Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Someone had to. The crew relinquished authority to a civilian settlement board. If there was a command vacuum then I suppose I helped fill it. But it wasn’t just me making those decisions like some kind of autocrat. There was Morgan Valois too, and . . . Rurik Taine.’

  ‘The man you later shot, or attempted to shoot.’

  ‘Whatever we were driven to, Glass, it was only ever because of the wolves.’ I regarded the object between my hands with renewed fascination and horror. No venomous snake or spider could have filled me with more dread. ‘I saw those transmissions when they came in. There was nothing distant or abstract about the way people were dying. Extinction isn’t some bureaucratic erasure. It’s screaming, suffocation, desperation and terror. It’s pain and sorrow and the certain promise of more to come. I saw it and swore we’d never be touched by any part of that in Sun Hollow.’ I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. ‘I kept my promise, right to the end.’

  ‘A promise that drove you to the brink of mass murder. Oh, poor brother War.’

  ‘Enough,’ I said angrily. ‘You weren’t there, down in those caverns. You have no right to judge me.’

  ‘Oh, I have every right. Shouldn’t the executed be allowed an opinion on her executioner?’

  ‘I said I’d kill you, Glass – I haven’t yet.’ I shuddered, trying to push her questions and madness out of my skull. A piece of rough-edged glass, bored through the middle. ‘This . . . wolf,’ I said, focusing on the immediate practicality of the thing I held between my hands, ‘how did it get in here, and can you really be sure it’s dead?’

  Glass sighed: I could not be sure whether it was one of modest relief, or quiet disappointment that I had not allowed her to keep picking at the scabs of my past. ‘Scythe detected it. It fell against the hull and was immediately recognised for what it is. Recognised and quarantined, then brought inside for examination. To your second point: it isn’t dead. If it were, we would not see it. When they die, the cubes collapse and you’re left with a tiny remnant of dust. The fact that the cube is still present, and that it triggered the ship’s countermeasures, proves that it’s still alive. But more than likely in a dormant or weakened state, and therefore of no immediate risk to us. May I?’ Gingerly Glass took the containment device back from me and made some adjustment to the controls in the end. ‘Watch. I’ll reduce the containment strength.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘I said reduce it, not turn it off.’ Glass’s fingers played the controls as if they were the buttons of an accordion. The Inhibitor machine swelled: no longer a dot, now, but a black speck about the size of a skin flake. Still I could see no structure to it, no hint of depth. Glass allowed it to grow a little further. A grain of rice, then a sultana, then a small, blank-faced gaming die.

  ‘Enough,’ I whispered.

  The containment device quivered in her grip. Red lights pulsed on the ends.

  ‘Oh, but there’s some life in you, isn’t there?’ Glass let the cube increase further still in size. Now a fat die, now a child’s play block. The violet radiance stammered. The red lights were all lit continuously: the device straining to hold back the cube’s desire to expand. ‘You were sleeping, until you hit me, weren’t you? Sleeping and nearly forgetting the thing you are. The thing you are meant to be. But now it’s all coming back to you.’ She lofted the device until the cube was level with her eyes. ‘Such determination. Such an evil, earnest need to do your duty. Such . . . selflessness.’ She snapped her fingers, and a white flash pulsed out of the device’s sides. I blinked, an after-image floating before me. As my vision cleared, I saw that the cylinder was empty, the violet field dimming. Glass opened a little port in the base and out squirted a grey haze of fine ash. She pinched some of it onto her fingers, then held them up to my nose. ‘Smell it. That’s what extinction smells like.’

  ‘Fireworks?’

  ‘I’ve never smelled fireworks. But they say everyone has a different idea about that smell. It races up the olfactory nerve and finds something in each of us. Some memory or connection to death.’

  ‘I take it the dust is safe.’

  ‘Inert matter. When they collapse – when an external force overrides their field-generating capability – they’re careful not to leave anything useful behind; anything an inferior species might be able to reverse-engineer and turn against them. So yes, safe.’

  ‘That really wasn’t necessary, Glass.’

  ‘On the contrary: it was more than necessary. You’ve seen the worst of what they can do, via those transmissions. The screams and the sorrow. I’ve drunk my share of that as well. And you know the slower, more agonising sort of terror that lies in the act of hiding – hiding for years or decades, never daring to make a single mistake. That terror that seeps into every thought, every dream. The terror that underlines every pleasure, the terror that negates hope, the terror that stains every joy with the knowledge that it may all soon end, and horribly. But this is the counterpoint: the truth that we must also carry within us. The understanding that for all they have done to us, for all they have brought us to the whimpering edge of annihilation, they’re not invulnerable. That we can kill them, and we shall.’

  Glass’s words resonated within me for a second or two before I answered.

  ‘Perhaps we can kill them. But only when they’re kind enough to arrive in ones or twos, and be half-asleep when they do.’

  ‘There’ll be other means. There are other means.’ Glass set aside the containment device, its purpose – to rattle me, or inspire me, or both – evidently served. ‘Now at least we know that the wolves are still here, albeit in some state of dormancy. Scythe can rebuff them in small numbers, and without drawing too much attention to itself. But we would be advised not to run into any large aggregations.’

  ‘And if we do?’

  ‘We should be well to have found ourselves a wolf-killer.’ Glass was silent for a moment. ‘Which, with your assistance, we shall.’

  The habitats crowded nearer. The distances between them narrowed to mere hundreds of metres. It turned dark in those canyon-like spaces, and I had a strong urge to turn back. But Glass was still following the trace from the beacon and she would not be deterred.

  ‘Do you see?’ Glass said suddenly.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Black filaments, black structures connecting these drifting hulks. That’s why they’re following the same orbit. They’re tethered.’ She ruminated for a moment. ‘I don’t think it’s wolf material. If they meant to engulf and assimilate these ruins, they’d have done so in a very short while. There’s no need to, not with so much raw matter elsewhere in the system, there for the taking.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘Something indigenous, which has broken out of control. An opportunistic regrowth of plague strains, perhaps, erupting from private vivaria or the hidden niches where it was never entirely eliminated. Or something spawned deliberately, some self-replicating biological or cybernetic process now enjoying unfettered growth, far beyond the whims of its creators.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the wolves have come back to stop it?’

  ‘I doubt that it concerned them enough to go to such trouble. These are maggots.’

  ‘Maggots?’

  ‘The wolves have taken apart civilisations before. Many of them must have produced unregulated end-stage growth patterns not unlike these forms. It’s a marker for morbidity: a highly integrated society going through its terminal spasms.’ She waited a moment, then brought up some synthetic image of the intricate, netlike structures binding the drifting ruins. Blue lines, radiating and intersecting. ‘What does that remind you of?’

  ‘Cobwebs. And where there are cobwebs . . .’

  ‘Then we shan’t delay. The beacon is just ahead, loosely adhered to the outer wall of the nearest habitat. Go to the suiting room. By the time we begin station-keeping you will be ready to leave.’

  ‘Can’t you send out some of your robots instead?’

  ‘The s
ervitors can’t move around very efficiently in vacuum, whereas the suits can. And if I am going to commit a suit, I might as well give it an autonomous capability.’

  ‘So glad I get to be an autonomous capability,’ I said.

  The crossing to the beacon was no test for the suit: just a quick jaunt across a couple of hundred metres of open space. The robots had delivered a self-burrowing probe to the airlock in time for my departure, and now it spooled out behind me, trailing a hair-thin line back to Scythe. The main part of the probe was a squat, dual-handled cylinder with a battery of gripping, cutting and drilling devices set into its end. Glass had assured me that it would know what to do.

  The space I drifted through was the canyon-like gap between two habitats that had come near to each other, but hadn’t quite fused. The two surfaces were pitted and scarred, ready to close in like a pair of vast rotten molars. Their surfaces stretched away in all directions, leaving only narrow slots above and below. The blackened and scabbed walls gave off no light of their own, but Yellowstone was below, fully illuminated by Epsilon Eridani. Some of that reflected radiance found its way into the crevice between the habitats, bouncing around and casting a sepia tinge on the ship, my suit, the walls of the habitats, and the cobwebbing that stretched between the walls.

  Glass had loaded a navigation trace into the suit, homing in on the beacon, but it still took me a minute to recognise my target. The beacon was a dodecahedron, about four metres across, with panels made of some lustrous substance. It was partially enclosed by cobwebbing, binding it to the wall, but not so thoroughly that it was impossible to reach.

  The cobwebbing thickened as I neared. The suit wanted to charge on through, but I slowed it and switched to a fully manual approach. Eventually I had to tuck in my arms and legs to squeeze through the narrowest passages. As I made contact with the beacon, I was able to stretch out again and plant my feet on a ledge-like protuberance of the wall, then rest a hand on one of the dodecahedron’s panels.

  We knew the beacon to be functional, so it was no surprise to see the occasional pulse of light flicker beneath the panel. It was the only continuing process I had seen anywhere around Yellowstone; the only indication that our civilisation had been capable of more than mute ruins. Before continuing, I looked back through the tangle of cobwebs, reassuring myself that Scythe was still there. Glass had said nothing since my departure, not even sending a signal through the line, but I imagined she was studying my progress.

  I positioned the cutting face of the probe on the nearest and least-obstructed panel. At the last instant before contact the probe jerked from my grip, fastening itself on. With my palm against another part of the beacon I felt a constant grinding vibration. This went on steadily for a minute or two, then abated. Faint tremors and bumps came from the beacon, but by now I guessed that the probe had dug its fangs beneath the outer armour and was working through the softer tissue of logic arrays and memory registers.

  The flickering lights responded in kind: the beacon registering its distress. I watched the lights warily, willing this to be over and done with. So long as it was just those lights, we were not in too much trouble. They were surely too faint for any trace of them to make its way out of the canyon.

  The beacon jolted hard, nearly knocking me off my perch. The probe must have broken through some inner membrane . . . or ruptured some pressure vessel or energy cell. Everything stopped. The beacon was still, the probe pausing in its efforts.

  ‘Glass . . .’ I began to say, invoking her name without contacting her.

  I saw the probe twitch as it resumed its work, sending a kink back through the data line—

  —and the beacon screamed. Every other one of its panels was flashing a brilliant, blinding pink. It was putting out a clangorous emergency tone across a wide spread of radio frequencies, detected by my suit and amplified into my helmet. I had no doubt that the signal was strong enough to reach halfway around Yellowstone, and probably far beyond it.

  I moved to the probe and tried to detach it. It was rooted in place, impossible to budge. It was still drilling.

  ‘Glass!’ I shouted, content to use the suit-to-ship channel now that we were already making so much electromagnetic noise. ‘You’ve triggered something! Make it stop!’

  ‘No – not yet. The data is beginning to flow back to Scythe.’

  ‘The wolves will hear this!’

  ‘The signal has already done its damage: nothing would be gained by stopping now. We will just have to trust that the wolves interpret the signal as a natural consequence of the processes going on among these ruins. Besides, I am exploring a number of promising override pathways . . .’

  ‘Explore faster!’

  The beacon silenced. The pink panels stopped flashing. It had happened so suddenly that it was nearly as shocking as when it had begun.

  The probe remained in place. I imagined that it had pushed a fatal load of venom into its prey and was now sucking it dry from within. I watched it for a few more seconds, wondering if I had any further part to play in the operation. If I went back directly, Scythe ought to be able to reel in the probe without my assistance.

  The beacon moved again, shifting languidly in its nest of cobwebs. But it was not the beacon that had initiated that motion: it was the cobwebs themselves, stirring. I froze for a moment, surveying the scene around me. What had been stillness was starting to creep and ooze. The sepia light exaggerated the encroachment of a thousand shadows, as the cobwebs tightened and unravelled and slid over themselves according to some huge, slow, coordinated plan.

  I pushed myself off the ledge, into free space. The probe could take its chances: I wanted to get away from the area where the cobwebs were at their densest. They were already wrapping around the beacon more thoroughly than before, cocooning it in a tightening weave of slithering threads. Glass had set up the suit to home in on the beacon, but she had left it to me to plot my own way back to Scythe. I could still make out the black absence of the ship, just barely. Like a message that had been scribbled over several times it was becoming harder to keep my attention on it, as the cobwebs criss-crossed the space before me. They were moving now, as well as the ones near the beacon, and with steadily more vigour. Some were as thick as tree trunks, flexing or uncoiling with the quiet, hungry purposefulness of pythons.

  ‘Glass,’ I said, fear overcoming my inclination to keep silent. ‘We’ve started something. You’d better move Scythe well away from this area.’

  ‘I’m not finished. Stay with the probe, in case it detaches.’

  ‘To hell with the probe. I’m already on my way back. But I’d like the ship to be in one piece when I arrive.’

  ‘This was your one test. The one thing I asked you to do—’

  ‘You mean, the thing you demanded I do—’

  ‘Get back,’ Glass hissed.

  Something snagged my ankle, jerking me to a halt before the suit had gathered any useful speed. A black tendril had hooked me, forming a loop in itself, and tightening. I thrashed and kicked, loosening myself at what felt like the last possible moment before the loop closed off any possibility of escape. Perhaps the suit would have had some countermeasure in reserve, but it was nothing I was prepared to stake my life on. I gunned the jets, breathing hard. The line still stretched all the way back to Scythe, a fine thread catching the last golden blush of Yellowstone before the face below us was swallowed by night. The ship was clearer in my view now, less than two hundred metres away, but the cobwebs were exploring it, brushing against its hull. Glass must have known, but still she was delaying departure, anxious to drink the last drop of data from her prize. If there had been something in my suit capable of cutting that line, I would have done so without hesitation.

  The line went slack, and then tautened again.

  ‘The probe is returning,’ Glass said. ‘Grab it and ride it home. It will be quicker than coming in on suit power.’

  I steered close to the line and looked back just in time to see
the drilling head speeding towards me, hauled in by the accelerating winch. I only had one chance to seize it, and the velocity difference was already four or five metres per second. The jolt might have torn my arms out of my sockets, if they were not protected by the suit. I held on, my breath rasping in my throat, and then a secondary concern presented itself. Glass was winching me in so fast I was in danger of smashing into the rear wall of the airlock. At the last instant I released the winch, and the suit instigated its own anti-collision procedure before I could begin to command the thrusters. I slowed hard, but remained conscious, and then drifted almost peaceably into the lock. By the time the door began to close, we were already moving.

  But not so quickly as Glass must have desired. The cobwebs had furled around Scythe, and now they were consolidating their embrace.

  CHAPTER TEN

  As we slipped free, I think even Glass understood that she had cut matters too fine for comfort.

  ‘I hope that was worth it.’

  ‘So do I, because I’d hate to rely on you twice. Fortunately, it won’t be necessary to look for any other beacons. I have what I needed from this one. A ship entered the ruins six years ago. Its point of origin isn’t determined, but there’s no reason to think it didn’t come from the lighthugger.’

  ‘How can you be sure it wasn’t some other ship, and nothing to do with your allies?’

  ‘Because there aren’t any other ships. This is the only logged movement in or out of the wider system in fifty-three years. No one has come near enough to be picked up by the beacon.’

  ‘Before you pin all your hopes on that one entry . . .’

  ‘It’s them. The pattern fits. They make a direct approach to Yellowstone, then are lost in the atmosphere. Two weeks later the beacon picks up a vessel of the same general profile leaving Yellowstone. But they never continue back to John the Revelator.’

  ‘Something still got to them, then. Perhaps they ran into those cobwebs, or some more of those wolf cubes latched onto them – more than they could defend against.’