Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  To my wife, for being there.

  INHIBITOR PHASE

  A Novel of the Revelation Space Universe

  Alastair Reynolds

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Preface

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Three

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Five

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Six

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part Seven

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  End Notes

  Key Characters in the Timeline

  Selected Glossary

  A Note On Chronology

  Credits

  Also by Alastair Reynolds from Gollancz:

  Copyright

  PREFACE

  Dear Reader,

  This is a novel set in the Revelation Space universe. While it shares some connective tissue with some of the other books and stories in that sequence, it’s my hope that it can be read independently. In addition, while there are callbacks to events and characters from earlier in the history, I’ve tried to avoid significant spoilers for the other titles. If you want to dive into the book cold, please do so and skip the rest of this introduction.

  If you’d like a little more orientation, but not too much, then here is the essential setup:

  About five hundred years from now, humanity has spread into interstellar space and settled many nearby solar systems. There have been good times and bad: golden ages, factional wars, a devastating plague. While exploring the ruins of a vanished alien civilisation, humans manage to trigger a long-dormant threat from the dawn of time. Remorseless cube-shaped replicating machines – Inhibitors – emerge from the darkness and begin culling humanity. Over the next two hundred years, humans and their allies (including hive-mind ‘Conjoiners’ and genetically engineered ‘hyperpigs’) band together, squabble, and generally go to ever more extreme ends to find a weapon against the Inhibitors (also known as ‘wolves’).

  These measures all fail to one degree or another.

  By the late years of the twenty-eighth century all that’s left of humanity is a few isolated pockets of survivors, hunkering down with ever more limited resources, and still no real idea how to fight back against the wolves.

  This is where Inhibitor Phase begins.

  Again, if that’s enough for you, please dive in. If you’d appreciate some more detailed notes on the chronology, terminology and key figures in the history, then please turn to the back of the book – but be aware that these notes do indeed contain mild spoilers both for Inhibitor Phase and the other titles.

  That’s why they’re at the back.

  AR

  Part One

  SUN HOLLOW

  CHAPTER ONE

  Victorine was painting a wall. I looked down at her as she added a touch of detail to the mural’s darkening edge. Cubes swarmed in from space, each rendered in two efficient strokes of midnight blue and black. They stood out against the ruddier background of the dust disk, gathering into sinuous straggly formations, loops, and chains, before coagulating into larger and more ominous forms – dark, dense masses prickling with lightning like an armada of thunderheads. Victorine had done none of that: it was all the work of other schoolchildren, some long grown or long gone.

  But she was adding to it, layering paint over paint. From out of the thunderheads burst a pack of creatures: twisted, straining, mad-eyed forms of muscle and claw, fur and tooth.

  ‘I know they’re not really wolves,’ she said, anticipating any remark I might have been about to make. ‘I know that’s just what we call them. But they might as well be wolves.’

  ‘You’ve never seen wolves.’

  ‘I don’t need to.’

  ‘They’re a reminder of what drove us here,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s why they’re on the mural. But you’re painting them as if they’re about to pounce out of the sky. Is that how you feel?’

  Victorine set her brush down on the lip of the metal box she cradled in her other arm. The materials inside it were improvised: chemical pigments and stabilising emulsions that had once served some other purpose in the great plan of settlement. There were colours denied to her, because the right ingredients had never been found, or could not be spared for something as frivolous as a school mural. Her brushes were crude sticks tipped with coarse eruptions of stiff animal hair from the cattle stocks we kept for food and clothing. The paintbox was itself the front compartment of a life-support pack, long-since dismantled and repurposed for its vital treasures. That Victorine could make any sort of mark on the wall was something of a miracle. In fact, her wolves were alive with a desperate energy and purpose.

  ‘What do you think I ought to feel?’ she asked, in answer to my query.

  A deep, resonant thud shook the ground. It shook everything. We looked up: up from the wall, up from the school, up to the ceiling of rock far above us. A second thud came again, and a rain of dirt and dust loosened itself from the ceiling. The ceiling’s lights flickered and died. A third thud came, harder than before. Heavier stones and boulders began to detach. Screams sounded across the cavern.

  Victorine was calm, though.

  ‘They’re here,’ she said, taking a step back from her work. ‘They’re here and they want to break in.’ Her tone became quietly accusatory. ‘It means you failed, Miguel. It means you failed and everything here is going to end.’

  She dipped her brush into its little jar of cleaning solvent and stirred it methodically.

  The thudding became the low throb of the wake-up alarm. The stir of Victorine’s brush was the high, cyclical tone of air-circulation pumps purring to life. The sting of the debris against my eyes was the discomfort of forcing them wide, after weeks of sleep.

  I was awake.

  Awake and inside the torpor box.

  For a moment, lying weightless, it was enough to know that I had survived the crossing; that the ship and its components had held together long enough to bring me to the interception point. Given the state of our equipment and defences, that alone was something to thank. The torpor boxes were good enough to keep us in hibernation for a few weeks, but they were nowhere near as reliable as the long-duration reefersleep caskets that we had once taken for granted. Every trip involving a period of torpor carried a risk of death or permanent disability. I had rolled the dice once and survived: I would be rolling it at least one more time before my return to Sun Hollow.

  I waited a minute, gathering my strength, and set about removing the box’s monitors and catheters. When that slow, painful business was done, I took another few moments and examined myself with the detached, methodical eye of a physician. The box’s blue light laid me ou
t unsparingly. Blemishes, scars, poor muscle tone, white hairs: all old news. A few fresh pressure sores, some bruising, bleeding here and there. The usual numbness and tremor in my fingers. Nothing, though, that was going to kill me in the next few hours.

  The memories of the last few days before my departure were still fresh. The detection, the confirmation, the decision to interdict. My volunteering for the operation. The arguments against and for; the tears and the strained farewells that followed. Saying goodbye to Nicola and Victorine. The launch boost, blasting away from the false-bottomed crater over Sun Hollow’s shuttle pen. The strain on my bones as the shuttle accelerated, gaining speed while it still had the cover of the circumstellar dust disk. Ten gees, four point seven hours. I had been unconscious for most of that, mercifully, and had only endured it because of a suite of aggressive life-support measures, taking the load off my heart and lungs. My spine still ached from the twin abuses of compression under acceleration and now the slow, painful unloading under weightlessness.

  Hard on a young man; murderous on a relic like me.

  Why had I volunteered for this? I had to dig deeper into my memories for that. Hitting them was like finding a loose tooth jangling against a nerve: an instant, savage hit of raw agony.

  Ah, yes. That was why.

  Political atonement.

  I was making amends for a mistake, a blemish on my office, after a badly managed coup against me failed. After a contentious trial and a botched execution.

  Rurik Taine, writhing on the floor, not quite dead.

  My fault, all of it. Nothing that was enough to unseat me from office – nothing criminal, just a series of bad judgements – but enough to undermine the trust vested in me, the trust I had fought so hard to earn since the founding of Sun Hollow.

  I swallowed back any self-pity. Doing this had been my choice, not something forced on me. Allies and doubters alike had tried to argue me out of it. But I had known that the only path to redemption lay in the acceptance of my duty.

  Now I had a task to finish.

  Once I was free of revival grogginess, I extracted myself from the box and floated through to the control cabin with its pilots’ positions and faintly glowing instrumentation. Although the ship could easily accommodate a larger crew, I was alone aboard it. I settled into the middle seat and brought the readouts to normal illumination while keeping the windows shuttered. Satisfied that the ship was in good health – the engineers had done well to keep it spaceworthy – I turned to communications, hoping for an update on the status of the incomer. It would have suited me very well to learn that it was a false alarm, a data mirage, or that the crew had come to some change of heart, reversing for interstellar space and leaving us in peace.

  No such respite: it was still there, still coming in on a direct course for Michaelmas and Sun Hollow.

  I refined my position, using cold-gas thrusters to minimise the likelihood of being seen. Thirty million kilometres still separated my ship from the incomer, but that was a scratch against the size of the system. Our relative speed was a little under four thousand kilometres per second: two hours until we were on each other.

  I moved back to the missile bay, opened a pressure hatch, and peered in to inspect the weapon, making sure no harm had come to it during launch.

  There was only one missile: a thick, round-ended cylinder two metres long, fixed into a deployable launch cradle. The arming panel was a flattened area of the casing, set with black controls. At my touch, a matrix of red lights glimmered from the casing. They went through a start-up cycle then held steady, indicating readiness. With the hatch sealed, I depressurised the missile bay, then opened the outer door and lowered the cradle until it was projecting beyond the hull.

  I returned to the command deck. Missile inspection, arming and launch-readiness had taken less than ten minutes.

  I loaded the tactical input from the shuttle’s main console into the missile, giving it an up-to-date model for the incomer’s position and speed. I double-checked communications, just in case word had come in to break the attack.

  None had arrived.

  So I waited until our relative distance had narrowed to a mere two million kilometres, then let the missile loose. The cradle’s restraints opened and the weapon streaked away without fanfare, boosting to close up the distance. I watched for a response from the incomer, some sudden evasive swerve, but there was no change in its approach. Nothing about that surprised me: if the incomer had been capable of detecting the missile, the same capability should have given away my position long ago.

  According to the console, the missile was maintaining its lock on the incomer. It would slip like a dagger between the drive beams and auto-destruct a microsecond before impact. From a distance, the matter-antimatter blast would be indistinguishable from a Conjoiner drive malfunction: the self-same malfunction that was bound to follow an instant later, when the ship broke apart.

  With the deed all but done, I permitted my thoughts to turn to the sleepers on that ship. I still had no idea how many there were, or where and when they had commenced their journey. We would never know. But I liked to think that they had gone to their hibernation berths with no fear in their hearts; no intimation of the terror that must have detected them, and then chased them across the stars, forcing them to this desperate, final bolthole.

  Some day we would find a way to mourn them. It was not that we were murderers by nature, or that we had anything against the crew and passengers of that ship. Doubtless they were just looking for somewhere to shelter from the wolves: a quiet, out-of-the-way sanctuary; an unobvious hiding place. It was why we had selected Michaelmas – why we had selected this whole system – and presumably they had been guided by the same logic.

  But we had already done it. We had dug ourselves into the crust of Michaelmas and we had years of survival to prove that we were good at lying low. We had never given ourselves away, and we had no intention of doing so. Which was why this bright, clumsy visitor could not be tolerated. Even if they did not know of our presence, even if they never became aware of it, they might still be leading wolves right to our door.

  So they had to die, and in a manner that looked like accidental destruction.

  The console flashed red, synchronised with a piercing warning tone. To my consternation the missile had developed a steering anomaly. There was nothing I could do but observe, reading the faint telemetry trace: a low-bandwidth crackle designed to blend in with the radio-frequency noise coming out of Michael. The cold-gas thruster had jammed at one of its extreme deflections, making the missile begin to veer.

  I cursed our luck. The steering fault was a known factor with the improvised missiles – we were asking them to perform far outside their design envelope – but we had done all that we could to mitigate the problem.

  ‘Correct yourself,’ I whispered.

  The missile was waggling hard. At any moment, the gee forces might be sufficient to jolt the thruster out of its jammed position. There was still a chance . . .

  But the console flashed again. A different readout now, a different warning tone.

  Interception null.

  Interception null.

  Interception null.

  The mathematics could not be argued with. The missile’s contortions had pushed it too far off course. Unless the incomer obliged by changing its own course, there was no longer any means by which the missile could achieve a kill.

  ‘Abort and self-protect,’ I told the missile. My words were reserved for the console alone, which contained just enough artificial intelligence to understand natural language. All that was transmitted to the missile was a burst of prearranged binary code.

  The missile would attempt to use whatever was left of its fuel to put itself into a safekeeping orbit, allowing it to be recovered at some point in the future. As difficult as that exercise might prove, it was better than losing a warhead.

  I now knew what must be done. I had always known it might be necessary, but I had
pushed it to the back of my mind while there was hope that our first line of defence might be sufficient.

  Now that the missile had failed, though, I had to fall back on our only other means of stopping the lighthugger. It was not as surgical and, if anything, was even more costly to Sun Hollow . . . and, crucially, I would not have the satisfaction of knowing that it had succeeded.

  But there was no alternative.

  ‘Protocol two,’ I told the shuttle. ‘Zero abort.’

  Validation?

  ‘Cydonia,’ I said, using the codeword I had prearranged.

  The shuttle accepted my instructions. Its own cold-gas jets began to pop, lining it up ever more precisely with the incomer. It would be trying to follow the same intended trajectory as the missile, slipping between the drive beams. Hard for a missile; harder still for a bulky shuttle. But at least it no longer mattered if a little of the incomer’s drive radiation seeped through the hull.

  I had no munitions, so the destructive power of my shuttle lay solely in its mass and speed. It would be sufficient.

  I was calmer than I had expected. There was no room now for doubt or failure of nerve. I had assigned all necessary control to the shuttle and removed any possibility of rescinding that authority. I could wrestle with the controls, beg for my life, but no failure of my nerve would make a difference.

  I was going to die.

  In doing so I would condemn however many innocents were on that ship. But I would save the five thousand of us who lived in Sun Hollow, including the woman I loved and the daughter she had allowed into my world. I visualised Nicola and Victorine alone at our table, Nicola starting to break the news, Victorine absorbing it, holding her composure for brave seconds, before the truth undid her. I was not her father, and would never know a daughter’s love, but I believed that she had become fond of me.

  I steeled myself and watched the impact clock tick down to zero. There was a white burst, and for a foolish moment I thought it was the impact itself. But that whiteness continued. It pushed itself through the cabin walls, through the shutters, before dying away.

  The shuttle jolted hard.