Inhibitor Phase chapter six/seven

Hello. Until the audiobook problem is resolved, I'm putting the entire chapter six here for anyone missing the complete article. As I understand it from Stephanie's comments in the previous post, this is chapter seven in the audiobook. I've no idea why the numbering has changed.

Do let me know if anything else is missing, and I'll endeavour to put it up here.

In another part of the ship a table had been laid for dinner. Plump-backed chairs faced each other, with plates, cutlery, glasses, bottles and jugs set between them. Candle flames wavered in Scythe’s air-circulation currents. 

‘If you want me to eat, just give me some food I can take back to my quarters.’

‘No, I insist. And when I say “insist” . . .’ Glass indicated the chair facing the window. ‘Take that one. They say it’s polite to let guests have the view.’

Rather than argue with her – sensing how futile it was likely to be – I took my seat. Glass took up the opposing one, with the windows ranged behind her back. There was no sign of Michaelmas now, only the ruddy smear of the dust disk, pricked by a few of the brighter stars. There must have been some trick of contrast going on because even the candlelight should have washed out my view of those stars.

Glass poured wine for me without asking.

‘Let’s begin anew, Miguel. Let’s put all that bad business behind us. I’ve taken you from your family, and that’s not a thing I expect you to thank me for. But I guarantee in time you’ll see matters in a different light. Until then, we are obliged to share this ship. Share this ship, share in my quest, and – in so far as your survival is predicated on my own – look out for each other.’ She dropped her voice confidingly. ‘We’re heading for dangerous waters. Sea monsters and peril. But at the end of it will be a prize worth all our travails.’

‘Charybdis?’

‘You were paying attention after all. Now shall we agree to a truce, of sorts? My ship is your ship.’ She raised her own glass and encouraged me to raise mine. ‘A toast. But not to me, or even to us: it’s far too soon for that. You despise me and I understand your feelings. But to your friends, and mine, and our mutual struggle against the wolves. The night is cold, the forest full of terrors , but there is a glimmer of light on the horizon.’

‘To my friends,’ I allowed.

‘And to mine.’

‘And pray they never meet,’ I continued. ‘Because whatever you are, and whoever or whatever sent you, I want no part of it.’ 

‘My friends aren’t the same as me.’

Glass sipped from her wine, and I sipped from mine, and as much as I wished it to be otherwise, it was heady and delicious.

Nor did I care that the wine might contain anything, or that it would very likely cloud my judgement. I was on Glass’s ship now, entirely at the mercy of whatever she wanted to put into my body or take out of it. If I allowed myself to draw a breath of air, I might as well drink her wine.

‘What can I possibly offer that you can’t already do for yourself?’ I asked her. ‘Or have this ship do for you?’

‘You’ll have proven your worth by the time we get to Charybdis.’ 

‘Which is where, exactly? I didn’t think I’d ever heard of a planet called Charybdis. So I checked Sun Hollow’s libraries: no mention of any such place.’

‘Then you’ll have to trust that it exists. But I’ll help with part of your confusion. The reason the name doesn’t show up is that it’s one I gave to the place, not anything official.’

‘Then where is it?’

‘In a system within easy reach of this ship.’

‘But still decades of flight away.’

Glass gave a hopeless shrug, as if we were both caught up in a situation that had nothing to do with her interventions. ‘Space is deep. What can you do?’

White spheres floated into the room. They were some kind of servitor, each about the size of a human head . Multi-jointed arms came out of each sphere, holding the steaming plates containing our first course. The plates contained a selection of dumplings, glistening with drizzled sauces. The spheres set the dishes down, then departed.

If the wine had been superlative, the dumplings required a vocabulary I no longer possessed. It might have been the contrast with the diet in Sun Hollow, but I could not remember anything more delicious, or anything better suited to the fading preferences of my palette. I was a blind man rediscovering colour.

‘To your taste?’ 

‘Don’t expect gratitude.’ I paused, swallowed another morsel of dumpling. ‘But you were right about your ship. It cooks very well.’

I made to set down my knife, then hesitated with it still between my fingers. It was heavy, made of some cold solid alloy. It was not as long or as sharp as I might have wished, but it could still do some useful damage if I were quick enough.

Glass pushed aside her plate. ‘You’re thinking about stabbing me. You’re debating with yourself whether or not you could spring across the table speedily enough to reach me. There’s another part of you wondering if the knife will melt in your hand the instant you try to do some harm with it, or even if it will turn itself against you.’

She must have expected me to put down the knife in befuddlement, astonished that she had read my intentions so unerringly. She must also have thought I would ask how such a feat of mind-reading were possible.

Instead, I lunged across the table with all the force I could muster, the knife before me, scattering plates and glassware, only thinking of whether it was better to go for the eye, the throat, or the chest. I was ready to hack and stab at her until she died. I was ready to test her promise all the way.

Glass did not seem to move. There was simply a discontinuity; she was in a different position, blocking me with her right arm and seizing my knife hand with her left. I stopped as if I had impacted an iron framework, an armature welded into the shape of a woman. 

Glass did something to my wrist, barely a pinch, and the knife tumbled away. Then she held me in that posture, suspended over the wreckage of the table, our faces only a hand’s width apart.

‘I don’t blame you for trying,’ she said, as calmly as if we were still continuing our conversation. ‘It would have been all too easy for me to bluff.’ She reached out and retrieved the knife, then slid it back over to my side of the table, through a tide-pool of spilled wine. Then she relaxed her hold on me, giving me a gentle shove back in the direction of my seat. ‘Try again, just so you’re absolutely clear. Go for it with all your will. This time I won’t make any sort of countermove. Scythe will intervene instead.’ She dipped her hands into her lap, beneath the table. ‘No, please try. It will be . . . instructive.’

I thought about it for a second then pushed the knife further away. My hand contained a little hot star of pain where she had pinched my nerves together.

‘There wouldn’t be much point.’

‘You’re learning.’

Glass looked to the door. The spheres came in again and quickly tidied up the mess I had made. The throb in my wrist was starting to die down.

‘See the larger picture,’ she continued, lifting her goblet again. ‘Make that adjustment, no matter how hard it seems. Come with me and find something that will make a difference against the wolves. Show, if you will, the ultimate love for those close to you.’

The spheres brought in the main course. I had no wish to continue playing the subservient guest to my domineering host. But that was only my pride having its say: my appetite was perfectly willing to debase itself .

‘Back in Sanctum,’ I said, lifting my knife by way of emphasis, rather than with the intention of stabbing. ‘You said something that puzzled me.’

‘Did I?’

‘You were making a point about the ethics of intention. To serve as an example, you dredged up the Butcher of Tharsis.’

Glass cocked her head. ‘I suppose I did.’

‘Why him? You had all of history to play with; any number of despots and mad-men. Why did you settle on the Butcher of Tharsis, out of all the possibilities?’

She met my question with one of her own. ‘Did they teach you much about him?’

‘Enough that I remember that his name was Nevil Clavain.’ I ate on for a few mouthfuls. ‘A military figure, something to do with Mars. A long, long way back. Five or six hundred years, I suppose.’

‘He was involved in the first war against the Conjoiners,’ Glass said, leaning in with a sort of scholarly eagerness, as if she had just learned something and was itching to parade her knowledge. ‘He tried to crush them, tried to stop them from happening. He earned that name because of the excessive brutality and cruelty of his methods.’

‘He’d probably have said he was just doing his job as a soldier.’

‘I’m inclined to take the same view,’ Glass said, surprising me. ‘Different times. We mustn’t be too censorious. But a man like that – a man prepared to go to extremes, in the interests of a military end? He’d be quite useful to have around now, wouldn’t you say?’

*

My quarters were several times more comfortable and well-equipped than any chambers I had known in Sun Hollow. They consisted of several linked rooms. There was a bedroom, a small lounge, a toilet, a bathroom with a weightless shower and washing basin – which even ran to a selection of soaps, oils, unguents, and grooming accessories – as well as a wardrobe and exercise nook. The water in the bathroom ran so hot that I nearly scalded myself. For my entertainment, there was a small library of printed books, mostly classics, and all of them conveniently in their early Russish or late Russian or English editions. There was a digital library, with a searchable database accessed by a fold-out keyboard suspiciously similar to the ones we used in Sun Hollow. One of the lounge walls was configured to act as a false window, showing the view beyond Scythe’s hull, but it could as easily show ocean breakers or a mountaintop sunset or a million other supposedly soothing scenes. The facilities met all my needs and more: it was almost a shame that I would be making so little use of them.

Glass assured me that I was not a prisoner, and as soon as I had explored the room, washed and dressed (there were fresh garments in the wardrobe, and they fitted me perfectly) I tried leaving my quarters.

Nothing prevented me.

I walked in every direction for as far as I could, until I was certain that I had explored every possibility at least twice. I found the hibernaculum, with two waiting reefersleep caskets; I found a sort of games room or weapons-testing range, and near to it another room full of weapons stored behind walls of opaque glass, so that all I could make out were murky silhouettes.

In another part I came upon a corridor that ended in a partition inset with a small window, with a bright space beyond it. I peered through the window and saw what, at first, I imagined to be a kind of engine room, filled with a mass of beguiling, mirror-surfaced machinery. Spherical robots were toiling in and around the machinery, slipping between blade-like vanes and corkscrewing helices that made me think of some immense turbine, stilled for now, but capable of whirling into lethal motion. It could not be an engine room, though, or at least nothing resembling a conventional engine. I had seen little enough of Scythe from outside, as it hovered over Michaelmas. But that glimpse had been enough to identify the basic cruciform outline of a ship built according to Conjoiner principles, with a pointed hull and two outriggers upon which were mounted Conjoiner engines. Glass had mentioned that they were darkdrives, but my instincts told me that this was a variation on the basic technology, rather than something entirely new.

The partition had no hinges or visible seals in it, but that did not preclude it becoming a door upon the right command. Yet despite my curiosity as to the room’s contents, I felt an instinctive disinclination  to go beyond the partition. A prickling intuition told me that something was going on in that space that was neither safe nor wise, and I wondered what it said about the sanity of my host.

That was the only visible part of the ship to which I was denied immediate access, and yet it could be no accident that I had been allowed to get exactly as close as the window but no nearer. If Glass did not want me to see what was happening in that chamber, she could easily have denied me access to this whole area of the ship, or just made the partition opaque. She had done neither of those things, and I did not for a moment imagine it was through simple oversight or neglect. Glass was content – willing, even – for me to see the thing that the robots were working on, and that fact alone told me that it figured in my future.

Or at least the future that she thought she had planned for me.

I touched the glass, felt an astral coldness, then backed off and resumed my explorations. I went as far as I could, along straight corridors and curved passages, through junctions and nodes, and at every point I tried to visualise myself as a small moving dot within the form of Scythe, attempting to build a mental map. But the ship’s layout was disorientating, the task hopeless. I had been denied no apparent point of entry, except for that partition itself. And except for what I saw through the glass, I had come across nothing that looked delicate or dangerous enough to be a promising candidate for sabotage. I did not want to die, but if I had found a means of crippling the ship, forcing Glass to return to Sun Hollow, even if that did no more than buy me time until she once again bettered us, I would gladly have taken it. 

Perhaps it was something in the wine or the food, or it might be the accumulation of recent days, but eventually fatigue got the better of me. I gave up exploring, accepting that Glass was in complete control of my surroundings, and returned to my bedroom. It was easily found, as if the ship had detected my intentions and opened up a helpful short-cut within itself. A fog of tiredness sent me under the sheets, but not before I sat at the fold-down keyboard and attempted one query, typing in a word and seeing what Scythe had to say to me.

The word was Cydonia.

A moment later the system responded, an image appearing of the rust-red face of a small, airless planet, before zooming in on a part of that planet where a random conjunction of geological events had produced something eerily similar to a human face, staring back at me with blank eye-sockets that reminded me of nothing other than Glass herself.

Superimposed over that image, in green Russish text:

Cydonia: region of Mars, First System.

See also: Knights of Cydonia.

See also: Conjoiner-Coalition War.

See also: Nevil Clavain.

*

I slept badly.

I had been ripped from my home, torn from the two people I most loved in the universe. I had been severed from the community I had helped build; the five thousand faces that might be all that was left of humanity. In place of family life and the consoling obligations of work and duty – the almost comforting grind of daily worries and pressures – I had been granted the company of a ghoul-faced psychological tormentress and a dark, dangerous ship I neither understood nor trusted.

It was not what she had done to me that I found most troubling: not the sundering from my people; not the flight from Sun Hollow; not the confinement aboard Scythe.

It was the little cracks she was opening up in my self: fine as the flaws in tooth enamel. And just as surely with the promise of agony to come.

*

‘Good morning, Miguel.’ Glass was sitting at the table, finishing off a glass of squeezed fruit. ‘I trust everything was to your satisfaction?’

‘If it wasn’t, would it make any difference?’

‘Ah.’ She nodded peremptorily, confirming some inner suspicion. ‘I see that we’re going to continue in that vein. I’d rather hoped that a good night’s rest would have put you in a more agreeable mood.’

‘You mean, a more subservient one.’

‘I’d rather think in terms of cooperation. Still . . . how about a little diversion, over breakfast? Sit down, please.’

As I took my chair I said: ‘Nevil Clavain was a Knight of Cydonia.’

‘Was he now?’

‘But, of course, you’ll know that I know that. There’s no way in hell you’d let me access Scythe’s data systems without keeping a record of my queries.’ 

‘And what did you make of your little detour into early history?’

‘You tell me.’

‘He was an interesting figure,’ Glass mused. ‘First a staunch enemy of the Conjoiners; one of the highest-ranking figures in the Coalition for Neural Purity. But something happened to turn him. We know that he was captured and held prisoner by Galiana, the enemy’s leader. But he eventually returned to his own side and appeared to still believe in the cause. Something must have changed in him, though; some little seed of doubt planted during that period of capture.’

‘I read a little further. He didn’t defect without provocation.’

‘No?’ Glass asked, as if she did not already have the facts laid out like a schematic.

‘There was a peace mission. Clavain went down to Mars to talk the Conjoiners into accepting some kind of treaty. At that point he was still fully aligned with his own cause. But elements in his own side were working to sabotage the peace initiative. Clavain was deemed expendable in that effort. They set him up to die, making it look as if the Conjoiners were to blame. History tells us that he survived, though. And the fact of that betrayal was obviously sufficient to shift his loyalty to Galiana.’

Glass widened the black pools of her eyes. ‘The betrayal must have stung.’

‘I suppose that it did.’

‘The architect of that betrayal must have been very glad when Clavain took his leave from human affairs.’

‘Do you think so?’ Without waiting for her answer, I added, ‘Here’s another question, Glass. You dropped that reference into our conversation for a reason. Like a depth charge, trying to sound something out. But I’m afraid it didn’t have the effect you desired.’

‘I’m sure that it didn’t. Of course, it’s a little telling you felt the need to query Scythe . . .’

‘Because I’m still trying to figure you out, and if you throw me a bone, I’ll follow it. Even if it leads to a dead-end from history.’

‘Well, I think all we were talking about was the usefulness of the military mind. I picked a . . . bad example, is all. I’m sorry if it touched anything raw.’

‘It didn’t . . .’ But I shook my head, exasperated by Glass and even more frustrated by my own reaction to her; how easily I felt played. ‘But you’re wrong, anyway.’

‘How so?’

‘A man like that isn’t any use to anyone, now or then. We’re fighting monsters. We don’t have to become monsters ourselves.’

‘Let us hope, then, that we haven’t already done so.’ She passed me the other glass of squeezed fruit, and then whipped a cloth away from the thing in the middle of the table. It was the pegboard game we had played in the infirmary, set up for the start of play. Not the game itself, unless Glass had spirited it along with her, but an indistinguishably precise replica. ‘And to prove that I am not the monster you may think, I’m prepared to offer you back your family.’

I shook my head, refusing to accept any part of that statement.

‘If you want to mess with my head, Glass, do it some other way. I’m resigned. You wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble only to throw me back.’

‘Ah, but my word is my bond. And I’m perfectly sincere in this. I told you I like games. We’ll play three rounds. If you win two of those rounds, I’ll turn this ship around and take us back to Sun Hollow. You can go home, live happy ever after.’ She made a tiny doubtful pucker of her lips. ‘Well, apart from the wolves, of course. But if I win two rounds, we continue to my next port of call.’

Some foolish part of me played along. ‘Is that Charybdis?’

‘No, there’s some small business I have to attend to first, in another system. You needn’t be woken for any part of that. But of course, you can avoid all that by taking me on.’

I shook my head, refusing to be drawn in. ‘I don’t believe for a second that you’ll honour your promise if I win.’

Glass sighed. ‘You have a choice here. We’ll either play the game or we won’t. If we don’t, we’ll go straight to the hibernaculum. If you do play, there’s an outside possibility that you’ll see Nicola and Victorine again. And I’ll make it a fairer contest: I can handicap myself, de-allocating neural resources.’

With a fatal guarded interest, I asked: ‘By how much?’

Glass looked pleased. ‘I’ll start with a figure; a percentage handicap. I’ll make my opening offer generous, but I’ll be reducing that handicap by one per cent for every second that passes. The sooner you jump in, the better your advantage – but you’ll need to be quick about it. Wait too long, and I’ll be playing with almost no handicap at all.’

‘I know this is meaningless,’ I said, sighing as well. ‘But if there’s even a tiny chance that you can be beaten, and that you’ll honour your promise, I’m compelled to try.’

Glass nodded emphatically. ‘Right answer.’

‘Start your damned reverse auction.’

‘I shall. Fifteen per cent . . .’

‘Accept,’ I said, I jumping in before she had a chance to say another word.

Glass favoured me with a tight-lipped, approving nod. ‘That was . . . much quicker than I expected. My opening bid wasn’t too low for you?’

‘Of course it was too low. What difference is a fifteen per cent handicap likely to make? But it was the best offer I was going to get. It’s vastly in your favour, but it’s still better than no advantage at all.’

‘You aren’t the first I’ve played this auction game with,’ Glass confided. ‘You’d be surprised how many don’t see things as clearly as you did. Others hesitate.’ 

‘Perhaps they don’t trust you enough to take the game seriously.’

‘But you did?’

‘No, but a poor chance in a weighted game is better than no chance at all. Shall we get this over with?’

Glass let me have the first game. Or perhaps I won it by legitimate means: she was playing well, but so was I. The difference between this time and the game in the infirmary was that I gave no quarter from the outset. In the infirmary I had been playing to keep her amused, not taking it seriously until she began to better me, by which point it was far too late to turn the tide. Now I went in hard, straining to think as many moves ahead as possible, and drawing on the memories of a thousand games won and lost against Nicola and Victorine. It was not about the fates of individual pegs, but the disposition of pieces as a whole. 

But the second game went to Glass. I held her off for as long as I could, and at one point thought I had her cornered, but it proved a false dawn. She responded cleverly and soon had me pinned down. I managed to drag out the inevitable for a few more moves, but the game was all but decided. She had bettered me, and yet I could not deny that the game had felt fairly won. I had played against machines, and knew the feeling of losing to an algorithm. Glass was not like that. I only ever felt that I was playing against a person: one who was both ruthless and extremely quick to learn and adapt

Defeated, I leaned back in my chair.

‘You knew you’d beat me, even with half your brain switched off.’

‘But I haven’t beaten you – not just yet. We’re even: both a game up. The third is the decider.’

‘I’ve nothing left to play.’

‘You’ve also nothing left to lose. We’ve each learned from each other. Either of us could make an error. Either of us could stumble on a surprising move.’

I sighed, shook my head, but set up the pegs on my side of the board while Glass did hers. Glass permitted me to make the starting move. I accepted, and embarked on a counter-intuitive opening, one that opened up an initial weakness in my flank. It looked like a bid to end the game quickly, but I had lulled Nicola into a similar false security, and it had not gone well for her. I doubted there was much hope of Glass falling into the same trap, but it seemed to offer marginally better odds than a continuation of my earlier style of play.

It worked, for a little while. Glass was thrown . . . she could dig into the bag of moves she had learned from me, and find that none of them were applicable to this new configuration. She had to improvise, and in doing so she opened up a subtle vulnerability of her own, one that it took my own experience to recognise and exploit. I retaliated, treating her as callously as she had treated me, and I began to methodically shatter her defences. 

But as we each depleted our opponents’ pieces, so the game fell into a more familiar pattern, and Glass was again able to draw on her developing library of moves and sequences of moves. There came a point where all my instincts told me I was beaten, but I strove not to show it, playing with all the intensity and concentration I had brought to the game from the outset.

Glass won. I had bloodied her, but not enough, and the tournament was hers.

‘That was instructive,’ she said, packing away the pegboard.

‘To see how gullible I was, to ever think you would let me win?’

‘On the contrary: to see how determined you were, until the last. I’ve a small confession to make.’

‘You cheated?’

‘No, I kept to my promise. But I had Scythe run a non-invasive scan of your neural workflow during all three games. I wanted to see how seriously you were taking it. The answer pleases me. You gave your all, right until the end. No one could have played more valiantly, more determinedly.’

‘This proves something?’

‘It proves that I was right about you. You’ll fight until the bitter end. Until your last breath. No matter how the odds seem to be stacked against you.’

‘I was ready to give in.’

‘But you didn’t, which is the important thing. I’ll be frank: after that first game we just played, there was very little likelihood of you winning. But the probability wasn’t zero.’

‘Would you have honoured your promise?’

‘I like to think so.’

I wondered if that was the first truly sincere thing that had come from her lips since our acquaintance.

‘But you can’t be sure.’

‘Under the circumstances, I’d have honoured the pledge . . . and then looked at other means of persuasion. It wouldn’t have pleased me to lose you, especially now I know how tenaciously you’ll fight.’ Glass rose from the table, leaving the pegboard where it stood. ‘Come. There’s nothing to prevent us going directly to the hibernaculum. It will be easier for you, once you’re on the other side of reefersleep.’

Glass extended a hand across the table, beckoning me to my feet. I got up and moved along the table until we were both at the same end of it. I cowed my head, faking submission, ready to be led to my fate. I doubted very much that she was convinced by it, especially if Scythe was still looking into my skull, reading brain activity. My intentions would have been obvious to the dimmest machine. Still, it was all I had.

I lunged, planting my left hand around her throat and punching her beneath the ribs with my right. Glass crashed back against the wall behind her. I redoubled the pressure on her throat and pushed hard into her abdomen. Glass got her right arm up, balled her fist and punched me across the face. She followed through with her elbow, jabbing into my throat. Something crunched somewhere in my larynx or windpipe. I drew a breath and nothing came. Glass wrenched my hand away from her throat, raised a knee and kicked me in the groin. I went tumbling back into the table, hitting its edge with a spine-jarring crack. I tried to snatch another breath and still nothing came.

Glass laughed. It was a deep, broken, wet-throated laugh, like a tumble of rocks in a bucket. She got a foot up and kept me pressed against the table, bent backwards so that it would only take a little more pressure to snap my spine.

‘You know . . .’ She paused, rubbing at her neck. ‘You know, I’d have been ever so slightly disappointed if you hadn’t tried that.’

I made a wheezing sound. A straw’s worth of air must have reached my lungs.

‘I’ll keep trying.’

‘But not here, not today. Today, you sleep.’

Glass yanked me up as six or seven of her white globes came into the room. They bustled around me, pinning me with their multi-jointed manipulators. I wrestled against them, but I had no strength left in my limbs.

Glass gave no audible command to the spheres, but they knew what to do with me. Scooping me up like a doll, no part of me able to touch any surface, they conveyed me to the hibernaculum. We got there easily, as if the labyrinthine puzzle of the ship had straightened itself out overnight. The two caskets waited for their occupants, side by side and set at forty-five degrees to the floor. They were chrome-green cocoons, fluted with radiator fins, control pedestals next to each. Instead of the lidded casket that had brought Glass to Sun Hollow, these units peeled open along their mid-sections, with interlocking hinged petals waiting to close over again and form an impervious seal.

I might as well have been a drowsy baby being lowered into a crib, for all the resistance I was able to muster. The idea of fighting was still there, it was just that my body had already surrendered. The spheres busied around me with surprising tenderness, while Glass stood by and watched, hands on hips.

I managed to croak:‘You said you had business in some other system. Where?’ 

‘You don’t need to worry your little head about that.’

‘I still want to know. If I matter to you, give me that much.’

Glass looked at me with a distant species of pity. ‘Oh, very well. We’ll be making a short stopover in the Yellowstone system, around Epsilon Eridami. I’ve made arrangements to collect some items of importance.’

‘Items?’

‘Gideon stones.’

‘I’m afraid that means nothing to me.’

‘I’d be concerned if it did.’

‘What are Gideon stones, Glass?’

She leaned in a little, as if she were about to whisper a lullaby. ‘They’re going to help us murder some wolves. Quite a lot of wolves, if all goes well.’

‘I saw something through a window. All blades and helices.’

‘Ah. You saw that, did you?’

‘You know what I saw.’ I wheezed against the effort of speaking. ‘You’ve controlled that happens to me since I came aboard this ship. What is that thing?’

‘Oh, you do like to spoil a surprise.’

‘I suppose I do.’

She sighed as if I had taken the fun out of a parlour game. ‘It’s something else that will help us. Not so much a weapon as something that will make a weapon. But for it to work the way it needs to, we must have the Gideon stones.’ Glass touched a finger to the black cupid’s bow of her upper lip. ‘But I’ll take care of that, little man. Rest now. I can’t have you worrying. You can stay asleep while I take care of the stones. I want you rested: you’ll need all the strength of mind and body you can get, for when you meet them.’

‘Them?’

‘The Pattern Jugglers,’ Glass said, as if that was the fullest answer that I could reasonably expect.

Excerpt from Inhibitor Phase, copyright Alastair Reynolds 2021.