If anyone else had spoken to her like that they would have been nursing at least one interesting dislocation about two seconds later. But Khouri had long since learned to make allowances for Volyova.
‘Where is he? Still on the same level as before?’
‘Depends what you mean by “him”. I suppose you could say his epicentre is still there, yes. But there’s really very little point in distinguishing between him and the ship nowadays.’
‘Then he’s everywhere? All around us?’
‘All-seeing. All-knowing.’
‘I don’t like this, Ilia.’
‘If it’s any consolation, I very much doubt that he does either.’
After many delays, reversals and diversions the elevator finally brought them to the bridge of Nostalgia for Infinity. To Khouri’s considerable relief a consultation with the Captain did not seem to be imminent.
The bridge was much as she remembered it. The chamber was damaged and careworn, but most of the vandalism had been inflicted before the Captain changed. Khouri had even done some of it herself. Seeing the impact craters where her weapons discharges had fallen gave her a faint and mischievous sense of pride. She remembered the tense power-struggle that had taken place aboard the lighthugger when it was in orbit around the neutron star Hades, on the very edge of the present system.
It had been touch and go at times, but because they had survived she had dared to believe that a greater victory had been won. But the arrival of the Inhibitor machines suggested otherwise. The battle, in all likelihood, had already been lost before the first shots were fired. But they had at least bought themselves a little time. Now they had to do something with it.
Khouri settled into one of the seats facing the bridge’s projection sphere. It had been repaired since the mutiny and now showed a real-time display of the Resurgam system. There were eleven major planets, but the display also showed their moons and the larger asteroids and comets - all were of potential importance. Their precise orbital positions were indicated, along with vectors showing the motion, prograde or retrograde, of the body in question. Pale cones radiating from the lighthugger showed the extent of the ship’s instantaneous deep-sensor coverage, corrected for light-travel time. Volyova had strewn a handful of monitor drones on other orbits so that they could peer into blind spots and increase the interferometric baseline, but she used them cautiously.
‘Ready for a recent-history lesson?’ Volyova asked.
‘You know I am, Ilia. I just hope this little jaunt turns out to be worth it, because I’m still going to have to answer some tricky questions when I get back to Cuvier.’
‘They may not seem so massively pressing when you’ve seen what I have to show you.’ She made the display zoom in, enlarging one of the moons spinning around the system’s second-largest gas giant.
‘This is where the Inhibitors have set up camp?’ Khouri asked.
‘Here and on two other worlds of comparable size. Their activities on each seem broadly the same.’
Now dark shapes fluttered into view around the moon. They swarmed and scattered like agitated crows, their numbers and shapes in constant flux. In an instant they settled on to the surface of the moon, linking together in purposeful formations. The playback was evidently accelerated - hours compressed into seconds, perhaps - for transformations blistered across the moon’s surface in a quick black inundation. Zoom-in showed a tendency for the structures to be formed of cubic subelements of widely differing sizes. Vast lasers pumped heat back into space as the transformations raged. Grotesque black machines the size of mountains clotted the landscape, ramping down the moon’s albedo until only infra-red could tease out significant patterns.
‘What are they doing?’ Khouri asked.
‘I couldn’t tell at first.’
One or two weeks had passed before what was taking place became clear. Dotted at regular intervals around the moon’s equator were volcanic apertures, squat gape-mouthed machines that extended a hundredth of the moon’s diameter into space. Without warning, they began to spew out rocky material in ballistic dust plumes. The matter was hot but not actually molten. It arced above the moon, falling into orbit. Another machine - Volyova had not noticed it until then - circled in the same orbit, processing the dust, shepherding, cooling and compactifying the plume. In its wake it left an organised ring system of processed and refined matter, gigatonnes of it in tidy lanes. Droves of smaller machines trailed behind like minnows, sucking in the pre-refined matter and subjecting it to even further purification.
‘What’s happening?’
‘The machines seem to be dismantling the moon,’ Volyova said.
‘That much I’ve figured out for myself. But it strikes me as a pretty cumbersome way of going about it. We’ve got crustbuster warheads that would do the same thing in a flash ...’
‘And in the process vaporise and disperse half of the moon’s matter.’ Volyova nodded sagely. ‘I don’t think that’s quite what they wanted to do. I think they want all that matter, processed and refined as efficiently as possible. More, in fact, since they’re ripping apart three moons. There’s a lot of volatile material they won’t be able to process into solids, not unless they’re going to be doing some heavy-duty alchemy, but my guess is they’ll still give themselves around a hundred billion billion tonnes of raw material.’
‘That’s a lot of rubble.’
‘Yes. And it rather begs the question: what, precisely, do they need it for?’
‘I suppose you’ve got a theory.’
Ilia Volyova smiled. ‘Not much more than guesswork at this stage. The lunar dismantling’s still in progress, but I think it’s reasonably clear that they want to build something. And do you know what? I strongly suspect that whatever it is may not have our absolute best interests at heart.’
‘You think it’s going to be a weapon, don’t you?’
‘Obviously I’m getting predictable in my old age. But yes, I rather fear a weapon is on the cards. What kind, I can’t begin to guess. Clearly they could have already destroyed Resurgam if that was their immediate intention - and they wouldn’t need to dismantle it neatly.’
‘Then they’ve got something else in mind.’
‘It would seem so.’
‘We’ve got to do something about it, Ilia. We’ve still got the cache. We could make some kind of difference, even now.’
Volyova turned off the display sphere. ‘At the moment they seem not to be aware of our presence - we appear to fall beneath their detection threshold unless we’re in the vicinity of Hades. Would you be willing to compromise that by using the cache weapons?’
‘If I felt it was our last best hope, I might. So would you.’
‘I’m just saying there won’t be any going back. We have to be completely clear about that.’ Volyova was silent for a moment. ‘There’s something else as well...’
‘Yes?’
She lowered her voice. ‘We can’t control the cache, not without his help. The Captain will need to be persuaded.’
Of course they did not call themselves the Inhibitors. They had never seen any reason to name themselves anything. They simply existed to perform a duty of astonishing importance, a duty vital to the future existence of intelligent life itself. They did not expect to be understood, or sympathised with, so any name - or any hint of justification - was entirely superfluous. Yet they were passingly aware that this was a name that they had been given, assigned to them after the glorious extinctions that had followed the Dawn War. Through a long, tenuous chain of recollection the name had been passed from species to species, even as those species were wiped from the face of the galaxy. The Inhibitors: those that Inhibit, those that suppress the emergence of intelligence.
The overseer recognised, ruefully, that the name was indeed an accurate description of its work.
It was difficult to say exactly where and when the work had begun. The Dawn War had been the first significant event in the history of the inhabited galaxy,
a clashing of a million newly emergent cultures. These were the first starfaring species to arise, the players at the beginning of the game.
The Dawn War, ultimately, had been about a single precious resource.
It had been about metal.
She returned to Resurgam.
In Inquisition House there were questions to be answered. She fielded them with as much insouciance as she could muster. She had been in the wilderness, she said, handling a highly sensitive field report from an agent who had stumbled on an exceptionally good lead. The trail to the Triumvir, she told her doubters, was hotter than it had been in years. To prove this she reactivated certain closed files and had old suspects invited back to Inquisition House for follow-up interviews. Inwardly, she felt sick at what had to be done to maintain the illusion of probity. Innocents had to be detained and made, for the sake of realism, to feel as if their lives, or at least their liberties, were in extreme jeopardy. It was a detestable business. Once she had sweetened it by making sure that she only terrorised people who were known to have evaded punishment for other crimes, revealed by judicious snooping of the files of rival government departments. It had worked for a time, but then even that had begun to seem morally questionable.
But now it was worse. She had doubters in the administration, and to silence their qualms she had to make her investigations unusually efficient and ruthless. There had to be plausible rumours circulating Cuvier of the degrees to which Inquisition House was prepared to go. People had to suffer for the sake of her cover.
She reassured herself that it was all, ultimately, in their best interests, that what she was doing was for the greater good of Resurgam; that a few terrified souls here and there were a small price to pay when set against the protection of an entire world.
She stood at the window of her office in Inquisition House, looking down towards the street, watching another guest being bundled into a blunt grey electric car. The man stumbled as the guards walked him to it. His head was covered and his hands were tied behind his back. The car would speed through the city until it reached a residential zone - it would be dusk by then - and the man would be dumped into the gutter a few blocks from his home.
His bonds would have been loosened, but the man would likely lie still on the ground for several minutes, breathing hard, gasping at the realisation that he had been released. Perhaps a gang of friends would find him as they made their way to a bar or back from the repair factories. They would not recognise him at first, for the beating he had taken would have swollen his face and made it difficult for him to talk. But when they did they would help the man back to his house, glancing warily over their shoulders in case the government agents who had dumped him were still abroad.
Or perhaps the man would find his own feet and, peering through the slits of bloodied, bruised eyelids, might somehow contrive to find his own way home. His wife would be waiting, perhaps more scared now than anyone in Cuvier. When her husband came home she would experience something of the same mingled relief and terror that he had experienced upon regaining consciousness. They would hold each other despite the pain that the man was in. Then she would examine his wounds and clean what could be cleaned. There would be no broken bones, but it would take a proper medical examination to be sure of that. The man would assume that he had been lucky, that the agents who had beaten him had been weary after a hard day in the interrogation cells.
Later, perhaps, he would hobble to the bar to meet his friends. Drinks would be bought and in some quiet corner he would show them the worst of the bruises. And word would spread that he had acquired them in Inquisition House. His friends would ask him how he could ever have fallen under suspicion of being involved with the Triumvir, and he would laugh and say that there was no stopping Inquisition House; not now. That anyone even remotely suspected of impeding the House’s enquiries was fair game; that the pursuit of the criminal had been notched up to such an intensity that any misdemeanour against any government branch could be assumed to indicate tacit support for the Triumvir.
Khouri watched the car glide away and pick up speed. Now she could barely remember what the man had looked like. They all began to look the same after a while, the men and women blurring into one homogenous terrified whole. Tomorrow there would be more.
She looked above the buildings, into the bruise-coloured sky. She imagined the processes that she now knew were taking place beyond Resurgam’s atmosphere. No more than one or two light-hours away, vast and implacable alien machinery was engaged in reducing three worlds to fine metallic dust. The machines seemed unhurried, unconcerned with doing things on a recognisably human timescale. They went about their business with the quiet calm of undertakers.
Khouri recalled what she had already learned of the Inhibitors, information vouchsafed to her after she had infiltrated Volyova’s crew. There had been a war at the dawn of time, a war that had encompassed the entire galaxy and numerous cultures. In the desolate aftermath of that war, one species - or collective of species - had determined that intelligent life could no longer be tolerated. They had unleashed dark droves of machines whose only function was to watch and wait, vigilant for the signs of emergent starfaring cultures. They left traps dotted through space, glittery baubles designed to attract the unwise. The traps both alerted the Inhibitors to the presence of a new outbreak of intelligence and also served as psychological probing mechanisms, constructing a profile of the soon-to-be-culled fledglings.
The traps gauged the technological prowess of an emergent culture and suggested the manner in which they might attempt to counter the Inhibitor threat. For some reason that Khouri did not understand, and which had certainly never been explained to her, the response to the emergence of intelligence had to be proportionate; it was not enough simply to wipe out all life in the galaxy or even in a pocket of the galaxy. There was, she sensed, a deeper purpose to the Inhibitor culls that she did not yet grasp, and might not ever be capable of grasping.
And yet the machines were imperfect. They had begun to fail. It was nothing that could be detected over any timescale shorter than a few million years. Most species did not endure that long, so they saw only grim continuity. The only way that the decline could be observed was in the much longer term, evidenced not in the records of individual cultures but in the subtle differences between them. The ruthlessness quotient of the Inhibitors remained as high as ever, but their methods were becoming less efficient, their response times slower. Some profound and subtle flaw in the machines’ design had worked its way to the surface. Now and then a culture slipped through the net, managing to spread into interstellar space before the Inhibitors could contain and cull it. The cull then became more difficult; less like surgery and more like butchery.
The Amarantin, the birdlike creatures who had lived on Resurgam a million years earlier, had been one such species. The effort to cleanse them had been protracted, allowing many of them to slip into various hidden sanctuaries. The last act of the culling machines had been to annihilate Resurgam’s biosphere by triggering a catastrophic stellar flare. Delta Pavonis had since settled down to normal sunlike activity, but it was only now that Resurgam was beginning to support life again.
Their work done, the Inhibitors had vanished back into the stellar cold. Nine hundred and ninety thousand years passed.
Then humans came, drawn to the enigma of the vanished Amarantin culture. Their leader had been Sylveste, the ambitious scion of a wealthy Yellowstone family. By the time Khouri, Volyova and Nostalgia for Infinity arrived in the system, Sylveste had put in place his plans for exploring the neutron star on the system’s edge, convinced that Hades had something to do with the Amarantin extinction. Sylveste had coerced the crew of the starship into helping him, using its cache of weapons to break through shells of defensive machinery and finally penetrating to the heart of a moon-sized artefact - they called it Cerberus - which orbited the neutron star.
Sylveste had been right all along about the Amarantin. But in verifying
his theory he had also sprung a primed Inhibitor trap. At the heart of the Cerberus object, Sylveste had died in a massive matter-antimatter explosion.
And at the same time he had not died at all. Khouri knew; she had met and spoken to Sylveste after his ‘death’. So far as she was capable of understanding it, Sylveste and his wife had been stored as simulations in the crust of the neutron star itself. Hades, it turned out, was one of the sanctuaries that the Amarantin had used when they were being harried by the Inhibitors. It was an element of something much older than either the Amarantin or the Inhibitors, a transcendent information storage and processing system, a vast archive. The Amarantin had found a way inside it, and so, much later, had Sylveste. That was as much as Khouri knew, and as much as she wanted to know.
She had met the stored Sylveste only once. In the more than sixty years that had passed since then - the time that Volyova had spent carefully infiltrating the very society that feared and loathed her - Khouri had allowed herself to forget that Sylveste was still out there, was still in some sense alive in the Hades computational matrix. On those rare occasions when she did think about him, she found herself wondering if he ever gave a moment’s thought to the consequences of his actions all those years ago; if memories of the Inhibitors ever stirred him from vain dreams of his own brilliance. She doubted it, for Sylveste had not struck her as someone overly troubled by the results of his own deeds. And in any case, by Sylveste’s accelerated reckoning, for time passed very rapidly in the Hades matrix, the events must have been centuries of subjective time in his past, as inconsequential as childhood misdeeds. Very little could touch him in there, so what was the point of worrying about him?
But that hardly helped those who were still outside the matrix. Khouri and Volyova had spent only twenty of those sixty-plus years out of reefersleep, for their infiltration scheme had been necessarily slow and episodic. But of those twenty years, Khouri doubted that a single day had passed when she had not thought of - and worried about - the prospect of the Inhibitors.
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