and buckled beyond any sensible repair. It would have been quicker to have Scythe fabricate a new one.