The ability to function in smaller groups enabled the Banished to probe further from Resurgam, out of the immediate volume of light-limited communication. The more psychotic individuals reached even further from the sun, until they found Hades and the odd, troubling planet which orbited it. By this time the Banished had gone through the same philosophical hoops which Volyova and Pascale had just summarised for Khouri’s benefit. How the galaxy should have been a busier place than it really was, if their ideas were correct — which, as a consequence, was probably not the case. They had listened in the radio, optical, gravitational and neutrino bands for the voices of other cultures, others like them, but had heard nothing. Some of the more adventurous among them — or the more deranged, depending on one’s point of view — had even left the system entirely, and had found nothing of great consequence to report back to home: a few ruins here and there (enigmatic) and a puzzling sludge-like organism which hinted at organisational sophistication, encountered on a handful of aquatic planets, as if it had been placed there.
But all of this became incidental when they found the thing around Hades.
It was, beyond any possible doubt, artefactual. It had been placed there by another civilisation, uncountable millions of years in the past. It seemed to actively invite them to enter its mysteries. So they began to explore it.
And that was when their problems began.
‘It was an Inhibitor device,’ Pascale said. ‘That was what they found, wasn’t it?’
‘It had been waiting there for millions of years,’ Khouri said. ‘All the time they were evolving from what we’d think of as dinosaurs, or birds. All the time they spent reaching towards intelligence; learning to use tools; discovering fire…’
‘Just waiting,’ Volyova echoed. Behind her, the tactical display had been pulsing red for many minutes now, indicating that the shuttle had now fallen within the theoretical maximum range of the lighthugger’s beam weapons. A kill at this distance would be difficult but not impossible, and neither would it be swift. She continued, ‘Waiting for something recognisably intelligent to enter its vicinity — at which point it doesn’t strike out mindlessly; doesn’t destroy them. Because that would defeat the point. What it does is encourage them in, so it can learn as much about them as possible. Where they come from. What kind of technology they have, how they think, how they co-operate and communicate.’
‘Gathering intelligence.’
‘Yes.’ Volyova’s voice was as dolorous as a church bell. ‘It’s patient, you see. But sooner or later there comes a point when it decides that it has all the intelligence it needs. And then — only then — it acts.’
Now the three of them were on common ground. ‘Which is why the Amarantin died out,’ Pascale said, wonderingly. ‘It did something to their sun; tampered with it, triggered something like a vast coronal mass ejection; just enough to scour Resurgam clean of life, and cause a phase of cometary-infall for a few hundred thousand years.’
‘Ordinarily the Inhibitors wouldn’t go to such drastic lengths,’ Volyova said. ‘But in this case they’d left it far too late for anything less. And even that wasn’t sufficient, of course; the Banished were already spaceborn. They had to be hunted down; across tens of light-years, if necessary.’
Again there was a chime from the hull sensors, warning of a directed radar scan. Another chime followed soon after; evidence that the pursuing ship was narrowing its focus.
‘The Inhibitor device around Hades must have alerted others, elsewhere,’ Khouri said, trying to ignore the mechanised prophecies of imminent doom. ‘Transmitted the intelligence it had gathered, warning them to be on the lookout for the Banished.’
‘It can’t have simply been a case of sitting around waiting for them to show up,’ Volyova said. ‘The machines must have switched over from passivity to something more active — replicating hunting machines, for instance, programmed with the templates of the Banished. No matter which direction the Banished turned to flee, light would have outraced them, and Inhibitor systems would always be one step ahead, alert and waiting.’
‘They wouldn’t have stood a chance.’
‘But it can’t have been instantaneous extinction,’ Pascale said. ‘The Banished had time to return to Resurgam; time to preserve what they could of the old culture. Even if they knew they were being hunted down, and that the sun was in the process of destroying their homeworld.’
‘Maybe it took ten years; maybe a century.’ The way Volyova spoke, it was obvious she didn’t think it made a great deal of difference. ‘All we know is that some managed to get further than others.’
‘But none survived,’ Pascale said. ‘Did they?’
‘Some did,’ Khouri said. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
Behind Volyova, the tactical display began to shriek.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The final shell was hollow.
It had taken him three days to reach it; a day since he had left Sajaki’s bodyless suit on the floor of the third shell, more than five hundred kilometres above him now. If he stopped to think about those distances, he knew, he would go quietly mad, so he carefully quarantined them from his thoughts. Simply being in an entirely alien environment was troubling enough; he did not wish to compound his fear with an additional dose of claustrophobia. Yet his quarantining was not complete, so that behind every thought there was a nagging background of crushing fright, the thought that at any instant some action he did would cause the delicate equilibria of this place to shift catastrophically, bringing down that vast, impossible ceiling.
With each inward layer he seemed to pass through a subtly different phase of Amarantin construction methodology. History, too, he supposed — but nothing was ever that simple. The levels did not seem to get systematically more or less advanced as he penetrated deeper, but rather evinced different philosophies; different approaches. It was as if the first Amarantin to arrive here had found something (what, he had not yet begun to guess) and had taken the decision to englobe it in an artificial shell armoured and capable of defending itself. Then another group must have arrived and elected to englobe that, perhaps because they believed their fortifications were more secure. The last of all had taken the process one logical step further, by camouflaging their fortifications so that they did not resemble anything artificial at all. It was impossible to guess over what timescales this layering had taken place, so he studiously avoided doing so. Maybe the different layers had been emplaced almost simultaneously — or perhaps the process had been drawn out over the thousands of years between Sun Stealer’s departure with the Banished Ones, and his godlike return.
Naturally, he had been less than comforted by what he found in Sajaki’s suit.
‘He was never there,’ Calvin said, filling in his thoughts. ‘All the while you thought he was in the suit, he wasn’t. The suit was empty. No wonder he never let you get too close.’
‘Sneaky bastard.’
‘I’ll say. But it wasn’t actually Sajaki being a sneaky bastard, was it?’
Sylveste was desperately trying to find another way to explain this paradox, but was failing at every attempt. ‘But if not Sajaki…’ He trailed off, remembering how he had not actually seen the Triumvir in person before they departed the ship. Sajaki had called him from the clinic, but he had no reason to believe that had really been Sajaki.
‘Listen, something was driving that suit until it crashed.’ Calvin was doing his favourite trick of sounding absurdly calm, despite the situation. But he lacked the usual bravado. ‘I’d say there’s only one logical culprit.’