Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  Each stone had been placed in contact with the skin and allowed to undergo a process of limpet-like attachment, pushing roots deep into the existing hull armour. The stones did this on their own: if I had kept hold of one long enough, it would have tried to anchor itself into me as well. Once so anchored, the stones co-opted some of the ship’s local fabric to grow meandering interconnections, linking themselves up and also searching for a native technology with which to bind and establish a control protocol.

  Once we were done appraising the hull from a distance, Pinky and I told our suits to take us to separate worksites about a hundred metres apart and well out of sight of each other. I clamped on with my boots and dug into a pouch fixed to my chest. I took out one of the remaining stones; Pinky confirmed that he had done likewise.

  A ruby glow slipped between my fingers.

  ‘Glass, Lady Arek: I’m ready.’

  Lady Arek called back: ‘Pinky, are you in position?’

  ‘Just getting there.’ I heard him grunt as he settled onto the hull. ‘I’ve got the magic pebble. Just say the word.’

  ‘Integration seems to go more smoothly when the stones are introduced synchronously,’ Lady Arek said. ‘You will lay the three remaining pairs at the designated positions, then the ninth and final stone. Hourglass? Tell them how to proceed.’

  ‘Offer the stone up to the hull. You need not press too firmly. In fact, it would be advisable to remove your fingers from the attachment site as soon as contact is established.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘Because you may find your fingers useful in later life.’

  ‘Thank you, Glass. Is there a reason Stink and I drew the short straws on this one?’

  Lady Arek said: ‘If you feel you have the neural workflow to manage two conflicting system integration tasks with an optimum intervention lag on the order of zero point three seconds, by all means come on in.’

  ‘The thing I like about her,’ Pinky said, ‘is that she’s never in a rush to protect my feelings.’

  ‘I think we’re outflanked, Pinky,’ I said confidingly. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Ready as you are, Stink.’

  ‘Deploy,’ Glass and Lady Arek said in unison.

  I held the stone in both hands, cradling it between my fingers, then almost flung it at the hull. I pulled back, fingertips tingling as if some part of the Gideon stone’s energy had already begun to penetrate them. The stone seemed to have jumped out of my grip, slamming into the hull with some sudden magnetic attraction. It was already anchoring itself, partially submerged into what, only a moment ago, had been almost impermeable armour.

  ‘In,’ I reported.

  ‘In,’ Pinky confirmed.

  ‘Good,’ Lady Arek said. ‘Now proceed to your second installation points. Hourglass and I will commence initial integration of these stones as soon as the tendrils marry with Scythe’s avionics.’

  ‘Take your time,’ I said quietly.

  Pinky and I worked efficiently but carefully, and within an hour we had laid in the last of the four pairs of stones. That left me with the odd one to finish the job.

  ‘Do not delay your return to the lock,’ Lady Arek said, as I knelt with the stone in my grip. ‘Something happens with an unpaired stone. It seems to be the factor that encourages the others to begin skein initialisation.’

  ‘Nice to know. Shouldn’t Pinky go inside ahead of me?’

  ‘We started this together, Stink,’ came his voice. ‘May as well see it through.’

  I pushed the ninth stone nearer the hull until I felt it trying to wriggle out of my fingers. I let it go, the stone speeding out of my grip as if on a sling. It rammed into the hull, and I began my retreat.

  Pinky and I arrived back at the lock within a second of each other. Once we were within the lock, even with the outer door still open, I assumed we were safe. But our mistresses urged us to cycle through and complete the sealing off of the outer hull. ‘The skein is surface-conformal,’ Lady Arek explained. ‘It will tend to suck itself into any cavity. You would be ill-advised to be inside that cavity when it does.’

  ‘I like this more by the hour,’ Pinky said.

  We came through the lock, back into Scythe.

  The engines were already coming back on: Glass and Lady Arek not wanting to waste a second in which we might be decelerating ahead of our encounter with Bright Sun. We slipped out of our suits, stowed them, and made our way back to the control room.

  Glass and Lady Arek barely acknowledged us as we came in. They were already knee-deep in the mental task of initialising the seven new stones. Their backs were arched, their necks rigid, their mouths open, their eyelids fluttering: ill-matched cousins caught in the same rapturous fit. I was seeing what it meant to be a Demi-Conjoiner now: how each of them was able to tap into the mental resources of their progenitors, to coordinate and share mental tasks between themselves, yet without dissolving into the absolute hive consciousness of the Conjoiners.

  They had left a schematic of Scythe active, showing the meshlike connections between the Gideon stones – worming yellow lines readapting, thickening and consolidating by the second, like eldritch lightning playing over and around the hull.

  ‘Ladies weren’t kidding,’ Pinky said in a low voice. ‘It’s happening quickly.’

  ‘How much did they tell you about all this?’

  ‘Oh, plenty.’ He cocked his head, reflecting on his answer. ‘How much I understood, different question.’

  The ship juddered. Various alarms sounded. On the schematic, the yellow lines had stabilised. But now a secondary influence was asserting itself. A colourless, frosted, scale-patterned membrane was spreading out from each of the stones, clinging to the hull and merging at the contact points between the stones.

  ‘The skein?’ I asked.

  ‘Trying to form, I think.’

  I thought of the pearly, faceted membrane that had bled out of the stone when I was shown it in the stronghold, oozing over my hand – gloving it against the impact of a blade. ‘It spills out from the nodes, becomes a kind of armour sticking close to us. I don’t think we need to know what it is, Pinky, just that there are a whole range of things that won’t be able to get through it.’

  ‘That’s the level of understanding that’s worked for me for most of my life.’

  ‘It’s a sensible philosophy.’

  ‘It’d better be. It’s the only one I’ve got.’

  The ship juddered again, but less violently than before, with the alarms becoming more muted. I had the sense that these were merely protestations of irritation as the alien and human technologies came to a grumbling, bad-tempered accord.

  Lady Arek jerked and coughed. She was coming out of her trance. On the display, the pearly bloom was thinning and curdling, breaking back down into distinct regions, then sucking back into the Gideon stones.

  ‘We have stable coordination across nine,’ Lady Arek said.

  ‘Will nine do?’ I asked.

  Glass echoed Lady Arek’s emergence. For a second her eyes were still rolled back in their sockets, as if they had stuck there. She shook her head as it to rattle them loose.

  ‘Nine will have to.’ Glass nodded at the woman beside her. ‘You did well. We did well.’

  ‘It was . . . taxing,’ Lady Arek answered. Her chest heaved, as if she had just come up from under water. ‘But not unenjoyable.’

  ‘Between us, we should be able to manage the stones as we pass through the photosphere,’ Glass said. ‘It won’t be easy: the magnetohydrodynamic loads will require constant adjustment. But it will be . . .’

  ‘Fun,’ Lady Arek said, tilting her head slightly, as if the word was new to her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Bright Sun grew larger and brighter by the day. Scythe’s windows were able to simulate a perfectly realistic view, and already the star’s disc was becoming uncomfortable to stare at for any length of time. Holding my squinting eye to the curdled, storm-rid
den boundary where its glare met the black of space, I marvelled at our brilliant madness. We were going into that: dipping ourselves willingly into those molten shallows. And here was the real madness: hoping it wouldn’t kill us.

  Although we were committed to the manoeuvre, there were still many variables that needed to be considered. Everything was a brutal trade-off. The harder the ship decelerated, the less time it would need to spend in the photosphere, minimising the load on the Gideon stones and the cryo-arithmetic devices. Above a certain threshold, though, no guarantees could be made for the safety of any of us, including our sleeping passengers. The further we cut into the photospheric layer – which formed a thin, bright rind around the star of about one hundred kilometres in depth – the better hope we had of concealment when we performed the slowdown. But then everything else got harder. I was glad that Glass and Lady Arek had taken it upon themselves to weigh these factors and offer what they considered the least-bad option.

  Neither Pinky nor I quibbled with it.

  From the moment we dipped into the photosphere, until the moment we emerged from it, about an hour would pass. When we touched the photosphere, we would be travelling at about eight hundred and fifty kilometres per second relative to Bright Sun. By the time we emerged, our speed would have been reduced to a still-fast four hundred and ninety kilometres per second. That was manageable: we could shed that excess with slow, stealthy deceleration measures between the star and Ararat. But to gain that advantage we needed to decelerate continuously at ten gees while inside the photosphere.

  There was a complication.

  We couldn’t just arrow straight through the star, taking the path of least distance. That would have bored us deep into the convection layer, beyond any hope of survival. Our trajectory had to follow a precise curve, keeping within the incredibly narrow boundary of the photosphere: a margin no thicker than a planet’s atmosphere. But since our speed would be so high when we came in, we would be travelling faster than the motion of any object that just happened to be in orbit around the star at the same altitude. The effect of that would be an outward force far greater than our deceleration burn: around one hundred and four gees at the start of the manoeuvre. That was made slightly more bearable by the star’s own gravitational field, acting in the opposite direction, but it was by no means neutralised. Bright Sun was less massive than the sun, but also more compact. The result was a surface gravitational acceleration of thirty-four gees, meaning our net outward force would be a mere seventy gees.

  Against that, our ten gees of deceleration was barely consequential. We would feel it only as a slight deflection in the local vertical. But then we wouldn’t be feeling anything: those levels were far beyond any point where consciousness was feasible, even with artificial measures. Even Conjoiners were incapable of thinking at seventy-plus gees.

  But things would get better as we slowed down and the radial component of our acceleration diminished. Eighteen minutes into our manoeuvre, when we passed the midpoint of our journey through the photosphere, the outward gee-load would have reduced to just forty-five gees, which (according to Glass and Lady Arek) was approaching the point where Glass could begin to resume normal cognitive operations, and therefore have both knowledge and influence over the ship. Lady Arek would follow some while after. But it would be a lonely wait before Pinky and I were able to approach the same functionality. By the time the outward force was reduced to ten gees, the same magnitude as our deceleration, another half-hour would have passed. Even then we would feel fourteen gees, because by then the deceleration vector was no longer negligible.

  The acceleration couches were designed for sustained loads of three gees, and transient loads of between ten and twenty. Beyond that, we all needed specialised protection and life-support measures, including Glass and Lady Arek.

  For those of us who were still awake, these turned out to be our suits, already engineered to cushion their hosts against a range of stresses. The suits were normally full of air, but each was capable of immersing their subjects in a dense but breathable fluid. No part of that would be enjoyable, but it would be survivable. As for the evacuees, their reefersleep caskets could be auto-modified to provide an equivalent degree of protection. Scythe knew what it was being called upon to do and had taken it upon itself to make the necessary arrangements. The caskets had gained additional footings, rooting them more solidly to the floor. Within them, a dark-tinted gel seemed to have been introduced to fill the space around the bodies, and perhaps provide some support from within. Elsewhere, similar signs of preparation were evident. The ship was steeling itself, reinforcing weaknesses, eliminating superfluous design features, consolidating its maze of rooms and corridors. It was becoming an iron needle, with the sole purpose of slipping through the winking eye of the photosphere. It was a living castle that had begun to gird and buttress itself for war, shedding the fineries of peace.

  As Bright Sun kept growing, so Glass and Lady Arek kept refining the simulations, calculating to the second when they were likely to be able to issue their last useful commands. One might last a little longer than the other, but by the time they had both succumbed, the ship would need to be a master of its own fate. They had given it some leeway to deflect its course up and down, steering around any developing storms in the photosphere – or perhaps exploiting them for maximum cover.

  By the same token, we knew exactly how late we could delay our entry into the suits. Too late, and the cushioning medium would not have time to build up to the necessary support pressure before the seventy gees came in.

  The last two hours saw Bright Sun swelling to a third of the sky, then half of it: a blinding orange-yellow furnace, as if the end of the universe were a blazing wall. Like nearly any star, it only looked calm and unchanging from a distance. This close, its surface had become a storm-tossed sea of prominences and rifts, with vast convection cells welling up from beneath.

  Scythe went into free-fall for its final approach, and at thirty minutes before contact, Pinky and I took refuge in the suits, with Glass and Lady Arek monitoring.

  The immersion fluid lapped into my mouth, into my throat and nasal passages. No part of my body was yet ready to give in to drowning, and the gag reflex was beyond any conscious control. I convulsed several times before succumbing to the inevitable.

  Glass came through: ‘Can you hear me, Clavain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. You’ll start feeling drowsy very shortly. The suit will use mechanical and electrical intervention to keep you alive, so don’t be surprised when you wake up with a few cracked ribs and a headache the size of a solar system. Since you don’t have to do anything except survive, unconsciousness need not concern you.’

  ‘In other words, I’m baggage.’

  ‘Valuable baggage,’ Glass said, as if that were meant to make me feel better.

  On the long fall in from the last million kilometres, the stresses on Scythe continued to mount. The bulk of it was thermal. To begin with, the conventional materials and cooling systems of the ship were easily able to re-radiate the heat, but not without cost. Within a vacuum a re-radiant object could only stay cool by glowing, and to glow was to make oneself known. The background temperature of space was a little under three kelvin above absolute zero: a ship only had to stand out against that by one or two kelvin to make itself a very tempting target.

  So, long before we needed them, the cryo-arithmetic engines had already spun up to algorithmic speed, performing acts of occult calculation. By moving symbols around, playing chequers with the basic informational granularity of local spacetime, the engines were able to swindle the incorruptible bookkeeping of classical and quantum thermodynamics. The individual cheats were subtle and bought almost no gain, but the cryo-arithmetic engines ran them over and over again, thrashing through the same cycles until the effects became first measurable and then macroscopic.

  It worked. But the nearer we got to Bright Sun, the more furiously the engines had to compute
, and the closer they came to a feared instability – a cliff-edge beyond which their algorithmic cycles became self-reinforcing, self-accelerating. It was said that a ship succumbing to this condition opened a mouth inside itself to the winds of hell, a mouth that might never close. It was down to Lady Arek and Glass to push the cryo-arithmetics all the way to that brink, but never once over it.

  No cryo-arithmetic engines had ever had to work so hard as those of Scythe. Normally all they were asked to do was cool areas of a ship by a few hundred kelvin. Now the demand was for thousands of degrees, and the cooling gradient was inversed. It no longer mattered how hot the outside of the ship got: there was no chance of detecting it now, within the gathering howl of the photosphere. But the inside had to remain cool enough not to overload the hundreds of life-support devices, each of which contained a warm, salty bag of water and cells with a mind and memories.

  As Scythe dipped into the photosphere, it was hitting an atmosphere of entirely ionised particles. Ships encountered plasmas all the time, and mostly sailed through them without consequence. Indeed, we had already descended through a coronal plasma that was hundreds of thousands of times hotter than the photosphere. But while the temperature of the particles in that plasma might have been high, meaning that each had an enormous kinetic energy, there were not nearly enough of them in a given volume to begin overwhelming our systems. It was not like that down in the photosphere. There, the temperature was a modest five thousand kelvin – but the heat capacity of a given volume was far greater. We were flying through a medium with a particle density comparable to a breathable atmosphere at sea level, except that it was as hot as a furnace and we were passing through it at hundreds of kilometres per second.

  I saw us. In my mind’s eye I looked down from above the photosphere, into a blinding sea. A black, needle-sharp form arrowed through that sea, parting it like a hypodermic. Mach cones swept back from its tip and tail, barbs of savage shock. They made me think of feathered plumes, diamond-patterned. A curdled wake, tens of thousands of kilometres long, followed our passage. At its boundary it became fractal, consumed in diminishing recursive iterations. But the sea was ever-seething and soon swallowed any trace of us.