Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  I sighted my boser and blasted the ninecat still attached to Glass. The ninecat fell away: a charred, flailing ruin. The pulse had taken a bite out of the suit as well: a blackened, smoking depression in which it was impossible to say where the laminated structures of the suit ended and Glass began.

  The ramp continued to seal up into the belly. When it was nearly done, and the chasm walls were racing past us as Scythe accelerated, two of the sphere robots dropped out and extracted Glass from our care, spiriting her with immense speed back into the ship. Pinky and I followed, both of us risking a last glance down at the Swinehouse before the ramp closed off our view.

  Multiple explosions flowered around the Swinehouse. They hit suddenly and in unison, concentrated around the anchor points where the Swinehouse extended its tethers and wall-braces. The tethers snapped and whiplashed, and the braces and buttresses sagged and ripped under uncontrolled force. The explosions halted. They had done their work, and mechanics and gravity would finish the task. The Swinehouse was detaching from the chasm wall. Instead of dropping like a stone, it seemed to hover for a second or two, unwilling to submit to the inevitable. Then, still moving as one structure, it began a slow, leisurely acceleration. Pinky and I watched in the last seconds before the view was closed to us. The Swinehouse was tumbling forward, facing down, and parts of it were flaking off as the winds of the chasm had their way. Still accelerating, it lost itself in the opacity of the deeper mist layers. It was like watching a dark coffin vanishing beneath roiling white waves. All that remained were the remnants of the buttresses and tethers, the latter still flailing around as if in some terrible agitation.

  ‘It’s still a long way down,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Like I need to be reminded?’

  ‘It might’ve been the right thing for her to do. If there was no way to save the prisoners inside, then at least they’ll be out of their pain very shortly.’

  ‘But not yet.’

  ‘Not just yet, Scorp.’

  The ramp sealed up into the belly lock. There were the two of us there: the spheres had already bustled away with Glass. The air exchange proceeded rapidly and our suits peeled away from us as we stepped into the suiting room. Two more robots arrived in prompt fashion and immediately set about attending to our obvious injuries while we remained standing. While that was going on – and our old blood pumped back into us by the same robots – I wondered about Glass, and the price she had paid for our rescue.

  ‘I won’t say that went well,’ I said. ‘But given how much more badly it could have gone, I think we have to consider ourselves lucky.’

  I expected some rebuff, but Pinky’s answer wrong-footed me. ‘You think she’ll mend, Stink?’

  ‘I think she has a better chance of it than you or I would have in the same situation. The main thing is . . . for whatever purpose they’re going to serve, we have the Gideon stones.’ I nodded at the floor. Somewhere below us, lost in the mist, I wondered if the Swinehouse was still falling. ‘Everything else, including your survival or mine, has to be secondary to that.’

  ‘I’m not saying this rubs out all my doubts about you.’

  ‘I’d be surprised if it did.’

  ‘But it’s a start. A small one.’ He paused. ‘One other thing.’

  ‘Yes?’ I asked guardedly.

  ‘Why’d you call me Scorp?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, you did. Very distinctly. I didn’t mishear. So where’d it come from? What made that drop from your lips?’

  ‘Does it mean something?’

  ‘It’s my name. A name. One of several. Lady Arek knows it, and she knows that just now I happen to prefer Pinky. But Scorpio is a name I took once, and it didn’t fall out of your mouth by accident.’

  ‘I can’t explain it. Perhaps Lady Arek said it once, and I picked up on it without realising?’

  ‘No, not that. Nor did you hear it from Snowdrop. She doesn’t know it. Plenty she does know, but not that. Anyway, you used the form of it he always did. I was Scorp to Nevil.’

  ‘But I’m not him!’ I said, raising my hands in protest. ‘I might be his brother – maybe I can start to believe that much – but I’m not him.’ I shook my head, rattled by Pinky’s line of questioning, and unable to deny the root of it. I had used that name. For an instant, a piece of the past had swum into my present: a connection between Pinky and me.

  As if we already knew each other.

  ‘Glass will know,’ I said.

  Pinky nodded slowly. ‘You want her to live?’

  ‘More that I don’t want her to die before I wring some answers out of her.’

  ‘You’re deeper than you look, Stink.’ Pinky went to the door that led out of the suiting room into the rest of Scythe. ‘Let’s go see if we can find that cold-hearted ghoul, shall we?’

  ‘That sounds like an excellent plan.’

  He opened the door.

  Glass was not on the other side of it. But a hundred other faces were.

  I was the first to speak.

  ‘After everything, she rescued them. Before she came for us, she must have found them and got them aboard Scythe.’

  ‘We have tongues,’ said the foremost of the hyperpigs, the one who had been standing immediately in front of the door. ‘At least, those of us she didn’t get around to cutting them out of.’ The pig, dressed in little more than rags, offered a hand. ‘I’m Barras.’

  I took Barras’s hand. ‘I’m . . . something. Call me Warren for now.’

  ‘He’s working through some issues,’ Pinky said. Then, to Barras: ‘I’m Pinky. Maybe you already knew that.’

  ‘Word did get round,’ Barras said, nodding slowly, and with something like admiration. ‘Especially when you came to the Swinehouse. They were gearing up for the feast of the century.’

  ‘So I gathered. Are you going to be all right, Barras? I’m sorry we didn’t get to free you personally, but Glass had other ideas.’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Pinky. We’ll all be all right.’ Barras looked back at the throng pressing up behind him, stretching away along the corridor’s length. ‘This is a good day. This morning we were all going to die, and now we’re not. I mean, not just yet, and not in the Carvery. I don’t know whether the news you have for us is good or bad in your terms, but I guarantee it’ll seem good to us.’

  ‘How many of you did she rescue?’ I asked.

  ‘We haven’t done numbers,’ Barras said. ‘But about three-quarters, I’d guess. Some she couldn’t get to in time. She said she would save as many as she could, but some would have to stay behind.’

  ‘It’s gone,’ Pinky said.

  Barras did not need clarification. ‘It’s better. I’m sorry for those we left behind, but . . . this is better.’

  ‘Do you remember Snowdrop?’

  There was a cautious murmur from the gathering. ‘We do. They say she made it out. Did you have news?’

  ‘Better than that, Barras.’ Pinky closed his hand around Barras’s wrist, squeezing it hard. ‘You’ll see her soon, when we get back to Lady Arek’s stronghold. And others. Bruno, Chersini, Maude, Yilin . . . if those names mean anything to you, they all made it, they’re with us, and you’ll see them soon.’

  I felt bad about dragging the conversation back into the immediate reality, but it had to be done. ‘Did you see Glass after you came aboard?’

  ‘No,’ Barras said, puzzlement creasing his brow. ‘Where is she? I thought you’d know.’

  ‘Glass was hurt. The ship must be looking after her. But that leaves the question of who’s looking after the ship.’ I braced my hand against the wall, feeling vibrations. The floor was tilted, and my knees were registering an increasing load. ‘We seem to be climbing, so I think we can assume we’re on our way back to space. But I’m not going to sit back and assume the best.’ I raised my voice. ‘Ship! Scythe! You know me. You knew me well enough to wake me up when Glass was in trouble. Now I’d really like to see her!’

&nb
sp; ‘Can you operate this ship?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘Glass assigned me certain controls, but not all of them. And I don’t know what the ship will and won’t let me do. Scythe!’

  A door opened before me, in what had previously been the unmarked side of the corridor. Barras and three of the pigs squeezed aside. Floating in the doorway was one of the sphere robots, with its two arms extended in supplication.

  ‘Follow it,’ Pinky said. ‘I’ll stay with Barras; we have to start discussing plans for these survivors. When you have something, get back to us.’

  ‘I will.’ I hesitated at the point of reaching out to him, wanting to cement whatever new-found respect had begun to form between us, but I worried that it was still too fragile for that, and I might do more harm than good. Instead I contented myself with nodding, meeting his eyes as I did so. ‘We won’t waste the opportunity to help these people, Pinky.’

  ‘Damn right we won’t,’ he answered.

  I set off after the robot, the door sealing behind me.

  The angle of the floor tilted, acceleration rising, and then the floor formed treads into itself and I found myself climbing a steepening stairway. After a turn or two the robot brought me to a room in the ship that I had not seen before, despite my wanderings. It was the medical suite, or infirmary, or whatever Glass called it.

  She was in the middle of the bright white room, lit by the angelic glow emanating from its own seamless walls, cordoned by medical machines and enclosed in a large, fluid-filled tank. Glass was restrained by a harness of spiderlike manipulators that were applying gentle contact to various intact parts of her body. She was not wearing any sort of mask or breathing device, so she was either inhaling the pale green support medium or already dead. But if she were dead, or in some way beyond resurrection, I did not think the machines would be showing such obvious devotion.

  Whether they were trying to keep her alive, or bring her back to life, I was in no doubt that something was happening. Larger machines moved around outside the tank with speed and purpose. I supposed they were running scans of some sort, or perhaps projecting energies into the tank. Within it, smaller machines swam or undulated through the medium with the busy industry of fish. Now and then one of the machines on the outside made contact with the tank’s exterior and seemed to exchange a machine or part of a machine with those on the inside through a matter-permeable region of the container. A constant flicker of blue lights emanated from the machines.

  But Glass herself was still, her face a mask of death. It was motionless and her eyes were dark-lidded. If she breathed, I saw no sign of it.

  I noticed a familiar-looking device, fixed to a medical console. A tray-sized portable medical scanner, not far removed from the instruments we had in Sun Hollow. I detached the device, thumbed it to power, and swept it across the tank, eyeing the blur of details which played across its display surface. I zeroed in on Glass, and allowed the device to probe into her chest, peeling away layers of anatomy as it scanned and processed.

  Now at last I had a clearer view of the implanted mass. Glass was either too preoccupied to override the imagery, or no longer concerned with the keeping of secrets.

  It was a fist-sized kernel of dense machinery, lodged deep in her thoracic cavity. An artificial heart or heart-lung machine? When we spoke in Sun Hollow, just before leaving the pressurised part of the tunnel, she had admitted that it was a life-support device.

  But I could also see Glass’s heart, and her lungs. The heart pulsed, and the lungs inflated and deflated, albeit very slowly. So she was breathing, after all. Was alive.

  What did a creature like Glass, already superhumanly strong and resilient, need with a clumsy-looking machine inside her chest?

  The scanner freckled over with static.

  ‘Clavain,’ her voice sounded, ringing from the walls, even as her mouth remained still. ‘Did no one tell you it’s bad manners to pry?’

  I set aside the scanner.

  ‘I’m sorry that you were hurt.’

  ‘Sorry that I was nearly killed, before you had a chance to do it yourself? Or sorry that these injuries have upstaged some of what you might have been thinking of doing to me?’

  ‘I am simply sorry you were hurt.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like you. Whatever happened to your pledge?’

  I blunted her question with one of my own. ‘Why in hell didn’t you tell us that you’d already saved those pigs?’

  ‘Because I had no reason to justify myself. Because their safety was contingent on the safe departure of Scythe, which at that point was by no means assured.’

  ‘It was a good thing. A kind thing.’

  ‘It was tactically feasible.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Glass. You can drop the act. I see you for what you are. A nearly invulnerable shell wrapped around something that’s still a lot warmer and more human than she’s ready to admit – a human core that still makes mistakes and still cares.’

  ‘It was an error to risk rescuing the pigs. I was already beginning to see indications that the ninecats were reverting to non-compliance.’

  ‘Non-compliance. What do you call death? Non-respiration?’

  ‘I call death death. We have a solid understanding.’ She paused. ‘But it was an error. I risked compromising the one component of the operation we could ill afford to lose.’

  ‘I’m back to being a component now, am I?’

  ‘We’re all components.’

  ‘Those pigs are people you saved. You can run some cold-blooded calculation after the fact and say you shouldn’t have done it, but that doesn’t change the fact of their survival. They were going to die; now they get to live.’

  ‘We may not have improved their life chances. I received a transmission from Lady Arek as soon as she was clear of Yellowstone. Conditions have deteriorated while we were down below.’

  ‘To what extent?’

  ‘The Inhibitor movements we have been monitoring since our arrival have shifted to a more organised level of activity. Lady Arek’s stronghold has become the focus of their attentions.’

  ‘Then we have to do something.’

  ‘Right answer. Go to the control room and ask the ship to put you in contact with Lady Arek. Scythe will do what it can to avoid signal interception, but you must refrain from all but essential communication.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘I need time for self-repair. Perhaps several days. The ship will place me in an induced coma, to assist the neural processes.’

  ‘This really isn’t the time.’

  ‘There’s no choice. I have to skirt death in order to live again. Now go and speak to Lady Arek. She will understand where we have to go next.’

  ‘The fabled Charybdis?’

  ‘Not yet. Before Charybdis, we need more information. We will find it on Ararat, in the p Eridani system. Lady Arek will explain.’

  ‘Glass,’ I said softly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t die in there.’

  I placed my hand against the container, half wondering if she might move her hand to press against mine from the other side. But Glass made no movement, and I left her to heal.

  Part Four

  EVACUATION

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  To my relief – and no small astonishment – I realised that I was down, alive and mostly unhurt. The dropship was perfectly still. Through my visor, and the curve of the transparent segment of the hull beyond it, I made out a low, rust-coloured ridge which seemed to be a few hundred metres away. Nearer me was an area of sloping ground dotted with small, sharp boulders. The sky was a pale buff, deceptively bright. It did not take many atoms to scatter the sun’s radiation in a way that suggested the full, comforting blanket of a breathable atmosphere.

  I was on my side, nearly horizontal. None of the other dropships were to be seen, although a few faint smoke trails still lingered in the air. I ran a systems review. If I had a broken limb, or irreparable damage to
my suit, my mission was finished. None of us was indispensable, and the others could find workarounds for my absence.

  But the suit was intact. A good a thing, too, as I would be totally dependent on it for my entire spell on Mars. The dropship was finished, its outer skin burned to a crisp, but that was to be expected. It had never been meant to do more than get me onto the surface. Its only remaining task was to conceal itself. As for my body, the toll of damage was about as serious as it could be without actually preventing me from continuing. I had neither broken nor dislocated any limbs. I did have a bruised or fractured rib or two, and there was ligament and muscle damage around my hips and knees. I had suffered mild concussion during the landing, and had a small retinal bleed in one eye. I seemed to have bitten my tongue and chipped a tooth.

  I could cope with all of that – and would have to, immediately. Before moving, though, I scrolled through the medical diagnostic options and authorised my suit to do whatever was required to make me functional. Micro-syringes pricked my skin around the damaged joints, and pumped a cocktail of steroids, anti-inflammatories and localised painkillers into the affected regions. I soon felt a warm numbness around my hips and knees. As awkward and uncoordinated as it made me feel, it allowed me to begin the work ahead.

  Groaning against the pain of my ribs – there was nothing the suit could do for me there – I cracked open the dropship’s hull and wriggled out of its close-fitting compartment. Somewhat unsteadily, I stood up and moved around the wreckage. Lying there on the ground, still smoking, the dropship looked far too small to have contained me, let alone to have been my home for the three months it had taken to reach Mars.