The Revelation Space Collection

‘You think it’s going to be a weapon, don’t you?’

‘Obviously I’m getting predictable in my old age. But yes, I rather fear a weapon is on the cards. What kind, I can’t begin to guess. Clearly they could have already destroyed Resurgam if that was their immediate intention — and they wouldn’t need to dismantle it neatly.’

‘Then they’ve got something else in mind.’

‘It would seem so.’

‘We’ve got to do something about it, Ilia. We’ve still got the cache. We could make some kind of difference, even now.’

Volyova turned off the display sphere. ‘At the moment they seem not to be aware of our presence — we appear to fall beneath their detection threshold unless we’re in the vicinity of Hades. Would you be willing to compromise that by using the cache weapons?’

‘If I felt it was our last best hope, I might. So would you.’

‘I’m just saying there won’t be any going back. We have to be completely clear about that.’ Volyova was silent for a moment. ‘There’s something else as well…’

‘Yes?’

She lowered her voice. ‘We can’t control the cache, not without his help. The Captain will need to be persuaded.’

Of course they did not call themselves the Inhibitors. They had never seen any reason to name themselves anything. They simply existed to perform a duty of astonishing importance, a duty vital to the future existence of intelligent life itself. They did not expect to be understood, or sympathised with, so any name — or any hint of justification — was entirely superfluous. Yet they were passingly aware that this was a name that they had been given, assigned to them after the glorious extinctions that had followed the Dawn War. Through a long, tenuous chain of recollection the name had been passed from species to species, even as those species were wiped from the face of the galaxy. The Inhibitors: those that Inhibit, those that suppress the emergence of intelligence.

The overseer recognised, ruefully, that the name was indeed an accurate description of its work.

It was difficult to say exactly where and when the work had begun. The Dawn War had been the first significant event in the history of the inhabited galaxy, a clashing of a million newly emergent cultures. These were the first starfaring species to arise, the players at the beginning of the game.

The Dawn War, ultimately, had been about a single precious resource.

It had been about metal.

She returned to Resurgam.

In Inquisition House there were questions to be answered. She fielded them with as much insouciance as she could muster. She had been in the wilderness, she said, handling a highly sensitive field report from an agent who had stumbled on an exceptionally good lead. The trail to the Triumvir, she told her doubters, was hotter than it had been in years. To prove this she reactivated certain closed files and had old suspects invited back to Inquisition House for follow-up interviews. Inwardly, she felt sick at what had to be done to maintain the illusion of probity. Innocents had to be detained and made, for the sake of realism, to feel as if their lives, or at least their liberties, were in extreme jeopardy. It was a detestable business. Once she had sweetened it by making sure that she only terrorised people who were known to have evaded punishment for other crimes, revealed by judicious snooping of the files of rival government departments. It had worked for a time, but then even that had begun to seem morally questionable.

But now it was worse. She had doubters in the administration, and to silence their qualms she had to make her investigations unusually efficient and ruthless. There had to be plausible rumours circulating Cuvier of the degrees to which Inquisition House was prepared to go. People had to suffer for the sake of her cover.

She reassured herself that it was all, ultimately, in their best interests, that what she was doing was for the greater good of Resurgam; that a few terrified souls here and there were a small price to pay when set against the protection of an entire world.

She stood at the window of her office in Inquisition House, looking down towards the street, watching another guest being bundled into a blunt grey electric car. The man stumbled as the guards walked him to it. His head was covered and his hands were tied behind his back. The car would speed through the city until it reached a residential zone — it would be dusk by then — and the man would be dumped into the gutter a few blocks from his home.

His bonds would have been loosened, but the man would likely lie still on the ground for several minutes, breathing hard, gasping at the realisation that he had been released. Perhaps a gang of friends would find him as they made their way to a bar or back from the repair factories. They would not recognise him at first, for the beating he had taken would have swollen his face and made it difficult for him to talk. But when they did they would help the man back to his house, glancing warily over their shoulders in case the government agents who had dumped him were still abroad.

Or perhaps the man would find his own feet and, peering through the slits of bloodied, bruised eyelids, might somehow contrive to find his own way home. His wife would be waiting, perhaps more scared now than anyone in Cuvier. When her husband came home she would experience something of the same mingled relief and terror that he had experienced upon regaining consciousness. They would hold each other despite the pain that the man was in. Then she would examine his wounds and clean what could be cleaned. There would be no broken bones, but it would take a proper medical examination to be sure of that. The man would assume that he had been lucky, that the agents who had beaten him had been weary after a hard day in the interrogation cells.

Later, perhaps, he would hobble to the bar to meet his friends. Drinks would be bought and in some quiet corner he would show them the worst of the bruises. And word would spread that he had acquired them in Inquisition House. His friends would ask him how he could ever have fallen under suspicion of being involved with the Triumvir, and he would laugh and say that there was no stopping Inquisition House; not now. That anyone even remotely suspected of impeding the House’s enquiries was fair game; that the pursuit of the criminal had been notched up to such an intensity that any misdemeanour against any government branch could be assumed to indicate tacit support for the Triumvir.

Khouri watched the car glide away and pick up speed. Now she could barely remember what the man had looked like. They all began to look the same after a while, the men and women blurring into one homogenous terrified whole. Tomorrow there would be more.

She looked above the buildings, into the bruise-coloured sky. She imagined the processes that she now knew were taking place beyond Resurgam’s atmosphere. No more than one or two light-hours away, vast and implacable alien machinery was engaged in reducing three worlds to fine metallic dust. The machines seemed unhurried, unconcerned with doing things on a recognisably human timescale. They went about their business with the quiet calm of undertakers.

Khouri recalled what she had already learned of the Inhibitors, information vouchsafed to her after she had infiltrated Volyova’s crew. There had been a war at the dawn of time, a war that had encompassed the entire galaxy and numerous cultures. In the desolate aftermath of that war, one species — or collective of species — had determined that intelligent life could no longer be tolerated. They had unleashed dark droves of machines whose only function was to watch and wait, vigilant for the signs of emergent starfaring cultures. They left traps dotted through space, glittery baubles designed to attract the unwise. The traps both alerted the Inhibitors to the presence of a new outbreak of intelligence and also served as psychological probing mechanisms, constructing a profile of the soon-to-be-culled fledglings.

The traps gauged the technological prowess of an emergent culture and suggested the manner in which they might attempt to counter the Inhibitor threat. For some reason that Khouri did not understand, and which had certainly never been explained to her, the response to the emergence of intelligence had to be proportionate; it was not enough simply to wipe out all life in the galaxy or even in a pocket of the galaxy. There was, she sensed, a deeper purpose to the Inhibitor culls that she did not yet grasp, and might not ever be capable of grasping.

And yet the machines were imperfect. They had begun to fail. It was nothing that could be detected over