Inhibitor Phase Read online

  ‘You know a lot about wolves. Or seem to.’

  ‘I’ve made it my life’s work. Someone had to.’ She gestured at the window, where the horizon of my world was already tightening, closing towards a circle. ‘Say goodbye to Michaelmas, Miguel: it’ll be a faint, fading pebble the next time you see it.’

  I looked at my home for a few seconds, until the thought of Nicola and Victorine still down there, never knowing what would become of me, me never knowing what would become of them, our lives strung together by a lengthening bond of grief, became too much for me to bear, and in shame and despair I averted my eyes.

  Glass was wrong. There would not be a next time.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In another part of the ship a table had been laid for dinner. Plump-backed chairs faced each other, with plates, cutlery, glasses, bottles and jugs set between them. Candle flames wavered in Scythe’s air-circulation currents.

  ‘If you want me to eat, just give me some food I can take back to my quarters.’

  ‘No, I insist. And when I say “insist” . . .’ Glass indicated the chair facing the window. ‘Take that one. They say it’s polite to let guests have the view.’

  Rather than argue with her – sensing how futile it was likely to be – I took my seat. Glass took up the opposing one, with the windows ranged behind her back. There was no sign of Michaelmas now, only the ruddy smear of the dust disk, pricked by a few of the brighter stars. There must have been some trick of contrast going on because even the candlelight should have washed out my view of those stars.

  Glass poured wine for me without asking.

  ‘Let’s begin anew, Miguel. Let’s put all that bad business behind us. I’ve taken you from your family, and that’s not a thing I expect you to thank me for. But I guarantee in time you’ll see matters in a different light. Until then, we are obliged to share this ship. Share this ship, share in my quest, and – in so far as your survival is predicated on my own – look out for each other.’ She dropped her voice confidingly. ‘We’re heading for dangerous waters. Sea monsters and peril. But at the end of it will be a prize worth all our travails.’

  ‘Charybdis?’

  ‘You were paying attention after all. Now shall we agree to a truce, of sorts? My ship is your ship.’ She raised her own glass and encouraged me to raise mine. ‘A toast. But not to me, or even to us: it’s far too soon for that. You despise me and I understand your feelings. But to your friends, and mine, and our mutual struggle against the wolves. The night is cold, the forest full of terrors, but there is a glimmer of light on the horizon.’

  ‘To my friends,’ I allowed.

  ‘And to mine.’

  ‘And pray they never meet,’ I continued. ‘Because whatever you are, and whoever or whatever sent you, I want no part of it.’

  ‘My friends aren’t the same as me.’

  Glass sipped from her wine, and I sipped from mine, and as much as I wished it to be otherwise, it was heady and delicious.

  Nor did I care that the wine might contain anything, or that it would very likely cloud my judgement. I was on Glass’s ship now, entirely at the mercy of whatever she wanted to put into my body or take out of it. If I allowed myself to draw a breath of air, I might as well drink her wine.

  ‘What can I possibly offer that you can’t already do for yourself?’ I asked her. ‘Or have this ship do for you?’

  ‘You’ll have proven your worth by the time we get to Charybdis.’

  ‘Which is where, exactly? I didn’t think I’d ever heard of a planet called Charybdis. So I checked Sun Hollow’s libraries: no mention of any such place.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to trust that it exists. But I’ll help with part of your confusion. The reason the name doesn’t show up is that it’s one I gave to the place, not anything official.’

  ‘Then where is it?’

  ‘In a system within easy reach of this ship.’

  ‘But still decades of flight away.’

  Glass gave a hopeless shrug, as if we were both caught up in a situation that had nothing to do with her interventions. ‘Space is deep. What can you do?’

  White spheres floated into the room. They were some kind of servitor, each about the size of a human head. Multi-jointed arms came out of each sphere, holding the steaming plates containing our first course. The plates contained a selection of dumplings, glistening with drizzled sauces. The spheres set the dishes down, then departed.

  If the wine had been superlative, the dumplings required a vocabulary I no longer possessed. It might have been the contrast with the diet in Sun Hollow, but I could not remember anything more delicious, or anything better suited to the fading preferences of my palette. I was a blind man rediscovering colour.

  ‘To your taste?’

  ‘Don’t expect gratitude.’ I paused, swallowed another morsel of dumpling. ‘But you were right about your ship. It cooks very well.’

  I made to set down my knife, then hesitated with it still between my fingers. It was heavy, made of some cold solid alloy. It was not as long or as sharp as I might have wished, but it could still do some useful damage if I were quick enough.

  Glass pushed aside her plate. ‘You’re thinking about stabbing me. You’re debating with yourself whether or not you could spring across the table speedily enough to reach me. There’s another part of you wondering if the knife will melt in your hand the instant you try to do some harm with it, or even if it will turn itself against you.’

  She must have expected me to put down the knife in befuddlement, astonished that she had read my intentions so unerringly. She must also have thought I would ask how such a feat of mind-reading were possible.

  Instead, I lunged across the table with all the force I could muster, the knife before me, scattering plates and glassware, only thinking of whether it was better to go for the eye, the throat, or the chest. I was ready to hack and stab at her until she died. I was ready to test her promise all the way.

  Glass did not seem to move. There was simply a discontinuity; she was in a different position, blocking me with her right arm and seizing my knife hand with her left. I stopped as if I had impacted an iron framework, an armature welded into the shape of a woman.

  Glass did something to my wrist, barely a pinch, and the knife tumbled away. Then she held me in that posture, suspended over the wreckage of the table, our faces only a hand’s width apart.

  ‘I don’t blame you for trying,’ she said, as calmly as if we were still continuing our conversation. ‘It would have been all too easy for me to bluff.’ She reached out and retrieved the knife, then slid it back over to my side of the table, through a tide-pool of spilled wine. Then she relaxed her hold on me, giving me a gentle shove back in the direction of my seat. ‘Try again, just so you’re absolutely clear. Go for it with all your will. This time I won’t make any sort of countermove. Scythe will intervene instead.’ She dipped her hands into her lap, beneath the table. ‘No, please try. It will be . . . instructive.’

  I thought about it for a second then pushed the knife further away. My hand contained a little hot star of pain where she had pinched my nerves together.

  ‘There wouldn’t be much point.’

  ‘You’re learning.’

  Glass looked to the door. The spheres came in again and quickly tidied up the mess I had made. The throb in my wrist was starting to die down.

  ‘See the larger picture,’ she continued, lifting her goblet again. ‘Make that adjustment, no matter how hard it seems. Come with me and find something that will make a difference against the wolves. Show, if you will, the ultimate love for those close to you.’

  The spheres brought in the main course. I had no wish to continue playing the subservient guest to my domineering host. But that was only my pride having its say: my appetite was perfectly willing to debase itself.

  ‘Back in Sanctum,’ I said, lifting my knife by way of emphasis, rather than with the intention of stabbing. ‘You said something that puzzled m
e.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You were making a point about the ethics of intention. To serve as an example, you dredged up the Butcher of Tharsis.’

  Glass cocked her head. ‘I suppose I did.’

  ‘Why him? You had all of history to play with; any number of despots and madmen. Why did you settle on the Butcher of Tharsis, out of all the possibilities?’

  She met my question with one of her own. ‘Did they teach you much about him?’

  ‘Enough that I remember that his name was Nevil Clavain.’ I ate on for a few mouthfuls. ‘A military figure, something to do with Mars. A long, long way back. Five or six hundred years, I suppose.’

  ‘He was involved in the first war against the Conjoiners,’ Glass said, leaning in with a sort of scholarly eagerness, as if she had just learned something and was itching to parade her knowledge. ‘He tried to crush them, tried to stop them from happening. He earned that name because of the excessive brutality and cruelty of his methods.’

  ‘He’d probably have said he was just doing his job as a soldier.’

  ‘I’m inclined to take the same view,’ Glass said, surprising me. ‘Different times. We mustn’t be too censorious. But a man like that – a man prepared to go to extremes, in the interests of a military end? He’d be quite useful to have around now, wouldn’t you say?’

  My quarters were several times more comfortable and well equipped than any chambers I had known in Sun Hollow. They consisted of several linked rooms. There was a bedroom, a small lounge, a toilet, a bathroom with a weightless shower and washing basin – which even ran to a selection of soaps, oils, unguents, and grooming accessories – as well as a wardrobe and exercise nook. The water in the bathroom ran so hot that I nearly scalded myself. For my entertainment, there was a small library of printed books, mostly classics, and all of them conveniently in their early Russish or late Russian or English editions. There was a digital library, with a searchable database accessed by a fold-out keyboard suspiciously similar to the ones we used in Sun Hollow. One of the lounge walls was configured to act as a false window, showing the view beyond Scythe’s hull, but it could as easily show ocean breakers or a mountaintop sunset or a million other supposedly soothing scenes. The facilities met all my needs and more: it was almost a shame that I would be making so little use of them.

  Glass assured me that I was not a prisoner, and as soon as I had explored the room, washed and dressed (there were fresh garments in the wardrobe, and they fitted me perfectly) I tried leaving my quarters.

  Nothing prevented me.

  I walked in every direction for as far as I could, until I was certain that I had explored every possibility at least twice. I found the hibernaculum, with two waiting reefersleep caskets; I found a sort of games room or weapons-testing range, and near to it another room full of weapons stored behind walls of opaque glass, so that all I could make out were murky silhouettes.

  In another part I came upon a corridor that ended in a partition inset with a small window, with a bright space beyond it. I peered through the window and saw what, at first, I imagined to be a kind of engine room, filled with a mass of beguiling, mirror-surfaced machinery. Spherical robots were toiling in and around the machinery, slipping between blade-like vanes and corkscrewing helices that made me think of some immense turbine, stilled for now, but capable of whirling into lethal motion. It could not be an engine room, though, or at least nothing resembling a conventional engine. I had seen little enough of Scythe from outside, as it hovered over Michaelmas. But that glimpse had been enough to identify the basic cruciform outline of a ship built according to Conjoiner principles, with a pointed hull and two outriggers upon which were mounted Conjoiner engines. Glass had mentioned that they were darkdrives, but my instincts told me that this was a variation on the basic technology, rather than something entirely new.

  The partition had no hinges or visible seals in it, but that did not preclude it becoming a door upon the right command. Yet despite my curiosity as to the room’s contents, I felt an instinctive disinclination to go beyond the partition. A prickling intuition told me that something was going on in that space that was neither safe nor wise, and I wondered what it said about the sanity of my host.

  That was the only visible part of the ship to which I was denied immediate access, and yet it could be no accident that I had been allowed to get exactly as close as the window but no nearer. If Glass did not want me to see what was happening in that chamber, she could easily have denied me access to this whole area of the ship, or just made the partition opaque. She had done neither of those things, and I did not for a moment imagine it was through simple oversight or neglect. Glass was content – willing, even – for me to see the thing that the robots were working on, and that fact alone told me that it figured in my future.

  Or at least the future that she thought she had planned for me.

  I touched the glass, felt an astral coldness, then backed off and resumed my explorations. I went as far as I could, along straight corridors and curved passages, through junctions and nodes, and at every point I tried to visualise myself as a small moving dot within the form of Scythe, attempting to build a mental map. But the ship’s layout was disorientating, the task hopeless. I had been denied no apparent point of entry, except for that partition itself. And except for what I saw through the glass, I had come across nothing that looked delicate or dangerous enough to be a promising candidate for sabotage. I did not want to die, but if I had found a means of crippling the ship, forcing Glass to return to Sun Hollow, even if that did no more than buy me time until she once again bettered us, I would gladly have taken it.

  Perhaps it was something in the wine or the food, or it might be the accumulation of recent days, but eventually fatigue got the better of me. I gave up exploring, accepting that Glass was in complete control of my surroundings, and returned to my bedroom. It was easily found, as if the ship had detected my intentions and opened up a helpful short-cut within itself. A fog of tiredness sent me under the sheets, but not before I sat at the fold-down keyboard and attempted one query, typing in a word and seeing what Scythe had to say to me.

  The word was Cydonia.

  A moment later the system responded, an image appearing of the rust-red face of a small, airless planet, before zooming in on a part of that planet where a random conjunction of geological events had produced something eerily similar to a human face, staring back at me with blank eye sockets that reminded me of nothing other than Glass herself.

  Superimposed over that image, in green Russish text:

  Cydonia: region of Mars, First System.

  See also: Knights of Cydonia.

  See also: Conjoiner-Coalition War.

  See also: Nevil Clavain.

  I slept badly.

  I had been ripped from my home, torn from the two people I most loved in the universe. I had been severed from the community I had helped build; the five thousand faces that might be all that was left of humanity. In place of family life and the consoling obligations of work and duty – the almost comforting grind of daily worries and pressures – I had been granted the company of a ghoul-faced psychological tormentress and a dark, dangerous ship I neither understood nor trusted.

  It was not what she had done to me that I found most troubling: not the sundering from my people; not the flight from Sun Hollow; not the confinement aboard Scythe.

  It was the little cracks she was opening up in my self: fine as the flaws in tooth enamel. And just as surely with the promise of agony to come.

  ‘Good morning, Miguel.’ Glass was sitting at the table, finishing off a glass of squeezed fruit. ‘I trust everything was to your satisfaction?’

  ‘If it wasn’t, would it make any difference?’

  ‘Ah.’ She nodded peremptorily, confirming some inner suspicion. ‘I see that we’re going to continue in that vein. I’d rather hoped that a good night’s rest would have put you in a more agreeable mood.’

  ‘You m
ean, a more subservient one.’

  ‘I’d rather think in terms of cooperation. Still . . . how about a little diversion, over breakfast? Sit down, please.’

  As I took my chair I said: ‘Nevil Clavain was a Knight of Cydonia.’

  ‘Was he now?’

  ‘But, of course, you’ll know that I know that. There’s no way in hell you’d let me access Scythe’s data systems without keeping a record of my queries.’

  ‘And what did you make of your little detour into early history?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘He was an interesting figure,’ Glass mused. ‘First a staunch enemy of the Conjoiners; one of the highest-ranking figures in the Coalition for Neural Purity. But something happened to turn him. We know that he was captured and held prisoner by Galiana, the enemy’s leader. But he eventually returned to his own side and appeared to still believe in the cause. Something must have changed in him, though; some little seed of doubt planted during that period of capture.’

  ‘I read a little further. He didn’t defect without provocation.’

  ‘No?’ Glass asked, as if she did not already have the facts laid out like a schematic.

  ‘There was a peace mission. Clavain went down to Mars to talk the Conjoiners into accepting some kind of treaty. At that point he was still fully aligned with his own cause. But elements in his own side were working to sabotage the peace initiative. Clavain was deemed expendable in that effort. They set him up to die, making it look as if the Conjoiners were to blame. History tells us that he survived, though. And the fact of that betrayal was obviously sufficient to shift his loyalty to Galiana.’

  Glass widened the black pools of her eyes. ‘The betrayal must have stung.’

  ‘I suppose that it did.’

  ‘The architect of that betrayal must have been very glad when Clavain took his leave from human affairs.’