The active radar returns were confused by the shifting forms of the approaching machines. Mass sensors registered phantom signals at the edge of their sensitivity, barely separable from the background of Roc’s own field. But the visual evidence was unequivocal. Discrete dark shapes were swimming towards the ship through the atmosphere. Swimming was the right word, Khouri realised, because that was exactly how it appeared: a squirming, flowing, undulating complexity of motion, the way an octopus moved through water. The machines were as large as her ship and formed of many millions of smaller elements, a slithering, restless dance of black cubes on many scales. Almost no detail was visible beyond the absolute shifting black of the silhouettes, but every now and then blue or mauve light flickered within the blocky masses, throwing this or that appendage into relief. Clouds of smaller black shapes attended each major assemblage, and as the assemblages neared each other they threw out extensions between each other, umbilical lines of flowing black daughter machines. Waves of mass pulsed between the main cores, and now and then one of the primaries fissioned or merged with its neighbour. The purple lightning continued to flicker between the inky shapes, occasionally forming a geometric shell around Khouri’s ship, before collapsing back to something which appeared much more random. Despite herself, despite the certain feeling that she was going to die, the approach was fascinating. It was also sickening: simply looking at the Inhibitor machines inspired a feeling of dreadful nausea, for she was apprehending something that had clearly never been shaped by human intelligence. It was breathtakingly strange, the way the machines moved, and in her heart she knew that Volyova and she had — if such a thing were possible — terribly underestimated their enemy. They had seen nothing yet.
The machines were now only a hundred metres from her ship. They formed a closing black shell, oozing tighter around their prey. The sky was being locked out, visible only between the tentacular filaments of the exchanging machines. Limned in violet arcs and sprays of lightning — quivering sheets and dancing baubles of contained plasma energy — Khouri saw thick trunks of shifting machinery probing inwards, obscenely and hungrily. The ship’s exhaust was still thrusting behind them, but the machines were quite oblivious to it, and it seemed to pass right through the shell.
‘Thorn?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with what sounded like genuine regret. ‘It’s just that I had to know. I’ve always been one to push things.’
I don’t really blame you. I might have done the same thing, if the tables were turned.‘
‘That means we’d have both been stupid, Ana. It isn’t any excuse.’
The hull clanged, then clanged again. The whooping alarm changed its tone: no longer reporting imminent pressure collapse or a stall warning, but indicating that the hull was being damaged, prodded from outside. There was a vile metallic scraping sound, like nails dragged down tin, and the wide, grasping end of a trunk of Inhibitor machinery splayed itself across the cockpit windows. The circular end of the trunk squirmed with a moving mosaic of tiny thumb-sized black cubes, the swirling motion possessing a weird hypnotic quality. Khouri tried to reach the controls that would shutter the windows, imagining it might make one or two seconds’ difference.
The hull creaked. More black tentacles attached themselves. One by one the sensor displays began to blank out or haze with static.
‘They could have killed us by now…’ Thorn said.
‘They could, but I think they want to know what we’re like.’
There was another sound, one she had been dreading. It was the squeal of metal being torn aside. Her ears popped as pressure fell within the ship, and she assumed that she would be dead a second or two later. To die by depressurisation was not the most desirable of deaths, but she imagined that it was preferable to being smothered by Inhibitor machinery. What would the grasping black shapes do when they reached her — dismantle her the same way they were pulling the ship apart? But just as she had formulated that consolatory thought, the sensation of pressure drop ceased and she realised that if there had been a hull rupture it had been brief.
‘Ana,’ Thorn said. ‘Look.’
The bulkhead door that led into the flight deck was a wall of rippling ink, like a suspended tidal wave of pure darkness. Khouri felt the breeze of that constant bustling motion, as if a thousand silent fans were being flicked back and forth. Only now and then did a pulse of pink or purple light strobe within the blackness, hinting at dreadful machine-filled depths. She sensed hesitation. The machines had reached this far into her ship, and they must have been aware that they had arrived at its delicate organic core.
Something began to emerge from the wall. It began as a domelike blister as wide across as Khouri’s thigh, and then it extended, taking on the form of a tree trunk as it probed further into the cabin. Its tip was a blunt nub like one extremity of a slime mould, but it waggled to and fro as if sniffing the air. A blurred haze of tiny black machines made the edge difficult to focus on. The process took place in silence, save for the occasional distant snap or crackle. The nub grew out from the wall until it was a metre long, and as many metres again from Khouri and Thorn. For a moment it ceased extending and swung to one side and then the other. Khouri saw a black thing the size of a bluebottle flit past her brow and then settle back into the main mass of the trunk. Then, with dire inevitability, the trunk bifurcated and resumed its extrusion. The split ends forked, one aiming for Khouri, the other for Thorn. It grew via oozing waves of cubes pulsing along the length of it, the cubes swelling or contracting before locking into their final positions.
‘Thorn,’ Khouri said. ‘Listen to me. We can destroy the ship.’
He nodded once. ‘What do I do?’
‘Free me and I’ll do it. It won’t accept the destruct order from you.’
He made to move, but had shifted barely an inch before the black tentacle had whipped out another appendage to pin him down. It was done with care — the machinery was clearly still unwilling to harm them inadvertently — but Thorn was now immobilised.
‘Nice try,’ Khouri said. The tips were only an inch from her. They had bifurcated and re-bifurcated on their final approach, so that now a many-fingered black hand was poised before her face, fingers — or appendages — ready to be plunged into eyes, mouth, nose, ears, even through skin and bone. The fingers were themselves split into tinier and tinier black spikes, vanishing into a grey-black bronchial haze.
The trunk pulled back an inch. Khouri closed her eyes, thinking the machinery was preparing itself to strike. Then she felt a sharp prick of coldness beneath her eyelids, a sting so quick and localised that it was hardly pain at all. A moment later she felt the same thing somewhere within her auditory canal, and an instant after that — though she had no real idea of how rapidly time was actually passing now — the Inhibitor machinery reached her brain. There was a torrent of sensation, confused feelings and images cascading by in rapid, random succession, followed by a sense that she was being unravelled and inspected like a long magnetic tape. She wanted to scream or make some recognisable human response, but she was pinned hard. Even her thoughts had become gelid, impeded by the invasive presence of the black machines. The tarlike mass had crept into every part of her, until there was almost no space left for the entity that had once thought of itself as Khouri. And yet enough remained to sense that even as the machine pushed itself into her there was a two-way flow of data. As it established communicational feeds into her skull, she became dimly cognisant of its smothering black vastness, extending beyond her head, back along the trunk, back through the ship and into the clump of machines that had surrounded the ship.
She even sensed Thorn, linked into the same information-gathering network. His own thoughts, such as they were, echoed hers precisely. He was paralysed and compressed, unable to scream or even imagine the release that would come from screaming. She tried to reach out to him, to at least let him know that she was still present and that somone else in the universe was aware of what h
e was going through. And at the same time she felt Thorn do likewise, so that they linked fingers through neural space, like two lovers drowning in ink. The process of being analysed continued, the blackness seeping into the oldest parts of her mind. It was the worst thing she had ever experienced, worse than any torture or simulation of torture that she had ever known on Sky’s Edge. It was worse than anything the Mademoiselle had done to her, and the only respite lay in the fact that she was only dwindlingly aware of her own identity. When that was gone she would be free.
And then something changed. At the limit of what she was feeling through the data-gathering channels, there was a disturbance on the periphery of the cloud that had englobed her ship. Thorn sensed it as well: she felt a pathetic flicker of hope reach her through the bifurcation. But there was nothing to be hopeful about. They were just feeling the machines regroup, ready for the next phase of the smothering process.
She was wrong.
She felt a third mind enter her thoughts, quite separate from Thorn’s. This mind was bell-clear and calm, and its thoughts remained unclotted by the oppressive black choke of the machinery. She sensed curiosity and not a little hesitation, and while she also sensed fear, she did not detect the outright terror that Thorn was radiating. The fear was only an extreme kind of caution. And at the same time she gained back a little of herself, as if the black crush had relented.
The third mind skirted closer to her own, and she realised, with as much shock as she was capable of registering, that it was a mind she knew. She had never encountered it on this level before, but the force of its personality was so pervasive that it was like a trumpet blast sounding a familiar refrain. It was the mind of a man and it was the mind of a man who had never had much time for doubt, or humility, or much in the way of compassion for the affairs of others. At the same time she detected the tiniest gleam of remorse and something that might even have been concern. But even as she came to that conclusion the mind snapped back, shrouding itself again, and she felt the powerful wake of its withdrawal.
She screamed, properly, for she was able to move her body again. In the same moment the trunk shattered, breaking apart with a high-pitched tinkle. When she opened her eyes she was surrounded by a cloud of jostling black cubes, tumbling in disarray. The black wall across the bulkhead was breaking up. She watched the cubes attempt to merge with each other, occasionally forming larger black aggregates that lasted only a second or so before they too broke apart. Thorn was no longer pinned to his seat. He moved, shoving aside black cubes, until he was able to release Khouri from the webbing.
‘Have you any idea what the hell just happened?’ he asked, slurring his words as he spoke.
I do,‘ she said. ’But I’m not sure if I believe it.‘
‘Talk to me, Ana.’
‘Look, Thorn. Look outside.’
He followed her gaze. Beyond the ship, the surrounding black mass was experiencing the same inability to cohere as the cubes within the ship. Windows were opening back into empty sky, closing and then re-opening elsewhere. And there was, she realised, something else out there as well. It was within the rough black shell that encompassed the ship but not of it, and as it moved — for it appeared to be orbiting the ship, looping around it in lazy open curves — the coagulated black masses moved nimbly out of its way. The shape of the object was difficult to focus on, but the impression Khouri retained later was of a whirling iron-grey gyroscope, a roughly spherical thing made out of many spinning layers. At its core, or buried somewhere within it, was a flickering source of dark red light, like a carnelian. The object — it also made her think of a spinning marble — was perhaps a metre across, but because its periphery swelled and retracted as it spun, it was difficult to be certain. All Khouri knew, all she could be sure of, was that the object had not been there before, and that the Inhibitor machinery appeared strangely apprehensive of it.
‘It’s opening a window for us,’ Thorn said, wonderingly. ‘Look. It’s given us a way to escape.’
Khouri eased him from the pilot’s position. ‘Then let’s use it,’ she said. They nosed out of the swarm of Inhibitor machines and arced towards space. On the radar Khouri watched the shell fall behind, fearful that it would smother the flickering red marble and come after them again. But they were allowed to leave. It was only later that something came up hard and fast from behind, with the same tentative radar signature that they had seen before. But the object only zipped past them at frightening acceleration, heading out into interplanetary space. Khouri watched it fall out of range, heading in the general direction of Hades, the neutron star on the system’s edge.
But she had expected that.
Where did the great work come from? What had instigated it? The Inhibitors did not have access to that data. All that was clear was that the work was theirs to perform and theirs alone, and that the work was the single most important activity that had ever been instigated by an intelligent agency in the history of the galaxy, perhaps even in the history of the universe itself.
The nature of the work was simplicity itself. Intelligent life could not be allowed to spread across the galaxy. It could be tolerated, even encouraged, when it confined itself to solitary worlds or even solitary solar systems.
But it must not infect the galaxy.
Yet it was not acceptable to simply extinguish life wholesale. That would have been technologically feasible for any mature galactic culture, especially one that had the galaxy largely to itself. Artificial hypernovae could be kindled in stellar nurseries, sterilising blasts a million times more effective than supernovae. Stars could be steered and tossed into the event horizon of the sleeping supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core, so that their disruption would fuel a cleansing burst of gamma rays. Binary neutron stars could be encouraged to collide by delicate manipulation of the local gravitational constant. Droves of self-replicating machines could be unleashed to rip worlds to rubble, in every single planetary system in the galaxy. In a million years, every old rocky world in the galaxy could have been pulverised. Prophylactic intervention in the protoplanetary discs out of which worlds coalesced could have prevented any more viable planets from forming. The galaxy would have choked in the dust of its own dead souls, glowing red across the megaparsecs.
All this could have been done.
But the point was not to extinguish life, rather to hold it in check. Life itself, despite its apparent profligacy, was held sacrosanct by the Inhibitors. Its ultimate preservation, most especially that of thinking life, was what they existed for.
But it could not be allowed to spread.
Their methodology, honed over millions of years, was simple. There were too many viable suns to watch all the time; too many worlds where simple life might suddenly bootstrap itself towards intelligence. So they established networks of triggers, puzzling artefacts dotted across the face of the galaxy. Their placement was such that an emergent culture was likely to stumble on one sooner rather than later. Equally, they were not intended to lure cultures into space inadvertently. They had to be tantalising, but not too tantalising.
The Inhibitors waited between the stars, listening for the signs that one of their glittering contraptions had attracted a new species. And then, quickly and mindlessly, they converged on the site of the new outbreak.
The military shuttle Voi had arrived in was docked outside, clamped to the underside of Carousel New Copenhagen via magnetic grapples. Clavain was marched aboard and told where to sit. A black helmet was lowered over his head, with only a tiny glass viewing window in the front. It was intended to block neural signals, preventing him from interfering with ambient machinery. Their caution did not surprise him in the slightest. He was potentially valuable to them — in spite of Voi’s earlier comments to the contrary, any kind of defector might make some difference, even this late in the war — but as a spider he could also cause them considerable harm.
The military ship undocked and fell away from Carousel New Copenhagen. The windo
ws in the armoured hull were quaintly fixed. Through the scratched and scuffed fifteen-centimetre-thick glass Clavain saw a trio of slim police craft shadowing them like pilot fish.
He nodded at the ships. ‘They’re taking this seriously.’
‘They’ll escort us out of Convention airspace,’ Voi said. ‘It’s normal procedure. We have very good relations with the Convention, Clavain.’
‘Where are you taking me? Straight to Demarchist HQ?’
‘Don’t be silly. We’ll take you somewhere nice and secure and remote to begin with. There’s a small Demarchist camp on the far side of Marco’s Eye… of course, you know all about our operations.’
Clavain nodded. ‘But not your precise debriefing procedures. Have you had to do many of these?’
The other person in the room was a male Demarchist, also of high status, whom Voi had introduced as Giles Perotet. He had a habit of constantly stretching the fingers of his gloves, one after the other, from hand to hand.
‘Two or three a decade,’ he said. ‘Certainly you are the first in a while. Do not expect the red-carpet treatment, Clavain. Our expectations may have been coloured by the fact that eight of the eleven previous defectors turned out to be spider agents. We killed them all, but not before valuable secrets had been lost to them.’
‘I’m not here to do that. There wouldn’t be much point, would there? The war is ours anyway.’
‘So you came to gloat, is that it?’ Voi asked.
‘No. I came to tell you something that will put the war into an entirely different perspective.’
Amusement ghosted across her face. ‘That’d be some trick.’
‘Does the Demarchy still own a lighthugger?’
Perotet and Voi exchanged puzzled glances before the man replied, ‘What do you think, Clavain?’