[Our autonomy is not so great that we can act without the other entity’s permission, Ilia. No matter how cleverly you attempt to persuade us.]
The Captain just needs persuading, that’s all. I’m sure he’ll come around, in the end.
[You have always been an optimist, haven’t you, Ilia?]
No… not at all. But I have faith in the Captain.
[Then we hope your powers of persuasion are up to the task, Ilia.]
I do too.
She gasped suddenly, as if she had been stomach-punched. Her head was empty again and the horrid sense of something sitting immediately behind her had gone, as abruptly as a slamming door. There was not even a hint of the presence in her peripheral vision. She was floating alone, and although she was still imprisoned in the weapon, the feeling that it was haunted had vanished.
Volyova gathered her breath and her composure, marvelling at what had just happened. In all the years she had worked with the weapons she had never once suspected that any of them harboured a guardian subpersona, much less a machine intelligence of at least high gamma-level status — even possibly low-to-medium beta-level.
The weapon had scared the living daylights out of her. Which, she supposed, had undoubtedly been the intended affect.
There was a bustle of motion around her. The access panel — in a totally different part of the wall than she remembered — budged open an inch. Harsh blue light rammed through the gap. Through it, squinting, Volyova could just make out another spacesuited figure. ‘Khouri?’
‘Thank God. You’re still alive. What happened?’
‘Let’s just say my efforts to reprogram the weapon were not an unqualified success, shall we, and leave it at that?’ She hated discussing failure almost as much as she hated the thing itself.
‘What, you gave it the wrong command or something?’
‘No, I gave it the right command but for a different interpreter shell than I was actually accessing.’
‘But that would still make it the wrong command, wouldn’t it?’
Volyova turned herself around until her helmet was aligned with the slit of light. ‘It’s more technical than that. How did you get the panel open?’
‘Good old brute force. Or is that not technical enough?’
Khouri had wedged a crowbar from her suit utility kit into what must have been a hair-fine joint in the weapon’s skin, and then levered back on that until the panel slid open.
‘And how long did you take to do that?’
‘I’ve been trying to get it open since you went inside, but it only just gave way, right this minute.’
Volyova nodded, fairly certain that absolutely nothing would have happened until the weapon decided it was time to let her go. ‘Very good work, Khouri. And how long do you think it will take to get it open all the way?’
Khouri adjusted her position, re-attaching herself to the weapon so that she could apply more leverage to the bar. ‘I’ll have you out of there in a jiffy. But while I’ve got you there, so to speak, can we come to some agreement on the Thorn issue?’
‘Listen to me, Khouri. He only barely trusts us now. Show him this ship, give him even a hint of a reason to begin to guess who I am, and you won’t see him for daylight. We’ll have lost him, and with him the only possible means of evacuating that planet in anything resembling a humane manner.’
‘But he’s even less likely to trust us if we keep finding excuses for why he can’t come aboard…’
‘He’ll just have to deal with them.’
Volyova waited for a response, and waited, and then noticed that there no longer appeared to be anyone on the other side of the gap. The hard blue light that had been coming from Khouri’s suit was gone, and no hand was on the tool.
‘Khouri… ?’ she said, beginning to lose her calm again.
‘Ilia…’ Khouri’s voice came through weakly, as if she were fighting for breath. ‘I think I have a slight problem.’
‘Shit.’ Volyova reached for the end of the crowbar and tugged it through to her side of the hatch. She braced herself and then worked the gap wider, until it was just wide enough for her to push her helmet through. In intermittent flashes she saw Khouri falling into the darkness, her suit harness tumbling away from her. Crouched on the side of the weapon she also saw the belligerent lines of a heavy-construction servitor. The mantislike machine must have been under the Captain’s direct control.
‘You vicious bastard! It was me who broke into the weapon, not her…’
Khouri was very distant now, perhaps halfway to the far wall. How fast was she moving? Three or four metres per second, perhaps. It was not fast, but her suit’s armour was not designed to protect her against impacts. If she hit badly…
Volyova worked harder, forcing the hatch open inch by painful inch. Dully, she realised that she was not going to make it in time. It was taking too long. Khouri would reach the wall long before Volyova freed herself.
‘Captain… you’ve really done it now.’
She pushed harder. The crowbar slipped from her fingers, whacked the side of her helmet and went spinning into the dark depths of the machine. Volyova hissed her anger, knowing that she did not have time to go searching for the lost tool. The hatch was wide enough to wriggle through now, but to do so she would have to abandon her harness and life-support pack. She could survive long enough to fend for herself, but there would be no way to save Khouri.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit… shit… shit.’
The hatch slid open.
Volyova climbed through the hole and kicked off from the side of the weapon, leaving the servitor behind. There was no time to reflect on what had just happened, except to acknowledge that only Seventeen or the Captain could have made the hatch open.
She had her helmet drop a radar overlay over her faceplate. Volyova rotated and then got an echo from Khouri. Her fall was taking her through the long axis of the chamber, through a gallery of menacing stacked weapons. Judging by her trajectory she must have already glanced against one of the monorail tracks that threaded the chamber.
‘Khouri… are you still alive?’
‘I’m still here, Ilia…’ But she sounded as if she had been hurt. ‘I can’t stop myself.’
‘You don’t have to. I’m on my way.’
Volyova jetted after her, zooming between weapons that were both familiar to her and yet still quietly mysterious. The radar echo assumed definition and shape, becoming a tumbling human figure. Behind it, looming closer and closer, was the far wall. Volyova checked her own speed relative to it: six metres per second. Khouri could not have been moving much slower than that.
Volyova squirted more thrust from her harness. Ten… twenty metres per second. She saw Khouri now, grey and doll-like, with one arm flopping limply into space. The figure swelled. Volyova applied reverse thrust in incremental stabs, feeling the frame creak at the unusual load it was being expected to distribute. Fifty metres from Khouri… forty. She looked in a bad way: a human arm was definitely not meant to articulate that way.
Tlia… that wall’s coming up awfully fast.‘
‘So am I. Hold on. There may be a slight…’ They thumped together. ‘… impact.’
Mercifully, the collision had not thrown Khouri off on another trajectory. Volyova held on to her by her unharmed arm just long enough to unwind a line and fasten it to Khouri’s belt and then let her go. The wall was visible now, no more than fifty metres away.
Volyova braked, her thumb hard down on the thruster toggle, ignoring the protestations from the suit’s subpersona. The line tethering Khouri extended to maximum tautness, Khouri hanging between her and the wall. But they were slowing. The wall was not rushing towards them with quite the same sense of inevitability.
‘Are you all right?’ Volyova asked.
I think I may have broken something. How did you get out of the weapon? When the machine flicked me off, the hatch was still nearly shut.‘
I managed to get it open a little wid
er. But I had some help, I think.‘
‘The Captain?’
‘Possibly. But I don’t know if it means he’s fully on our side after all.’ She concentrated on flying for a moment, keeping the tether taut as she swung around. The pale green ghosts of the thirty-three cache weapons loomed on her radar; she plotted a course through them back to the airlock.
I still don’t know why he set the servitor on you,‘ Volyova said. Maybe he wanted to warn us off rather than kill us. As you say, he could have killed us already. Just possibly he prefers to have us around.’
‘You’re reading a lot into one hatch.’
‘That’s why I don’t think we should count on the Captain’s assistance, Khouri.’
‘No?’
‘There’s someone else we could ask for help,’ Volyova said. ‘We could ask Sylveste.’
‘Oh no.’
‘You met him once before, inside Hades.’
‘Ilia, I had to die to get inside that fucking thing. It’s not something I’m going to do twice.’
‘Sylveste has access to the stored knowledge of the Amarantin. He might know of a suitable response to the Inhibitor threat, or at the very least have some idea of how long we have left to come up with one. His information could be vital, Ana, even if he can’t help us in a material sense.’
‘No way, Ilia.’
‘You don’t actually remember dying, do you? And you’re fine now. There were no ill effects.’
Khouri’s voice was very weak, like someone mumbling on the edge of sleep. ‘You fucking do it, if it’s that easy.’
Presently — and not a moment too soon — Volyova saw the pale rectangle which marked the airlock. She approached it slowly, winding Khouri in and depositing her first into the lock. By then the injured woman was unconscious.
Volyova pulled herself in, closed the door behind them and waited for the lock to pressurise. When the air pressure had reached nine-tenths of a bar she wrenched her own helmet off, her ears popping, and flicked sweat-drenched hair from her eyes. The biomedical displays on Khouri’s suit were all in the green: nothing to worry about. All she had to do now was drag her to somewhere where she could get medical attention.
The door into the rest of the ship irised open. She pushed herself towards it, hoping she had the strength to haul Khouri’s dead weight along behind her.
‘Wait.’
The voice was calm and familiar, yet it was not one she had heard in a long time. It reminded her of unspeakable cold, of a place where the other crewmembers had feared to tread. It was coming from the wall of the chamber, hollowly resonant.
‘Captain?’ she said.
‘Yes, Ilia. It’s me. I’m ready to talk now.’
Skade led Felka and Remontoire down into the bowels of Nightshade, deep into the realm of influence of her machinery. By turns, Remontoire started to feel light-headed and feverish. At first he thought it was his imagination, but then his pulse started racing and his heart thundered in his chest. The sensations worsened with every level that they descended, as if they were lowering themselves into an invisible fog of psychotropic gas.
Something’s happening.
The head snapped around to look at him, while the ebony servitor continued striding forwards. [Yes. We’re well into the field now. It wouldn’t be safe for us to descend much further, not without medical support. The physiological effects become quite upsetting. Another ten vertical metres, then we’ll call it a day.]
What’s going on?
[It’s a little difficult to say, Remontoire. We’re within the influence of the machinery now, and the bulk properties of matter here — all matter, even the matter in your body — have been changed. The field that the machinery generates is suppressing inertia. What do you think you know about inertia, Remontoire?]
He answered judiciously. As much as anyone, I suppose. It isn’t something I’ve ever needed to think about. It’s just something we live with.
[It doesn’t have to be. Not now.]
What have you done? Learned how to switch it off?
[Not quite — but we’ve certainly learned to take the sting out of it.] Skade’s head twisted around again. She smiled indulgently; waves of opal and cerise flickered back and forth along her crest, signifying, Remontoire imagined, the effort that was required to translate the concepts she took for granted into terms a mere genius could grasp. [Inertia is more mysterious than you might think, Remontoire.]
I don’t doubt it.
[It’s deceptively easy to define. We feel it every moment of our lives, from the moment we’re born. Push against a pebble and it moves. Push against a boulder and it doesn’t, or at least not very much. By the same token, if a boulder’s rushing towards you, you aren’t going to be able to stop it very easily. Matter is lazy, Remontoire. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it’s doing, whether that’s sitting still or moving. We call that laziness inertia, but that doesn’t mean we understand it. For a thousand years we’ve labelled it, quantified it, caged it in equations, but we’ve still only scratched the surface of what it really is.]
And now?
[We have an opening. More than a glimpse. Recently the Mother Nest has achieved reliable control of inertia on the microscopic scale.]
‘Exordium gave you all that?’ Felka asked, speaking aloud.
Skade answered without speaking, refusing to indulge in Felka’s preferred mode of communication. [I told you that the experiment gave us a signpost. It was almost enough to know that the technique was possible; that such a machine could exist. Even then it still took us years to build the prototype.]
Remontoire nodded; he had no reason to think she might be lying. From scratch?
[No… not entirely. We had a head start.]
What kind of head start? He watched mauve and turquoise striations pulse along Skade’s crest.
[Another faction had explored something similar. The Mother Nest recovered key technologies relating to their work. From those beginnings — and the theoretical clues offered by the Exordium messages — we were able to progress to a functioning prototype.]
Remontoire recalled that Skade had once been involved in a high-security mission into Chasm City, an operation that had resulted in the deaths of many other operatives. The operation had clearly been sanctioned at Inner Sanctum level; even as a Closed Council member he knew little other than that it had happened.
You helped recover those technologies, Skade? I understand you were lucky to get out alive.
[The losses were extreme. We were fortunate that the mission was not a complete failure.]
And the prototype?
[For years we worked to make it into something useful. Microscopic control of inertia — no matter how conceptually profound — was never of any real value. But lately we’ve had one success after another. Now we can suppress inertia on classical scales, enough to make a difference to the performance of a ship.]
He looked at Felka, then back to Skade. Ambitious, I’ll give you that.
[Lack of ambition is for baseline humans.]
This other faction…the one you recovered the items from — why didn’t they make the same breakthrough? He had the impression that Skade was framing her thoughts with extreme care.
[All previous attempts to understand inertia were doomed to failure because they approached the problem from the wrong standpoint. Inertia isn’t a property of matter as such, but a property of the quantum vacuum in which matter is embedded. Matter itself has no intrinsic inertia.]
The vacuum imposes inertia?
[It isn’t really a vacuum, not at the quantum level. It’s a seething foam of rich interactions: a broiling sea of fluctuations, with particles and messenger-particles in constant existential flux, like glints of sunlight on ocean waves. It’s the choppiness of that sea which creates inertial mass, not matter itself. The trick is to find a way to modify the properties of the quantum vacuum — to reduce or increase the energy density of the electromagnetic zero
-point flux. To calm the sea, if only in a locally defined volume.]
Remontoire sat down. I’ll stop here, if you don’t mind.
‘I don’t feel well either,’ Felka said, squatting down next to him. ‘I feel sick and light-headed.’
The servitor turned around stiffly, animated like a haunted suit of armour. [You’re experiencing the physiological effects of the field. Our inertial mass has dropped to about half its normal value. Your inner ear will be confused by the drop in inertia of the fluid in your semi-circular canal. Your heart will beat faster: it evolved to pump a volume of blood with an inertial mass of five per cent of your body; now it has only half that amount to overcome, and its own cardiac muscle reacts more swiftly to the electrical impulses from your nerves. If we were to go much deeper, your heart would start fibrillating. You would die without mechanical intervention.]
Remontoire grinned at the armoured servitor. Fine for you, then.
[It wouldn’t be comfortable for me, either, I assure you.]
So what does the machine do? Does all the matter within the bubble have zero inertia?
[No, not in the present operating mode. The radial effectiveness of the damping depends on the mode in which we’re running the device. At the moment we’re in an inverse square field, which means that the inertial damping becomes four times more efficient every time we halve our distance to the machine; it becomes near infinite in the immediate proximity of the machine, but the inertial mass never drops to absolute zero. Not in this mode.]
But there are other modes?
[Yes: other states, we call them, but they’re all very much less stable than the present one.] She paused, eyeing Remontoire. [You look ill. Shall we return upship?]
I’ll be fine for now. Tell me more about your magic box.
Skade smiled, as stiffly as usual, but with what looked to Remontoire like pride. [Our first breakthrough was in the opposite direction — creating a region of enhanced quantum vacuum fluctuation, thereby increasing the energy-momentum flux. We call that state one. The effect was a zone of hyper-inertia: a bubble in which all motion ceased. It was unstable, and we never managed to magnify the field to macroscopic scales, but there were fruitful avenues for future research. If we could freeze motion by ramping inertia up by many orders of magnitude we’d have a stasis field, or perhaps an impenetrable defensive barrier. But cooling — state two — turned out to be technically simpler. The pieces almost fell into place.]