Inhibitor Phase Read online

  ‘Did you come up with those words, or did someone in Sanctum do it for you?’

  ‘You’ll understand in time,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to understand.’

  Afterwards, when Victorine had collected her paintbox and gone to her room, and Nicola and I were cleaning up in the kitchen, she touched my wrist and said: ‘She will get over it, Miguel. It’s not that she blames you for coming back from the dead. Deep down, she is very glad. But for a few days you became something else in her imagination, a figment no man could ever live up to, and now she has to deal with the reality again.’

  ‘Thank you for speaking in my defence.’

  ‘I did not agree with your silence – you should never have put us through that. Even though Morgan said that you were right to expect that we should have worked things out for ourselves. But I believe in what you did, and what you set out to do. Those who think you had something to atone for? They are wrong, and so are you if still think that way.’ She pulled me in. The wholehearted embrace I had been waiting for since my return. ‘You are better than your detractors. You are a good man, Miguel de Ruyter, and I am proud that I am your wife.’

  In the morning I joined Morgan Valois and Alma Chung in Sanctum’s infirmary. Like all our facilities it was a rambling complex of makeshift, modular rooms and buildings tucked into a network of caves and caverns, hundreds of metres beneath the surface. Every part of it had been scavenged and repurposed from the hulk of the Salmacis.

  ‘I’m confused, Alma,’ my deputy administrator was saying as I made my entrance. ‘I could have sworn we spoke yesterday, but I must have slipped at least a day or two.’

  ‘We did,’ Chung answered tersely.

  ‘Then . . . why is Miguel here? He was encouraged to stay home and recuperate for at least twenty-six to fifty-two hours.’

  ‘A suggestion he clearly decided was best ignored.’ Chung – my head of planetary security – gave an unconcerned shrug: she had no time for these frivolities. ‘I don’t blame him in the slightest, given how quickly his prize is likely to emerge. He wants to see what he’s brought back to us.’

  The three of us were looking into a glass-partitioned annex where the passenger and her casket had been brought after my landing. The sterile, airtight recovery room contained a bed and the usual medical monitoring equipment – not that much – but for the time being the passenger was still in the casket. The reefersleep unit had been wheeled in on a trolley, the sort we used for missile handling, and was now connected to a much more sophisticated battery of support systems. Two technicians, wearing masks and anti-contamination garments, were fussing around the connections, checking vital signs and taking notes on their bulky portable screens.

  ‘Do we recognise the technology?’ I asked.

  ‘Older and more sophisticated than anything we brought here,’ Valois said. ‘But not so old that our earlier experience doesn’t give us something to go on. Pre-plague, most likely – which doesn’t mean we aren’t taking all available safeguards.’

  ‘If you find something in Sun Hollow capable of being touched by the plague, let me know. We’re deep in the Dark Ages, Morgan. No matter how far back things might have seemed to slip when she went under, we’ll be a step less developed than anything she’s prepared for. Have they got any further with that corrupted memory core?’

  ‘Different varieties of scrambled data, but all pointing in the same direction: a passenger manifest for someone embarking at Haven, in ’613. An adult female. Her name is Brianna Bettancourt.’

  ‘We have a ship record as well,’ Chung said. ‘Lighthugger Silence in Heaven. Bulk passenger, five point five megatonne displacement, commissioned ’329, Demarchist orbital manufactory, Fand, Lacaille 9352. Engines and associated propulsion sub-systems leased from the Conjoiners under the technology sharing protocols of the Europa Accords.’

  ‘Good to have a name,’ I acknowledged. But I was still trying to push away the fact of what that ship had been: an ark full of sleepers, on their way to some better world, some better future. ‘How long until we bring her out?’

  ‘They’ve begun perfusion,’ Valois said. ‘Say, thirteen to twenty-six hours, before she’s conscious and warm and safe to be moved to that bed. Even then she’ll likely be weak, confused and amnesiac: don’t expect to be playing chess with her any time soon.’

  ‘Other than her memory, which was starting to come back, she sounded sharp.’

  ‘That was then,’ Valois cautioned. ‘We’ve tried opening that neural channel, and we’ll keep trying as her brain comes back to life, but so far we haven’t found a way in.’

  ‘It was some emergency function of the casket. If the casket no longer detects that it’s at risk of failure, it won’t invoke that neural interface.’

  ‘If that little trick was done with implants,’ Chung said, ‘she’ll have to have them scooped out and incinerated before she takes a step out of that room.’

  I shook my head. ‘Be real, Alma. Even if she was a carrier, she’d be no threat to us.’

  ‘Point of principle, dear boy, just like your decision not to signal back to us,’ Valois answered loftily. ‘Still, we’ve scanned the box as well as we can. There doesn’t seem to be anything artificial inside her, nor any nasty surprises in the casket itself. We’ll conduct a complete set of tests once she’s out, but my best guess is that she’s come to us without augmentation, innocent as the snow.’

  ‘Innocence,’ Chung scoffed. ‘That’ll be a first for us. If you get a glimpse, tell me what it looks like.’

  A faint shudder came up through the floor. Beyond the glass, the technicians halted in their examinations. Valois, Chung and I lifted our eyes to the breach light up in the corner of the wall, waiting for the red flash and siren that would mean some part of Sun Hollow was losing air, venting out to the surface. None of us had breather boxes around our necks. Inside Sanctum, which could be pressure sealed in a few seconds, there was no need. Any impactor big enough to puncture Sanctum was not going to leave much in the way of survivors, nor any great need for government.

  The light stayed dim, and no siren came.

  ‘Perhaps she’ll want to climb back into the casket, when she finds out what sort of world she’s woken up to,’ Valois said.

  ‘She’ll be grateful to be alive at all,’ Chung said, with a fierce lack of sympathy. Then, with a frowning squint. ‘She did know about the wolves, didn’t she, Miguel?’

  ‘I don’t think she did.’

  ‘Then what did her captain tell her they were running from?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t think she had the first idea what had happened to that ship at any point since it left Haven.’

  Chung was silent for a few seconds. I could almost feel the mesh of mental gears; the whirring simulations going on in her brain. ‘Something’s been niggling me, Miguel, ever since you said you had a passenger. How the hell did she survive?’

  I nodded into the glassed enclosure. ‘I’d say just barely. You’ve seen the damage to that casket.’

  ‘Your closing speeds were on the order of seven thousand kilometres per second,’ Chung stated.

  ‘They were heading in, and I was heading out to intercept them, on a closely opposed vector. Two fists closing. Of course we had a high relative velocity.’

  ‘Yet from the shuttle’s navigation log, we know that it was within your capabilities to rendezvous with the casket. The differential motion was much lower than your closing velocities.’

  ‘You’re quibbling about how a survivor came to us?’

  ‘I’m saying there’s more to her story than simply being the one lucky soul who was thrown clear by that blast. There’s something else.’

  ‘I thought there might be.’

  ‘The shuttle log confirms your account of the distress signal.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t think I was making it up.’

  ‘But we didn’t pick it up, and neither did the other ships or Disciples.’

&n
bsp; ‘So it was aimed at me, and not them.’

  ‘To aim it at you,’ Valois said, picking up on Chung’s point, ‘she’d have needed to know where you were. But your account says that she didn’t seem to know who you were or where you’d come from.’

  ‘Maybe something in the casket was able to lock onto me automatically, without the passenger ever being aware of it.’

  Chung looked at me as if there were blood coming from my nostrils. ‘Something in that casket? Is that the best you can come up with?’

  ‘It’s not an interrogation, Alma,’ I stressed. ‘And when we do start asking questions of the passenger, we won’t be interrogating her, either. We’ll be treating her as what she is: the sole survivor of something harrowing. An honoured guest, to be shown kindness and understanding.’

  A functionary bustled up behind us. ‘Pardon me, sirs. I’m afraid your presences are requested in the Red Room.’

  ‘What is it?’ Chung snapped back.

  ‘Something odd with the seismophones, picked up in the last few minutes. You’d best come.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  The atmosphere in the Red Room was one of puzzlement, rather than outright alarm. The alert level was still amber: the same condition it had been since the demise of the Silence in Heaven. It had been red before, and would go down to yellow and then green if there were no further repercussions from the incomer.

  Chung’s analysts were crowded around the main table. Its display had been enlarged to focus on Michaelmas alone, with the two hemispheres of our planet placed side by side. Both faces were dotted with luminous, prism-shaped markers showing the positions of various sensors and defence assets, with a Neolithic huddle of them gathered around Sun Hollow. Other than that asymmetry, the two faces looked much alike: densely cratered, like a pair of coins that had been left in some corrosive medium, until no part of their surfaces remained unpitted.

  ‘Fill me in,’ I said, as we joined the analysts.

  ‘Something coming through here, sirs,’ said one of Chung’s senior people, called Cantor. ‘Quite close to the estimated impact point of that last event, about ninety kilometres due east of us. We have no eyes in that area, but we do have several seismophones.’

  ‘Show us,’ Chung said.

  Cantor drew our gazes to one of the screens suspended above the table at eye-level. A wavering green trace ran from one side of the screen to the other, pulsing up and down in a semi-regular pattern, almost like the electrocardiogram of a very slow pulse.

  ‘We’re not seismologists,’ Valois said.

  ‘Something is triggering the seismophones,’ Cantor said. ‘And not the normal after-shock pattern we’d expect to see following an impactor. Those shocks fall off in amplitude very quickly. This is . . . not falling away.’

  ‘Convert that trace to an acoustic signal and play it over the speakers,’ Chung said.

  We waited while Cantor made the necessary arrangements. The technicians stopped in their work as the sounds played across the general address system. There was a muffled thump, a crackly silence, another muffled thump. What we were hearing were not sounds conducted through air, but vibrations being sent through Michaelmas’s crust.

  The pattern continued. Thump, silence, thump. There was a rhythm to it that none of us could ignore.

  ‘It sounds like footsteps,’ Valois said, voicing the thought the rest of us shared. ‘Is this signal coming through all the seismophones in that sector?’

  ‘Yes, but at varying strength,’ Cantor said. ‘That’s why we don’t think it’s a fault in the phones themselves, or the cabling linking them back to Sun Hollow. There’s a hint . . .’ But Cantor silenced themself, directing a glance at Chung in expectation of permission or refusal to continue with this line of speculation.

  ‘Go on,’ Chung said.

  ‘The signal might be moving. It’s growing in amplitude in one receiver, falling away in the others – but still much too slowly to be anything to do with that impactor.’

  ‘If it is moving, would you put a figure on the speed?’ I asked.

  Cantor looked at Chung again, drew breath. ‘My best guess? About two kilometres per hour. Quite slow, for a walking pace. But maybe not so slow over the sort of terrain on the surface, given that whoever’s walking has to be wearing a vacuum suit.’

  ‘And if it’s moving,’ I pushed. ‘You can estimate a vector?’

  ‘Only very crudely.’

  ‘But you have estimated one.’

  ‘It could be travelling in the direction of Sun Hollow. If that’s the case, we’ll have a much better idea within the next twenty-six hours.’ Cantor gestured at the table. ‘These other phones should start registering the vibration, and we have eyes on the sector that the signal’s heading into. The coverage is sparse, but it might give us something.’

  ‘Ninety kilometres,’ I said. ‘If someone is headed our way, whoever they might be, they’ll be knocking on our doors in about forty-five hours. I wonder what they’re hoping to find?’

  Sensing that the moment could be delayed no longer I walked up the short flight of stairs that brought me onto the stage, in full view of the gathered citizens. Two functionaries followed me, shorn of their sheepskins and wearing ceremonial attire only a little less ornamented than my own.

  As the crowd noted my presence, there was a palpable shift in the atmosphere. Sweat prickled under my armpits. The air was not as cool as it had been in Sanctum, gently warmed and humidified by the five thousand bodies now pressed into the forum.

  Murmuring and fidgeting stopped. There was one last cough, then silence.

  I looked out, my gaze sweeping the ranks, trying to take everyone in. The first six rows were set with chairs, but after that it was standing room only, and even with my elevated position I could only see a little way into that press of tired, worry-worn faces. I had asked all of Sun Hollow to come here, with the exception of anyone hospitalised or on essential duty elsewhere. Five thousand was too many to recognise individually, but among the faces in plain view there were indeed hundreds that I did know by name, and with their names was a web of familial, occupational and political relationships.

  There was Mina Lofgrind, whose father, Marcus, had died in the opening up of the twentieth cavern. Mina worked in the spinach beds, breaking her back to feed us. There was Nate Masnek, who had lost most of his hand in an accident in the papermill only a few weeks earlier. He was making a good recovery considering the injury but would need different employment once he was strong again. There were Etienne and Mokhtar, tireless scholars of closed-cycle life-support: never a day passed when they were not fixing something or trying to make something work a little more efficiently. No children, of course – or, at least, no children younger than Victorine.

  I found Nicola and her daughter quite easily, seated just back from the first row. They were being pressed with questions by the gossip-fiends on either side: fishing for advance news about the announcement. By Nicola’s brittle, exasperated look, I thought she’d had more than enough of being probed.

  Of the people I recognised, how many were entirely on my side? It had been hard enough to say even before the Rurik Taine affair. Sun Hollow as a whole had not been in support of his attempted mutiny, but there had been many nuances of opinion besides simple disapproval. Some thought I had been too lenient in the past, allowing the dissenters to plot and organise, and that I ought to be held to partial account. Some thought I had been too lenient in the manner of his execution, and that nothing short of hanging, drawing and quartering was suitable for the man who had endangered us all.

  Within Rurik Taine’s family, I had no doubt where lay the sympathies. Rurik’s wife Orva was seated next to his brother (and her brother-in-law) Soren. I tried to look past them, without snagging either’s gaze, but it was futile. Some part of my brain wanted me to lock eyes with Orva, as if that were a necessary step in my rehabilitation.

  What do you want of me, I wondered: blood?

  There h
ad been no desire on my part to have Rurik executed. But the nature of his crime prohibited any other form of punishment. It was there in the tightly framed legislation we had both helped draft, in the earliest days of Sun Hollow. If we were going to survive, if we were going to stay hidden from the wolves, that entailed a simple, binding premise: no one could ever leave the system.

  I made sure of that by destroying the Salmacis. Once we had stripped the ship of the last of its useful materials, what remained of the hulk had been put on automatic pilot and allowed to crash itself into Michael: timed, of course, to coincide with an episode of flaring, so that the twin detonations of its Conjoiner drives would look like spurts of background radiation. That sacrificial act was well known and commemorated: it was there in the mural that Victorine and her fellow pupils (and those before them) had been painting on the school wall. The principle of the act was understood: since the temptation to leave might prove irresistible, especially after a few decades of hardship – and if the wolves failed to come, year after year, lulling us into the treacherous idea that they might have gone away – then the best way of avoiding catastrophe was to remove the means itself. We had deliberately left ourselves with only the capability to travel within the system, and then only for emergency purposes.

  But about five years ago a rumour had taken hold.