Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘There are too many,’ I said, raising my voice above the shrieking and the chaos. ‘This is more than she was meant to send in.’

  ‘If they’re here, then so is Glass,’ Pinky said, grunting as he made a pained lunge with the knife, encouraging one of the masked men to keep his distance.

  ‘She could barely control one of them.’

  ‘She doesn’t need to – they’re doing what they need to do.’

  ‘For now. Do you think you can make it to the landing deck? If Glass has commenced her attack then Scythe should be moving to the extraction point.’

  ‘I can make it. But I’m not the one Lady Arek shot in the leg.’

  ‘I’ll be all right. She aimed well.’

  I thought I could find the path back the way we had been brought. Almost lost in the chaos, we moved in the direction of the tall maroon doors. We had only got about halfway there before a fresh wave of swineherds burst through, all of them armed and armoured. They took a moment to appraise the scene before them, then discharged their weapons, partly in the general direction of the ninecats and partly at us. We would have been dead instantly if they’d had a clear line of fire, but the air was still a storm of blood, bone, meat and finely shredded armour. Pinky grabbed my shoulder and drove me into the cover of one of the empty plinths. Bullets clanged against the other side of the plinth. They had projectile weapons, but nothing that could penetrate the plinth’s thick metal construction.

  The ninecats were still arriving. There had to be a dozen in the room by now, perhaps as many as twenty. One slowed its whirling and sidled up to us, swivelling its blank silver body, its nine needle-tipped limbs varnished with blood.

  ‘It recognises us,’ I said quietly. ‘Tell me it recognises us.’

  Pinky dabbed at his skin and lifted his hand away, crimson-stained. ‘We’re getting a little tainted. Might not be getting so good a biometric fix on us.’

  The ninecat pushed nearer to me. I pushed back, but there was only so far I could go before I lost the shelter of the plinth. The ninecat lashed out a limb. There was a cold sting against my cheek. The limb withdrew, taking a small sample of me with it.

  I shot the ninecat. The pistol blasted it into about three large smoking pieces, dropping to the floor instantly. The disconnected limbs thrashed, but now without purpose. I squeezed away from the ruined machine as best I could.

  ‘Why’d you shoot it?’

  I glared at him. ‘Would you rather I hadn’t shot it?’

  ‘I’d rather those other ones weren’t suddenly taking an interest in us.’

  Half a dozen other ninecats had broken off from whatever they were doing and began to whirlwind their way in our direction. I shot, and shot again. With each discharge I feared that the next squeeze of the trigger would produce silence. The pistol was of a type unknown to me and I had no idea of its capacity or recovery time.

  A white explosion blinded and deafened me, and I lay numb, shivering. I forced my eyes open, squinting through dust and pain. Three white forms resolved, hovering on the edge of focus. They had blasted their way into the Carvery, and were now dispensing fire from built-in weapons. Two were suits of the same size I knew from Scythe; the third was of a similar design but smaller and with different anatomical proportions.

  ‘Our rides are here,’ Pinky said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Glass and the two slaved suits stomped in through the hole they had blown in the wall, smoke still billowing from the pop-out slug dispensers in their sleeves. Against the remaining numbers of swineherds, the suits were as good as invulnerable. Bosers were doing the main work now, firing from shoulder emplacements on the suits. Their coordination and accuracy was far beyond any human guidance. These in turn were augmented by micro-grenades which the suits extracted from a belt-feed and tossed into the air with unerring accuracy. The swineherds’ projectile weapons did more harm to their users than to the suits, ricocheting off the adaptive armour. Their edged and blunt weapons were as useless as kisses. It was almost cruel, seeing this total disparity in preparedness. But I only had to glance at the still-living forms on the plinths to remind myself the swineherds deserved every moment of it.

  The suits continued to work their way towards us. Glass was at least showing some restraint: as far as I could tell, none of her direct shots had yet hit any of the pigs. But there was little accounting for the stray fire and ricochets being scattered around.

  Then I noticed a development.

  The ninecats were reacting to the suits. In ones and twos they were pulling away from whatever they were doing and making lunging, whip-cracking strikes against the suits. Their limbs were not capable of slicing right through the suits’ armour, but they were forcing the suits to defend themselves, and direct more and more of their energy into emergency repair. Silver gashes were appearing in the white armour, then melting away . . . but the ninecats were gathering their numbers, flinging themselves against the suits at a quickening rate.

  Glass’s plan was going adrift.

  The suits began to retaliate. Not just passive defence now, but active measures. The bosers angled down to snap onto the ninecats. Mostly, all it took was one shot. Now and then, a lobbed grenade had the same effect. The fifth or sixth time a ninecat was destroyed, it produced an explosion nearly as powerful as the one that had heralded the suits’ arrival. It was enough to tip over two of the plinths, spilling their tormented occupants to the blood-slick floor. Everything was sticky and red: no amount of drainage could cope with the current demand.

  ‘I’m not sure if we’ll be safer in those suits or out of them,’ I confided to Pinky.

  ‘You take your chances either way you like, Stink. Know where I’d sooner be.’

  The suits had gained a moment’s advantage over the ninecats: enough time for Glass to complete her crossing and kneel by us, flanked by the two other suits. Her voice boomed out from the suit’s neck. ‘Are you ready? I’ll provide covering fire while you get into the suits. Simply stand and present yourselves to them: they will do the rest.’

  Bullets were still ringing against the plinth. Glass’s weapons began to concentrate on the swineherds who had been targeting us, and the incoming volleys became intermittent as our adversaries were taken out or forced to duck behind cover of their own. They had no hope at all, so long as the suits kept working.

  I chose my moment and sprang for the suit. It packaged itself around me with a reassuring brusqueness, indifferent to my suffering a few more bruises in the process. The faceplate was already framed by the familiar pattern of status icons. Glass had also allowed me access to some of the weapons modes that were normally blocked. Next to me, his head only coming up to my shoulder, Pinky had been swallowed by his own suit.

  ‘Now we leave,’ Glass said. ‘We’ll use minimum necessary force all the way out.’

  I glanced back at the destruction she had already wrought.

  ‘That was minimum necessary force?’

  ‘Difficult as you may find it to accept, Clavain, I used restraint. I don’t want to undermine the structure of this place while we’re still inside it.’

  ‘Fair observation. What do we do about these prisoners?’

  ‘I am already dispensing a painless euthanising gas.’

  ‘No, Glass,’ I said, knowing that to raise my voice would have achieved nothing. ‘We don’t gas them. You have room aboard Scythe for hundreds of evacuees.’

  ‘Upon my arrival I conducted a rapid situational triage. What has happened here is . . . regrettable.’

  ‘I’m so glad you find it regrettable,’ Pinky said.

  ‘They are beyond any sort of salvation, not helped by being caught in the crossfire of our rescue effort. This is by far the kindest option.’

  ‘Take him to the ship,’ Pinky declared. ‘He matters, apparently.’

  I turned to him. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To see what I can do about all the other captives she must have in this place.’

/>   ‘You think you can work that suit well enough to avoid trouble? Those ninecats are starting to turn against us, and only Glass knows how many more she sent into the building.’

  ‘How many?’ Pinky asked her sharply.

  She looked down at him. ‘More. But the suits will get us to Scythe, provided we leave immediately.’

  ‘Go,’ I said. ‘Get aboard Scythe and prepare for departure. Pinky and I will go back and look for her prisoners.’

  ‘I wasn’t looking for a shadow,’ the pig said.

  ‘No, but you might benefit from having someone at your side. Glass, do as I say. If you don’t, I’ll take this helmet off and breathe in some of that gas you just dispensed.’

  ‘I wouldn’t allow it,’ she said. ‘And I’m not allowing this. Your suits will stay slaved to mine. You have comms and weapons authority, but nothing else. And don’t think that means you’d be able to shoot me.’

  ‘Glass,’ I said, seething. ‘Allow us this. If not me, then at least let Pinky search the lower levels.’

  My visor pulsed with a pink hazard warning: a throbbing triangle bracketing an emerging a ninecat, sawing its way into the Carvery through a solid wall.

  ‘They’re here,’ Glass said. ‘And we’re leaving.’

  There was no further debate. Glass set off at a fast stride and my suit jerked into immediate pursuit. I had no means of slowing or altering my course: the suit’s dominion over me was total. Pinky must have come to the same conclusion because he did not offer a word of protest. I was starting to understand him a little better, to see the calculating intelligence beneath the swagger. Complaint was only effective up to a point, after which it was a waste of energies better kept in reserve. But I wondered what reckoning he planned for Glass, further down the line.

  More ninecats were breaking into the Carvery. We made it to the main doors without resistance, and Glass only paused to lob a few grenades and boser pulses back at the emerging ninecats at the far end of the room. Glass shut the doors behind us then used a continuous boser beam to perform a quick fusion-weld down the central seam. Then we were moving again. I felt two cold jabs: one in my thigh, the other in my upper arm.

  ‘I’ve been hit.’

  ‘No, you’ve been surgically punctured. Your suit is performing a reverse transition to the buffering solution. Or would you rather keep the haemoclast? Any longer in you, and you’d start to die.’

  I felt better, at least in a relative sense, as the suit did its work on my blood. I hoped Pinky was feeling the same benefit.

  We rose through the levels without difficulty, encountering only light resistance from the remaining dregs of the swineherds. Somewhere inside me was a developing guilt that I was leaving the other pigs behind to their fates. I tried to negate it by reminding myself that I had come to Chasm City not to rid the city of its evils, but to achieve the very specific objective of securing the stones. That had already cost me pain, fear and the very real possibility of losing my life. It was enough to know that we had damaged the lair and decapitated the queen’s cult, thereby sowing the likely seeds of its collapse. There were only three of us, and we had risked enough as it was . . .

  But I knew this was going to prickle inside me. It wasn’t that I had a choice: I had no doubt whatsoever that Glass could make my suit do anything she wanted it to. But what troubled me was my relief that Glass had taken that choice out of my hands. It was a coward’s comfort.

  Glass’s suit had decided that the most reliable way out of the Swinehouse was to retrace our journey down from the landing stage. One of the last places we passed through was therefore the examination room where the Swine Queen had failed to detect the haemoclast. The room thrummed, picking up the vibrations caused by an unusually large spacecraft holding position just overhead, displacing vast quantities of atmosphere as it kept station.

  A ninecat blocked our path. It was squatting on its needle-thin legs, fixed to the floor like an inverted candelabra.

  Glass shot it: at least they were able to be killed on an individual basis.

  ‘There are more converging. We must move quickly.’

  ‘Dear God, Glass: how many of those things did you release?’

  ‘Eighty.’

  ‘Eighty! Are you insane? How did you get hold of eighty of them?’

  ‘I . . . reasoned with Lady Arek. I convinced her that an overwhelming force offered our best chance for success. I brought them inside one of the suits.’

  ‘You missed something. Some detail somewhere in their programming. You got arrogant, thinking that there’s no system in the universe that the brilliant Glass can’t master. Did it occur to you that there might have been a reason those ninecats were left behind? That perhaps they were never to be trusted in the first place?’

  We ascended the stairs, Glass’s suit taking them two risers at a time, and ours following with the same bounding strides. My visor was clotting over with warning symbols again: detecting the moving, mechanical threats it had already decided were not a good thing. I risked a backward glance, and made out a swift, quicksilver scuttling. Two or three of the ninecats were coming up behind us, advancing slowly but deliberately, as if they too had conducted a threat assessment. We were to be neutralised. Carefully.

  Glass blasted open a final set of doors and a howling wind swept in. Murky, yellow-tinged daylight pushed down, interrupted by the clawed shadow of the huge ship hovering just out of sight. Its engines pushed a nerve-shredding scream all the way through my suit.

  I could only see part of the landing stage. There were a few bodies lying around, but no living swineherds. The turrets that had covered Lady Arek’s ship – those I could see – had been reduced to black-smoking chimneys. In one, I could still make out the remains of a Gatling cannon, reduced to a sagging, drooping sculptural mass, with two goggled and masked skeletons in attendance.

  Glass led us out. Scythe was about ten metres above the tops of the turrets, hovering horizontally, its long axis more or less parallel with the chasm wall, its belly ramp lowered to skim against the landing stage. A rush of relief surged over me, and for a moment that guilt was gone entirely. I was about to have my own skin saved, and that was enough. We had done it: got the stones, and saved ourselves. A million hard steps might lie ahead of us, but this one was done.

  Nearly.

  One ninecat emerged from the cover of one of the corpses, then another.

  Glass fell back, and suddenly I realised that I had complete control of my suit again.

  ‘Get aboard. You and the pig. I’ll provide a covering fire.’

  I did not argue; it seemed like an excellent plan to me. I might have had weapons authority, but I had nothing to compare with Glass’s superhuman reflexes. I grabbed at Pinky’s shoulder, sensing his hesitation, and as a pair we ran out across the deck, towards the base of the ramp. It was moving, as Scythe drifted in response to the winds and turbulence rising in the chasm. Glass took care of the two ninecats that had emerged from the corpses, but others were slithering into view, from apertures and hiding places. Pinky and I dispensed our own weapons with some effectiveness, but since we had to concentrate on running and aiming for the moving platform, our efforts were mixed. Glass was having to take up the slack, and the number of ninecats was taxing her capabilities. She must have depleted her grenades because now her suit was only using its bosers. The ninecats were concentrating their attentions on her, judging Pinky and me to be of less immediate concern.

  We reached the base of the ramp just as some gust overwhelmed Scythe’s control and sent the ramp bludgeoning into us like a runaway cart. It caught me mid-section and I folded into the impact, my chest and arms overhanging the ramp, my legs dangling beneath it, skimming the ground. Pinky had been knocked over completely: the impact had caught him above his centre of gravity. I hauled myself onto the ramp, grabbed a rail and reached down to scoop Pinky up as we passed over him again. I grunted, and swung him to safety. For an instant our faceplates met, and I saw some r
eaction in his expression: not gratitude exactly, but at least a twitch in that direction.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’d say I’m pretty far from all right.’ He paused. ‘But I’m better without that shit inside me. Glass was right.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I ain’t ever doing that again.’

  Then we were both standing, facing Glass. I ought to prioritise my own survival and hurry up the ramp, but I could not abandon her that easily, not while we had so much unfinished business.

  Glass retreated in the direction of the ramp, her back to us. Her boser shots were becoming more sparing now. The ninecats were snipping at her, lashing against her legs and thighs, sometimes flinging themselves against her chest. Silver furrows opened up in the suit, centimetres deep, only to close again as the suit marshalled its repair mechanisms. But the rate at which the ninecats were inflicting damage was exceeding the suit’s capacity for healing. The ninecats were getting more brazen. One flung itself at Glass, coiled its legs around her knee joint, and made a sharp savage twist. Glass dropped to a lopsided stagger, then a kneeling posture with her left hand pressed to the floor.

  ‘Move!’ I shouted.

  Glass hauled herself back to her feet. She covered some ground, limping as her knee refused to bear her weight, testifying to some severe damage in the suit and perhaps to Glass herself. She fell again, this time flat on her front. She was about six metres from the drifting sanctuary of the ramp. I made an instantaneous decision and hopped back onto the deck. A ninecat was already coiling itself around Glass’s right leg below the knee, chewing into the armour as it tightened its hold.

  I moved into a low, scrambling posture and grabbed Glass’s outstretched right hand. Trusting the suit to apply all necessary power augmentation, I yanked her as hard as I could, and nearly fell backwards in the direction of the ramp. I recovered, and the ramp brushed against me: either by luck or intention, the ship had closed the distance. Pinky grabbed me, and I retained my hold on Glass. Pinky pulled harder and by effort and will we managed to get both Glass and myself onto the ramp. Most of Glass was still overhanging, but it was enough. Scythe must have detected that its master was now back aboard – in the technical sense – because we began to ascend very rapidly, with the ramp retracting back into the belly. With Pinky still fixed onto me, I adjusted my hold on Glass and pulled more of her onto the ramp, with just her legs overhanging.