The Recollection (16 page)

“Abdulov...?” She saw his eyes flick to the captain’s glyph on her shoulder. “Excuse me, ma’am.
Please
, right this way.”

Enid Abdulov stood as they approached her table. She was a short, slim woman, with red lipstick, pretty blue eyes and tied-back blonde hair. She wore a conservative business jacket over a knee-length floral dress, and calf-length leather boots with four-inch heels. She’d chosen a table overlooking the sea bed, from where the lights of the restaurant illuminated the half-buried skeleton of a long-dead behemoth: all spines and broken ribs.

“Welcome to Vertebrae Beach,” she said, holding out her hand. They shook, and she gestured for Kat to sit.

“Make yourself at home, Captain. Now tell me, what news of Strauli Quay? Your father remains well, I trust?”

“Very well, thank you.” Kat settled into the chair. She clocked the orange juice Enid had on the table before her.

“Would you like a drink, Captain?”

The older woman signalled the waiter, who leaned forward expectantly, proffering an old-fashioned, printed wine menu.

“I’ll have a beer,” Kat said, not bothering to look.

“Perhaps madam would like to sample a local wine?”

Kat smiled. “Beer will be fine. As long as it’s cold and wet, and comes in a bottle.”

The waiter took a deep breath through his nose.

“Very well.”

He turned on his heel, returning moments later with a frosted bottle of imported lager and a flute glass. Just to spite him, Kat snaked the bottle from the tray and took a swig before he could pour it. When she looked up, she found Enid watching her.

“You do realise that bottle costs more than most of the local dome workers earn in a day?”

Kat looked down at her drink. It was a standard Strauli brew, and must have been shipped across the intervening light years in the hold of a trading ship.

“You import all your beer?”

Enid shrugged. “I’m afraid agricultural space is at a premium. We have a few successful vineyards, but hops take up too much room and we have to prioritise food crops.” She folded her hands on the table in front of her. “But if you’ll forgive me for speaking bluntly, Captain, I believe we have far more serious matters to discuss.”

“You’re talking about Victor Luciano?”

Enid’s voice lowered conspiratorially. “Word around the port has it that he’s trying to beat you to Djatt, for the Pep harvest.”

Kat sat back. “News travels fast.”

“Also, his flight plan lists Djatt as his next port of call.” Enid looked Kat up and down, her gaze as cool and unhurried as the ice floating on the ocean’s surface, eight kilometres above their heads. “Weren’t you two an item, once upon a time?”

“We were, but all that’s changed. He’s changed. Did you know he jumped his way out of the Quay at Strauli?”

“Out of the Quay itself?”

“He activated his jump engines inside the docking bay. If the bay’s pressure seals hadn’t held, he could have killed a lot of people.”

For the first time, Enid looked nonplussed. She scratched at her eyebrow with a delicate fingernail.

“Forgive me if I seem a little flustered, Captain. It’s not that I’m displeased to see you, it’s just that I
was
expecting another ship. The
Kilimanjaro
, en route to the spice harvest, under Captain Ramiro Abdulov, my second cousin.”

Kat’s thumbnail scratched at the label of her beer bottle.

“The
Kilimanjaro
’s not coming,” she said.

Enid pursed her lips, unsurprised yet still gloomy to have her suspicions confirmed. “Accident or sabotage?”

“The latter. And I can’t prove anything, but I’m sure Victor Luciano had something to do with it.”

Enid sat back in her chair, blue eyes narrowed. “Then this isn’t just bravado on his part? He seriously means to challenge our control of the Pep harvest?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Even at the risk he might trigger a trade war? Why would he take that chance?”

Kat shrugged. She didn’t much care why he was doing it, she just wanted to stop him, and make him pay for the things he’d already done.

She glanced through the transparent wall, at the bones of the dead whale-like creatures, and saw her own ghostly reflection in the glass: high cheekbones, dark eyes, and hair that hadn’t been brushed in a fortnight: a stark contrast to the other woman’s smart clothes and fair looks.

“Is there anything we can do to delay him?” she said.

Enid shook her head. “Nothing legal. At least, nothing that can be arranged in the time we have before he’s scheduled to leave.”

“Then we don’t have a lot of choice, do we?” Kat scraped back in her chair. “Where is he now?”

Enid’s eyes flicked up for a second, as she used her implant to consult the local Grid.

“He’s two domes across, in a hotel on the edge of the accommodation zone.” She stretched across to touch Kat’s wrist. “What are you planning to do?”

Kat stood. She pulled back her coat to reveal the pistol strapped to her thigh.

“What do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to go down there and stop him.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

SPLASHES

They had to abandon the Land Rover in the crevasse. It was wedged fast; nothing could be done to pull it free, even if they had had a crane capable of lifting it, which they didn’t. Instead, they had to content themselves with taking as much of its equipment as they could carry. Ed had his survival kit, and the stolen pistol from the glove compartment. Kristin had her own sidearm, and the first aid kit from Alice’s bag. Of Alice and her shotgun, no sign remained.

Kristin had twisted her ankle in the crash, and could barely put her weight on it. Ed helped her up, over the lip of the fissure, onto the rocky ledge beside the purple arch. Once out of the narrow split in the rocks, they could see the surrounding terrain for the first time, lit by the rising sun. The arch stood on a rocky hillside above a flat, grassy plain that stretched away to the horizon. The stream that ran down the base of the fissure widened where it hit the grasslands, broadening into a shallow, muddy brook. Tall reeds lined its banks. Way in the distance, Ed caught the glimmer of sunlight reflected on water: a sea, or perhaps a lake. And silhouetted against it, another pair of arches, one standing straight, and the other leaning at a drunken angle. He held up his thumb and index finger, framing the image. If he had the time and materials, he would have loved to paint it.

Kristin pulled a pair of sturdy binoculars from her pack.

“Three kilometres,” she said, “maybe four. If they’re heading for those arches, my guess is that they’ll follow the stream across the plain.”

Ed used a hand to shade his eyes. He still couldn’t believe that Alice had abandoned him.

“Do you really think that’s where they’re going?”

Kristin lowered the glasses. “We’re low on food and water, and we don’t have transport. Where else is there to go?”

Ed sat beneath a tree, beside a ruined Cornish tin mine, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean. The water and sky were a matching blue. He’d been sifting through some of Alice’s downloaded images on his palmtop, but now the battery had run low.

“Do you know,” he said, “that Earth is the only planet whose English name isn’t derived from Greek or Roman mythology?”

He switched off the palmtop and lay back against the tree. The bark was gnarled and warm. Sheep grazed among the fallen stones of the pit head, and the air smelled of dry grass, warm bracken and fresh dung.

Alice said, “What’s that got to do with anything?”

She came over and sat beside him. She’d spent all morning looking around the site, recording it all on film. She wore a white cotton dress with big, wooden buttons up the front.

“I don’t know,” Ed said. He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out the magazine he’d bought to read in the car on the way down from London. It had an article about the old Hubble telescope. The accompanying picture showed two distant galaxies colliding.

“Look at that for a picture,” he said, using a fingernail to trace the dusty whorls of tortured stars.

“It’s pretty,” Alice agreed.

Ed frowned. “The light from these stars is at least a million years old. It’s been travelling through space since before the dawn of civilisation.” He looked around at the collapsed walls of the abandoned pit head, the moss and lichen covering its scattered stones. The ruin looked so much a part of the landscape that it was difficult to imagine the headland without it.

Alice pushed her auburn hair back. Ed rubbed his hands together, wishing he had a canvas and some paints.

“It makes what I’m doing seem so bloody ephemeral,” he said.

When he looked across at Alice, her eyes were the same shade of green as the sunlight filtering through the bracken around the ruin.

“I like your paintings,” she said.

He ignored her. He rolled onto his front and put his chin on his fist.

“I could be doing so much more,” he said.

The air on the plain smelled of hot, dry grass. The sky overhead was a reassuring Earth-like blue, flecked with wisps of white cloud that hung above the water on the horizon. The reeds in the stream were maybe a metre and a half in height and ten centimetres across at the base, tapering up to dry seed pods at the top. When a breeze caught them, they rustled like paper. Around them, the waist-high yellow grass of the plain stretched away in all directions. To Ed, who’d spent his childhood in the valleys of South Wales and his adulthood in the east end of London, it looked the way he’d always imagined Africa to be, only without the elephants and zebras.

Then he remembered how far they were from Earth, and felt his head swim with vertigo. He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with both hands. Beside him, Kirsten said, “Are you okay?”

He shook his head. “Alice...”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll be okay, we’ll find her. They probably just went looking for help.”

“Do you believe that?”

Kristin looked away, unable to meet his stare. “We’ll know soon enough.”

She let go and started to limp in the direction of the two arches and distant lake. He watched her struggle for a few paces, then caught up and took her elbow, allowing her to rest her weight against him. Her clothes were stale, stained with old sweat, and he knew he smelled just as bad.

“How’s the ankle?” he said.

Kristin set her jaw. “It’ll have to do.”

He supported her as they shuffled their way across the plain. It took them two hours. But with each step, the arches grew larger.

Twice, Ed heard a rustle in the reeds, followed by a plop and splash, as if something about the size of a dog had slipped and slithered its way into the water. After the second time it happened, he pulled the gun from his pack, drawing comfort from its weight and solidity.

Eventually, the stream flowed into a wide, boggy river bed that cut across their path, forming a marsh that blocked them on two sides: hummocks of grass and reeds poking through evil-smelling black, oily water. Beyond the opposite bank, a slope led up, into taller grass.

Ed eyed the water dubiously.

“Can we get across?”

Still leaning against him, Kristin shaded her eyes with her free hand.

“The arches are only a few hundred metres on the other side of that rise,” she said. “This could stretch miles upstream. It might take hours to skirt around. And to be honest, I don’t know how much further I can walk.”

Huffing with effort, she eased herself down into a sitting position in the grass. Ed left her there, and scrambled down to the edge of the bog, where he pressed an experimental toe into the spongy mud.

“I think it’ll support us,” he said, “but we’ll have to wade.”

“Snap off a reed,” Kristin said. “Test the depth as you walk.”

Ed did as she suggested. He tucked the gun into his waistband, broke off a reed, then climbed back up to her and helped her down.

“Hold on to me, and tread where I tread,” he said.

The bog smelled rotten, like a damp compost heap. Tiny insects flicked back and forth across the scum-thick surface of the water. Wrinkling his nose, he stepped in, feeling the wetness slime its way into his boots. Using the snapped reed to probe the water ahead, he led her across, one painful step at a time.

By the time they got to the middle, the water had risen to their knees, and their feet were caked in mud.

“Are you okay?” he said.

Kristin had both hands on the back of his shoulders, gripping the epaulette of his combat jacket to support herself.

“Just concentrate on getting us across,” she said.

Somewhere off in the reeds, Ed heard a splash. He caught a glimpse of something moving in the water.