Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Twelve hours until we lose storm cover,’ I reported. ‘No other storm of comparable extent predicted for the next seven days.’

  Hope made a diffident sucking sound. ‘Couldn’t be nearer the knuckle.’

  ‘It’s sufficient. Five hours to the objective, one on site, five back. Maybe less than one on site, if all goes well. We’ll be back under shelter with at least an hour’s margin – but only if we leave now.’

  ‘Or sit it out until a longer storm.’

  ‘The longer we delay, the more chance we’ll give the spiders to reach the capsule ahead of us. We’ve planned for this.’ I turned to Charity. ‘Five hours will be tough on all of us, and there’ll be no chance to stop. It all hangs on you when we get to the Defection Capsule. I know we’re all tired after the drop, but this is probably our only opportunity.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ Charity affirmed.

  ‘Good – we’re depending on you.’ Almost as an afterthought I added: ‘By the way, control confirms your observation, Charity. The fourth dropship malfunctioned at the last moment.’

  ‘So no fourth suit,’ Charity said.

  I nodded, examining the spare visor that had come with our supplies. ‘A complication. But we’ll find a workaround.’

  Hope, next to me, said nothing.

  We stowed our inventoried equipment, selected what we would need for this part of the operation, and left the rest in the shelter where the walls would keep off the worst of the dust. The force of the storm was actually very slight. There was no chance of anything being blown over, or blown away – but the invasive, scouring dust was a constant problem. It always had been. Always would be on Mars. Now we depended on it, for no surveillance capability accessible to the Conjoiners should be able to track our movements under the storm’s screen.

  We deployed our stilts and moved out in close formation, guided by the transponder signal from the Defection Capsule.

  Two human faces were there as I emerged from reefersleep.

  Lady Arek had not changed to any noticeable degree. But Glass was a different version of herself. She had become thinner and steelier, the bones around her dark-margined eyes more sharply defined, her skin drawn tighter onto the armature beneath it. I thought of war drums and bowstrings.

  ‘Clavain, talk to us.’

  ‘Give him time, Glass. You forget how hard this is, for those without our gifts.’

  I tried to speak. My tongue felt like some dry, swollen maggot cramming my mouth.

  ‘Lady . . . Arek. Glass.’

  I blinked some of the gumminess out of my eyes. The lids were stiff canvas, rough against my eyeballs. Everything in me was glued to every other part, as if I had been part mummified in some hard-setting resin.

  ‘He remembers names, at least,’ Lady Arek commented to Glass.

  ‘More than names. Where are we?’

  Glass reached in and bundled me out of the casket with as much consideration as if I were a sack of meat with a few old bones tossed in. ‘What do you remember about our destination?’

  ‘Mars,’ I coughed, as she rough-handled me. ‘We were going to Mars.’

  She flung me onto some kind of couch she must have brought alongside the casket. ‘Not Mars, you bloody fool. Definitely not Mars.’

  ‘He is confused,’ Lady Arek said, with a faint pitying smile.

  Glass slapped my cheek. ‘Concentrate, Clavain! John the Revelator died. You remember John the Revelator. For pity’s sake tell me you remember John the Revelator . . .’

  ‘Something about . . .’ I had to wait while my brain shuttled impulses around its warming loom and dredged up fragments of memory. It was like a cold engine trying to run up to speed. ‘Gideon stones. And on our way to . . .’ I grunted, trying to force it out of me. ‘Albertine. Amduman.’

  ‘Ararat,’ Lady Arek said.

  I nodded fiercely. ‘Ararat. Where the Pattern . . . the Pattern . . .’

  ‘Jugglers,’ she helped.

  ‘Pattern Jugglers,’ I echoed. ‘To swim with them. To learn something.’ Like a lifting fog, some sort of clarity began to form. ‘Did we make it to Ararat? Glass was going to wake up before the rest of us . . .’

  ‘I did,’ Glass said. ‘We’re nearly there.’

  I pressed a finger to my brow, massaging away a knot. ‘How nearly is nearly?’

  ‘In-system, about to complete our slowdown phase. We just need to trim a little more speed, then we can make a ballistic crossing to Ararat.’

  ‘Tell him the rest,’ Lady Arek said.

  I swung my legs off the couch, forcing mobility into my limbs. ‘There’s a problem. If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t be waking me with this urgency. You said you’d bring us out well in advance of our arrival. An hour or a day here or there shouldn’t matter if we’re still weeks from Ararat. So what is it?’

  ‘A problem arose with the integration of the Gideon stones,’ Glass said.

  ‘Try rephrasing that in something other than the passive voice, there’s a good Glass,’ said Lady Arek.

  Glass shot a glare at her. ‘I attempted to embed three of the Gideon stones. If they’re to be useful to us, they must work in conjunction with the cryo-arithmetic engines. Unfortunately, there was a conflict.’

  Lady Arek chided: ‘And instead of waiting for my counsel, how did you react to this conflict?’

  ‘I pressed on, because only I have the necessary understanding of this ship’s systems.’

  ‘An understanding that proved lamentably insufficient when put to the test.’

  Their bickering was worse than the reefersleep revival. ‘Enough,’ I said, raising a hand. ‘What happened? Clearly the ship is all right, or we wouldn’t be here. Are the stones damaged? The cryo-arithmetic engines?’

  ‘There has been no lasting damage,’ Glass said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But there is a complication,’ Lady Arek said. ‘A significant one. We have . . . not been able to arrive at a joint position concerning the best course of action ahead of us.’

  ‘What about Pinky?’

  ‘Pinky has declared his opinion,’ Glass said.

  ‘Fine. I’ll declare mine, as soon as I know what the hell it is I’m supposed to be declaring one on.’

  ‘Can you walk, Clavain?’ Lady Arek asked.

  ‘Give me a moment. Or several.’

  She jammed an arm under my left armpit and heaved me off the couch. Glass grunted and took my other side. Between them they dragged me out of the room while I tried to get my legs to make slippery contact with the floor. They felt like two flimsy tentacles scraping beneath me.

  ‘You are right about the ship,’ Glass said. ‘All systems are now nominal. As you will have noticed, we are in a deceleration configuration.’

  ‘Barras, Probably Rose and the others?’

  Lady Arek seemed pleased by my concern. ‘They are well. But still asleep, for now. It is probably for the best that they remain that way, until we have resolved the complication ahead of us. We shall wake them once we are on Ararat. If all is well, that will be as far as they ever need to travel.’

  ‘Are there wolves around Ararat?’

  ‘If there are, they are concealed for now,’ Glass answered.

  ‘The problem is that their presence must be assumed, even in the absence of evidence,’ Lady Arek said.

  I nodded. ‘This ship can run silently, if it needs to.’

  ‘So it would have done,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately, Glass’s experiments have made that impossible. Tell him. He will hear all of it before long, from your lips or mine.’

  ‘The systems conflict . . .’ Glass, for once, was tongue-tied. ‘The conflict I created.’

  Lady Arek urged: ‘Continue.’

  ‘I pressed on when I should have backed away. My tests led to a cascade of failures and the ship went into a coma, save for life-support power. The darkdrives defaulted to a failsafe condition.’

  ‘In other words,’ Lady Arek said, ‘they stopped.’ />
  ‘When we should have been slowing down, we were not,’ Glass went on. ‘It took time to bring the ship back to normality. As a consequence, we’re now coming in too fast.’

  ‘Too fast for what?’ I asked.

  ‘To avoid being seen,’ Lady Arek said. ‘If we operate the engines at the necessary level to complete our approach to Ararat, we will emit detectable drive products. If there are wolves in the vicinity, they will undoubtedly track us.’

  We had come to the control room. Pinky was already there, occupying one of the command seats, spooning something into his mouth and reviewing a set of scrolling simulations. The ship had configured its manual controls to suit his fingers. We nodded at each other, two acquaintances who had only lately spoken, and whose last exchange was separated only by a single sleep. That the sleep had taken a decade, and might well have been our last was, for the moment, immaterial.

  ‘How much’ve they told you, Stink?’

  ‘That we have to slow down a little more, and it’s hard to see how we can do it without making ourselves known to the wolves. How are you?’

  ‘Doing well for a pig.’

  ‘Then I’m glad.’

  ‘Outline the proposition, Pinky, if you would be so good.’

  ‘My very great pleasure, your ladyship.’ He rubbed at his snout, thoughtfully. ‘Okay. You settled, Stink? Buckled in? You’ll need to be.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘We need cover. That’s the essence of it, Stink. Some nice moon or planet we can screen ourselves behind while we kill this extra speed Glass has so kindly given us.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But the kicker is, there isn’t any moon or planet that works for us. Not with our approach vector the way it is, and not with any reasonable guess as to where wolves might be hiding, if they’re here at all.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if they weren’t.’

  ‘It certainly would, Stink. Still, there is an option on the table. A concealment method. Works very well under almost any set of assumptions. We use P Eridani A: the star we used to call Bright Sun.’

  ‘Good . . . ?’ I said provisionally, certain there was an aspect to this that I was not yet seeing. ‘There’s a vector that lets us hide behind the star while we complete our slowdown?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Glass said. ‘We won’t be employing Bright Sun as a mask. We’ll be using the star itself. Scythe has projected a course that allows us to skim close to the star, dip beneath the photosphere and execute our final slowdown while we’re within it.’

  I laughed. It was the only sane response. ‘I must have some post-revival confusion. I could have sworn you said inside the star.’

  ‘It isn’t as bad as it sounds.’

  ‘No,’ Pinky said. ‘It’s much, much worse.’

  I regarded Glass. ‘You’re not stupid, and I’m reasonably sure you’re not suicidal. Explain how this helps us.’

  ‘Good, Clavain – at least you’re open-minded. The fact is, we’re only considering a brief dip into the photosphere of the star: barely different to skimming the atmosphere of a planet.’

  ‘Except it’s a star.’

  ‘Don’t get too hung up on that. The photosphere is merely a transitional zone where the mean free paths for photon collisions undergo a large change. From Scythe’s point of view, it will be no different to moving from one plasma environment to a somewhat denser, more excited environment containing the same plasma.’

  ‘Except it’s a star,’ I repeated.

  ‘Inside the photosphere,’ Glass continued, undaunted, ‘the ambient energy background will screen our emissions very effectively. We can complete our slowdown and emerge at the correct speed to make a safe crossing to Ararat. Some thermal transfer will have taken place during the passage, but simulations indicate that it will be within the dissipative capacity of the cryo-arithmetic engines.’

  ‘“Simulations” and “indicate”. Two words to inspire confidence, if ever there were any.’

  ‘He’s as thrilled about it as I was,’ Pinky said.

  I turned to Lady Arek. ‘You’re at least as smart as Glass. Is any part of this even remotely feasible?’

  ‘It is . . . not without its challenges. But I have reviewed the same projections as Glass. I believe the proposal to be fundamentally sound.’

  ‘Now tell him the fun part,’ Pinky said.

  ‘The manoeuvre isn’t feasible without a contribution from the Gideon stones,’ Glass said. ‘The dynamic loads on Scythe, both from the ambient forces, and the deceleration pattern, result in terminal hull collapse under all simulations, absent the Gideon stones.’

  ‘Absent these almost entirely untested Gideon stones,’ I said. ‘Exactly how many did you get to work, Glass, before it all went wrong?’

  ‘Three. Two, if you wish to split hairs.’

  ‘And how many will it take to work?’

  ‘All nine.’

  I shrugged. ‘Well, that’s no problem at all.’

  ‘With my assistance in coordinating the integration,’ Lady Arek said, ‘it may not be so difficult as the first time. There is, also, a secondary consideration. The stones must be made to work eventually. If they fail us now, at least we will know that the rest of our plan is hopeless.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, sighing my acceptance. ‘That’s the extreme option. I don’t like it, but I’m prepared to believe that it might work, if Glass and Lady Arek both work at it. What’s the back-up plan?’

  ‘We abandon our approach,’ Glass said. ‘Slip through the system at our current speed, hope that we’re not detected, return to interstellar space, wait until we’ve gained enough distance, then reverse our course.’

  ‘Which will add time to our rendezvous.’

  Glass nodded. ‘About two years, with an unavoidable margin of uncertainty – and at the end of it we’ll still have to make the Gideon stones work en masse.’

  ‘I think I like being late better than I like being burned to a crisp inside a star. But it’s not that simple a comparison, is it?’

  ‘Any moving object runs a chance of detection, especially passing through the dusty, magnetic environment of a solar system,’ Lady Arek said. ‘The more times we do it, the greater likelihood of being seen.’

  I looked back at the scrolling simulations. ‘Give me your honest answer, both of you. If the systems work as they should, is this really something we can survive?’

  I watched Glass for the slightest trace of hesitation or equivocation. But her answer was immediate and firm.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lady Arek?’

  ‘It is within our capabilities.’

  I turned to Pinky. ‘They tell me you’ve already weighed in.’

  ‘I have, Stink.’

  ‘And your position?’

  ‘I think it would be better if you answered first,’ Lady Arek said. ‘Pinky and I are split on how best to proceed, so your vote will settle things. You may reflect on it for a little while. Our course needs to be modified one way or the other, and the earlier we do it the smaller the possibility of detection. A decision within the hour would be exceedingly helpful . . . not least because there will be work to be done if we go with the sun-skimming manoeuvre.’

  ‘I could spend ten hours weighing those alternatives and it wouldn’t help.’

  ‘There is that,’ Lady Arek agreed.

  ‘If we don’t get to Ararat, I don’t get to meet my brother. Without the information you expect to learn from him, no other part of our plan has a hope. And without our plan, the wolves will ultimately destroy us.’ I breathed in. ‘In essence, you’re telling me to make a decision which could save or condemn whatever’s left of humanity.’

  ‘No pressure, Stink.’

  ‘Then I go with my intuition. It’s all or nothing: we try to reach Ararat on this pass.’

  Lady Arek nodded solemnly. ‘Is that your final decision?’

  ‘It is.’ Then, to Pinky: ‘I hope you won’t resent me for that.�
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  Rolls of frown corrugated his forehead. ‘Why would I? You just sided with me.’

  ‘I assumed you’d have regarded this as complete madness.’

  ‘Because pigs are said to be risk-averse?’

  ‘Because pigs are sane.’

  ‘The dissenting opinion was mine,’ Lady Arek said. ‘I was moved to reject Glass’s plan. I still am. But now the majority has spoken, and I abide by it. You and Pinky have decided our course.’

  She closed her eyes.

  With the engines damped, Pinky and I suited up and went outside. We floated out of the weightless ship and allowed our momentum to drift us a couple of hundred metres away from the hull before slowing down with suit thrusters. Then we turned around to inspect the transformations that had already been wrought on Scythe.

  We could just about see the ship. It was a black form against blackness, but faint lustres of highlight played across the form, defining its shape.

  P Eridani was a double star, made up of two similar K-type dwarves. Ararat only orbited one of these stars, P Eridani A, the so-called Bright Sun, with the B component always being more distant. Bright Sun was obvious to us now, much more luminous than the seemingly smaller and fainter counterpart. But although it was the most obvious thing in the sky, even at our present distance Bright Sun only emitted a dim golden pall. Most of the light available to us was coming from the floodlights built into our suits. The ship could have made itself darker still, soaking up all the photons we fired at it, but we were still far enough out to be able to dispense with such precautions.

  Pinky and I carried the remaining seven stones, three with him and four with me. The two that had successfully integrated were tiny in comparison to the ship, but they stood out like warts on an otherwise smooth face.

  I had handled a single stone before, and been shown something of its capabilities. Their real usefulness only came out when they were employed in numbers, though, according to functional principles Lady Arek and Glass had done their best to explain to me.