Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I decided that I much preferred Glass when she was certain of things. If I was going to be forced into cooperation with a merciless killing angel, I wanted her to be entirely free of doubt. Doubt was for the rest of us.

  ‘Does the beacon have anything to say?’

  My question must not have seemed entirely imbecilic to her, because she answered in a surprisingly civil manner. ‘It doesn’t keep a detailed fix on their movements. It’s impossible for a single beacon to sweep all of the ruins at the same time with Yellowstone sitting in the middle. But there’s nothing about the way they left the atmosphere that makes me think they had difficulties with their ship. They seem to be moving towards a small body in one of the outer orbits, just before the trace goes cold. They don’t reappear. I think they must be still waiting in orbit, but well enough concealed that there’s no way to pick up a locator trace.’

  ‘I know you want them to be alive. But six years is a long time to sit around for no good reason.’

  ‘They must have determined that it was too dangerous to make the agreed rendezvous. Perhaps wolf activity was heightened until recently, or they were aware of some other threat.’ Glass squeezed her fist, seizing an idea and crushing it until its juices flowed. ‘They’re waiting for us. They knew we’d follow their trail as best we could, but they can’t advertise their location. They have to rely on us finding them, using the beacon records.’

  ‘All right . . . supposing we run with this. After six years, can we narrow down their location?’

  ‘It should not tax us. Even if there are a number of candidates, Scythe can search them quite efficiently with its remotes, looking for stray emissions or thermal noise. They can’t reach out to us across any sort of distance, but if we can get very close they may announce their presence.’

  ‘This is going to be like playing hide-and-seek in a darkened room.’

  ‘Except the hunter and hunted both have sharpened daggers, and each has reason to be nervous.’ With that reassurance, Glass flashed a fierce grin. ‘I have the search volume: it’s a little further around the orbit, but Scythe can narrow down the candidate list as we travel. The game’s afoot, dear War; no reason not to start playing!’

  It took us three hours to skulk our way further around Yellowstone, using the ruins for cover where it was prudent to do so. Now and then we saw drifting clusters of habitats or parts of habitats tethered together by something similar to the cobwebs, indicating that the growth had taken root in multiple sites. I was relieved when Glass showed no inclination to curiosity. There was enough to keep our nerves on edge without indulging in dangerous sightseeing. Scythe was detecting and neutralising wolf cubes every few minutes as they rained against our hull. These were either lone cells or micro-aggregations of less than a dozen, and in such small numbers were not a serious threat. In all cases the cubes were destroyed before they showed any tendency to begin the assimilation of local matter, confirming that they were in the same state of dormancy as the first. But the threat of the wolves lay in coordinated action, and it would only take one cube to wake up sufficiently to send an alert back to a larger concentration, in the ruins or nearby. This was not speculation: it was a pattern that had been documented time and again as the wolves picked our civilisation apart.

  Between them, Glass and Scythe had narrowed down the possible hiding places to three bodies, all following a similar orbit. When we were a thousand kilometres out from each candidate, Scythe launched a drone.

  One object was a ruptured cylinder, blasted open at both ends, so we could see right through it without any special sensors. The interior had been landscaped – shaped with lakes, rivers, waterfalls, little hills and hamlets linked by meandering roads better suited to mules and carts than high-speed travel. Only a grey death-mask of this one-time Eden remained. The habitat must have depressurised quickly, its waters boiling into vacuum and its trees torn from their roots. A few petrified trunks were still floating in the core. A ship could have parked within the gutted shell, but unless it had disguised itself in the remains of the hamlets, or dug its way into the thin skin between the inner and outer walls, the drone should have found it.

  The second candidate offered a little more cover: it was a sphere that had only been punctured at one point, meaning that most of the interior was still well concealed. But the drone found almost nothing inside besides some broken lights and the lacy remnants of withered vegetation.

  Only the third candidate really offered a plausible place to hide a functioning spacecraft. Rather than a fabricated structure like the first two, this was a lump of rock that had been tunnelled into and made liveable. Being a boulder, it had withstood collisions and impacts that would have shattered a wheel or cylinder. That was not to say it had come through the attack unscathed, or that it would have been easy for anyone to keep living inside it. Something like an energy beam had punched a dozen clean holes right through the boulder, and the entry and exit wounds were wide enough for a small ship. Scythe wheeled around this rock, sniffing for emissions. Nothing struck, but when the drone went in and out of one of the tunnels, it picked up a slight but statistically significant excess of neutrinos. The boulder was also a little warmer than some of the surrounding bodies, although not so much that it called attention to itself.

  Glass summoned the drone back.

  ‘We’ll go inside. They’ll know we’re here, so the next move is theirs.’

  ‘I’d raise an objection,’ I said sourly. ‘But you’d only say I was worrying.’

  ‘You mustn’t let Glass get under your skin,’ Glass said, commenting on herself as if she were absent.

  She took us in through the only hole large enough to accept a ship the size of Scythe. This was not one of the energy-beam punctures; the walls on either side of us had been smoothly bored, and as we went deeper they widened into a reception cavern. Here and there were the ghost traces of structures that might have been bracketed out from the walls, but which had now been removed.

  ‘This used to be a docking bay,’ I said, before Glass had a chance to voice her own opinion. ‘It’s not something that formed by accident. There were berthing cradles here – servicing racks and airlock ports. But it’s all been cleaned out a long time ago, leaving just the witness marks. Perhaps a really long time ago – even before the wolves.’

  Glass said nothing. I had come to realise that this was her silent, brooding acknowledgement that I had made a statement that was neither incorrect nor easily refutable.

  ‘It would have made a good place to dock,’ I went on. ‘But there aren’t any ships. We can search the other holes, I suppose. But it could be that your probe was just picking up residual radiation from something that happened in the past.’

  ‘There’s a ship near us.’

  ‘You want there to be a ship near us. That doesn’t mean . . .’

  Something was happening in the back wall of the chamber. A section of what had seemed to be a seamless surface was receding into the wall, leaving a clean-bored shaft behind it. The shape of the section was curious but too deliberate to be accidental: an ellipsoidal middle with two lobelike extensions on either side, each tipped with a smaller ellipse of their own.

  Without a word, Glass advanced her ship.

  ‘It could be a trap.’

  ‘It’s not a trap. It’s a lock.’ She glanced at me. ‘I mean in the old-fashioned sense, rather than a thing to keep in air. It’s a lock and we’re the key.’

  I understood. Scythe had exactly the right cross-section to fit into that peculiar slot that had opened up in the wall. The central ellipse was for the hull; the lobes and smaller ellipses for the Conjoiner drives. Through the false view of the control room windows, I watched as the sides of the bore slipped past us. There was ample clearance to begin with, but Scythe widened near its mid-section and by the time half the ship was into the lock, the proximity alarms were informing us that we were only centimetres away from a collision.
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  Terrain! Terrain!

  Glass silenced the alarms and pushed on blithely. She barely blinked when the ship ground against the walls.

  ‘If we jam inside this thing, we’re in trouble.’

  ‘We shan’t jam. This lock has been purpose-designed for Scythe.’ Disapproval clouded her face. ‘It’s an unnecessary flourish, but not out of keeping. It reassures me. To have engineered this lock, they must have had time and resources and the means to move matter around without attracting the wolves.’

  Scythe crunched to a halt, jerking us forward in our seats.

  We had arrived at the end of the shaft, and there was no way through.

  Glass touched the cold-gas thrusters and began to back us up.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Reversing a little, then I will deploy cutting devices. Something must have malfunctioned in the lock: the wall ahead of us is sticking at this point. If the cutters don’t work, I will use limited-yield energy beams or shaped-charge munitions, but they may require a retreat to the first chamber.’

  ‘You’re not thinking this through.’

  Glass looked at me sharply. ‘Oh, and you are?’

  ‘You said we’re the key. What’s the first thing you do to a key, after you’ve pushed it into a lock? Or have you forgotten how keys actually work?’ I nodded forward. ‘Take us back in as far as we’ll go, then use those jets to apply a rotational torque. Keys turn.’

  Glass brooded on my answer then appeared to find some grain of sense in it. She took us back into the limit of the wall, kissing it more cautiously this time.

  ‘Which way? Clockwise or anticlockwise?’

  I shrugged. ‘Whichever works.’

  Glass applied the jets. At first it got us nowhere. We were already tight against all the surfaces so Scythe barely twitched before it stopped moving. Clockwise hadn’t worked. Glass tried an anticlockwise torque and that got us no further.

  ‘So much for your one idea.’

  ‘You give in too easily. Locks get sticky, and if this one is only meant to work for Scythe, you can be sure it won’t have been operated for a long time. Waggle us around harder.’

  ‘Scythe doesn’t waggle . . .’

  ‘Today it does.’

  Glass offered a wordless grunt, then set about doing what I had suggested, applying the jets first one way then the other with increasing force, Scythe clunking back and forth against the limits of the walls until, with a lurch, we continued rotating, the lock’s barrel finally loosening. It was a clockwise turn that did it in the end, and we must have gone around more than one hundred and eighty degrees before some secondary mechanism activated, causing the obstructing surface ahead of us to drop away. Scythe now had a clear path forward again. Glass advanced us, passing out of the opposite counterpart to the lock entrance, into a sealed space about as large as the first chamber, but considerably further into the rock.

  Scythe exited the lock and floated in airless stillness and dark.

  ‘You have your uses,’ Glass said.

  After about a minute, lights came on. Around the walls of the chamber, twenty or so beams had activated, pinning us in a cat’s cradle of light. The beams were visible in the trace gases of the manoeuvring jets. They slid around the hull, examining it. Then they became still again and a small door opened in the wall.

  A much smaller in-system vehicle was docked next to ours, fixed to the wall by a berthing clamp. It was dark red, with a scale-like patterning to its armour.

  ‘Do you recognise it?’

  Glass nodded once. ‘That’s the shuttle they brought with them from Hela, carried here in the hold of John the Revelator. It’s small enough to traverse the lock, like a universal key.’

  ‘It doesn’t look damaged.’

  ‘Are you an expert on that design?’

  ‘No . . . but I don’t need to be. Is it damaged?’

  After a few seconds Glass said: ‘It appears superficially intact.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I admitted no error.’

  ‘No, but I’m learning to take my victories where I can.’

  We watched the door for several minutes, wondering if someone or something (up to and including a weapon) was going to come out of it. When it became plain that nothing of that sort was going to happen, Glass and I arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that we were meant to let ourselves in.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I ventured. ‘Then you can do the same excellent job of protecting me as you did when I went to the beacon.’

  ‘Did you come to any harm?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Then you’ve nothing to complain about. I almost am tempted to send you ahead, you know, just in case there are any traps we still have to pass. But we’ll go in together. The sooner we’re all acquainted, the sooner we’ll gain the Gideon stones.’

  I nodded slowly, as if this was all reasonable. She had mentioned these stones already but I was still none the wiser about their nature or function.

  ‘Do we go in armed?’

  She looked shocked. ‘Where are your manners, War? That would be rude. And futile. We’re not here to negotiate. They’ll be relieved to see us, and fully cooperative.’

  ‘It’s been a warm welcome so far. And please stop calling me War.’

  Glass put Scythe into safekeeping mode and we went to the suiting bay. We carried no extra weapons or equipment with us, although I was certain that the suits had built-in self-defence capabilities. But as long as we were not flaunting weapons, I supposed we hewed to some tenuous definition of good manners.

  The chamber was weightless, so we drifted over the door using suit thrusters. Beyond the door was an airlock of unremarkable design, equipped with a full set of manual controls. It was spacious enough to take both of us. Glass sealed the outer door and allowed air to flood in. She looked back at Scythe through the door’s small viewing port, her ship still pincered between those beams.

  ‘Misgivings?’ I asked gently. ‘The faint feeling that something isn’t quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it? If they have these stones you need, and since their ship is intact, why didn’t they find a way to get them to the lighthugger, or at least send a message? How hard can that have been? And what, by the way, are the stones?’

  The airlock provided an atmosphere determined to be both breathable and absent of any harmful additives, so in the interests of further good manners we stepped out of the suits and left them to wait by the lock. It was colder than I might have wished, wearing my shipboard clothes, but I could tolerate it for the sake of diplomacy. I rubbed my hands hard, urging blood to circulate into my fingertips. Glass seemed untroubled.

  Still weightless, we half drifted and half propelled ourselves down a connecting corridor lit by pale yellow strips. The corridor soon came to an abrupt end, with a smooth sheer wall blocking us. I reached out to touch the wall, wanting to get some sense of its solidity. There had to be a means of getting through it: it was absurd to allow us all this way and then deny any further progress.

  Glass slapped my hand away before my fingers contacted the wall.

  ‘It’s moving, you fool.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re only seeing a small part of a much larger moving surface, like the side of a wheel.’

  I stared at the wall, seeing it anew. Though it had seemed flawless before, I now realised that this was only a consequence of its motion. Now and then, a scratch or scuff passed across the width of the corridor very rapidly.

  I glanced back to my fingers, glad that they were still attached to me. It would not have taken much – a crack or seam in the surface – to rip them from my knuckles.

  ‘I don’t understand why they’d block us this way.’

  ‘They aren’t,’ Glass said. ‘Sooner or later there’ll be a gap, a recess, in the wall. This is the transition between the main body of the rock and some part of it made to spin, for centrifugal gravity. When the gap comes around, we have to step into it.�
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  We did not have long to wait. The gap was an interruption in the rim, a recess big enough to take at least two suited forms. It came and went in two or three seconds, then returned around again about a minute later. Glass and I looked at each other then nodded, ready for the next opportunity. There could be no hesitation: if we mistimed our entries, we’d be crushed between the moving and stationary parts of the structure.

  The transition was bruising, but my bones remained unbroken. Glass had made it look easy: she was already standing, legs spread for balance, one hand against the fixed wall of the moving structure.

  I got up on my feet, readjusting to the presence of gravity.

  ‘It feels heavy.’

  ‘Not even close to a gee.’ Glass strode over to a circular hole in the floor, planting her feet to either side of it and peering into a yellow-lit void. ‘There’s a ladder going down. Your weight will increase as you descend. Go ahead of me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if you fall off, I don’t want you dragging me down with you.’

  ‘Your kind concern is noted.’

  I made an awkward approach to the ladder, wishing there was a handhold on the floor to help as I levered my legs into the shaft and searched for a rung. Eventually I got going and set about a steady descent, rung by rung. Glass was right. The load was steadily increasing as we moved further and further from the centrifuge’s axis of rotation. But my muscles were readjusting to the imposition of gravity as well, and the two kept pace.

  ‘Nice of your friends to come all the way to the front door and greet us.’

  ‘There’s no need. We’ve come this far; we’d hardly turn back at the last step. Can you see a bottom to the shaft?’

  I glanced down into a yellow haze of receding perspectives. ‘Not yet. Are you going to tell me about these Gideon stones before we meet our host, or would that give you one less reason to feel superior over me? I’d hate to deprive you of one of the few small pleasures in your life.’

  I went down a few more rungs, grunting with the effort, my palms turning sweaty. The ache in my bones was reasserting itself jealously, as if I had neglected to give it enough attention. Glass followed a short distance above me, moving with an easy, catlike rhythm that only made my own efforts seem more laboured.