Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Do you think so?’ Without waiting for her answer, I added, ‘Here’s another question, Glass. You dropped that reference into our conversation for a reason. Like a depth charge, trying to sound something out. But I’m afraid it didn’t have the effect you desired.’

  ‘I’m sure that it didn’t. Of course, it’s a little telling you felt the need to query Scythe . . .’

  ‘Because I’m still trying to figure you out, and if you throw me a bone, I’ll follow it. Even if it leads to a dead-end from history.’

  ‘Well, I think all we were talking about was the usefulness of the military mind. I picked a . . . bad example, is all. I’m sorry if it touched anything raw.’

  ‘It didn’t . . .’ But I shook my head, exasperated by Glass and even more frustrated by my own reaction to her; how easily I felt played. ‘But you’re wrong, anyway.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘A man like that isn’t any use to anyone, now or then. We’re fighting monsters. We don’t have to become monsters ourselves.’

  ‘Let us hope, then, that we haven’t already done so.’ She passed me the other glass of squeezed fruit, and then whipped a cloth away from the thing in the middle of the table. It was the pegboard game we had played in the infirmary, set up for the start of play. Not the game itself, unless Glass had spirited it along with her, but an indistinguishably precise replica. ‘And to prove that I am not the monster you may think, I’m prepared to offer you back your family.’

  I shook my head, refusing to accept any part of that statement.

  ‘If you want to mess with my head, Glass, do it some other way. I’m resigned. You wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble only to throw me back.’

  ‘Ah, but my word is my bond. And I’m perfectly sincere in this. I told you I like games. We’ll play three rounds. If you win two of those rounds, I’ll turn this ship around and take us back to Sun Hollow. You can go home, live happy ever after.’ She made a tiny doubtful pucker of her lips. ‘Well, apart from the wolves, of course. But if I win two rounds, we continue to my next port of call.’

  Some foolish part of me played along. ‘Is that Charybdis?’

  ‘No, there’s some small business I have to attend to first, in another system. You needn’t be woken for any part of that. But of course, you can avoid all that by taking me on.’

  I shook my head, refusing to be drawn in. ‘I don’t believe for a second that you’ll honour your promise if I win.’

  Glass sighed. ‘You have a choice here. We’ll either play the game or we won’t. If we don’t, we’ll go straight to the hibernaculum. If you do play, there’s an outside possibility that you’ll see Nicola and Victorine again. And I’ll make it a fairer contest: I can handicap myself, de-allocating neural resources.’

  With a fatal guarded interest, I asked: ‘By how much?’

  Glass looked pleased. ‘I’ll start with a figure; a percentage handicap. I’ll make my opening offer generous, but I’ll be reducing that handicap by one per cent for every second that passes. The sooner you jump in, the better your advantage – but you’ll need to be quick about it. Wait too long, and I’ll be playing with almost no handicap at all.’

  ‘I know this is meaningless,’ I said, sighing as well. ‘But if there’s even a tiny chance that you can be beaten, and that you’ll honour your promise, I’m compelled to try.’

  Glass nodded emphatically. ‘Right answer.’

  ‘Start your damned reverse auction.’

  ‘I shall. Fifteen per cent . . .’

  ‘Accept,’ I said, I jumping in before she had a chance to say another word.

  Glass favoured me with a tight-lipped, approving nod. ‘That was . . . much quicker than I expected. My opening bid wasn’t too low for you?’

  ‘Of course it was too low. What difference is a fifteen per cent handicap likely to make? But it was the best offer I was going to get. It’s vastly in your favour, but it’s still better than no advantage at all.’

  ‘You aren’t the first I’ve played this auction game with,’ Glass confided. ‘You’d be surprised how many don’t see things as clearly as you did. Others hesitate.’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t trust you enough to take the game seriously.’

  ‘But you did?’

  ‘No, but a poor chance in a weighted game is better than no chance at all. Shall we get this over with?’

  Glass let me have the first game. Or perhaps I won it by legitimate means: she was playing well, but so was I. The difference between this time and the game in the infirmary was that I gave no quarter from the outset. In the infirmary I had been playing to keep her amused, not taking it seriously until she began to better me, by which point it was far too late to turn the tide. Now I went in hard, straining to think as many moves ahead as possible, and drawing on the memories of a thousand games won and lost against Nicola and Victorine. It was not about the fates of individual pegs, but the disposition of pieces as a whole.

  But the second game went to Glass. I held her off for as long as I could, and at one point thought I had her cornered, but it proved a false dawn. She responded cleverly and soon had me pinned down. I managed to drag out the inevitable for a few more moves, but the game was all but decided. She had bettered me, and yet I could not deny that the game had felt fairly won. I had played against machines, and knew the feeling of losing to an algorithm. Glass was not like that. I only ever felt that I was playing against a person: one who was both ruthless and extremely quick to learn and adapt

  Defeated, I leaned back in my chair.

  ‘You knew you’d beat me, even with half your brain switched off.’

  ‘But I haven’t beaten you – not just yet. We’re even: both a game up. The third is the decider.’

  ‘I’ve nothing left to play.’

  ‘You’ve also nothing left to lose. We’ve each learned from each other. Either of us could make an error. Either of us could stumble on a surprising move.’

  I sighed, shook my head, but set up the pegs on my side of the board while Glass did hers. Glass permitted me to make the starting move. I accepted, and embarked on a counter-intuitive opening, one that opened up an initial weakness in my flank. It looked like a bid to end the game quickly, but I had lulled Nicola into a similar false security, and it had not gone well for her. I doubted there was much hope of Glass falling into the same trap, but it seemed to offer marginally better odds than a continuation of my earlier style of play.

  It worked, for a little while. Glass was thrown . . . she could dig into the bag of moves she had learned from me, and find that none of them were applicable to this new configuration. She had to improvise, and in doing so she opened up a subtle vulnerability of her own, one that it took my own experience to recognise and exploit. I retaliated, treating her as callously as she had treated me, and I began to methodically shatter her defences.

  But as we each depleted our opponents’ pieces, so the game fell into a more familiar pattern, and Glass was again able to draw on her developing library of moves and sequences of moves. There came a point where all my instincts told me I was beaten, but I strove not to show it, playing with all the intensity and concentration I had brought to the game from the outset.

  Glass won. I had bloodied her, but not enough, and the tournament was hers.

  ‘That was instructive,’ she said, packing away the pegboard.

  ‘To see how gullible I was, to ever think you would let me win?’

  ‘On the contrary: to see how determined you were, until the last. I’ve a small confession to make.’

  ‘You cheated?’

  ‘No, I kept to my promise. But I had Scythe run a non-invasive scan of your neural workflow during all three games. I wanted to see how seriously you were taking it. The answer pleases me. You gave your all, right until the end. No one could have played more valiantly, more determinedly.’

  ‘This proves something?’

  ‘It proves that I was right about you. You’ll fight until the
bitter end. Until your last breath. No matter how the odds seem to be stacked against you.’

  ‘I was ready to give in.’

  ‘But you didn’t, which is the important thing. I’ll be frank: after that first game we just played, there was very little likelihood of you winning. But the probability wasn’t zero.’

  ‘Would you have honoured your promise?’

  ‘I like to think so.’

  I wondered if that was the first truly sincere thing that had come from her lips since our acquaintance.

  ‘But you can’t be sure.’

  ‘Under the circumstances, I’d have honoured the pledge . . . and then looked at other means of persuasion. It wouldn’t have pleased me to lose you, especially now I know how tenaciously you’ll fight.’ Glass rose from the table, leaving the pegboard where it stood. ‘Come. There’s nothing to prevent us going directly to the hibernaculum. It will be easier for you, once you’re on the other side of reefersleep.’

  Glass extended a hand across the table, beckoning me to my feet. I got up and moved along the table until we were both at the same end of it. I cowed my head, faking submission, ready to be led to my fate. I doubted very much that she was convinced by it, especially if Scythe was still looking into my skull, reading brain activity. My intentions would have been obvious to the dimmest machine. Still, it was all I had.

  I lunged, planting my left hand around her throat and punching her beneath the ribs with my right. Glass crashed back against the wall behind her. I redoubled the pressure on her throat and pushed hard into her abdomen. Glass got her right arm up, balled her fist and punched me across the face. She followed through with her elbow, jabbing into my throat. Something crunched somewhere in my larynx or windpipe. I drew a breath and nothing came. Glass wrenched my hand away from her throat, raised a knee and kicked me in the groin. I went tumbling back into the table, hitting its edge with a spine-jarring crack. I tried to snatch another breath and still nothing came.

  Glass laughed. It was a deep, broken, wet-throated laugh, like a tumble of rocks in a bucket. She got a foot up and kept me pressed against the table, bent backwards so that it would only take a little more pressure to snap my spine.

  ‘You know . . .’ She paused, rubbing at her neck. ‘You know, I’d have been ever so slightly disappointed if you hadn’t tried that.’

  I made a wheezing sound. A straw’s worth of air must have reached my lungs.

  ‘I’ll keep trying.’

  ‘But not here, not today. Today, you sleep.’

  Glass yanked me up as six or seven of her white globes came into the room. They bustled around me, pinning me with their multi-jointed manipulators. I wrestled against them, but I had no strength left in my limbs.

  Glass gave no audible command to the spheres, but they knew what to do with me. Scooping me up like a doll, no part of me able to touch any surface, they conveyed me to the hibernaculum. We got there easily, as if the labyrinthine puzzle of the ship had straightened itself out overnight. The two caskets waited for their occupants, side by side and set at forty-five degrees to the floor. They were chrome-green cocoons, fluted with radiator fins, control pedestals next to each. Instead of the lidded casket that had brought Glass to Sun Hollow, these units peeled open along their mid-sections, with interlocking hinged petals waiting to close over again and form an impervious seal.

  I might as well have been a drowsy baby being lowered into a crib, for all the resistance I was able to muster. The idea of fighting was still there, it was just that my body had already surrendered. The spheres busied around me with surprising tenderness, while Glass stood by and watched, hands on hips.

  I managed to croak: ‘You said you had business in some other system. Where?’

  ‘You don’t need to worry your little head about that.’

  ‘I still want to know. If I matter to you, give me that much.’

  Glass looked at me with a distant species of pity. ‘Oh, very well. We’ll be making a short stopover in the Yellowstone system, around Epsilon Eridami. I’ve made arrangements to collect some items of importance.’

  ‘Items?’

  ‘Gideon stones.’

  ‘I’m afraid that means nothing to me.’

  ‘I’d be concerned if it did.’

  ‘What are Gideon stones, Glass?’

  She leaned in a little, as if she were about to whisper a lullaby. ‘They’re going to help us murder some wolves. Quite a lot of wolves, if all goes well.’

  ‘I saw something through a window. All blades and helices.’

  ‘Ah. You saw that, did you?’

  ‘You know what I saw.’ I wheezed against the effort of speaking. ‘You’ve controlled that happens to me since I came aboard this ship. What is that thing?’

  ‘Oh, you do like to spoil a surprise.’

  ‘I suppose I do.’

  She sighed as if I had taken the fun out of a parlour game. ‘It’s something else that will help us. Not so much a weapon as something that will make a weapon. But for it to work the way it needs to, we must have the Gideon stones.’ Glass touched a finger to the black cupid’s bow of her upper lip. ‘But I’ll take care of that, little man. Rest now. I can’t have you worrying. You can stay asleep while I take care of the stones. I want you rested: you’ll need all the strength of mind and body you can get, for when you meet them.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘The Pattern Jugglers,’ Glass said, as if that was the fullest answer that I could reasonably expect.

  Part Two

  REVELATOR

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Six sleeping bodies fell towards Mars.

  Their re-entry capsule had detached from its mother vessel just beyond the boundary of the interdiction volume. Nineteen decoys of similar size and mass had also been deployed, hoping to confuse and overwhelm our orbital defence systems and allow the occupied Defection Capsule to slip through the screen and make it down to the surface.

  It was a familiar strategy. We were ready for it.

  In the nine months since the war’s outbreak, we had engaged with countless similar efforts, originating from all over the system. It would have been simpler to shoot at the mother vessels before they reached the interdiction boundary, but we had foolishly agreed to some military treaties that made such actions problematic. Often, the incoming ships contained human shields: civilian hostages who were not fully turned to the Conjoiner ideology. It was not good for our cause to be seen to be killing too many civilians, so we were obliged to track these ships, but not to fire on them unless they made a clear bid for the surface. Any re-entry capsules were considered fair game, but only once they had crossed the interdiction boundary – which was just wide enough to include the orbit of Deimos, the outermost of the two tiny Martian moons.

  The orbital tracking systems and gun platforms had to operate smoothly to target these Defection Capsules, and lately they had been getting a lot of practice. Our interception efficiency was now at ninety-six per cent, meaning that fewer than one in twenty attempts to reach the surface succeeded. The enemy knew that as well. It was why they had begun to make increasing use of decoys. In response, we deployed more guns and improved our discrimination algorithms.

  Against such measures, this new capsule stood little chance.

  As it fell into their sphere, the tracking systems had shone lasers onto each of the twenty possible targets. The lasers’ photons had been reflected off the hulls and reacquired. By measuring phase shifts between the transmitted and reflected light, tiny vibrations in the interiors of the capsules could be detected. A particular pattern of signals was only coming from one of the capsules. Fourier analysis showed that this pattern was consistent with six human heartbeats. The guns were assigned and prioritised accordingly, concentrating their attention on that one capsule while neglecting none of the other nineteen. It was a given that at some point the Conjoiners would find a way of confusing the heartbeat detectors.

  The guns fired, spitting out high-veloci
ty railgun shells. There was no immediate kill. The capsules swerved and veered in a way that made course prediction difficult. We had beam weapons – more powerful versions of the detection lasers – but these were cumbersome to deploy, slow to energise, and not as quick to achieve a kill as a single well-aimed shell. Ultimately, force of numbers was still on our side. With multiple guns spaced around Mars at different inclinations and elevations, a number of different course predictions could be fed into the targeting systems at the same time.

  Sooner or later – nineteen times out of twenty – one gun was going to make the correct shot.

  One after the other, most of the nineteen decoys were taken care of. One shell each was all it took in most cases. Three probable decoys got through to the upper atmosphere, but subsequent tracking showed that none of them made any attempt to slow down before cratering into the surface at multiple kilometres per second.

  That left the twentieth; the one with the heartbeats.

  Luck was on its side, for a while. There were three distinct intervals, each lasting several seconds, when one or more guns had ample opportunity to shoot down the capsule. The guns swung and their magnetic barrels cycled to firing readiness.

  But the guns did not discharge. Treaty-compliance systems had activated, putting the guns into temporary safing conditions. Areas of the Martian surface remained under Demarchist jurisdiction, even if they had been all but abandoned, and the guns were forbidden from firing if their projected lines of fire transgressed any of those sensitive areas.

  That still left one gun that had a clear shot at the capsule.

  The gun was in the lowest orbit of any of the weapons, and its position meant that it had to fire up and away from Mars, not down at it. Even if the shell missed the target, or sailed right through, it would just become another piece of fast-moving deep space debris on its way out of the solar system.

  Since there were no treaty entanglements, the gun was free to operate. It cycled up to firing readiness, a shell already chambered and dialled to its maximum impact yield. The gun was extremely confident of doing the job it asked of itself. It had fifteen whole milliseconds in which to fire.