He ponders these concerns during a mission when he ends up rescuing Antoinette Bax as she flies her freighter through the top of the atmosphere of the gas giant Tangerine Dream, to fulfill her promise to her late father to bury him there.

Clavain defects to the Demarchists at Yellowstone and spreads the news of the Inhibitors, and also enlists Antoinette Bax's help to escape the Conjoiners under Skade who are pursuing him.

Skade and Clavain race to the Resurgam system by employing various strategies, including inertia suppression that pushes their ships to faster relativistic speeds.

Eventually, Skade's vessel is damaged in an attempt to use an advanced technology to exceed the speed of light, and she witnesses the death of a crew member trapped in a collapsing bubble.

Several years later (roughly 50 from the start of the events in the book), Triumvir Ilia Volyova and Ana Khouri are on the planet Resurgam and have discovered a new threat to life: the Inhibitors.

Alerted to the presence of humanity during events described in Revelation Space, these swarms of intelligent machines have begun dismantling several rocky moons across the system and are moving their components towards the gas giant, Roc.

On Resurgam, Volyova, Khouri, and Thorn begin the lengthy evacuation and preparation of their ship, while the Inhibitors continue their mysterious construction project, suspected to target the system's star.

Only a few thousand people are evacuated when the Inhibitors approach Resurgam's star so closely that Volyova scrambles to deploy the cache weapons, in the hope to buy more time.

When Zodiacal Light arrives in the system, and because of the failure of his beta-level to negotiate a handover from Volyova, Clavain attacks Nostalgia for Infinity and uses Scorpio and his loyal hyper-pigs as a boarding party.

Clavain finds Volyova dying from injuries she sustained when Captain Brannigan attempted to commit suicide by turning a cache weapon against the ship.

Volyova makes a final deal with Clavain to take half of the remaining cache weapons and Storm Bird to mount a last-ditch attack on the Inhibitors.

The Inhibitors use their alien technology, built from the matter harvested from the gas giant, Roc, to pierce the layers of Resurgam's star and expose its nuclear fusion core.

Remontoire and Khouri remain in the system aboard the Zodiacal Light to contact Dan Sylveste in the Hades Matrix (seen in the final events of Revelation Space) in the hopes that he may provide knowledge they can use to fight the Inhibitors.

Felka reveals her true relationship to Clavain and how his lover Galiana visited this planet hundreds of years ago, where she may have uploaded her mind into the Pattern Jugglers in the ocean.