Inhibitor Phase Page 12

  Inside the Defection Capsule, the hearts of the sleepers each gave off a single beat.

  The gun detected a fault.

  It was a malfunction alert, an error diagnostic that had floated up through its decision-action modules without any prior warning. Puzzled, the gun put itself into a temporary safing mode while it conducted a thorough top-down systems review.

  The safing mode was scheduled for three milliseconds; undesirably long but sufficient (the gun felt) to resolve the problem and continue with the firing sequence.

  The gun needed to know exactly where it was pointed. This was not normally a problem, since the gun maintained a history of itself and was in constant dialogue with the other weapons platforms and tracking systems, enabling a continuous process of error-correction. Until that alert, the gun had never had any cause to doubt its faculties.

  Yet now one of its three extremely precise helium-superfluid gyroscopes was giving a discrepant reading. As far as the gun was concerned, the two majority readings were the ones to be trusted, especially as they were self-consistent with its assumed orientation, as well as the verifying signals it had received as part of the last error-correction pulse.

  But still. There was a small but finite chance that the minority reading was correct, and too much was at stake for the gun to be able to dismiss that possibility. It would not be the one to break the treaty conditions.

  The gun needed more time to get to the bottom of this. It extended its safing mode by another three milliseconds while it ran more detailed functional checks on the gyroscopes. It was now more than six milliseconds into its firing window.

  There was still time.

  The functional checks were inconclusive. There might have been a hint of a developing failure mode in the suspect gyroscope twenty-two seconds earlier, but the statistics were far too poor to rely on. The gun dithered. using up more of its available firing window. Nothing in its history had prepared it for this. Less than three milliseconds now remained. In two milliseconds, the next error-correction update was due to arrive from the rest of the network. Could it wait that long?

  The gun thought ahead, simulating the time it would need to analyse that update and make a decision concerning the gyroscope discrepancy.

  The time was insufficient. The gun could arrive at a decision, but there would not be enough of the window remaining to launch the shell. The gun reanalysed its simulation, seeking a way to streamline the process. If it emptied some arrays, and made reasonable guesses about the likely contents of others, and was prepared to proceed on the basis of an incomplete but reasonably robust analysis of the error-correction pulse . . .

  But no.

  It could not be done. Not under any circumstances. All pathways that involved a firing solution within the window involved at least as much of a gamble as simply firing now, without waiting for the update.

  The gun could not act. It held itself in safing mode, and the window closed.

  The six sleepers remained silent. There had not been time for any one of their hearts to beat again. By the time one of them did, the capsule had passed out of range of the interdiction’s guns, already feeling the first thin, cold kiss of Martian atmosphere. Beneath it lay the desolate, time-blasted uplands of the Tharsis Bulge.

  The opening of the casket’s petals jolted me into consciousness. Glass and her robots had put me into it, but now I seemed to be expected to get out on my own. It was tempting to do nothing except wallow in my slowly returning sense of self. Getting out of the casket at all felt like a form of treasonous cooperation.

  But at the same time, I did not want to die. The ship sounded quiet. I raised an arm, allowed it to float in front of my face. Scythe was weightless, which could only mean that it was not under any form of acceleration.

  I eased myself out of the casket, floating free. I rubbed my limbs, inspecting the damage. Whatever shunts, plugs and monitoring devices it might have applied to me before I went under had detached painlessly, leaving only a few sore spots. There was no hint of tremor in my hands, and when I touched my fingertips the old numbness had vanished. The casket must have rebuilt my peripheral nervous system while I was under.

  I pushed myself sideways, along to the adjoining casket. It was also open.

  ‘Glass!’ I called out, as much to test my vocal cords as to summon my host. My voice was raw and dry, but more than ample to reach beyond the hibernaculum. ‘Glass, where are you?’

  No reply.

  I moved around the hibernaculum, drifting from one point to the next. It was easy, since I was never out of reach of a hand- or foot-hold. The air was cool, and I was glad to find a cabinet that held a couple of extra layers I could wrap around myself. Another contained various medical and nutritional dispensers. I used them without hesitation: if Glass was going to poison me, this was an absurdly long-winded way to go about it.

  Deciding that nothing was going to be gained by waiting in the hibernaculum, I set off to investigate. Provided the ship allowed me into the areas I had already seen, I fully expected to find Glass up and active, wearing an attitude of detached indifference to my feelings.

  But Glass was in none of the places I knew.

  The ship made no effort to obstruct or confuse me. For once corridors led where I expected them to lead, doors were where they were meant to be, and all I found was empty rooms.

  Finally one of the spheres appeared. It seemed to be on its way somewhere, limbs retracted into its body. I followed it all the way back to the belly airlock chamber, where I had first come aboard. There was still no sign of Glass, but one of the suits remained, partially submerged into the wall.

  Where the other had been was a hollow, suit-shaped concavity.

  ‘Scythe,’ I said. ‘If you can hear me, and understand me, can you confirm that Glass has left the ship?’

  No answer.

  I went to the airlock, hoping there might be a clue as to when it had last been activated. But as with much of the ship, the readouts and controls were subjugated to neural or gestural channels to which only Glass had access.

  I had already searched the control room but I went back there anyway. I had been looking for Glass before: now I wanted to know what might be outside.

  Nothing had caught my eye before and there was a reason for that. The windows were a ribbon of blackness. Scythe was not near a planet or a star, or in orbit around anything. But if we were in interstellar space, where were the stars? Even if we were mid-crossing, one or two of the brighter stars should have been visible, even allowing for relativistic effects.

  Glass had given me authority to learn the control system. Did that set of permissions still apply? I put it to the test, easing into the same acceleration chair I had used before. Sensing me, the readouts in my locus of the control room shifted to Russish. This time I concentrated. None of the configurations were familiar, but neither were any so alien that I could not make some hesitant sense of them. Some related to the direct control of the ship, its engines, precision-manoeuvring systems and navigational functions. Even some hints that I might have limited access to defensive and offensive measures.

  Ten minutes later I had learned nothing of the ship’s status or position, but I had found a way to reduce the glow from the controls, as well as increasing the transmitted light through the false windows.

  It made almost no difference.

  If there were so few photons reaching Scythe’s sensors, then there was only so much it could do to amplify them for my benefit. There were hints of fixed structure out there: little twinkling emanations coming from roughly the same handful of places – but nothing my eyes or brain could make sense of. If Scythe had landed inside one of the caverns on Sun Hollow, without the benefit of artificial lights, the view would have been barely distinguishable from what I was seeing. But the one thing I could be sure of was that we were not inside a planet – be it Charybdis or any other stopping point, or even any sort of moon or asteroid. By now even a weak gravitational field wou
ld have revealed itself.

  I returned to the airlock. One suit was still present and one still absent. I floated up to the one suit that was still there, facing the tinted band of its visor. There were no controls or seams on the outside; no clue as to how I was meant to get into the thing.

  ‘Open,’ I commanded.

  The suit did not obey. Then I remembered Glass telling me in the tunnel that all I needed to do was shuffle into my suit, or just allow it to come to me – submitting to the suit’s programmed desire to shield me from vacuum. It was obvious in hindsight that the suit would be programmed to respond to a postural/proximity trigger. I only had to avert myself from the suit, while maintaining the same body orientation, and drift slowly towards contact with it. The suit gave some wet slurping sounds as it opened up along hidden bonds, and then extended parts of itself to wrap around and guide me in. I pushed aside any inclination to panic: if the suit was clever enough to detect my intention to wear it, then it surely knew better than to suffocate me.

  The suit came to life. Around the visor’s field of view appeared the same pattern of symbols and readouts I had come to recognise during our exodus from Sun Hollow. The only difference was the suit’s annotation had shifted to Russish.

  I was still ignorant about many of the suit’s functions. But I knew the colour green when I saw it: where dials and needles were displayed, they were all comfortably into that end of the spectrum. The suit was powered up and stocked with all that it needed, and had presumably taken care of any repairs or maintenance needed after Sun Hollow. I had a feeling it could keep me alive for a very long time.

  I tried moving my arms. The suit complied with my request, alleviating much of the effort but leaving just enough resistive feedback to remind me I was suited, and at the mercy of its protection. Next, I tried propelling myself away from the recessed berth in the wall. The suit came unglued, then drifted. I put out my arms and legs and checked myself against the opposite wall. Then I turned around until I had the airlock in sight. It was one thing to get the suit working – I had already been allowed a degree of autonomy during our walk. But Glass would never have wanted me to be able to use one of the locks without her consent, in case I did something inconvenient like killing myself.

  I used a combination of drifting and handholds to bring myself to the lock. But it would not open for me. I tried pressing my hand against the panel around the door, hoping to work some hidden control, but nothing obliged.

  I needed some assistance.

  ‘Can you understand me?’

  ‘Yes,’ the suit answered, speaking with a fast, buzzy intonation, like a recording that had been speeded up.

  ‘I need to leave Scythe. Open the airlock for me.’

  ‘Unit Beta cannot parse this request.’

  ‘There is a door ahead of me. I need you to make it open.’

  ‘Unit Beta cannot parse this request.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said, mentally backtracking. ‘Where is Unit Alpha?’

  ‘Unit Alpha is extravehicular.’

  ‘Is Unit Alpha coming back?’

  ‘Unit Beta cannot parse this request.’

  I could feel my breathing quicken. I hoped that the suit would be a little more helpful when I asked to be allowed out of it.

  ‘Tell me . . . how far away is Unit Alpha?’

  The suit seemed to think this over. I wondered if it was stupid, or damaged, or labouring under such a restrictive set of command protocols that it could answer almost no request.

  ‘Unit Alpha is one point two three kilometres from Unit Beta.’

  ‘Is Unit Alpha on the move?’

  ‘Unit Beta cannot . . .’

  ‘Never mind,’ I interrupted. ‘Can Unit Beta open a communications channel to Unit Alpha?’

  ‘An event-log channel remains open.’

  ‘I want to speak to Glass. To the occupant of Unit Alpha. Can you make that happen?’

  ‘Unit Beta cannot . . .’

  ‘Never mind. Can Unit Beta follow Unit Alpha?’

  ‘Unit . . .’

  ‘And never mind that, either. Take me to Unit Alpha.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Verify directive.’

  ‘Yes!’ I exclaimed, before the dim-witted suit lost the thin thread of comprehension it had finally established. ‘Verified!’

  ‘Directive accepted. Unit Beta will assume autonomous control until directive is satisfied. Autonomous control may be overridden at any point. Prepare for vehicle egress and transition to hard vacuum.’

  What had been impossible for me was simplicity for the suit, now that it had a purpose. The lock opened automatically and the suit drifted me into it. The lock cycled. The exchange was rapid and it could only have been thirty seconds before the outer door opened and the suit accelerated me out of Scythe, into whatever volume of space surrounded the ship.

  I looked around. I had some lateral view through the visor, but if I averted my direction of gaze sufficiently the symbols around the visor shuffled obligingly and the visible field extended back another ten or fifteen degrees, to the limit of my peripheral vision. If I carried on trying that, the suit created another visual band above the main one, displaying a rear-looking view and allowing my eyes to rest. Apart from the glowing belly lock, which was already sealing up after me, I could see nothing of Scythe against the blackness of its surroundings.

  I felt a faint, rising acceleration. The suit was gaining speed via its micro-thrusters. Glass had never used them, so I guessed they were only powerful enough to function in a weightless vacuum.

  It was unnerving: like closing my eyes and running headlong into a darkened room, not knowing how far away the walls were. The airlock had closed completely, robbing me of a reference point. Within a few seconds I had lost any sense of our speed or direction.

  ‘Slow down.’

  ‘Do you wish to amend the current directive?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to crash into anything.’

  The suit pondered my answer. ‘Collision mitigation measures are in force. Do you wish to review the collision mitigation measures?’

  ‘No, I . . . yes. Yes! Show me the measures.’

  A list of items scrolled onto the upper left part of my visor. As soon as I saw it I realised how much was going on without my direct awareness; the suit not troubling me with what it considered to be matters of minor housekeeping. It was scanning the space around us with radar and laser-ranging systems of proven reliability. It was using image amplification to detect visual obstacles. It was running gravitational-proximal spacetime gradient measurements, capable of detecting any large, dense nearby object. It was sniffing for neutrinos, muons, and a dozen other particle types. It was even ingesting the not-quite-perfectly-hard vacuum and running mass spectroscopy on trace atoms and ions . . . and it was following the course-log transmitted by Glass’s suit when it made exactly the same journey.

  Now that I knew what the suit was up to – and satisfied that a collision was not my biggest concern – I persuaded the suit to show me a visual representation of its active and passive sensory modes. A lilac-tinted tracery settled over my field of view, annotated with rapidly changing digits showing relative distance and velocity. Rough-surfaced walls surrounded the whole space, which I now understood to be hundreds of metres across. It was a cavern, after all: deeper than it was wide and with sheer, circular ends, like a cylinder. Most of this three-dimensional contour-map was assembled from radar and laser returns, but there were also several pale glowing smudges that must have corresponded to the faint lights I had seen from inside Scythe.

  Only now did I understand that these smudges were caused by light leaking into the cavern from outside.

  The suit conveyed me towards the cavern’s wall, heading towards a depression or rent in the wall’s surface. Again, it seemed that we were going too fast, but the suit had matters under control. From somewhere in my chest thrusters began to burn, quickly reducing our speed. As the wall approached, so
the overlay became sharper, and with a jolt of shifting perceptions I realised that what I had taken to be natural formations were nothing of the kind.

  The walls were of artificial construction, yet lacking any regularity or organisation. There were interlocking panels, projecting modules, criss-crossing pipes and conduits, handling arms, clawlike docking cradles, all of it huge in scale while at the same time appearing haphazard and piecemeal, as if a succession of owners had each their own ideas about repair and alteration. The chamber also bore the imprint of the Melding Plague, which is why I had been so easily convinced that the enclosure was natural. The plague’s fibrous, branching strands had erupted across nearly every surface, softening and corrupting where it touched. It was like the cloisters of some abandoned cathedral, wreathed in pale worming vines and slowly succumbing to ruin and time.

  The presence of the plague stirred the usual fears, hardly blunted after thirty years in Sun Hollow. But the corruptive process appeared to have been arrested here: the plague must have gained a hold then faltered, leaving the chamber’s original form still recognisable, and with no projection into the main volume. There might still be traces of active spore, but if I wished to pursue Glass, I would have to put such concerns aside. My quarry had come this way and must have known what her suit was capable of dealing with.

  The gap in the wall was just wide enough for me to pass through. The suit swivelled, reorientating me. The gap was a rupture, or what remained of a doorway, allowing entry into what I first took to be a corridor, running in the same direction as the chamber’s longest axis. It was very wide to be a corridor, though, and despite the plague’s predations it was still possible to make out the linear tracks which threaded along its length, spaced around the walls at intervals of ninety degrees. Buckled and interrupted as they were, I recognised their function: guidance rails for a vehicle; a train or perhaps an elevator.

  ‘Minimum hazard threshold exceeded. Verify continuation of current directive?’