‘We’ll never know for sure,’ Inquisitor Vuilleumier said. ‘Clearly the crew wasn’t as united as we thought during the Sylveste crisis. It looks from the internal evidence as if there was some sort of factional dispute aboard the ship.’
‘We always suspected this was the case,’ the other woman, Irina, added. ‘Evidently there was trouble brewing just below the surface. Seems that whatever happened around Cerberus/Hades was enough to spark off a mutiny. The crew must have killed each other, leaving the ship to take care of itself.’
‘Handy for us,’ Thorn said.
The women exchanged glances. ‘Perhaps we should move on to the item of interest,’ Vuilleumier said.
They played a movie for him. It was holographic, running in the big eye. Thorn assumed that it was a computer synthesis assembled from data that the ship had gathered from a multitude of sensor bands and viewpoints. What it presented was a God’s-eye view, the view of a being able to apprehend entire planets and their orbits.
‘I must ask you to accept something,’ Irina said. ‘It is difficult to accept, but it must be done.’
Tell me,‘ Thorn said.
‘The entire human species is poised on the brink of sudden and catastrophic extinction.’
‘That’s quite a claim. I hope you can justify it.’
‘I can, and I will. The important thing to grasp is that the extinction, if it is to happen, will begin here, now, around Delta Pavonis. But this is merely the start of something that will become greater and bloodier.’
Thorn could not help but smile. ‘Then Sylveste was right, is that it?’
‘Sylveste knew nothing about the details, or the risks he was taking. But he was correct in one assumption: he believed that the Amarantin had been wiped out by external intervention, and that it had something to do with their sudden emergence as a spacefaring culture.’
‘And the same thing’s going to happen to us?’
Irina nodded. ‘The mechanism will be different this time, it seems. But the agents are the same.’
‘And they are?’
‘Machines,’ Irina told him. ‘Starfaring machines of immense age. For millions of years they’ve hidden between the stars, waiting for another culture to disturb the great galactic silence. All they exist to do is detect the emergence of intelligence and then suppress it. We call them the Inhibitors.’
‘And now they’re here?’
‘The evidence would suggest so.’
They showed him what had happened so far, how a squadron of Inhibitor machines had arrived in the system and set about the dismantling of three worlds. Irina shared with Thorn her suspicion that Sylveste’s activities had probably drawn them, and that there might even be further waves converging on the Resurgam system from further out, alerted by the expanding wavefront of whatever signal had activated the first machines.
He watched the three worlds die. One was a metallic planet; the other two were rocky moons. The machines swarmed and multiplied on the surfaces of the moons, covering them in a plaque of specialised industrial forms. From the equators, plumes of mined matter belched into space. The moons were being cored out like apples. The matter plumes were directed into the maws of three colossal processing engines orbiting the dying bodies. Streams of refined matter, segregated into distinct ores and isotopes and granularities, were then flung into interplanetary space, arcing out along lazy parabolas.
‘That was just the start,’ Vuilleumier said.
They showed him how the mass streams from the three dismantled moons converged on a single point in space. It was a point in the orbit of the system’s largest gas giant, and the giant planet would arrive at that point at exactly the same time as the three mass streams.
‘That was when our attention switched to the giant,’ Irena said.
The Inhibitor machines were fearfully difficult to detect. It was only with the greatest of effort that she had managed to discern the presence of another smaller swarm of machines around the giant. For a long time they had done nothing but wait, poised for the arrival of the matter streams, the hundred billion billion tonnes of raw material.
‘I don’t understand,’ Thorn said. ‘There are plenty of moons around the gas giant itself. Why did they go to the trouble of dismantling moons elsewhere if they were going to be needed here?’
Those aren’t the right sort of moon,‘ Irina said. ’Most of the moons around the giant aren’t much more than ice balls, small rocky cores surrounded by frozen or liquid-state volatiles. They needed to rip apart metallic worlds, and that meant looking further afield.‘
‘And now what are they going to do?’
‘Make something else, it seems,’ Irina said. ‘Something bigger still. Something that needs one hundred billion billion tonnes of raw material.’
Thorn returned his attention to the eye. ‘When did this start? When did the matter streams reach Roc?’
‘Three weeks ago. The thing — whatever it is — is beginning to take shape.’ Irena tapped at a bracelet around her wrist, causing the eye to zoom in on the giant’s immediate neighbourhood.
Most of the planet remained in shadow. Above the one limb that was illuminated — an off-white crescent shot through with pale bars of ochre and fawn —
‘It’s a solid object, so far as we can tell,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘An arc of a circle one hundred thousand kilometres in radius. It’s in an equatorial orbit around the planet, and the ends are growing.’
Irina zoomed in again, focusing on the precise midpoint of the growing arc. There was a swelling, little more than a lozenge-shaped smudge at the current resolution. She tapped more controls on the bracelet and the smudge bloomed into clarity, expanding to fill the entire display volume.
‘It was a moon in its own right,’ Irina said, ‘a ball of ice a few hundred kilometres from side to side. They circularised its orbit above the equator in a few days, without the moon breaking apart under the dynamic stresses. Then the machines built structures inside it, what we must assume to be additional processing equipment. One of the matter streams falls into the moon
Irina nodded, noting Thorn’s evident incredulity. ‘Yes, that’s quite correct. What you see here has been achieved in the last ten standard days. We are dealing with an industrial capacity beyond anything in our experience, Thorn. Our machines can turn a small metal-rich asteroid into a starship in a few days, but even that would seem astonishingly slow by comparison with the Inhibitor processes.’
‘Ten days to form that arc’ The hairs on the back of Thorn’s neck were standing up, to his embarrassment. ‘Do you think they’ll keep growing it until the ends meet?’
‘It seems likely. If the ends are to form a ring, they’ll meet in a little under ninety days.’
‘Three months! You’re right. We couldn’t do that. We never could; not even during the
‘We don’t know. Yet. There’s more, though.’ Irina nodded at the eye. ‘Shall we continue?’
‘Show me,’ Thorn said. ‘I want to see it all.’
‘You won’t like it.’
She showed him the rest, explaining how the three individual mass streams had followed near-ballistic trajectories from their points of origin, like chains of pebbles tossed in precise formation. But near the gas giant they were tightly orchestrated, steered and braked by machines too small to see. They were forced to curve sharply, aimed towards whichever constructional focus was their destination. One stream rained down into the maw of the moon that was extruding out the whiskers. The other two streams plunged into similar mawlike structures on two other moons, both of which had been lowered into orbits just above the cloud layer, well within the radius at which they should have been shattered by tidal forces.
‘What are the other two moons doing?’ Thorn asked.
‘Something else, it seems,’ Irina said. ‘Here, take a look. See if you can make more sense of it than we’ve been able to.’
