‘Next.’
The picture showed Thorn, another man and a woman on the flight deck of the shuttle, all of them smiling into the camera, the instrumentation lit up behind them.
‘It took a long time — many days — but we finally got the shuttle to talk to us. It wasn’t that it didn’t want to deal with us, simply that we’d forgotten all the protocols that its builders had assumed we’d know. But as you can see, the ship is at least nominally functional.’
‘Can they fly?’
Thorn looked serious. ‘We don’t know for sure. We have no reason to assume that they can’t, but so far we’ve only scratched the surface of those diagnostic layers. We have people there now who are learning more by the day, but all we can say at the moment is that the shuttles should fly, given everything that we know about Belle Époque machinery.’
‘How did you find them?’ asked another woman.
Thorn lowered his eyes, marshalling his thoughts. ‘I have been looking for a way off this planet my entire life,’ he said.
‘That isn’t what I asked. What if those shuttles are a government trap? What if they planted the clues that led you to them? What if they’re designed to kill you and your followers, once and for all?’
‘The government knows nothing about any way to leave this planet,’ Thorn told her. ‘Trust me on that.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Next.’
Thorn now showed them a picture of the thing in the sky, waiting while the projector lurched in and out of focus. He studied the reaction of his audience. Some of them had seen this image before; some had seen pictures that showed the same thing but with much less resolution; some had seen it with their own eyes, as a faint ochre smudge in the sky chasing the setting sun like a malformed comet. He told them that the picture was the latest and best image available to the government, according to his sources.
‘But it isn’t a comet,’ Thorn said. ‘That’s the government line, but it isn’t true. It isn’t a supernova either, or any of the other rumours they’ve put about. They’ve been able to get away with those lies because not many people down here know enough about astronomy to realise what that thing is. And those that do have been too intimidated to speak out, since they know that the government is lying for a reason.’
‘So what is it?’ someone asked.
‘While it doesn’t have anything like the right morphology to be a comet, it isn’t something outside our solar system either. It moves against the stars, a little each night, and it’s sitting in the ecliptic along with the other planets. There’s an explanation for that, quite an obvious one, really.’ He looked them all up and down, certain that he had their attention. ‘It is a planet, or rather what used to be one. The smudge is where there used to be a gas giant, the one we call Roc. What we’re seeing is Roc’s disembowelled corpse. The planet is being pulled apart, literally dismantled.’ Thorn smiled. ‘That’s what the government doesn’t want you to know, because there’s nothing they can do about it.’
He nodded towards the back. ‘Next.’
He showed them how it had begun, over a year earlier.
‘Three medium-sized rocky worlds were dismantled first, ripped apart by self-replicating machines. Their rubble was collected, processed and boosted across the system to the gas giant. Other machines were already waiting there. They turned three of Roc’s moons into colossal factories, eating megatonnes of rubble by the second and spewing out highly organised mechanical components. They spun an arc of matter around the gas giant, a vast metallic ring, unbelievably dense and strong. You can see it here, very faintly, but you’ll have to take my word that it’s more than a dozen kilometres thick. At the same time they were threading tubes of similar material down into the atmosphere itself.’
‘Who?’ another man asked. ‘Who is doing this, Thorn?’
‘Not who,’ he said. ‘What. The machines aren’t of human origin. The government’s pretty certain about that. They have a theory, too. It was something Sylveste did. He set off some kind of trigger that brought them here.’
‘Just like the Amarantin must have done?’
‘Perhaps,’ Thorn said. ‘There’s certainly speculation along those lines. But there’s no sign that any major planets have ever been dismantled in this system before, no resonance gaps in orbits where a Jovian would have belonged. But then again, it was a million years ago. Maybe the Inhibitors tidied up after they’d done their dirty work.’
‘Inhibitors?’ asked a bearded man whom Thorn recognised as an unemployed palaeobotanist.
‘That’s what the government calls the alien machines. I don’t know why, but it seems as good a name as any.’
‘What will they do to us?’ asked a woman who had exceptionally bad teeth.
‘I don’t know.’ Thorn tightened his fingers around the edge of the podium. He had felt the mood of the room change within the last minute. It always happened this way, when they saw what was happening. Those who knew of the thing in the sky had viewed it with alarm from the moment the rumours began. For most of the year it had not been visible at all from Cuvier’s latitude, where most of the citizenry still lived. But no one had been of the opinion that it was likely to be a good omen. Now it had hoved into the evening sky, unignorable.
The government’s experts had their own ideas about what was going on around the giant. They had correctly deduced that the activities could only be the result of intelligent forces, rather than some outlandish astronomical cataclysm, although that had, for a while, been considered. A minority considered it likely that the agency behind the destruction was human: the Con-joiners, perhaps, or a new and belligerent group of Ultras. A smaller and less credible minority thought that the Triumvir herself, Ilia Volyova, had to have something to do with it. But the majority had correctly deduced that alien intervention was the most likely explanation, and that it was in some way a response to Sylveste’s investigations.
But the government’s experts had access only to the sketchiest of data. They had not glimpsed the alien machinery in close-up, as Thorn had.
Volyova and Khouri had their own theories.
As soon as the arc was finished, as soon as the giant had been girdled, there had been a dramatic change in the properties of the planet’s magnetosphere. An intense quadrupole field had been set up, orders of magnitude more intense than the planet’s natural field. Loops of magnetic flux curled between lines of latitude from equator to pole, ramming far out of the atmosphere. The field was clearly artificial, and it could only have been produced by current flow along conductors laid along those lines of latitude, great metallic loops wound around the planet like motor windings.
That was the process Thorn and Khouri had observed with their own eyes. They had watched the loops being laid, spooled deep into the atmosphere. But they had no idea how deep they had gone. The windings must have sunk far into the metallic hydrogen ocean, deep enough to achieve some kind of torque coupling with the planet’s shrivelled yet immensely metal-rich rocky kernel. An exterior acceleration force transmitted to the windings would be transferred to the planet itself.
Meanwhile, around the planet, the orbital arc generated a pole-to-pole current flow, passing through the giant and returning to the arc via the mag-netospheric plasma. The charge elements in the ring reacted against the field in which they were embedded, forcing a tiny change in angular momentum in the motor windings.
Imperceptibly at first, the gas giant began to rotate faster.
The process had continued for most of a year. The effect had been catastrophic: as the planet had spun faster and faster, so it had been pushed closer and closer towards the critical break-up velocity when its own gravity could no longer stop it from flying apart. Within six months, half the mass of the planet’s atmosphere had been flung into space, ejected into the half-beautiful, half-repulsive new circum-planetary nebula that was visible from Resurgam as a thumb-sized smudge in the evening sky. Now most of the atmosphere was gone. R
elieved of the compressive weight of the overlying layers, the liquid-hydrogen ocean had returned to the gaseous state, liberating squalls of energy that had been pumped smoothly back into the spin-up machinery. The metallic-hydrogen ocean had undergone a similar but even more convulsive state change. That too had been part of the plan, for the great process of dismantling had not faltered once.
Now all that remained was a husk of tectonically unstable core matter spinning close to its own fragmentation speed. The machines were surrounding it even as Thorn spoke, processing and refining. In the nebula, revealed as shadowy knots of coherent shape and density, other structures were taking shape, larger than worlds in their own right.
Thorn said again, ‘I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t think anyone does. But I do have an idea. What they’ve done so far has been very hierarchical. The machines are awesome, but they have limitations. Matter has to come from somewhere, and they couldn’t immediately start smashing apart the gas giant. They had to make the tools to do that, and that meant smashing three smaller worlds first. They need raw material, you see. Energy doesn’t seem to be a problem — maybe they can draw it directly from the vacuum — but they obviously can’t condense it back down into matter with any precision or efficiency. So they have to work in stages, one step at a time. Now they’ve ripped apart a gas giant, liberating perhaps one-tenth of one per cent of the entire useful mass in this system. Based on what we’ve seen so far, that liberated mass will be used to make something else. What, I don’t know. But I’m willing to hazard a guess. There’s only one place to go now, only one hierarchy above a gas giant. It has to be the sun. I think they’re going to take it apart.’
‘You’re not serious,’ someone said.
‘I wish I wasn’t. But there has to be a reason why they haven’t smashed Resurgam yet. I think it’s obvious: they don’t have to. In a while, perhaps much sooner than we’d like, there won’t be any need for them to worry about it. It’ll be gone. They’ll have ripped this solar system apart.’
‘No…’ someone exclaimed.
Thorn started to answer, ready to work on their understandable doubts. He had been through this before, and he knew the truth took a while to sink in. That was why he told them about the shuttles first, so that there would be something they could pin their hopes on. It was the end of the world, he would say, but that didn’t mean they all had to die. There was an escape route. All anyone needed was the courage to trust him, the courage to follow him.
But then Thorn realised that the person had said ‘no’ for an entirely different reason. It had nothing to do with his presentation.
It was the police. They were coming through the door.
Act as you would if you thought your life was in danger, Khouri had told him. It has to look totally credible. If this is going to work — and it has to work, for all our sakes — they have to believe that you’ve been arrested without any foreknowledge of what was going on. You had better struggle, Thorn, and be prepared to get hurt.
He jumped from the podium. The police were masked, unrecognisable. They came in with sprays and pacifiers at the ready, moving through the stunned and frightened audience with quick jerky movements and no audible communication. Thorn hit the ground and dashed towards the escape route, the one that would lead to the getaway car two blocks away. Make it look real. Make it look bloody real. He heard chairs scraping as people stood or tried to stand. The crack of fear-gas grenades and the buzz-snap of stun guns filled the room. He heard someone cry out, followed by the sound of armour on bone. There had been a moment of near calm; now it was over. The room erupted into a panicked frenzy as everyone tried to get out.
His exit was blocked. The police were coming in that way as well.
Thorn spun around. Same story the other way. He started coughing, feeling panic rise in him unexpectedly, like a sudden urge to sneeze. The effect of the fear-gas was so absolute that it made him want to crawl into a corner and cower rather than stand his ground. But Thorn fought through it. He grabbed one of the chairs and raised it aloft as a shield as the police stormed towards him.
The next thing he knew he was on his knees, and then his hands, and the police were hitting him with sticks, expertly aimed so that he would have bruises but no major broken bones or internal injuries.
Out of the corner of his eye, Thorn saw another group of police laying into the woman with the bad teeth. She disappeared under them, like something mobbed by rooks.
While it waited for the singer to finish building itself, the overseer dug playfully through the stratalike memories of its earlier incarnations.
The overseer did not exist in any single Inhibitor machine. That would have been too vulnerable a concentration of expertise. But when a swarm was drawn to the site where a local cleansing would be required — typically a volume of space no more than a few light-hours wide — a distributed intelligence would be generated from many less than sentient subminds. Light-speed communications bound together the dumb elements, weaving slow, secure thoughts. More rapid processing was assigned to individual units. The overseer’s larger thought processes were necessarily sluggish, but this was a limitation that had never handicapped the Inhibitors. Nor had they ever attempted to weave together an overseer’s subelements with superluminal communication channels. There were too many warnings in the archive concerning the hazards of such experiments, entire species that had been edited out of galactic history because of a single foolish episode of causality violation.
The overseer was not only slow and distributed. It was also temporary, permitted to achieve only fleeting consciousness. Even as its sense of self had come into being it had known with grim fatality that it would die once its duties were accomplished. But it felt no sense of bitterness at the inevitability of this fate, even after it had sifted through archived memories of its previous apparitions, memories laid down during other cleansings. It was simply the way things had to be. Intelligence, even machine intelligence, was something that could not be allowed to infect the galaxy until the coming crisis had been averted. Intelligence was, quite literally, its own worst enemy.
It found itself remembering some of the earlier cleansings. Of course, it had not really been the same overseer that had masterminded those extinction episodes. When Inhibitor swarms met, which was rarely, they traded knowledge of recent kills and outbreaks, methods and anecdotes. Lately, those meetings had become more rare, which was why there had been only one significant addition to the library of starcide techniques in the last five hundred million years. Swarms, isolated from each other for so long, reacted cautiously when they met. There were even rumours of different Inhibitor factions clashing over extinction rights.
Something had certainly gone wrong since the old days, when the kills had happened cleanly and methodically, and no major outbreaks slipped through the net. The overseer could not avoid drawing conclusions. The great galaxy-encompassing machine for holding back intelligence — the machine of which the overseer was one dutiful part — was failing. Intelligence was starting to slip through the cracks, threatening infestation. The situation had certainly worsened in the last few million years, and yet this was nothing compared with the thirteen Galactic Turns — the three billion years — that lay ahead, before the time of crisis arrived. The overseer had grave doubts that intelligence could be held in check until then. It was almost enough to make it give up now, and let this particular species go uncleansed. They were quadrupedal vertebrate oxygen-breathers, after all. Mammals. It felt a distant echo of kinship, something that had never troubled it when it was extinguishing ammonia-breathing gasbags or spiny insectoids.
The overseer forced itself out of this mood. Very probably it was just this sort of thinking that was decreasing the success rate of cleansings.
No, the mammals would die. That was the way, and that was how it would be.
The overseer looked on the extent of its works around Delta Pavonis. It knew of the previous cleansing, the wiping out of the
avians who had last inhabited this local sector of space. The mammals had probably not even evolved locally, meaning that this would only be phase one of a more protracted cleansing. The last lot had really botched things up, it thought. Of course, there was always a desire to perform a cleansing with the minimum amount of environmental damage. Worlds and suns were not to be converted into weapons unless a class-three breakout was imminent, and even then it was to be avoided wherever possible. The overseer did not like inflicting unnecessary devastation. It had a keen sense of the irony of ripping apart stars now, when the whole point of its work was to avoid greater destruction three billion years down the line. But what was done was done. A certain amount of additional damage had now to be tolerated.
Messy. But that, as the overseer reflected, was ‘life’.
The Inquisitor looked out across rain-soaked Cuvier. Her own reflection hovered beyond the window, a spectral figure stalking the city.
‘Will you be all right with this one, ma’am?’ the guard who had brought him asked.
‘I’ll cope,’ she said, not yet turning around. ‘If I can’t, you’re only a room away. Undo his cuffs and then leave us alone.’
‘Are you certain, ma’am?’
‘Undo his cuffs.’
The guard wrenched the plastic restraints apart. Thorn stretched his arms and touched his face nervously, like an artist checking paint that might not have dried.
‘You can go now,’ the Inquisitor said.
‘Ma’am,’ the guard replied, closing the door after him.
There was a seat waiting for Thorn. He collapsed into it. Khouri continued to look out of the window, her hands clasped behind her back. The rain drooled in great curtains from the overhang above the window. The night sky was a featureless haze somewhere between red and black. There were no stars tonight, no troubling omens in the sky.
‘Did they hurt you?’ she asked.
He remembered to keep in character. ‘What do you think, Vuilleumier? That I did this to myself because I like the sight of blood?’