Inhibitor Phase Read online

  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, where most of the damage lay and where numerous pipes and cables had been severed cleanly away.

  ‘A place of safety. A small settlement, on a world called Michaelmas, orbiting a star called Michael.’

  ‘I don’t know those names.’

  ‘There’s no reason that you should.’ With insulating gloves on, I examined the severed connections, trying to identity familiar technologies and functions. ‘May I ask . . . do you remember anything about yourself?’

  ‘There was the ship. They were putting us aboard it. Then they came to put us to sleep, and said that when we woke up we’d be somewhere else. My name’s . . .’ But she trailed off, unable to supply the answer she must have expected to come without effort. ‘I don’t . . . I can’t remember.’

  ‘It’ll come back,’ I said, fingering two thick lines that had alloy cores, suggesting that they were power umbilicals. ‘If I said “wolf” to you . . . would that mean anything at all?’

  ‘We had wolves in the hills above Zawinul’s Landing. They’d come on one of the first ships. I’d listen to them
when the moons were high.’

  ‘These are different wolves. But it’s good that you remember something of home. Zawinul’s Landing.’ I said the words slowly, ruminatively. ‘That’s a place on Haven, I think – one of the first Demarchist settlements. Do you remember when you left there?’

  ‘Not exactly. What did you say your name was?’

  I examined one of the other cables. It had a slippery, eel-like texture and seemed to want to coil itself around my fingers.

  ‘Miguel de Ruyter.’

  ‘Are you a pilot?’

  ‘No.’ I smiled at the idea. ‘An administrator.’

  ‘An important one?’

  I moved away from the casket in the weapons bay and tugged open a general service hatch in the wall of the shuttle. Behind the bee-striped panel was a mess of power lines and sensor cabling. Like everything else on the shuttle, it showed clear signs of being repaired and adapted several times.

  ‘Reasonably high up the food chain.’

  ‘Then why did they send you?’

  ‘I sent myself.’

  I had brought a tool and repair kit with me to the weapons bay. I opened it and sifted through the items I would need to make some kind of improvised connection between the ship and the casket. I decided it would be feasible, if inelegant.

  ‘Are they really all dead, Miguel de Ruyter?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Is it bad that I don’t feel anything?’

  I turned back to look at the casket, troubled by her question but trying to find a way to deflect it.

  ‘I’d say that it’s entirely human. You wouldn’t necessarily have known a single soul on that ship. On the Salmacis, many of us travelled alone, with no contact with the other passengers. We didn’t begin to know each other until we founded the settlement.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘We’ve become a community. A family, five thousand strong. We have our differences, as in any family: sometimes very serious differences. But there’s a unity that binds us. A mutual understanding; a sense of our own fragility. Call it love. We have to look after each other if any one of us is to survive. We’re vulnerable without the affection and support of our fellow citizens. Together, provided each plays their part, we’re strong enough to wait out the wolves. We’ve been doing it for thirty years now, through thick and thin.’