‘That’s what I call myself. Best leave off the Volyova part for the time being, though. No sense in pushing our luck.’
‘None at all. I suppose I should say…’ Again, she looked around. She could not help herself. ‘It’s good to see you again, Ilia. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.’
‘I’ve missed your company, too. Odd to think we once started out almost killing each other. All water under the bridge now, of course.’
‘I began to worry. You hadn’t been in touch for so long…’
‘I had good reasons to keep a low profile, didn’t I?’
‘I suppose so.’
For several minutes neither of them said anything. Khouri, for that was how she was daring to think of herself again, found herself recalling the origin of the audacious game the two of them were playing. They had devised it themselves, amazing each other with their nerve and ingenuity. Together, they made a very resourceful pair indeed. But for maximum usefulness they found that they had to work alone.
Khouri broke the silence, unable to wait any longer. ‘What is it, Ilia? Good news or bad?’
‘Knowing my track record, what do you think?’
‘A wild stab in the dark? Bad news. Very bad news indeed.’
‘Got it in one.’
‘It’s the Inhibitors, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry to be so predictable, but there you are.’
‘They’re here?’
‘I think so.’ Volyova’s voice had dropped low now. ‘Something is happening, anyway. I’ve seen it myself.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Volyova’s voice, if anything, became quieter still. Khouri had to strain to hear it. ‘Machines, Ana, huge black machines. They’ve entered the system. I never saw them actually arrive. They were just… here.’
Khouri had tasted the minds of those machines briefly, feeling the furious predatory chill of ancient recordings. They were like the minds of pack animals, ancient and patient and drawn to the dark. Their minds were mazes of instinct and hungry intelligence, utterly unencumbered by sympathy or emotion. They howled across the silent steppes of the galaxy to each other, summoning themselves in great numbers when the bloody stench of life again troubled their wintry sleep.
‘Dear God.’
‘We can’t say we weren’t expecting them, Ana. From the moment Sylveste started fiddling around with things he didn’t understand, it was only a matter of when and where.’
Khouri stared at her friend, wondering why the temperature in the room appeared to have dropped ten or fifteen degrees. The feared and hated Triumvir looked small and faintly grubby, like a bag lady. Volyova’s hair was a close-cropped greying thatch above a round, hard-eyed face which betrayed remote Mongol ancestry. She did not look like a very convincing herald of doom.
‘I’m scared, Ilia.’
‘I think you have excellent reason to be scared. But try not to show it, will you? We don’t want to terrify the locals just yet.’
‘What can we do?’
‘Against the Inhibitors?’ Volyova squinted through her glass, frowning slightly, as if this was the first time she had given the subject any serious consideration. ‘I don’t know. The Amarantin didn’t have a lot of success in that department.’
‘We’re not flightless birds.’
‘No, we’re humans — the scourge of the galaxy… or something like that. I don’t know, Ana. I really don’t. If it was just you and I, and if we could persuade the ship, the Captain, to come out of his shell, we could at least consider running away. We could even contemplate using the weapons, if that would help matters.’
Khouri shuddered. ‘But even if it did, and even if we could make a getaway, it wouldn’t help Resurgam much, would it?’
‘No. And I don’t know about you, Ana, but my conscience isn’t exactly whiter-than-white as it is.’
‘How long do we have?’
‘That’s the odd thing. The Inhibitors could have destroyed Resurgam already, if that was all they intended to do — it’s within even our technology to do that much, so I very much doubt that it would trouble them particularly.’
‘So maybe they haven’t come to kill us after all.’
Volyova tipped back her drink. ‘Or maybe… just maybe… they have.’
In the swarming heart of the black machines, processors that were not themselves sentient determined that an overseer mind must be quickened to consciousness.
The decision was not taken lightly; most cleansings could be performed without raising the spectre of the very thing that the machines had been made to suppress. But this system was problematic. Records showed that an earlier cleansing had been performed here, a mere four and half thousandths of a Galactic Turn ago. The fact that the machines had been called back showed that additional measures were clearly necessary.
The overseer’s task was to deal with the specifics of this particular infestation. No two cleansings were ever quite the same, and it was a regrettable fact of life that the best way to annihilate intelligence was with a dose of intelligence itself. But once the cleansing was over, the immediate outbreak traced back to source and its daughter spores sanitised — which might take another two-thousandths of a Galactic Turn, half a million years — the overseer would be dumbed down, its self-awareness packed away until it needed it again.
Which might be never.
The overseer never questioned its work. It knew only that it was acting for the ultimate good of sentient life. It was not at all concerned that the crisis it was acting to avert, the crisis that would become an unmanageable cosmic disaster if intelligent life was permitted to spread, lay a total of thirteen Turns — three billion years — in the future.
It did not matter.
Time meant nothing to the Inhibitors.
SEVEN
[Skade? I’m afraid there’s been another accident.]
What kind of accident?
[A state-two excursion.]
How long did it last?
[Only a few milliseconds. It was enough, though.]
The two of them — Skade and her senior propulsion technician — were crouched in a black-walled space near Nightshade’s stern, while the prototype was berthed in the Mother Nest. They were squeezed into the space with their backs arched and their knees pressed against their chests. It was unpleasant, but after her first few visits Skade had blanked out the sensation of postural discomfort, replacing it with a cool Zenlike calm. She could endure days squashed into inhumanly small hideaways — and she had. Beyond the walls, secluded in numerous cramped openings, were the intricate and perplexing elements of the machinery. Direct control and fine-tuning of the device was only possible here, where there were only the most rudimentary links to the normal control network of the ship.
Is the body still here?
[Yes.]
I’d like to see it.
[There isn’t an awful lot left to see.]
But the man unplugged his compad and led the way, shuffling sideways in a crablike manner. Skade followed him. They moved from one hideaway to another, occasionally having to inch through constrictions caused by protruding elements of the machinery. It was all around them, exerting its subtle but undeniable effect on the very space-time in which they were embedded.
No one, not even Skade, really understood quite how the machinery worked. There were guesses, some of them very scholarly and plausible, but at heart there remained a gaping chasm of conceptual ignorance. Much of what Skade knew about the machinery consisted only of documented cause and effect, with little understanding of the physical mechanisms underpinning its behaviour. She knew that when the machinery was functioning it tended to settle into several discrete states, each of which was associated with a measurable change in the local metric… but the states were not rigidly isolated, and it had been known for the device to oscillate wildly between them. Then there was the associated problem of the various field geometries, and the tortuously complex way they fed back into the state stability…