Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Crime & Mystery; Space Opera

Synopsis

A stellar new science fiction adventure from the author who redefined space opera, set in his bestselling Revelation Space universe.For thirty years a tiny band of humans has been sheltering in the caverns of an airless, crater-pocked world called Michaelmas. Beyond their solar system lie the ruins of human interstellar civilization, stalked by a ruthless, infinitely patient cybernetic entity determined to root out the last few bands of survivors. One man has guided the people of Michaelmas through the hardest of times, and given them hope against the wolves: Miguel de Ruyter.When a lone human ship blunders into their system, and threatens to lead the wolves to Michaelmas, de Ruyter embarks on a desperate, near-suicide mission to prevent catastrophe. But an encounter with a refugee from the ship—the enigmatic woman who calls herself only Glass—leads to de Ruyter's world being turned upside down.

Release date: July 27, 2021

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 432

Sample

Victorine was painting a wall. I looked down at her as she added a touch of detail to the mural’s darkening edge. Cubes swarmed in from space, each rendered in two efficient strokes of midnight blue and black. They stood out against the ruddier background of the dust disk, gathering into sinuous straggly formations, loops, and chains, before coagulating into larger and more ominous forms—dark, dense masses prickling with lightning like an armada of thunderheads. Victorine had done none of that: it was all the work of other schoolchildren, some long grown or long gone.

But she was adding to it, layering paint over paint. From out of the thunderheads burst a pack of creatures: twisted, straining, mad-eyed forms of muscle and claw, fur and tooth.

“I know they’re not really wolves,” she said, anticipating any remark I might have been about to make. “I know that’s just what we call them. But they might as well be wolves.”

“You’ve never seen wolves.”

“I don’t need to.”

“They’re a reminder of what drove us here,” I said quietly. “That’s why they’re on the mural. But you’re painting them as if they’re about to pounce out of the sky. Is that how you feel?”

Victorine set her brush down on the lip of the metal box she cradled in her other arm. The materials inside it were improvised: chemical pigments and stabilising emulsions that had once served some other purpose in the great plan of settlement. There were colours denied to her, because the right ingredients had never been found, or could not be spared for something as frivolous as a school mural. Her brushes were crude sticks tipped with coarse eruptions of stiff animal hair from the cattle stocks we kept for food and clothing. The paintbox was itself the front compartment of a life-support pack, long-since dismantled and repurposed for its vital treasures. That Victorine could make any sort of mark on the wall was something of a miracle. In fact, her wolves were alive with a desperate energy and purpose.

“What do you think I ought to feel?” she asked, in answer to my query.

A deep, resonant thud shook the ground. It shook everything. We looked up: up from the wall, up from the school, up to the ceiling of rock far above us. A second thud came again, and a rain of dirt and dust loosened itself from the ceiling. The ceiling’s lights flickered and died. A third thud came, harder than before. Heavier stones and boulders began to detach. Screams sounded across the cavern.

Victorine was calm, though.

“They’re here,” she said, taking a step back from her work. “They’re here and they want to break in.” Her tone became quietly accusatory. “It means you failed, Miguel. It means you failed and everything here is going to end.”

She dipped her brush into its little jar of cleaning solvent and stirred it methodically.

The thudding became the low throb of the wake-up alarm. The stir of Victorine’s brush was the high, cyclical tone of air-circulation pumps purring to life. The sting of the debris against my eyes was the discomfort of forcing them wide, after weeks of sleep.

I was awake.

Awake and inside the torpor box.

For a moment, lying weightless, it was enough to know that I had survived the crossing; that the ship and its components had held together long enough to bring me to the interception point. Given the state of our equipment and defences, that alone was something to thank. The torpor boxes were good enough to keep us in hibernation for a few weeks, but they were nowhere near as reliable as the long-duration reefersleep caskets that we had once taken for granted. Every trip involving a period of torpor carried a risk of death or permanent disability. I had rolled the dice once and survived: I would be rolling it at least one more time before my return to Sun Hollow.

I waited a minute, gathering my strength, and set about removing the box’s monitors and catheters. When that slow, painful business was done, I took another few moments and examined myself with the detached, methodical eye of a physician. The box’s blue light laid me out unsparingly. Blemishes, scars, poor muscle tone, white hairs: all old news. A few fresh pressure sores, some bruising, bleeding here and there. The usual numbness and tremor in my fingers. Nothing, though, that was going to kill me in the next few hours.

The memories of the last few days before my departure were still fresh. The detection, the confirmation, the decision to interdict. My volunteering for the operation. The arguments against and for; the tears and the strained farewells that followed. Saying goodbye to Nicola and Victorine. The launch boost, blasting away from the false-bottomed crater over Sun Hollow’s shuttle pen. The strain on my bones as the shuttle accelerated, gaining speed while it still had the cover of the circumstellar dust disk. Ten gees, four point seven hours. I had been unconscious for most of that, mercifully, and had only endured it because of a suite of aggressive life-support measures, taking the load off my heart and lungs. My spine still ached from the twin abuses of compression under acceleration and now the slow, painful unloading under weightlessness.

Hard on a young man; murderous on a relic like me.

Why had I volunteered for this? I had to dig deeper into my memories for that. Hitting them was like finding a loose tooth jangling against a nerve: an instant, savage hit of raw agony.

Ah, yes. That was why.

Political atonement.

I was making amends for a mistake, a blemish on my office, after a badly managed coup against me failed. After a contentious trial and a botched execution.

Rurik Taine, writhing on the floor, not quite dead.

My fault, all of it. Nothing that was enough to unseat me from office—nothing criminal, just a series of bad judgements—but enough to undermine the trust vested in me, the trust I had fought so hard to earn since the founding of Sun Hollow.

I swallowed back any self-pity. Doing this had been my choice, not something forced on me. Allies and doubters alike had tried to argue me out of it. But I had known that the only path to redemption lay in the acceptance of my duty.

Now I had a task to finish.

Once I was free of revival grogginess, I extracted myself from the box and floated through to the control cabin with its pilots’ positions and faintly glowing instrumentation. Although the ship could easily accommodate a larger crew, I was alone aboard it. I settled into the middle seat and brought the readouts to normal illumination while keeping the windows shuttered. Satisfied that the ship was in good health—the engineers had done well to keep it spaceworthy—I turned to communications, hoping for an update on the status of the incomer. It would have suited me very well to learn that it was a false alarm, a data mirage, or that the crew had come to some change of heart, reversing for interstellar space and leaving us in peace.

No such respite: it was still there, still coming in on a direct course for Michaelmas and Sun Hollow.

I refined my position, using cold-gas thrusters to minimise the likelihood of being seen. Thirty million kilometres still separated my ship from the incomer, but that was a scratch against the size of the system. Our relative speed was a little under four thousand kilometres per second: two hours until we were on each other.

I moved back to the missile bay, opened a pressure hatch, and peered in to inspect the weapon, making sure no harm had come to it during launch.

There was only one missile: a thick, round-ended cylinder two metres long, fixed into a deployable launch cradle. The arming panel was a flattened area of the casing, set with black controls. At my touch, a matrix of red lights glimmered from the casing. They went through a start-up cycle then held steady, indicating readiness. With the hatch sealed, I depressurised the missile bay, then opened the outer door and lowered the cradle until it was projecting beyond the hull.

I returned to the command deck. Missile inspection, arming and launch-readiness had taken less than ten minutes.

I loaded the tactical input from the shuttle’s main console into the missile, giving it an up-to-date model for the incomer’s position and speed. I double-checked communications, just in case word had come in to break the attack.

None had arrived.

So I waited until our relative distance had narrowed to a mere two million kilometres, then let the missile loose. The cradle’s restraints opened and the weapon streaked away without fanfare, boosting to close up the distance. I watched for a response from the incomer, some sudden evasive swerve, but there was no change in its approach. Nothing about that surprised me: if the incomer had been capable of detecting the missile, the same capability should have given away my position long ago.

According to the console, the missile was maintaining its lock on the incomer. It would slip like a dagger between the drive beams and auto-destruct a microsecond before impact. From a distance, the matter-antimatter blast would be indistinguishable from a Conjoiner drive malfunction: the self-same malfunction that was bound to follow an instant later, when the ship broke apart.

With the deed all but done, I permitted my thoughts to turn to the sleepers on that ship. I still had no idea how many there were, or where and when they had commenced their journey. We would never know. But I liked to think that they had gone to their hibernation berths with no fear in their hearts; no intimation of the terror that must have detected them, and then chased them across the stars, forcing them to this desperate, final bolthole.

Some day we would find a way to mourn them. It was not that we were murderers by nature, or that we had anything against the crew and passengers of that ship. Doubtless they were just looking for somewhere to shelter from the wolves: a quiet, out-of-the-way sanctuary; an unobvious hiding place. It was why we had selected Michaelmas—why we had selected this whole system—and presumably they had been guided by the same logic.

But we had already done it. We had dug ourselves into the crust of Michaelmas and we had years of survival to prove that we were good at lying low. We had never given ourselves away, and we had no intention of doing so. Which was why this bright, clumsy visitor could not be tolerated. Even if they did not know of our presence, even if they never became aware of it, they might still be leading wolves right to our door.

So they had to die, and in a manner that looked like accidental destruction.

The console flashed red, synchronised with a piercing warning tone. To my consternation the missile had developed a steering anomaly. There was nothing I could do but observe, reading the faint telemetry trace: a low-bandwidth crackle designed to blend in with the radio-frequency noise coming out of Michael. The cold-gas thruster had jammed at one of its extreme deflections, making the missile begin to veer.

I cursed our luck. The steering fault was a known factor with the improvised missiles—we were asking them to perform far outside their design envelope—but we had done all that we could to mitigate the problem.

“Correct yourself,” I whispered.

The missile was waggling hard. At any moment, the gee forces might be sufficient to jolt the thruster out of its jammed position. There was still a chance…

But the console flashed again. A different readout now, a different warning tone.

Interception null.

Interception null.

Interception null.

The mathematics could not be argued with. The missile’s contortions had pushed it too far off course. Unless the incomer obliged by changing its own course, there was no longer any means by which the missile could achieve a kill.

“Abort and self-protect,” I told the missile. My words were reserved for the console alone, which contained just enough artificial intelligence to understand natural language. All that was transmitted to the missile was a burst of prearranged binary code.

The missile would attempt to use whatever was left of its fuel to put itself into a safekeeping orbit, allowing it to be recovered at some point in the future. As difficult as that exercise might prove, it was better than losing a warhead.

I now knew what must be done. I had always known it might be necessary, but I had pushed it to the back of my mind while there was hope that our first line of defence might be sufficient.

Now that the missile had failed, though, I had to fall back on our only other means of stopping the lighthugger. It was not as surgical and, if anything, was even more costly to Sun Hollow… and, crucially, I would not have the satisfaction of knowing that it had succeeded.

But there was no alternative.

“Protocol two,” I told the shuttle. “Zero abort.”

Validation?

“Cydonia,” I said, using the codeword I had prearranged.

The shuttle accepted my instructions. Its own cold-gas jets began to pop, lining it up ever more precisely with the incomer. It would be trying to follow the same intended trajectory as the missile, slipping between the drive beams. Hard for a missile; harder still for a bulky shuttle. But at least it no longer mattered if a little of the incomer’s drive radiation seeped through the hull.

I had no munitions, so the destructive power of my shuttle lay solely in its mass and speed. It would be sufficient.

I was calmer than I had expected. There was no room now for doubt or failure of nerve. I had assigned all necessary control to the shuttle and removed any possibility of rescinding that authority. I could wrestle with the controls, beg for my life, but no failure of my nerve would make a difference.

I was going to die.

In doing so I would condemn however many innocents were on that ship. But I would save the five thousand of us who lived in Sun Hollow, including the woman I loved and the daughter she had allowed into my world. I visualised Nicola and Victorine alone at our table, Nicola starting to break the news, Victorine absorbing it, holding her composure for brave seconds, before the truth undid her. I was not her father, and would never know a daughter’s love, but I believed that she had become fond of me.

I steeled myself and watched the impact clock tick down to zero. There was a white burst, and for a foolish moment I thought it was the impact itself. But that whiteness continued. It pushed itself through the cabin walls, through the shutters, before dying away.

The shuttle jolted hard.

The clock ticked past zero, and continued counting.

So I was not dead. But something had happened. Through half-blinded eyes I saw that the shuttle’s systems had all blanked out. There had only been one jolt, but my gut told me that the whole ship was yawing, out of control.

I gasped, stunned by my own continued existence. Shocked, confused, and more than a little aggrieved that whatever redemption I had hoped for in the moment of my death was no longer for the taking.

Slowly my eyes recovered from the white pulse, and slowly the shuttle began to recover its own faculties. The console’s indications came back on. There was some damage, but not nearly enough to be consistent with any sort of collision. The outer hull had taken the brunt of something, but it was not an impact.

Then came a rain of blows: a soft succession of fist-falls and claw-taps against the hull. It came and went.

I began to understand.

I had not needed to hit the incomer after all. In the last few seconds before the collision, the strain on its engines had finally taken its toll. The white flash had been the disintegration of the drives, which knocked my shuttle senseless, but had not destroyed it. I had sailed through the expanding debris cloud of the former ship.

The shuttle was confused. It had been given a task, but now the object of that task no longer existed.

Null solution for protocol two.

Null solution for protocol two.

Null solution for protocol two.

Revoke zero abort condition?

“Yes,” I stammered out, still half breathless from the cold slap of my own survival. “Yes—revoke zero abort condition. Confirm revocation.”

Zero abort condition now revoked. Awaiting orders.

Orders. The idea seemed ludicrous. How was I supposed to come up with orders, now? A few moments earlier I had scrubbed my mind of anything except the total acceptance of my own imminent end. Now I was expected to fumble around for the severed thread of my own life, find a purpose, and keep going.

“I… don’t know,” I said. “Just… stabilise yourself. Maintain course and… assess what the hell just happened. And… call the missile back, if it’s got enough fuel to meet us.”

Thirty minutes passed while I carried on drifting past the point of the explosion. Then a chime came from the console. It was a soft tone, polite as a cough in a theatre.

The shuttle had detected something. It was not an update from the missile, nor a communication from Sun Hollow or any of the Disciple observation satellites. But it was an electromagnetic signal: a repeating radio pulse, with an interval very close to exactly one second. I let the shuttle gather enough of these pulses to subject them to a close-grained analysis, looking for embedded content. There was nothing: just a smooth rise and fall, followed by silence, then another rise and fall.

As we drifted, the shuttle was able to triangulate the pulse. It was moving away from the point where the incomer had blown up, but on a velocity vector much closer to my own, differing by only a few hundred kilometres per second. If it had been co-moving with the debris field, it ought to have been tens of millions of kilometres away from me by now, but it was not even two million astern of me.

Something had survived the blast, or been ejected just before it happened. Something that was now putting out exactly the kind of signature that Sun Hollow had spent thirty years doing its best not to broadcast: a clear, repeating and unambiguous indicator of functioning human technology. The wolves might or might not have been drawn to the explosion, but a systematic distress signal would be more than they could be ignore.

Unless that signal fell silent. Very quickly.

The missile returned, sidling in from the darkness then latching itself back onto the cradle.

I brought it back into the weapons bay, then began to recharge its fuel tank from the shuttle’s own supplies. It was time-consuming, but the only option. While the tank was reloading, I used a delicate but well-rehearsed procedure to extract the antimatter warhead from the front of the missile. The magnetic pen—and its associated arming and detonation system—was a fist-sized chunk of sterile metal, clean and gleaming as an artificial heart. It was much too valuable to waste against a target I fully expected to be easily susceptible to a pure kinetic energy strike.

With that done, and the revised target loaded into the missile, I sent it back on its way.

And waited.

My plan was straightforward enough: I had already commenced a course alteration that would eventually bring me back to Sun Hollow. This far off the elliptic plane, I did not have nearly so much dust screening as when I had started out. My thrust bursts had to be done sparingly, at pseudo-random intervals, disguised as far as possible to blend in with Michael’s own variability.

After the missile had done its work, my course would bring me close enough to the impact point to inspect the field for any clues as to the nature of the transmitting source. I pushed aside thoughts of what that debris might point to.

The missile was thirty minutes from its interception when the voice came through.

It was a woman, speaking Canasian: the language most of us used in Sun Hollow.

“Help me. Someone has to be able to hear this. Please… help me.”

The console confirmed that the voice was originating from the same position as the distress pulse. It was a faint signal, but just as problematic.

“Stop talking,” I implored, as if she could hear me. “You’re going to die, don’t complicate things.”

The voice carried on. “I don’t know where I am, or when. But something’s happened, and I’m on my own. I think the ship… I think something happened to the ship, something bad. If you can hear me, and you’re close by, I need you to help me. I’m cold… getting colder. Please come.”

Some spectral quality attended the voice: thin and otherworldly, as if it were not being made by a human larynx.

“Are you wolf?” I whispered to the emptiness of the cabin. “Are you a trap, designed to bait me into replying?”

“I’m so cold. I don’t think this is how it’s meant to be. I can’t move… can’t feel anything below my neck. I’m not even sure if I’m really speaking. I can hear myself… but I don’t sound quite right. I sound like a ghost of myself.”

“Because you’re dead,” I said.

I told the console to open a reciprocal channel back on the same frequency.

“Stop talking,” I said again, but this time for her benefit. “Stop talking and find a way to turn off that distress beacon.”

Twelve seconds of silence. Then an answer:

“Who are you? Can you help me?”

“Who I am doesn’t matter. You’re making a lot of noise, and it has to stop.” I was making noise now as well, but at least the shuttle was tight-beaming my response in her direction only, minimising the chances of it being scattered or intercepted. “If you can’t…” But there was no “if” about it. I was going to kill her whatever happened. “Just turn off that distress beacon. You must still be in reefersleep, but you’ve been raised to a minimum consciousness level. You should still be able to address the casket’s command tree. Find a way to stop it pulsing, and stop broadcasting your voice.”

The silence again: the lag caused by the distance between us. It stretched so long that I thought she might have taken my warning to heart.

Then she said: “I’m frightened. I don’t remember what happened. There was the ship, and then this. I don’t even—”

“Stop.”

“—remember who I am.”

“Listen to me very carefully. This isn’t a safe place. I have a duty to protect my people, and you’re endangering them.”

“Where am I?”

“Drifting, a long way from where you ever wanted to be. Now turn off that beacon.”

“I’m so cold.”

Twenty seconds later the beacon stopped. Either it had silenced itself, or she had found a way into the command tree. I permitted myself a sigh of partial relief. How much harm had been done, it was impossible to say. But I was glad not to have that repeating tone coming from the console, and glad also not to have to expend our missile.

“I think it’s stopped now.”

“Good,” I said beneath my breath. “Now—”

“Please help me.”

I calculated a new course, called off the missile; and told it to put itself on a safekeeping orbit again. We were due to pass through the same neck of space, but at vastly different times and speeds: there was no hope of re-intercepting it this time. But even without its warhead the missile was worth preserving.

It would take three weeks to reach her position. I crawled back into the torpor box, fixed the catheters and monitors back in place, and set the box to revive me when the shuttle was two hours out from contact with the drifting object.

Her casket was floating free, long since separated from any other part of the debris field. It was tumbling slowly, presenting all its aspects to me. It was a round-cornered rectangular box, with a gristle of tubes and cables sprouting from one end of it. A reefersleep unit, but not of a kind that was immediately familiar to me. From the damage at one end of the casket—the end opposite the passenger’s head—I saw that it must have been ripped away from some cradle or chassis, perhaps supplying some function that the casket alone could not provide for itself. How long could it have kept her alive, without the sustenance flowing through those severed roots? I thought she would be doing well to last a few days, never mind the weeks that it had taken me to reach her.

I crept closer. I used the shuttle’s passive sensors alone, relying on ambient illumination. Never far from my mind was the possibility that this could still be a wolf trap of sorts; a clever imitation designed to bait me in. But the nearer I got, the less I thought that was likely. It was all too real, too convincing. There were scorch marks on the capsule, dents and gashes, a mass of scarred bubbling where some of its sheathing must have registered tremendous heat. A rectangular window lay at the intact end, roughly where the passenger’s face would have been. There were grilled bars over the window, protecting the glass beneath. The casket’s design looked robust, old-fashioned.

The capsule continued tumbling. Floating beneath the window—was there something?

A serene sleeping face, balmed by Michael’s ruddy light, just for an instant.

I brought the shuttle to within a few metres of the casket. Metres or kilometres: if it was a bomb, I was already far too close. I opened the weapons bay then lowered the cradle, using the pincers to grasp at the casket and try and stop its tumbling. It was clumsy work but after twenty minutes of fumbling the casket, losing it, chasing after it, I finally had it tamed sufficiently to bring back into the ship. It was good that there was no missile: there would have been no room in the bay otherwise. Luckily the two objects were not too dissimilar in size and shape.

I sealed the bay, repressurised it, and opened the inner door. The casket had come to rest with the window nearest to me, facing back into the ship. The sudden transition to atmosphere had laid a frosting across the glass beneath the grilled bars, hiding whatever I thought I might have seen beneath.

I had come prepared, a pair of headphones already settled over my ears. I attached a magnetic limpet to the casket’s outer casing, then angled a microphone before my lips.

“Can you hear me?” I asked, tentatively. “My name is Miguel de Ruyter, the same man who spoke to you three weeks ago. I’ve brought you inside my ship. I’ve fixed a radio transmitter onto the outside of your casket, using the same frequency we spoke on originally. Make some response if any of this is getting through to you.”

There was no answer from the casket, but nor was I expecting one. I was going through the motions, mostly resigned to the passenger already being dead, which was another way of saying that she was beyond any possibility of safe revival. Death came in many shades. Everyone was dead at the deepest point of reefersleep: no thoughts, no cellular processes. But they could still be brought back to life—if the casket operated as it was meant to. If one of several things went wrong, though, then a wave of damage could sweep through those cells, rupturing them from inside, tearing apart the connections between them. In the brain, those connections encoded everything that was most dear to us about ourselves. A warm corpse, with a grey mush of scrambled neural pathways, was no better than a cold one.

On other worlds, in better times, there had always been hope. In Sun Hollow, even extracting a tooth or setting a broken bone came with challenges. Remaking a damaged mind was a little beyond our capabilities.

“Rest,” I said, as if it mattered. “You’re safe now, and I’m taking you back to our world.”

I left the magnetic limpet in place, the radio channel open.

I went forward and began readying the shuttle for the rest of my journey home. A few thrust bursts, a course correction or two, some food in my stomach, and I could crawl back into the torpor box again. Someone else could worry about what to do with the macabre trophy I had brought back home.

“Talk to me.”

Her voice was coming out of the console, relayed through the magnetic limpet. I dashed back to the weapons bay, grabbed a glove, and used it to swab away as much of the frost as I could from the grilled window.

“I’m here,” I said, speaking through the microphone. “Are you… all right? Do you remember anything of the last three weeks?”

“Where am I?”

Her voice still sounded distant and not quite real. There was something too pure, too crystalline about it, like the notes that came off a wine glass when it was stroked by a wet finger.

“In a ship. I rescued you.”

“Rescued me?”

I peered closer, trying to get a better glimpse of the face beneath the window. But there was still too much fog on the inside of the glass. She hovered beneath like a dark-eyed moon peeking in and out of threads of cirrus.

“Something happened. You were on a ship—a much bigger ship than this one. There was an accident… your ship blew up as it was coming into our system.”

“An accident?”

“An engine failure. It seems you were blown free. I picked up a signal from your casket. Yours, but no one else’s.”

“There were others,” she said distantly, as if half a memory had just presented itself. “You have to search for them. I can’t be the only one.”

“I don’t think there was anyone else. Even if there were… I’m afraid we don’t have the means to look for them. You had a transmitter; no one else did.”

“I want to get out of this thing. I feel numb.”

“I don’t have the means to help you until we’re back in Sun Hollow. Once we’re there, you’ll be well taken care of.”

“What is Sun Hollow?”

I moved around to the other end of the reefersleep casket, w