Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ she said, watching me guardedly, daring me to contradict her assessment. But I could not. I had seen the playback as well, and nothing out of the ordinary had shown.

  ‘I’m viewing it through this window,’ I said. ‘There must have been a reflection, a trick of the light.’

  The masked figure nodded doubtfully, perhaps not fully convinced that I was over the strains of my mission. ‘The bloodwork and associated tests will need several hours. But provided we maintain our usual hygienic measures, there’s no reason not to bring her to consciousness as soon as you’re ready to greet her.’

  ‘I am ready.’

  ‘Good. Shall we say – thirty minutes?’

  As she spoke, a gap opened up between the physicians and I caught my first glimpse of the passenger without the grilled window of her casket between us. A small, pale, vulnerable form lay in the casket. She was no longer armoured in metal, invulnerable to heat or cold or vacuum. She was a human being, fragile and easily broken, just like the rest of us.

  ‘Treat her carefully,’ I said.

  Cantor had already prepared the main table with a highly magnified view of the surrounding two hundred kilometres. At that resolution, the projected area of Sun Hollow was about the size of a fat thumbprint: a cluster of twenty caverns buried between two hundred and six hundred metres beneath the surface. A dozen or so radial lines pushed out to between five and twenty kilometres from the settlement: hard-fought tunnels leading to reactor cores, shuttle pens and surface locks. After that, there were no underground digs, just remote monitoring stations, railgun emplacements, and the spidering threads of cables linking remote sensors and weapons to Sanctum.

  Cantor had positioned green prisms to denote the seismophones within that two-hundred-kilometre radius, including the three that had picked up the repeating signal. Now there was a luminous dotted trace extending from that cluster, wandering around crater walls and deep fissures, but generally heading in the direction of Sanctum. I estimated it was between forty-five and fifty kilometres long. The trace had already passed close to several other seismophones – the coverage improved the nearer one got to Sun Hollow – and it was now on the threshold of two blue prisms. These were eyes as well as ears, and we had fewer of them.

  ‘So it’s not a fault,’ I said quietly.

  ‘If you find that stating the obvious helps your analytic faculties, please don’t hold back,’ Chung answered in the same low register.

  Valois directed his question at Cantor. ‘Do we have visual contact?’

  ‘If there’s anything to be seen, we have our best chance in the next few minutes. Michael’s most of the way up, which means low contrast but high illumination: not ideal but much better than darkness. These two eyes are set back behind a ridge, so we can’t see anything just yet. But if our seismophone readings are correct, whatever’s making the disturbance ought to be emerging very shortly.’

  ‘Are those eyes armed?’ I asked.

  ‘Negative: passive defence only.’ But Cantor jabbed a finger towards another pair of close-set prisms just beyond the twenty-kilometre marker of our furthest surface lock. ‘These have teeth, though, and they should be able to bear onto a slow-moving surface target.’

  We had two classes of railgun: heavy ordnance aimed at the sky, and smaller units that were our last line of defence in case anything made it all the way to the surface. That final stockade was mostly psychological, but I would sooner have torn out my fingernails than dispense with it. Human beings could be comforted against the night by a drawn curtain or a head buried under bed sheets. It seemed to me that we needed all the comfort we could get.

  ‘Something . . .’ Cantor began.

  Two of the suspended screens had been assigned visual feeds from the eyes covering the ridge. Both views looked quite similar, since the two eyes were only a kilometre from each other. The ridge was a ragged, not-quite-horizontal line dividing the views into two halves. Above the ridge was the blackness of space: even though it was ‘day’ on Michaelmas, there was no atmosphere to scatter Michael’s illumination across the sky, and Michael himself was behind the eyes. Whatever dust was in Michaelmas’s orbital path was far too faint to be seen against the glare from the terrain in the lower half of each view. And that terrain was nearly featureless; distances, elevations and relative sizes difficult to judge. Michael was not a bright star but even a red dwarf’s light was sufficient to blast away shadows and contrast, leaving the ground like a flat ochre smear daubed across a wall, curtailed abruptly by the ridge line.

  I could pick out slight differences in parallax caused by the eyes’ differing vantage points. And now Cantor had mentioned it, I was starting to see something rising above the ridge line on one of the two views. It was a white prominence, like a pale planet pushing above the horizon. The planet became a white hemisphere. Then, very slightly to the right of it, a second one. Now the other eye was picking up the same projecting forms.

  We watched in silence. The hemispheres kept rising. They were heads: or more properly, helmets. They had black slots across their fronts. Beneath them came shoulders, torsos, arms and legs. Two white-clad figures, walking side by side. Not one set of footsteps, then, but two. Though the figures were walking in lockstep, each planting a foot at the same time, lifting, planting, lifting.

  They crested the ridge and began to descend. They looked like two pale paper cut-outs sliding down a vertical surface, but that was only the extreme foreshortening of the eyes, coupled with the absence of atmospheric blurring and the lack of any reference points to help with perspective.

  I was struck by how slowly they seemed to be walking. Cantor’s earlier estimate of two kilometres per hour could not have been far off the mark. Over a day, that was enough to account for the forty-five or fifty kilometres of that sinuous trace. A suit could easily keep someone alive for that length of time – much longer, if required – and with augmentation, and volition systems, a suit could walk on auto-pilot even if its occupant were injured or sleeping. But there still seemed to me to be something unnatural, something reminiscent of troubled dreams, in that slow, synchronised gait.

  My neck hairs prickled.

  ‘Will we get a closer look, as they come nearer?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Cantor said. ‘Depends on the path they take, coming down off the ridge.’

  ‘I want anything you can give me. Markings, names – anything on those suits that might tie them to the Silence in Heaven. I presume you’d have told me if there’d been any attempt at contact?’

  ‘Radio silent the whole time we’ve been hearing those footsteps. If they’re communicating between themselves, it’s on some short-range channel we can’t intercept.’ Cantor looked doubtful. ‘Should Sanctum send someone out to meet them, sir? They’re about twenty kilometres beyond our outer lock, but if we sent out a party now, using a cart to get to the end of the shaft, they should be able to meet them about halfway.’

  ‘No. Not yet,’ I demurred. ‘Wait until we have a clearer view, or until we’re confident that they’re heading for the lock. Then we’ll decide how to respond.’

  ‘I don’t see anything that looks like a weapon,’ Valois said.

  Doctor Kyrgiou helped me into the sterile garb. ‘Keep the mask and goggles on at all times. No physical contact until we’re sure about that bloodwork. A conversation is fine, but don’t stress her unnecessarily. If she doesn’t remember too much about her predicament, no need to bring it all back to her in one go.’

  ‘I’ll go gently. But there are questions we need to ask.’

  ‘I’ll be watching duplicate feeds on the monitors on this side of the glass: I’ll know if her anxiety levels start rising.’

  I let myself into the partitioned area through a double-door airlock, then walked to the passenger’s bedside and sat down in the chair that had been provided on her left, opposite the monitoring equipment. Kyrgiou had told me that our guest ought to be surfacing from the anaesthesia, but for
the moment she showed no awareness of my presence. I studied her properly for the first time, finally seeing a human woman rather than a disembodied face in a box.

  She looked younger than me, but then so did everyone. She was white: literally the colour of snow. There was no pigmentation anywhere on her skin, except for the black smears around her eyes, presently lidded. She looked hairless: her skull a smooth white dome. Her lips had the tint of smoke.

  Her fingernails, where they rested on the bed sheets, were a pearly grey.

  I waited, watching her breathing. When I detected the tiniest motion of her head, a quiver in her eyelids as if she was on the verge of opening them, I said: ‘Welcome back, Brianna.’

  Her nostrils flared as she drew in a slow breath. Her eyes stayed closed but her lips moved.

  ‘Where am I?’

  Her words were faint but perfectly comprehensible. It was the first time I had heard her actual voice, as opposed to a synthetic emulation. It was deeper and throatier than I had expected.

  ‘A place called Sun Hollow. That might mean something to you. My name is Miguel. I found you in space, after an accident, I promised I’d bring you back to my world.’

  She answered after a few moments.

  ‘What happened to me?’

  ‘You were on a ship that ran into trouble. I found you drifting in a hibernation casket, and we spoke to each other. Then I brought you aboard my own ship and carried you back to safety.’

  ‘Where is . . . Sun Hollow?’

  ‘Under the crust of a world called Michaelmas, orbiting a star called AU Microscopii, which we call Michael.’

  She opened her eyes to narrow slits. ‘I remember. There was a red light. A whorl of dust. I was . . . cold. And you found me.’

  ‘I’m glad that you remember. It’s a very good sign that you’ll remember all the other things as well.’

  She angled her head to look at me. Within their black margins they were the colour of iron. She was as monochrome as an old photograph.

  ‘The other things?’

  ‘What happened to your ship before it got to us. We think you may have been born on Haven, and probably lived close to a place called Zawinul’s Landing. From the records we’ve recovered, it seems likely that you left Haven around one hundred and eighty years ago. We also think your name may have been Brianna Bettancourt. Does that name seem familiar?’

  ‘Say it to me again.’

  ‘Brianna Bettancourt,’ I replied.

  She lifted the arm with the line in it and looked at the bandaged-over catheter, her expression neutral. I wondered what she made of our medicine; whether it inspired horror or reassurance.

  ‘Am I all right?’

  ‘Yes . . .’ I said, tentatively, not wanting to pre-empt the physicians. Then, with more confidence: ‘Yes – you’re doing very well. You can breathe for yourself, move your own limbs, speak and understand us, and you’re beginning to remember fragments of your past. I’ve helped a lot of people come out of hibernation, and I know when the omens are good.’

  ‘Omens.’ A faint smile played across those pallid lips. They were closer to the colour of static, the colour of storm-clouds. ‘Am I an omen?’

  ‘A guest,’ I affirmed. ‘A patient, for now, until you’re well enough to leave the infirmary, and then a welcome newcomer.’ I leaned forward slightly. ‘Brianna . . . if that’s your name. I must ask you one or two difficult questions. I’d sooner wait, but I’m afraid we don’t have that luxury.’

  The edges of her lips curled, buckling the skin around her mouth. It was as if she were tasting some delicious memory, or anticipating some coming delight.

  ‘What are your questions?’

  ‘Can you remember how you came to be separated from your ship? There was an explosion, and then I picked up your signal. I assumed you’d been thrown free, but it’s difficult for us to understand how that could have happened. Is it possible you’d already left the Silence in Heaven?’

  Instead of frown lines, two perfect dimples appeared in her brow. It was as if they were being depressed into some yielding, resilient surface by two invisible fingers.

  ‘Why would I leave the ship?’

  ‘I don’t know. But we wonder if your ship may have sent out a scouting party, long before it reached the edge of our planetary system. Maybe more than one such party, more than one smaller vessel?’

  The dimples popped out of her brow, leaving it as unmarred as a sheet of virgin ice.

  ‘Have you found someone else?’

  ‘I . . . don’t know.’ I smiled – or perhaps grimaced – through my mask, feeling as if Brianna and I were engaged in some sort of parlour game for which only one of us had been handed the rules. ‘There are indications that another ship may have landed on our planet, or come near enough to set down an exploratory team. Two people, two other survivors.’

  ‘Are they here?’

  ‘Not yet. It would help us very much if you could shed any light on them. What they might want, what they might expect . . . what they might already know of us. Then we can be sure that they’re friends, and welcome them accordingly.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they be friends?’

  ‘I hope that they will be.’

  An urgency seemed to grip her. ‘There was a light: a very bright light. Everything before that is . . . washed out, faint.’ Her eyes widened, beseeching me. ‘Did you see the light, Miguel?’

  ‘I did.’ I pushed myself up from the chair, unaccountably drained by our short conversation. ‘It was a terrible thing.’

  ‘Were there people in that light, besides the two you just told me about?’

  ‘In that light?’

  ‘Killed by it, I mean.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘There’s a good chance of it. But out of it, you came to us.’

  ‘I hope I won’t disappoint,’ she said.

  ‘Enhance it,’ Alma Chung ordered, arms folded across her chest as Cantor brought up another video sample of the two approaching figures. The White Walkers, some of the analysts were starting to call them, borrowing the nomenclature from some half-forgotten mythos that had somehow found its way to Sun Hollow.

  ‘This is the best we’ll have until the next set of eyes,’ Cantor said. ‘I’ve applied every reliable filter in our arsenal, and then a few I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘It’ll do,’ I mouthed.

  The visitors – as Chung, Cantor, Valois and I were still calling them – had come down off the ridge by a moderately meandering trail and then cut a course that took them to the south of the two eyes, skirting the nearest by two and a half kilometres. Unfortunately, the eyes were designed to scan large areas of sky and terrain, rather than magnify a tiny portion of either.

  But now at least we had a side-on view of the suits as they skirted around the southernmost eye. Cantor had isolated about fifteen seconds of video and put it on a loop, so that the figures kept walking past the same bit of terrain. Michael’s elevation had decreased since the suits had first come over the ridge, and now the ground shadows were longer, offering slightly more contrast and a chance to pick out details on the suits: markings and tools that might offer a clue as to their intentions.

  Even in the enhanced zoom, though, the suits looked smooth and nearly featureless. There were no articulation points between the body parts, just a smoothly flexing white integument. The boots and gloves were seamless extensions of the legs and arms. The helmets swelled up from the necks and upper torsos, with no trace of a pressure collar. The only details, when the suits were face-on, were the narrow, slot-like visors, wrapping around the helmets from ear to ear. Viewed from the side, as we were doing, the suits had hump-like backpacks but again these were formed from an integral extension of the main suit and offered no clue as to what else they might contain besides life-support systems.

  The loop kept playing. I stared at it, willing some detail to spring out that I had missed the last time.

  ‘Suits like that would be very handy to have,’
Valois mused. ‘The next time we have to ask some poor volunteer to go out onto the surface during a flaring episode, it would be good to get something back with a life expectancy exceeding a few hours. Do you think they’ll let us have those suits, if we ask nicely?’

  ‘If they’re friendly, and abide by the terms of our community, there’ll be no reason for them not to share the technology.’

  ‘In exchange for what?’ Chung asked. ‘Sheepskins and spinach?’

  ‘Stop the playback,’ I said suddenly.

  Cantor obliged. I ask for the video to be reversed by a few seconds, then frozen.

  ‘Kyrgiou said you’ve been seeing phantoms,’ Valois commented.

  ‘Not this time. Take a close look at the horizon line behind the leading figure.’ The suits were walking side by side, but because of the eye’s viewing angle, the one on the right appeared to be ahead of the one on the left. ‘Just for a second, it cuts behind the visor. Cantor: advance the playback, but at much less than normal speed.’

  Cantor let the video move forward, but at a twentieth of its usual rate. The suits oozed to the right, their bipedal gait now all but imperceptible. It was like the movement of clouds: no human quality to it at all.

  ‘Trust Miguel to see something on the horizon line, not the two things the rest of us are looking at,’ Valois went on.

  ‘It’s not the horizon line: it’s what happens to it. Look closely as it passes behind the curve of that visor. We can still see it.’

  ‘And?’ Chung asked.

  ‘Shouldn’t there be a head in the way?’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The two railguns at the twenty-kilometre margin each contained nine kinetic energy slugs, their normal operational load. The magazines contained ten rounds, but since the rounds were manufactured in batches, and the loading process required partial disassembly and reassembly of the gun, it was always considered necessary to fire one test shot, to verify that the rounds had been machined within tolerance, and that the guns had been put back together correctly.