Redemption Ark

It had been touch and go at times, but because they had survived she had dared to believe that a greater victory had been won. But the arrival of the Inhibitor machines suggested otherwise. The battle, in all likelihood, had already been lost before the first shots were fired. But they had at least bought themselves a little time. Now they had to do something with it.

Khouri settled into one of the seats facing the bridge’s projection sphere. It had been repaired since the mutiny and now showed a real-time display of the Resurgam system. There were eleven major planets, but the display also showed their moons and the larger asteroids and comets — all were of potential importance. Their precise orbital positions were indicated, along with vectors showing the motion, prograde or retrograde, of the body in question. Pale cones radiating from the lighthugger showed the extent of the ship’s instantaneous deep-sensor coverage, corrected for light-travel time. Volyova had strewn a handful of monitor drones on other orbits so that they could peer into blind spots and increase the interferometric baseline, but she used them cautiously.

‘Ready for a recent-history lesson?’ Volyova asked.

‘You know I am, Ilia. I just hope this little jaunt turns out to be worth it, because I’m still going to have to answer some tricky questions when I get back to Cuvier.’

‘They may not seem so massively pressing when you’ve seen what I have to show you.’ She made the display zoom in, enlarging one of the moons spinning around the system’s second-largest gas giant.

‘This is where the Inhibitors have set up camp?’ Khouri asked.

‘Here and on two other worlds of comparable size. Their activities on each seem broadly the same.’

Now dark shapes fluttered into view around the moon. They swarmed and scattered like agitated crows, their numbers and shapes in constant flux. In an instant they settled on to the surface of the moon, linking together in purposeful formations. The playback was evidently accelerated — hours compressed into seconds, perhaps — for transformations blistered across the moon’s surface in a quick black inundation. Zoom-in showed a tendency for the structures to be formed of cubic subelements of widely differing sizes. Vast lasers pumped heat back into space as the transformations raged. Grotesque black machines the size of mountains clotted the landscape, ramping down the moon’s albedo until only infra-red could tease out significant patterns.

‘What are they doing?’ Khouri asked.

I couldn’t tell at first.‘

One or two weeks had passed before what was taking place became clear. Dotted at regular intervals around the moon’s equator were volcanic apertures, squat gape-mouthed machines that extended a hundredth of the moon’s diameter into space. Without warning, they began to spew out rocky material in ballistic dust plumes. The matter was hot but not actually molten. It arced above the moon, falling into orbit. Another machine — Volyova had not noticed it until then — circled in the same orbit, processing the dust, shepherding, cooling and compactifying the plume. In its wake it left an organised ring system of processed and refined matter, gigatonnes of it in tidy lanes. Droves of smaller machines trailed behind like minnows, sucking in the pre-refined matter and subjecting it to even further purification.

‘What’s happening?’

‘The machines seem to be dismantling the moon,’ Volyova said.

‘That much I’ve figured out for myself. But it strikes me as a pretty cumbersome way of going about it. We’ve got crustbuster warheads that would do the same thing in a flash…’

‘And in the process vaporise and disperse half of the moon’s matter.’ Volyova nodded sagely. ‘I don’t think that’s quite what they wanted to do. I think they want all that matter, processed and refined as efficiently as possible. More, in fact, since they’re ripping apart three moons. There’s a lot of volatile material they won’t be able to process into solids, not unless they’re going to be doing some heavy-duty alchemy, but my guess is they’ll still give themselves around a hundred billion billion tonnes of raw material.’

That’s a lot of rubble.‘

‘Yes. And it rather begs the question: what, precisely, do they need it for?’

‘I suppose you’ve got a theory.’

Ilia Volyova smiled. ‘Not much more than guesswork at this stage. The lunar dismantling’s still in progress, but I think it’s reasonably clear that they want to build something. And do you know what? I strongly suspect that whatever it is may not have our absolute best interests at heart.’

‘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.