Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  The cryo-arithmetic engines were safeguarding Scythe from the heat of the star, but it took the Gideon stones to armour the ship against the pressure and shock of moving through the photosphere. The problem was that these two forms of defence tended to squabble . . . and it took a pair of human minds, or at least a pair of augmented minds, to resolve each knot of discord before it engulfed the ship. When the stones and the engines tussled, one or both had to be adjusted, backed off, or sometimes strengthened. If an error were made, an instability allowed to propagate, the ship would have all the durability of a moth’s wing touching fire.

  And all the while this was happening, every other system of the ship had to operate at its limit, including the Conjoiner drives, pushed as hard into the red as was ever the case. But the engines only gave us ten gees of deceleration along our line of flight: they were insufficient to provide the seventy gees of downforce needed to maintain that curving path. That component came from the magnetohydrodynamic interaction of Scythe’s hull with the plasma, with the ship using its engine spars as control surfaces. Without the Gideon stones, Glass had assured me, the spars would have buckled and torn away under the load, taking the engines with them.

  Then our difficulties would have been of an entirely different complexion, but at least they would have been mercifully brief.

  I dreamed of a beach.

  A flat black beach, stretching limitlessly, and a lone figure buckled nearly to the horizontal as they stooped against the wind – a wind as luminous and scalding as molten metal, searing the eye until the figure melted away into the whiteness, diminishing to a little star-shaped speck, and then flaking away into scouring white oblivion.

  ‘Clavain. Stop mumbling.’

  Hands were easing me out of the suit. I let them. I had no power to either resist or assist them. I was a sack of body parts, a gristly mess held together by pain and stubbornness and the distant, nagging sense that I still had unfinished business.

  ‘Where,’ I said, too weary to frame my word as a question.

  ‘We’re out, on our emergence trajectory. Scythe is weightless now, but we have more than enough speed to escape the gravity well. Once the ship has run a self-repair cycle on itself, fixing damage from the stresses we accrued in the photosphere, I will begin our gradual slowdown for Ararat. Our atmospheric entry interface will be in approximately . . . fifty-three hours.’

  ‘I’m all right, thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t ask. You are conscious, therefore the suit did its job. Do your ribs hurt?’

  ‘There’s no part of me that doesn’t hurt. How’s Pinky?’

  ‘Unconscious for the time being. We’ll keep him that way for now. He’s going to need to be strong when we get to Ararat, for your sake, because there’ll be a limit to my effectiveness. Now, we need to talk about Lady Arek . . .’

  Through everything, I still managed to frown.

  A little warm spark flaked away from Bright Sun. This was not unusual. Tongues of plasma were lifting from the surface all the time, snagged in pincers of magnetic flux. Sometimes they fell back; on other occasions they broke off into phlegmatic fragments, coughed all the way into space. For a little while, as it rose, that warm spark gave no indication that it was anything other than one of these spitballs of stellar material, destined to thin out and cool and eventually lash its way across the magnetic fields of the planets orbiting Bright Sun. Nothing about it was odd or distinctive enough to warrant further interest.

  The blob cooled, but it did not disperse. It was our ship, rapidly chilling itself back down to two point seven kelvin above absolute zero. By the time it broke free of the star’s chromosphere, it had become undetectably dark and cold, and even as its propulsion systems cycled back to readiness, they did so stealthily, emitting nothing that could be detected by human or wolf faculties.

  Inside that ship, still weightless, Glass and I floated in seated positions facing each other, while my friend Scorpio remained in his suit.

  ‘Something happened as we were completing our slowdown,’ Glass said. ‘An instability developed in the interplay between the stones and the cryo-arithmetic engines. More than we could neutralise. A flutter, on the outside of the ship, magnifying instead of diminishing. The stresses increased. The conflicting influences put a torsional load on the hull . . . and a stone began to detach, peeling away from its anchorage. It was the ninth, the one we placed last of all.’

  ‘You said nine stones would suffice. I’m sure, with your talents, you could have found a way to make do with eight.’

  ‘And now we must, because eight is all we have left.’ Glass composed herself. She was more rattled, more distraught, than I had ever known her. ‘It was not just the fear of losing one stone. Unless there was an intervention, there was a danger of the loose stone ripping the others away as it detached. We could not allow that. Would not allow it. One of us had to go outside, Clavain. Out onto the hull, during the photospheric passage. One of us had to resecure the stone, or cut it away sacrificially, before it took the rest . . . and Lady Arek went.’

  ‘No one could have survived going outside, Glass. We were inside a star.’

  ‘It was survivable, provided Lady Arek moved quickly. It was survivable.’ She repeated it, as if to assert the fact of it against her own crumbling judgement. ‘It was survivable. If the suit remained in contact with the hull, the armouring skein would have conformed to its surface, protecting Lady Arek against the plasma shock. The cooling demands on the suit would have been extreme, but so long as it maintained thermal contact with the ship, the cryo-arithmetic engines would have taken over most of the refrigeration burden . . .’

  ‘Glass, don’t tell me you sent another human being outside while we were inside a star. Don’t tell me you ever thought this was sane.’

  ‘One of us had to go. ‘

  ‘Why the hell couldn’t you have sent a suit, or a drone?’

  ‘Autonomy was needed. The plasma would have blocked any control signals. Sometimes you just have to send meat in a tin.’

  ‘She’s not meat!”

  ‘We’re all meat. One of us had to remain, to coordinate the stones as they readjusted to the intervention. We . . . debated, Clavain. Traded scenarios. Formed a duelling adversarial network. Each tried to convince the other we were right.’ Glass shook her head in wonder. ‘But she triumphed over me. She was best suited to going outside, and I was best suited to controlling the ship. No ambiguity, no doubt, no hard feelings. This wasn’t about courage or sacrifice or nobility, it was about functional usefulness.’

  ‘We’re here,’ I said slowly. ‘And you said we’re on our way to Ararat. So whatever happened out there . . . we didn’t die.’ My voice broke on rising anger. ‘So what the hell happened? How is it we are here and Lady Arek isn’t?’

  ‘We were in contact. Neural exchange. But the packets were fragmenting, the further she got from the lock. She was struggling against the plasma front, moving towards the instability . . . we were inside each other’s heads, Clavain. In those last few seconds she opened up more of herself to me than I ever saw before. As if she trusted me, finally. As if she knew.’

  ‘That she wasn’t going to make it?’

  ‘She must have reached the ninth stone in time to cut it loose. That’s all I know. Scythe detected . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Scythe detected something falling away from it, very quickly. Falling away into the plasma.’ Glass reached around her back and retrieved something that she must have had clipped to her waist. It was a boser pistol.

  She pressed it into my fingers. I closed them around its cold, weightless heft.

  ‘There’s a point to this?’

  ‘I’ve set the yield to an appropriate setting. It won’t do any damage to the ship, just to me. I’ve disabled any intervention protocols.’

  ‘I’m not going to kill you.’

  ‘Why not. Isn’t that what you want?’ Before I could react – for all her infirmity, Glass was
still fast – she had grabbed my wrist and twisted my arm so that the gun was aimed directly at her forehead. ‘Do it. Kill me. Kill me again.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I let Lady Arek die. My mistake, in the first place. My errors.’

  ‘You weren’t to know.’

  ‘I knew what I was doing to you! I destroyed everything you cared for. I stole your life away. The moment you had happiness, I crushed it. I ripped you away from the people you loved, and who loved you. And you promised to kill me for it.’ Her voice became a snarl. ‘So do it!’

  I tried to deflect the pistol, but Glass was stronger. ‘I’m not going to kill you. Not now.’

  ‘You made a vow.’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’ I breathed in hard, every part of me shaking except my hand and wrist, which remained in her grasp. ‘I didn’t. A dead man made that vow. He’s gone now.’ I paused, shuddering from within. ‘I was never him.’ I started weeping, fiercely and uncontrollably. ‘Whatever I am, it’s not the good man who made that vow.’ I swallowed, used my other hand to scrape the tears from my eyes. ‘What is it you want from me, Glass? What did I ever do to you? What the hell did you mean by kill me again?’

  ‘You murdered me once. Left me for dead. But it turns out, not quite dead enough. Now, all I’m asking is that you do the job properly.’ She nodded, her eyes meeting mine encouragingly. ‘Go ahead, Clavain. Finish it off.’

  ‘No.’

  There was a finality in my answer that must have persuaded her. Glass moved my hand aside, took the boser pistol back. ‘You won’t do it now. Not ever?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I needed to know. I thought that this was the simplest way.’ Glass reached out again, but instead of pinning my hand she drew me into her, hugging me close, showing no consideration for my bruised or fractured ribs. I wrapped my arms around Glass, and between us we stilled the tremors running through our bodies.

  ‘What are we?’ I asked.

  ‘Two ragged soldiers,’ Glass said. ‘A long way from the war that made us.’

  ‘You’re not as angry with me as I thought you’d be,’ I said to Pinky, after I had helped him out of reefersleep and explained the bare facts of our situation.

  ‘Why would I hold you responsible for this, Stink?’ he asked, looking at me oddly.

  ‘It’s all because of me. Us being here. It’s on me, in the end. I didn’t ask for it, but that doesn’t mean I’m absolved of responsibility.’

  ‘Some of it’s on you,’ he admitted thoughtfully. ‘But not all of it. This was Glass’s screw-up, all along. If she hadn’t messed around with those stones, we’d never have needed to do any dumb shit like trying to fly through a star.’

  ‘Lady Arek always thought it was unwise.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘It’s not right that she’s the one who ended up paying for it.’

  ‘There we’re on the same page, Stink. But I’ve got some news for you. Universe doesn’t give a damn about what’s fair and right. And Lady Arek knew that better than any of us.’ He paused, shook his head. ‘No, it’s not all on you, not this time. And you know why you can be sure of that?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked down at his wrists. ‘Because I’ve got two good hands, and you’re still breathing.’

  Part Six

  ARARAT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  We saw nothing of the Defection Capsule until the last possible moment, when it loomed out of the scudding dust, angled onto its side and partially buried.

  I slowed my stilt-walk, struck by the way that the capsule seemed larger, darker, and more ominous than the orbital scans had led me to expect. From space it had seemed a clear tactical objective: a fallen metal object with useful things inside it. That did not mean that we had been blasé about our chances. There had been numerous things to be concerned about, from the possibility of our activities being detected, to the occupants being dead, to Charity’s takeover protocol not working in the way it was intended. All I knew was that my team had been as prepared as it could be, and if some aspect of the mission failed, it would not be due to any negligence on our part. For all that, though, I had not been ready for the physical presence of the capsule, its brooding inertness, the sense that it was waiting for us, inviting trespass.

  I went a little closer while Hope and Charity circled around the back. There were no bad surprises so far. If the capsule had come down in such a way that its door was buried, we were in trouble. We would have to dig it out, in the middle of the storm, and then put things back in a way that looked completely natural, while making sure no dust got anywhere inside the lock itself. The scans had offered some confidence about the orientation, but there had still been room for doubt. Until now.

  I played wrist and helmet torchlight across the hull, and after a moment the others turned on their lights as well. It felt reckless, but we had planned to use the torches. While the storm continued – blacking out the noonday sky as if it were midnight – there was no chance of detection.

  Considering the violence of its approach, re-entry and landing, the Defection Capsule was in excellent condition. A beacon blinked on and off near the narrower end of the roughly cone-shaped vehicle. The transponder signal was still sounding its two-tone lullaby. The airlock door was entirely exposed, but not tilted so far off the ground that we would have trouble climbing up to it.

  Really, it could not have been more helpfully orientated.

  ‘Charity?’ I asked.

  ‘Proceed.’

  ‘Hope?’

  ‘Proceed.’

  ‘Concurrence.’ I reached up and attached the magnetic limpet that contained the override and control mechanism for this type of lock. We had tested it on captured Conjoiner assets and had no reason to expect it not to work . . . but still there was a moment of unbearable tension before the limpet’s status lights pulsed red to green and the lock ground open against the rush of the storm.

  Leaving the limpet in place, we climbed into the lock, only retracting our stilts at the last moment. It was a squeeze, but we had trained for it and expected that the lock would accommodate all three of us.

  The lock was of rugged but dependable design. The outer door closed, and an automatic sequence flooded the chamber with air from the capsule’s pressure tanks. After two minutes, our suits detected one standard atmosphere and the inner door opened to a dim, red-lit interior.

  I went first and swept my torch around the cramped confines of the capsule. There was just one compartment, with six Conjoiner recruits strapped into hammock-like webs around the in-curving walls. Between the hammocks were windows and some rudimentary controls and life-support devices.

  My light fell on the faces of the recruits. They were either unconscious or dead. None wore spacesuits, but each had a transparent plastic mask over their nose and mouth. Their eyes were closed. In repose, they looked saintlike and calm.

  ‘Your show, Charity.’

  She unpacked her medical diagnostic devices and went to work. There were paste-on trans-cranial neural scanners and clip-on blood-sampling cuffs. She fixed them on without fuss. The devices performed their rapid scans, analyses and cogitations, and a series of summaries scrolled across Charity’s wrist and faceplate readouts.

  ‘All viable.’

  ‘Why aren’t they awake?’ I asked.

  She indicated drug catheters in the recruits. ‘Deep, medically induced comas to conserve shipboard resources. They’d have known there was a high likelihood of a long wait on the surface, so they came prepared to go into comas. It’s not as efficient as hibernation, but much simpler to instigate.’

  ‘Are they all spider?’ Hope asked.

  ‘Confirmed.’

  Not all recruits to the Conjoiner cause had been touched by the Transenlightenment. Some were just misguided pilgrims, convinced that there was a better life for them on the Martian surface. But in this case, according to Cha
rity’s devices, all six were already primed and ready to join Galiana’s army. Their neural hardware had been infected and transformed. Each would have already experienced some foretaste of life among the Conjoined.

  ‘Interneural traffic?’ I enquired.

  ‘Minimal protocols only,’ Charity answered. ‘If they were to crank up their brains to normal Conjoiner clock-speed, they’d soon burn through whatever’s left in this life-support system.’

  ‘Choose your best candidate,’ I said. ‘And one for the short straw.’

  There was not really much of a choice to be made. The six were all of similar vigour, similar age. But one had to be the host, and one had to be the stooge, to conceal our use of the lock.

  Charity made her choices, and offered them to Hope and me.

  ‘Proceed,’ I said.

  Charity took out more equipment. The injection device was a skeletal crown, which she fitted and adjusted around the skull of the middle-aged woman she had selected. Studded at intervals around the crown were the yellow nubs of nano-injectors which would wage shock warfare on the Conjoiner hardware. They had been tested and tested, and left only microscopic blemishes after the injection process. But the process was still fraught.

  ‘Weapons at readiness,’ Hope said.

  Faith and I took out small, semi-automatic pistols, ready to shoot and kill any of the five other Conjoiners should they respond to the injection process being performed on the sixth. The paste-on devices were designed to block or spoof short-range neural traffic, but until now they had never been tested in field conditions.

  ‘We’re ready,’ Charity said.

  ‘Continue,’ I said.

  She issued a command via her wrist interface and the injection crown plunged its yellow fangs into the subject’s skull. Instantly there was a reaction: a jerk from the subject, a shocked surfacing to consciousness, eyes wide and fearful. The Conjoiner systems were detecting the onset of the attack and raising their host’s cortical alert level.