Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Verify,’ I answered, but not without some disquiet.

  Still weightless, the suit drifted along this railed shaft. In the confined space, it was content to move at only a little more than walking pace, veering now and then to avoid some jagged protrusion or crimpage that blocked a clear path. There was no danger of anything still moving along these ruined rails, but only the rational part of my brain understood that. I still kept glancing behind, using the rear-angle display. If I was not doing so at regular intervals, my neck prickled.

  By now I had narrowed down my ideas about our location to three possibilities. The first was a cylindrical space inside some small, rocky body: say, an asteroid a few kilometres across. That was how some habitats were arranged, with the rock providing radiation shielding and impact protection. The second was a minor variation on that – a thin-walled artificial world in the form of a cylinder, but which for some reason was no longer spinning to generate artificial gravity.

  The third possibility, and the one I instinctively knew to be the correct solution, was that I was inside a starship. A lighthugger as large as Silence in Heaven or our own Salmacis. Such vessels were easily big enough to contain ten or twenty docking or cargo bays the size of this chamber.

  It fitted with what little I knew. Glass had spoken of business needing to be conducted before our next port of call – perhaps a rendezvous of some kind. I had never been meant to be awake for any part of that affair, but that assumed that Glass’s plan went smoothly.

  ‘How far away is Unit Alpha?’

  ‘Unit Alpha is zero point two four three kilometres from Unit Beta.’

  Less than a quarter of a kilometre. If there had been air, I could have called out to her.

  The shaft forked: a junction where the elevator was able to switch tracks. The suit took the less damaged of the two options, picking up speed again even as the shaft deflected, obstructing my direct view ahead.

  ‘Slow,’ I whispered, and the suit obeyed, dropping me back down to a walking-pace drift. A faint glow projected around the curve in the shaft, becoming brighter as we approached. I wondered for a moment if it was some outside light leaking in, but as the brightness increased, so I realised that its green-yellow hue owed nothing to Epsilon Eridani or any of its worlds. No stars or planets had that sickly pallor.

  A voice crackled into my helmet.

  ‘Speak to me, stranger.’

  It was not Glass. The voice was deep, slow, and masculine. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. If the voice of God had announced itself into my skull, I do not think it would have been too different.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I think I asked first.’

  It was not just the voice. There was something behind it: a sort of chorus of other voices, repeating a refrain. I tried to pick out the words, but their meaning was just out of reach. I was hearing one of the older languages, predating the modern forms of Norte, Canasian or Russish. There was still only vacuum around us, so the voice and its chorus must have been finding a way into the suit via its own communications channels. I saw no reason not to answer it truthfully.

  ‘I am Miguel de Ruyter.’

  My answer seemed to amuse the voice. ‘De Ruyter. Interesting etymology. The rider, or perhaps even The Knight. Into the haunted castle you ride. What business brings you to me, Miguel de Ruyter?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’ But guessing that this answer might not satisfy my nameless host, I added: ‘I’m here under duress, and I don’t even know for certain where here is.’

  ‘Yet you presume upon an invitation to continue. Are you a captain, de Ruyter? I’ve met all the captains. I think I was a captain once . . .’

  I spread my arms and legs and made faint, slipping contact with the sides of the walls. The suit had been drifting, so it only took a little effort to bring myself to a halt.

  ‘I’m not a captain. But I have come from a ship and the person who operates it is missing. Her name is Glass and my suit is telling me she’s somewhere inside this ship.’

  ‘Is Glass your friend?’

  ‘No,’ I answered carefully. ‘I think it would be safe to say she’s anything but a friend.’

  The voice deliberated. There would have been a silence if it had not been for that underlying chorus, still continuing. Now my brain picked out the meaning from the words. English, pre-Transenlightenment. Words I understood, with effort.

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals.

  The voice said: ‘You have answered well, de Ruyter. Pray continue. In fact, I insist upon it. While you’re on your way, though, tell me what it is Glass wants with you.’

  As I listened to the voice, I used my fingers and toes to propel myself at a slow drift, hardly faster than a walking pace.

  ‘I know only what she’s told me. I’ve been enlisted to help her find something.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘She’s been vague about what it is and where we’ll find it. But supposedly it’s something we could use against the wolves.’

  ‘A weapon.’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of weapons that were meant to stop the wolves. Carried some inside me, for a while. Exordium devices, hypometric weapons. None of them made a difference.’

  ‘I don’t know about those things. I don’t even know if I believe anything that Glass has told me. But if I thought there was even a tiny chance of her being right, I’d fight to the last drop of blood.’

  ‘I like your spirit.’

  ‘I hope it’s more than spirit.’

  ‘There was a man inside me once. An old soldier. He wouldn’t have stopped looking either. He’d have fought to the last drop, as well. But it didn’t help him in the end.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He gave his life so that another might live. Is that a sacrifice you think you could make?’

  ‘I know it for a fact.’

  ‘Not many can say that. Very few indeed can say it and make me believe them. But with you, there’s no pride or boastfulness about it. It’s just a matter of fact: you’ve been tested, and you were ready. But I’m guessing the universe played a little trick on you.’

  ‘I lived. But it wasn’t the universe.’

  ‘Glass? Well, that wouldn’t surprise me. She has a habit of twisting the fates of others. I’ll come clean: we do have a little history, Glass and I. Not a long one, but enough to understand each other.’

  ‘Have you killed her?’

  ‘Would you like that?’

  ‘I might, in the long run. But she’s not much use to me dead. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need her to operate her ship, or to at least give me control of it. Then I get to turn around and go home to the family she ripped me away from. If either of them are still alive.’ I paused. ‘Has Glass done something to you as well?’

  ‘Yes. The worst thing of all. She made me live again.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘You will, in a moment. Come nearer, Sir Knight.’

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals.

  A rupture in the wall of the shaft was the source of the yellow-green light. I slipped through this ragged, puckered opening, into a room filled with the living dead.

  It was a spherical chamber about a hundredth the volume of the docking bay. Jumbled around the walls of this chamber was a haphazard mosaic of reefersleep caskets. They were set at odd angles and alignments, and no two caskets were even approximately the same design. There were at least fifty of them, perhaps a hundred, and all were old. They were pressed back into the walls’ fabric like stones wedged into soft cement, half interred. Each was wreathed in the same branching, fibrous structures that I had seen in the
docking bay. Some of the caskets were closed, with no easy clue as to who or what might be inside them. Some were open and empty, their lids hinged wide as crocodile jaws. Others were open but still occupied. Bodies rested inside, in various states of corruption or decay. The yellow-green light emanated from the flesh of these bodies, from the caskets in which they lay, from the vinelike growths enshrouding them.

  They were dead, all of the bodies that were exposed to vacuum. But some were still moving. Their heads shifted at my approach. Their mouths were working, jaws opening and closing in time to the words of the chorus . . .

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals.

  The horror of this chorus-of-the-dead nearly overcame me. The only thing that moored my sanity, anchoring me to the moment, was the presence of Glass. I had come for Glass. Glass was still alive. Everything else was madness, but if I could hold onto that . . .

  Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

  Her suit was being pinned down on a plinth formed from another casket, set on top of a second. About a dozen bodies were ranged around this plinth, each with at least a hand pressed against Glass, holding her in place. They were singing, opening their jaws to vacuum. The bodies used their other limbs to lock themselves together and, in turn, to apply leverage against the other caskets to hold her in place.

  Glass writhed under their pressure. She thrashed her limbs a little but even the augmentation of her suit was insufficient to overcome that deadening laying on of hands.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ I asked.

  ‘De Ruyter,’ she said, suddenly and breathlessly. ‘Get out of here. Go back to Scythe and tell it to initiate—’

  ‘Now, now, Glass,’ said the voice. ‘Is that how you mean to reward me, after all I’ve done? By having your clever little ship gut me from inside?’

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked, fighting every natural instinct to turn and flee this place of horror. ‘What is your connection to Glass?’

  ‘Tell him,’ the voice said. ‘Tell him everything.’

  ‘You’ll kill me whatever I do or say.’

  ‘Just answer him,’ I said.

  Glass fought the hands, but with dwindling conviction. I wondered how long she had been here; how weakened she had become. Then some acceptance must have come over her. I heard the faintest of sighs before she began.

  ‘I needed a ship.’

  ‘You had one.’

  ‘I needed a second ship.’

  ‘You have one,’ I said.

  ‘Let me . . . explain.’

  I looked around at the ghoulish spectacle. I would have been frozen with shock and revulsion except for the tiny suspicion that my host had marked me as an ally, or at least an enemy of Glass.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘Now’s as good a time as ever.’

  ‘I’d been looking for you for a long time. First I went to Ararat, but you weren’t there. But you left a lead – a hint as to where I’d find you. Michaelmas, except that world had no name until you landed on it, and I couldn’t go to Michaelmas directly. The work ahead of me was too great. I needed allies; individuals who could attack one part of the problem while I worked on another.’

  ‘This is not starting to make sense.’

  ‘Give her time,’ the voice said, teasingly. ‘It’s the truth, isn’t it, Glass? However outlandish.’

  John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals.

  Her helmet nodded. The hands permitted her that much movement. ‘We agreed to travel separately: me to AU Microscopii, my allies to Epsilon Eridani. For which they needed a ship of their own. Fortunately, they had one, though it was a little damaged.’

  ‘This is the ship they came in?’ I asked. ‘We’re in the Epsilon Eridani system?’

  The voice laughed.

  ‘I am the ship. But she lies. I wasn’t damaged. I was dead.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’ve had many names. Before I died, I chose a last one for myself. Now they sing my praises.’

  ‘Then your name is . . . John.’ I hesitated, wondering how close I might be to giving lethal offence. ‘You are . . . were . . . some kind of construct? A gamma-level, or above, tasked to run this ship?’

  ‘Not a construct. A man, just like you.’

  ‘There was a man, a captain,’ Glass said. ‘He had been old and strange long before the plague ever touched him. Gradually he seeped into the structure of the ship; became inseparable from it. When I had Scythe inject the remains of this ship with plague-resistant replicator packages, it wasn’t the plague that fought back. It was the ship, fighting my attempts to bring it back to life. It was John the Revelator.’

  ‘They warned you I’d be trouble.’

  ‘You think I was ready to abandon my plans at the say-so of a barely sentient pig?’

  ‘A better pig than you’ll ever know.’

  Glass scoffed. I wondered, given her circumstances, if that was the wisest course of action.

  ‘I went in with heavier measures, forced the ship into accepting my treatment. I won. I turned the ship to my will, made it capable of one or two final interstellar hops, and sent my associates to Yellowstone.’

  ‘You tortured me back to life.’

  ‘I gave you another chance to redeem yourself.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, raising a hand. ‘Whatever grievances there are between you . . . I’m not a part of them. But I do need Glass. Please let her go.’

  ‘I could take her apart piece by piece before your eyes. Perhaps you think she is strong. Would you like to see how very much stronger I am? Would you like to see the things I could do to her?’

  ‘I want her alive. She turned my colony against itself, paralysed our defences and threatened us with decompression. Thanks to Glass there’s very little chance that I’ll ever see my wife again, or her daughter.’

  ‘Their names, Miguel de Ruyter?’

  I swallowed on my answer. ‘Nicola and Victorine.’

  ‘Good names. Did you love them?’

  ‘With all my heart.’

  ‘I believe you. We are both old men, and we have a sense of these things. But I wonder even more why you do not want her dead.’

  ‘Glass can go to hell, but only Glass knows how to work her ship.’

  ‘I could kill her, and then work my way into her ship. I don’t think it would be too hard for me to unravel its secrets. There’s not much I don’t know about ships. It helps . . . being one.’

  ‘Even if you could do that—’

  ‘He couldn’t,’ Glass interrupted. ‘Scythe would destroy him from the inside the moment he tried to breach its defences. He is not stronger, he just caught me at an inopportune moment, my defences not at optimum readiness.’

  ‘Put that on your gravestone, Glass.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ I said, admitting it to myself as I said it. ‘Now that I’ve been dragged here against my will, I at least want the satisfaction of knowing there was a point to it. I want to meet these associates, the ones you carried with you. What was their business in Yellowstone? Our last reports said the wolves had left only ruins, in orbit and down on the surface. I’d also like to know more about Charybdis, and what it has to do with killing wolves. If that means keeping Glass alive a little longer, so be it.’

  ‘She doesn’t know what became of her two associates.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘They left. They went off in a smaller ship I carried inside me to this system.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I’ve stopped keeping track of time. You would have, too. Maybe it was ten years ago. Maybe it was ten weeks.’

  I directed my next question at Glass. ‘What happened to the planned rendezvous? How long have we been here, before I woke up?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened, only that they’re not here.’ Glass paused.
‘Scythe docked three weeks ago. My associates were supposed to have reached Yellowstone in a smaller vehicle, completed their operation in Chasm City and made it back here to the lighthugger ahead of us. They should have been done years ago: they had ample time – decades to spare. The plan was that they’d seal up and go into reefersleep until I arrived. When I couldn’t find them, I went looking for my inertial clock.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘A device I left aboard, in case I needed to reconstruct its movements. My suit homed in on it. It led me . . . here.’

  ‘Is she telling the truth, John?’

  The ship gave a dry laugh.

  ‘For once.’

  ‘These two associates . . . do you hate them as much as you hate Glass?’

  ‘No,’ he said, after a moment’s reflection. ‘I could never hate them.’

  ‘But it sounds as if they were co-conspirators in whatever Glass did to you.’

  ‘They never realised how far she was prepared to go in forcing my resurrection. If they turned a blind eye, allowed themselves to be persuaded against their better judgement . . . there have been worse crimes. I should know; I committed some of them.’

  ‘Do you know where they are?’

  ‘They never came back to me after they left. The last indication I had from them put them in the vicinity of Yellowstone, but I can’t even say whether they made it into the atmosphere, let alone to Chasm City.’

  ‘What was their business there?’

  ‘Ask Glass.’

  ‘Please, let her come back with me. You don’t have to forgive her for what she’s done. Just let me be the one who eventually punishes her.’

  ‘Forgive me, Sir Knight, but you don’t seem to be in much of a position to be punishing anyone. From what you’ve said, you’re her prisoner.’

  ‘I’ll make her pay. Not here, not now, but eventually.’ I stopped myself, worried that I might be making an awful error in appealing to his better nature. ‘The ones who never came back – were they friends of yours?’

  ‘Close acquaintances, certainly. We’d been through a lot together.’

  ‘Then I’ll make you a pledge. Give me Glass, and we’ll find out what happened to your friends.’

  ‘Are you serious about this promise?’