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 any timescale shorter than a few million years. Most species did not endure that long, so they saw only grim continuity. The only way that the decline could be observed was in the much longer term, evidenced not in the records of individual cultures but in the subtle differences between them. The ruthlessness quotient of the Inhibitors remained as high as ever, but their methods were becoming less efficient, their response times slower. Some profound and subtle flaw in the machines’ design had worked its way to the surface. Now and then a culture slipped through the net, managing to spread into interstellar space before the Inhibitors could contain and cull it. The cull then became more difficult; less like surgery and more like butchery.The Amarantin, the birdlike creatures who had lived on Resurgam a million years earlier, had been one such species. The effort to cleanse them had been protracted, allowing many of them to slip into various hidden sanctuaries. The last act of the culling machines had been to annihilate Resurgam’s biosphere by triggering a catastrophic stellar flare. Delta Pavonis had since settled down to normal sunlike activity, but it was only now that Resurgam was beginning to support life again.Their work done, the Inhibitors had vanished back into the stellar cold. Nine hundred and ninety thousand years passed.Then humans came, drawn to the enigma of the vanished Amarantin culture. Their leader had been Sylveste, the ambitious scion of a wealthy Yellowstone family. By the time Khouri, Volyova and Nostalgia for Infinity arrived in the system, Sylveste had put in place his plans for exploring the neutron star on the system’s edge, convinced that Hades had something to do with the Amarantin extinction. Sylveste had coerced the crew of the starship into helping him, using its cache of weapons to break through shells of defensive machinery and finally penetrating to the heart of a moon-sized artefact — they called it Cerberus — which orbited the neutron star.Sylveste had been right all along about the Amarantin. But in verifying his theory he had also sprung a primed Inhibitor trap. At the heart of the Cerberus object, Sylveste had died in a massive matter-antimatter explosion.And at the same time he had not died at all. Khouri knew; she had met and spoken to Sylveste after his ‘death’. So far as she was capable of understanding it, Sylveste and his wife had been stored as simulations in the crust of the neutron star itself. Hades, it turned out, was one of the sanctuaries that the Amarantin had used when they were being harried by the Inhibitors. It was an element of something much older than either the Amarantin or the Inhibitors, a transcendent information storage and processing system, a vast archive. The Amarantin had found a way inside it, and so, much later, had Sylveste. That was as much as Khouri knew, and as much as she wanted to know.She had met the stored Sylveste only once. In the more than sixty years that had passed since then — the time that Volyova had spent carefully infiltrating the very society that feared and loathed her — Khouri had allowed herself to forget that Sylveste was still out there, was still in some sense alive in the Hades computational matrix. On those rare occasions when she did think about him, she found herself wondering if he ever gave a moment’s thought to the consequences of his actions all those years ago; if memories of the Inhibitors ever stirred him from vain dreams of his own brilliance. She doubted it, for Sylveste had not struck her as someone overly troubled by the results of his own deeds. And in any case, by Sylveste’s accelerated reckoning, for time passed very rapidly in the Hades matrix, the events must have been centuries of subjective time in his past, as inconsequential as childhood misdeeds. Very little could touch him in there, so what was the point of worrying about him?But that hardly helped those who were still outside the matrix. Khouri and Volyova had spent only twenty of those sixty-plus years out of reefersleep, for their infiltration scheme had been necessarily slow and episodic. But of those twenty years, Khouri doubted that a single day had passed when she had not thought of — and worried about — the prospect of the Inhibitors.Now at least her worry had transmuted into certainty. They were here; the thing that she had dreaded had finally started.And yet it was not to be a quick, brutal culling. Something titanic was being brought into existence, something that required the raw material of three entire worlds. For the time being the activities of the Inhibitors could not be detected from Resurgam, even with the tracking systems put in place to spot approaching lighthuggers. But Khouri doubted that this could continue to be the case. Sooner or later the activities of the alien machines would exceed some threshold and the citizenry would begin to glimpse strange apparitions in the sky.Very likely, all hell would break loose.But by then it might not even matter.CHAPTER 10
Xavier saw one ship detach itself from the bright flow of other vessels on the main approach corridor to Carousel New Copenhagen, tugged down his helmet’s binoculars and swept space until he locked on to the ship itself. The image enlarged and stabilised, the spined pufferfish profile of Storm Bird rotating as the ship executed a slow turn. The Taurus IV salvage tug was still nosing against its hull, like a parasite looking for one last nibble.Xavier blinked hard, requesting a higher magnification zoom. The image swelled, wobbled and then sharpened.‘Dear God,’ he whispered. ‘What the hell have you done to my ship?’Something awful had happened to his beloved
