“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. Theirplacement 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 ship undocked and fell away from Carousel New Copenhagen. The windows 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?”
Clavain didn’t answer him for several minutes. Through the window he saw Carousel New Copenhagen diminishing, the vast grey arc of the rim revealing itself to be merely one part of a spokeless wheel. The wheel itself grew smaller until it was nearly lost against the background of the other habitats and carousels that formed the Rust Belt.
“Our intelligence says you don’t,” Clavain said, “but our intelligence could be wrong, or incomplete. If the Demarchy had to get its hands on a lighthugger at very short notice, do you think it could?”
“What is this about, Clavain?” Voi asked.
“Just answer my question.”
Her face flared red at his insolence, but she held her temper well. Her voice remained calm, almost businesslike. “You know there are always ways and means. It just depends on the degree of desperation.”
“I think you should start making plans. You will need a starship, more than one, if you can manage it. And troops and weapons.”
“We’re not exactly in a position to spare resources, Clavain,” Perotet said, removing one glove completely. His hands were milky white and very fine-boned.
“Why? Because you will lose the war? You’re going to lose it anyway. It’ll just have to happen a little sooner than you were expecting.”
Perotet replaced the glove. “Why, Clavain?”
“Winning this war is no longer the Mother Nest’s primary concern. Something else has taken precedent. They’re going through the motions of winning now because they don’t want you or anyone else to suspect the truth.”
Voi asked, “Which is?”
“I don’t know all the details. I had to make a choice between staying to learn more and defecting while I had a chance to do so. It wasn’t an easy decision, and I didn’t have a lot of time for second thoughts.”
“Just tell us what you do know,” Perotet said. “We’ll decide if the information merits further investigation. We’ll find out what you know eventually, you realise. We have trawls, just like your own side. Maybe not as fast, maybe not as safe . . . but they work for us. You’ll lose nothing by telling us something now.”
“I’ll tell you all that I know. But it’s valueless unless you act on it.” Clavain felt the military ship adjust its course. They were headed for Yellowstone’s only large moon, Marco’s Eye, which orbited just beyond the Ferrisville Convention’s jurisdictional limit.
“Go ahead,” Perotet said.
“The Mother Nest has identified an external threat, one that concerns all of us. There are aliens out there, machinelike entities that suppress the emergence of technological intelligences. It’s why the galaxy is such an empty place. They’ve wiped it clean. I’m afraid we’re next on the list.”
“Sounds like supposition to me,” Voi said.
“It isn’t. Some of our own deep-space missions have already encountered them. They are as real as you or I, and you have my word that they’re coming closer.”
“We’ve managed fine until now,” Perotet said.