Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘We’re in something like a lock,’ I said. ‘It’s in vacuum now, just as ours would be. That must be a universal design feature, regardless of the species. I know we picked an almost random point of entry, but I imagine the ship’s skin will be honeycombed with these cells, so that the Nestbuilders could come and go as they pleased. They weren’t required to use a fixed set of locks as we are: they could create a functioning lock anywhere it suited them, just by making the right gestures. Lady Arek: are you through?’

  ‘Both clear, Warglass – and the door seems to be sealing behind us, just as you said it might.’

  ‘I’m encouraged. It means the cell is still functioning as it should. If I’m right, there should be a pressure equalisation very shortly.’

  ‘Since you seem to be well informed, what can we expect of their atmosphere?’

  ‘Oxygen dominated, but much too warm, corrosive and dense to be breathable. All the same, a fragrant breeze compared to Charybdis. We may also notice—’

  Sharply, Lady Arek said: ‘Gravity is decreasing.’

  I noted the readout on my faceplate, as well as the neural correlate of the same reading spooling inside my head.

  ‘Yes. For Nestbuilders, a gee is far too heavy to move around in without augmentation. Most of the ship must be creating its own microgravity environment. The lock handles both transitions: pressure and gravity.’

  ‘As long as it goes down, rather than up, we should not be inconvenienced. I am still reading Scythe, Warglass, is that the case for you?’

  ‘Yes – I’m still in contact, and the door doesn’t seem to be blocking the link to any significant degree. Test commands are still being received and acted on, too.’

  ‘It would be good to know the moment that stops being the case.’

  ‘Or even sooner,’ Pinky said. ‘You two are in neural contact as well, aren’t you?’

  ‘Interneural handshake protocols remain established,’ I answered. ‘That means we can communicate via Conjoiner channels, as soon as it becomes expeditious to do so. But for your sake, I think it would be a little rude if we did too much of it.’

  ‘If it’s a question of saving my neck, ladies, don’t spare my feelings.’

  ‘We shall not,’ Lady Arek said. ‘But there is a secondary consideration, which Warglass has not mentioned. Verbal communication, via our suits, may be safer than mind-to-mind binding. We do not yet know how the ship regards us, or what measures it may use against us, especially if it finds a vulnerability in the neural channels. Remember, we are dealing with an extraordinarily long-lived and resourceful survivor-species. They have not endured this long by being careless or overly trusting of outsiders, especially not galactic Johnny-come-latelies such as ourselves. They may not regard us as automatically hostile, but they may not welcome us either.’

  ‘If this is the welcome, it needs work,’ Pinky said. He stepped off the lip, arms wide, and began a slowly accelerating drift down to the bottom of the chamber.

  ‘Rash,’ I remarked.

  By the readings on our suits, gravity had decreased to one-hundredth of a gee: about the force we would have felt on a small moon or large asteroid. It would still have been very easy for Pinky to hurt himself, or at least put his suit into a position where it needed to take drastic action to preserve its occupant. But the thickening atmosphere meant that his terminal velocity was also much lower than it would have been under terrestrial conditions of pressure and gravity. Pinky’s lights gleamed across an expanse of gently upcurving floor, sheened like ice, and he landed about as daintily as any pig could. Lady Arek and I followed our friend, and we landed neatly either side of him. The sill – and the area where the doorway had been – with Scythe on the other side – was now about ten metres above us, with a smooth, slippery cliff of conch material underlying the sill. As we had landed gently, though, with some coordination it ought to be possible to jump back up onto the sill. Failing that, the suits’ thrusters would be able to overcome the gravity. But I was not too concerned either way: I had created a lock once; if so obliged, I could create another elsewhere. If I remained in neural linkage with Scythe, I could reposition the ship as needed.

  I looked more closely at the floor. Beneath a thin translucency was an impression of fast, fleeting movement along circuit-like flows. I thought of shoals of impossibly organised silver fish, darting with the efficiency of nerve signals. Through my boots I felt the throb of distant processes, constant as a city’s waterworks. The floater might be dormant, but it was anything but dead. Perhaps, in its way, it was rousing through layers of slumber, stirred by our presence.

  I tore my gaze from the floor. We moved in bounding leaps, until we came to a sheer wall directly opposite the point of entry. An opening was already forming as we approached, needing no intervention from me. A pale blue light shone out of the inner doorway, washing over our suits. There had been no change in the air currents, so we must now be experiencing the normal atmosphere of the ship’s habitable portions.

  The doorway was a semicircle, with its flat edge along the floor. The three of us passed through it at the same time without difficulty. Before I had assessed the new space beyond the doorway, I turned back to watch it close over.

  ‘Still in contact, Warglass?’

  ‘A little attenuation, but nothing I can’t compensate for.’

  I turned back to survey the blue-lit chamber in which we had arrived. It was an enormous bright vault, circular in plan with a domed ceiling, and according to my suit, just under eight hundred metres across. The surfaces were smooth and unadorned, gleaming back at us with the usual slippery lustre of conch material. Beneath or beyond them was the same shivering, eel-like rush of movement that had underpinned the floor. Blue light emerged from all the surfaces, obliterating shadows and making estimates of distance and perspective tricky. There were no Nestbuilders here, nor any objects that – allowing for human preconceptions – I perceived as distinct machines or larger modular components of the ship. I decided that this was not a control room in any recognisable sense, but rather something like an atrium or hallway. I could see no obvious points of exit or entry in the lower parts of the walls or the higher curvature dome.

  But there was a way to progress. The floor had a spiralling path cut into it, a tightening helix which vanished down into the middle of the chamber at an ever-steepening angle.

  ‘The ship is obviously functional,’ I said. ‘Likely its crew will be in the Nestbuilder equivalent of hibernation, a sort of desiccation, while they wait out whatever hazard compelled them to hide here. A thousand years, ten thousand, is nothing to Nestbuilders. All we need to do is find a means of accessing the ship’s native data architecture, from which we’ll be able to extract the Incantor construction schedules.’

  ‘All we need to do,’ Pinky repeated.

  ‘Will we recognise the means to access this data architecture, when we find it?’ Lady Arek asked.

  ‘I will,’ I said, and tipped my head to the ceiling. ‘The propulsion and defensive componentry is above: cubic kilometres of dangerous machinery that rarely needed any attention from the crew.’ Then I nodded to the spiralling path. ‘Beneath us lie the command and control cores, the nursery banks, the shell cribs and desiccation vaults. Those are our best places to look for a direct portal into the data architecture. I don’t think we will need to go too far down to find what we are looking for.’

  ‘Anyone would think you’d been here before,’ Pinky said.

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Speaking for Warglass, Glass, or the Old Man?’

  ‘Not one of us.’

  ‘But you have acquired knowledge hitherto undisclosed to us,’ Lady Arek said. ‘Including, I imagine, that repertoire of gestural commands. Was there ever really a codex, Warglass?’

  ‘I may have simplified one or two things.’

  ‘Simplified as in totally lied about?’ Pinky asked. His question was to the point, but his tone was matter-of-fact, almost agreeable
, as if now that he was in this situation he might as well make the best of it.

  I could see why Nevil had liked him; why Nevil had been glad to have him at his side.

  His side. Our side. My side.

  ‘The essentials haven’t changed. We’ve come for the Incantor. We’re going to get the Incantor – the schedules that need to be fed back to Scythe – and we’re going to leave.’ I set off for the spiral path. ‘I suggest we make use of this walkway, rather than waste suit propellant. On some level, the ship must be aware of our presence, and we won’t want to be rude guests.’

  Lady Arek and Pinky were following. ‘And hacking the data architecture won’t be considered bad manners?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘We’ll reserve that act of rudeness until the last possible moment,’ I replied. ‘Because I expect there will be repercussions.’

  Pinky paused, bent forward with his hands on his hips. ‘Well, just as long as we don’t leave ourselves too long a stroll back to the ship . . . we really are going down this scary plughole thing, aren’t we?’

  ‘We really are,’ I said cheerily. ‘Enjoy it, Pinky. This is a glorious day. You’re getting to do something novel. Nothing with a spine has ever been inside one of these ships.’

  He straightened up. ‘And it’ll be an even better day if something with a spine gets to leave.’

  We walked single file, following the winding path as it spiralled in on itself and descended, with the blue radiance becoming harder and brighter as the surfaces closed in. Beneath the path, the shimmering patterns chased and teased us, writhing in logical knots around the pressure points under our feet.

  ‘What do we know about Nestbuilders, Lady Arek?’

  ‘Very little, Warglass. Scraps of intelligence, little glimmers of fact: impressions and half-memories reported by the more lucid Juggler contactees, some of which correlate with each other, others of which do not. Added to that, my own fragmentary impressions gleaned from my time in the Hades matrix, when I was not even properly alive.’

  ‘But from those disparate traces . . .’

  ‘They are a long-lived galactic species; one of the very few that has managed to avoid total extinction. They are organic, rather than machine. Their native form is analogous to a terrestrial arthropod: a sort of large, intelligent crab or lobster. The name derives from the vast, free-floating space structures known to have been made by their kind – enormous nest-like agglomerations of conch-like elements, hundreds and thousands of times larger than this ship. But since the Inhibitor purge, the Nestbuilders have largely abandoned these objects and become migratory.’

  ‘All of that is correct,’ I stated. ‘All of that is also wrong.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The path had become constant in pitch and radius now, corkscrewing down beneath the floor, with a plunging well running through the middle. There were no barriers to the path, and in the microgravity it would not have been difficult to step off the floor and descend directly, using suit thrust to slow us down when needed. But I had been serious in my determination not to provoke the ship unduly.

  ‘How is it wrong, Warglass?’

  ‘The Nestbuilders did not survive. They are dead.’

  Pinky hummed to himself. We carried on down.

  ‘I do not grasp the point of that assertion. This ship is functional. You say that it is crewed, even if they are in hibernation. How can the Nestbuilders be dead?’

  ‘Because what we are seeing here is not really the work of Nestbuilders. Let me explain.’

  ‘Please do,’ Pinky urged.

  ‘Quite a long time ago – the timescales no longer matter, but we are talking about much less than a million years ago – another species encountered the Nestbuilders. They too were in flight from the Inhibitors. The distinction was that this second species recognised no ethical bounds on its own behaviour. Observing that the Nestbuilders had devised a viable survival strategy, with a robust and well-developed spacefaring and life-support capacity, this second species decided to parasite itself upon them.’

  ‘In what manner?’ Lady Arek said.

  ‘They took over their bodies. They completely co-opted the Nestbuilder starfaring civilisation: using them, in effect, as vehicles. The Nestbuilders’ minds were degraded to a purely housekeeping function, while the new hosts did all the thinking. They have a name for themselves, but it would break our sanity to utter it. Call them Slugs. The Slugs are the new masters: the custodians of what we see around us. They haunt the bodies of the Nestbuilders, running a zombie civilisation that only looks like the Nestbuilders from outside.’

  ‘That’s—’

  ‘Darwinian, Lady Arek. No more, no less. The wolves push us all to extremes. In extremes, one finds expressions of both beauty and cruelty. But we should not judge the Slugs too harshly. Earth’s biosphere has thrown up equal horrors of usurpation and genocidal self-interest. If you doubt me, ask a Neanderthal.’

  ‘This is of some theoretical interest,’ Lady Arek admitted. ‘But we come for their weapons, not their consciences.’

  ‘That is wise, because they have none.’

  ‘You have arrived at knowledge that surprises me, Warglass. I do not doubt that it is reliable: presumably springing from the same source that showed you how to break into this ship and understand its organisational structure. You have always known more than we understood to be possible. The mere fact of the Incantor . . . please, reassure me that we were not wrong about that, as well?’

  ‘No, the Incantor is very real.’

  ‘And now that we are here – you are confident that we can take it?’

  ‘The Nestbuilders would not have willingly relinquished such a thing, and neither will the Slugs. To each, the Incantor was a weapon of absolute last resort. They believed, probably with cause, that any lesser species would not be able to resist using it indiscriminately.’

  ‘Will we be any better than that?’

  ‘That’s a question for a thousand years from now. Today, we do whatever we must to survive. But in answer to your first question: I am confident that we can take it.’

  ‘And that confidence is predicated upon . . . ?’

  ‘We have an ally, Lady Arek. An insider. I made a generalisation just now: it would not be entirely true to say that all Slugs lack an awareness of their crime. One did. One does.’

  ‘You’ve met one,’ Lady Arek said marvellingly, as if she had just found the solution to a puzzle that had been greatly troubling her: a solution that was as charming as it was inevitable. ‘That is the only answer. In your travels, before you fell into my orbit, you encountered one of their kind. There was knowledge transfer. That is how you recognised the significance of the floater: how you knew that it would contain an Incantor. And how you have brought us this far. Is that true?’

  ‘True enough for our purposes.’

  ‘Kind of a big deal not to have mentioned that,’ Pinky observed.

  ‘Glass never concealed any part of it. You just didn’t ask the right questions of her.’ I slowed my drifting pace, indicating a blur of large, immobile forms beyond the blue walls that enclosed the spiral. ‘The desiccation vaults. We’re passing through them. Do you see the Nestbuilders?’

  Beyond the blue walls – beyond the thin shimmer of the logical flows – were ranks of spiralling alcoves, each containing the cancroid form of one of the host aliens. They were faint, watery shapes pinned behind that restless blue translucence. Contrary to what Lady Arek might have thought, I had never seen a Nestbuilder before, in any state of animation. The hardshelled organisms were all of a very similar size and state of development, indicating a cohort that had come up through the shell cribs at the same time, discarding exoskeletons in lockstep. Their main body was a metre across, an ornately folded shell with numerous crimped and puckered outlets for limbs and sensors. The main legs and manipulators were tucked in close, lending the form a shrivelled-up look.

  ‘Never was one for crab,’ Pinky remarked. ‘Even less s
o now.’

  The desiccation vaults went on and on – many turns of the spiral, a good hundred metres of vertical descent. But this would only be one of the hundreds of vaults dispersed through the ship, arranged so that there was always numerical redundancy in the event of an accident or attack. Eventually, the spiral widened again, and we emerged into the upper part of a chamber just as large as the first, with the path cutting a helical groove around the inner surface of a domed ceiling. Beneath us, bleached in the same directionless blue light, was a much more promising prospect. It was a geometric division of the floor, almost like a formal garden, but with frond-like functional components of the ship rising from the ground at the intersections and borders.

  ‘I feel I should mention something,’ Lady Arek said. ‘There is large, organised movement below.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. Fifty metres beneath us, pale scuttling forms were leaping and scrabbling along the floor’s pathways, spilling out of holes in the floor and lowest parts of the walls and coming in along different radial lines and organising into larger ranks. In microgravity they moved with astonishing speed, like liquid pouring into runnels.

  ‘They were meant to be hibernating,’ Pinky said.

  ‘Let us see what they want with us,’ I said. ‘They don’t seem to be carrying weapons or armour.’

  Pinky twisted his suit to look at me. ‘They’re giant armoured crabs. What part of them isn’t weapons or armour?’

  The Nestbuilders were flowing onto the helix, gathering into single file. These spiral walkways seemed like an inefficient means of connecting different parts of the ship, until one saw how speedily and effortlessly the aliens moved along them.