The Recollection (2 page)

He remembered her auburn hair and the print her lipstick had left on the wineglass.

“It’s not like Verne and I don’t love each other,” she’d said, looking down at her drink. “It’s just that we don’t know how to live together.”

Ed had been sitting on the edge of his work table, beside his easel.

“I’m sure you’ll work it out.”

Alice had her legs crossed at the ankle. She wore black stockings. Her shoe dangled carelessly.

“Sometimes I think I chose the wrong brother.”

Ed shifted position. He looked down at his hands.

“Don’t say that.”

She twirled the stem of her wineglass between thumb and forefinger. Her cheeks were flushed.

“Why not? It’s true.”

His mouth suddenly dry, Ed turned to look out of the open sash window.

“Okay,” he said, “but you don’t have to say it.”

Outside, the streets were hot and quiet, and bathed in electric orange light. He watched a car slide past, its tyres making a soft ripping noise on the warm tarmac.

Ordinarily, he would have jumped at the chance to be with a girl like Alice, married or not. She was clever and funny, and fiercely independent. And he’d known her longer than Verne had. Yet he couldn’t get away from the fact that she was his brother’s wife. That was one line he didn’t want to cross. He didn’t want to be that kind of guy.

He drained his glass and rose to get another bottle. As he did so, Alice slipped the wedding ring from her finger and dropped it into her handbag. She sat up straight and brushed a strand of auburn hair behind her ear, and started to unbutton her blouse.

“I know how you feel about me, Ed.”

That had all happened over a year ago. Thinking about it now made Ed’s hands shake all over again.

“She didn’t—I mean, she didn’t say anything to me.” He could feel his cheeks burning.

Watching him, Verne’s eyes narrowed the way they did when he caught the scent of a really good story. He sat back and used an index finger to push his glasses firmly back onto the bridge of his nose.

“Ed? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“No.”

Verne leaned across the table, almost out of his seat.

“What is it, Ed?”

“Nothing.”

Ed’s eyes were watering. He bit his lip, fighting back a nervous laugh.

“I know when you’re lying, Ed, and you’re lying now. Look at you. Come on, if you know something, anything, you have to tell me.”

In his peripheral vision, Ed saw faces turning their way, drawn to the brewing confrontation like sharks scenting blood in the water. He brought his hands up.

“Verne, please—”

He looked up and saw his face reflected in his brother’s specs.

“I’m sorry, I can’t. I don’t know anything.”

Verne frowned. “Don’t lie to me, Ed. I can tell there’s something—” He broke off, eyes wide.

“Oh
shit
,” he said. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

Ed looked down at his hands.

“Shit. She told me she’d seen you. I should have known.” Verne raked his fingers back through his thinning hair. “Jesus Christ, Ed. What were you thinking?”

Ed pressed back in the booth. The smirk was gone now. His heart beat so hard he could feel it at the back of his throat.

“Look, Verne—”

Verne’s mobile rang. With a curse, the older man pulled it out and checked the caller display.

“Don’t say another word, Ed. Not another fucking word, okay?”

Still scowling, he pressed the answer button and clapped the phone to his ear. After a few seconds he said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Tell the camera crew to wait for me.” Then he lurched to his feet and pocketed the phone, swept an angry hand through his hair, and straightened the lapels of his trench coat with an angry tug.

“I’ve got to go. There’s something going on by the Embankment. Some kind of emergency. They want me to report on it.”

Ed swallowed. He knew that if he let his brother walk out now, they’d never have a chance to talk this through. That would be it for them. Verne would cut him out of his life again, as he had after the funeral.

“Verne, I—”

Verne turned on his heel.

“Goodbye, Ed.” He stalked out of the room, down the passage that led past the oak-panelled front bar, out into the street.

For a moment, Ed sat and endured the curious stares of his fellow patrons. Then with a sigh, he pulled himself out of the booth, and gave chase.

When he got outside, he found it was raining. The shop windows were bright with Christmas lights and decorations. He splashed across the street, weaving between the buses and taxis, to the steps of the Tube station, catching Verne at the ticket barrier.

“Don’t go,” he said, tugging his brother’s sleeve.

Verne shook him off without a word. Without looking back, he swiped his ticket and barged his way through the barrier.

Ed didn’t have a ticket. He looked over at the queue for the machines. By the time he got a ticket, Verne would be on a train and gone. Without stopping to think, he jumped the barrier. Shouts came from the guards, but he didn’t stop to look. Scrambling to his feet, he pushed through the crowd and tackled his brother at the top of the escalator, grabbing his arm.

“We need to talk.”

Somewhere, an alarm rang. Verne shoved him away. He stepped backwards onto the moving escalator and pointed an angry finger at Ed.

“Stay the fuck away from me.”

“But—”

“I mean it. Take one more step and I’ll hit you.”

“But Verne—”

And then two armed police officers were yelling at Ed to kneel and put his hands behind his head. As they cuffed him, Verne turned away in disgust, riding the escalator down towards the platform. Kneeling there, on the cold wet floor at the top of the stairs, with one of the officers holding a firearm to the back of his head and the other talking into a radio, Ed watched his brother’s retreating back. Verne had his shoulders hunched and head tipped back, looking at the ceiling. Ahead of him, the air at the foot of the escalator rippled like a heat haze.

Ed blinked and shook his head. For a moment, he thought his eyes were playing tricks. Then as he watched, the haze solidified. A purple arch shimmered into place, filling the base of the sloping tunnel like a hungry mouth: a mouth into which the metal steps of the escalator were falling one by one, disappearing in searing flashes of actinic white light as they did so.

Ignoring the angry curses of the police officers, Ed struggled.

“Verne!”

He saw his brother’s shoulders twitch. Then Verne finally looked down and saw what was in front of him.

The air pressure in the tunnel changed. Ed felt his ears pop. He thrashed against his cuffs until one of the policemen slapped the side of his head hard enough to crack his nose into the moving rail of the escalator. Then the man noticed what was happening below. Ed heard him swear. Both policemen started shouting into their radio mikes. They still had their guns in hand, but now they didn’t know where to point them.

Ed raised his head. His nose felt broken. Hot blood dripped from his chin.

“Verne!”

Through watery eyes, he saw his brother trying to climb against the downward motion of the stairs, but he was too close to the arch and Ed could see he wasn’t going to make it. The stairs were falling away beneath his feet.

Ed strained forward. Their eyes met for a second, and Verne stopped moving.

“Run!” Ed yelled.

Verne shook his head. He closed his eyes. He let the stairs carry him down until the wounded escalator gave a final grinding screech and collapsed. Ed caught a final glimpse of his brother falling backwards into the archway, arms outstretched, his body disappearing in a flash of white.

CHAPTER TWO

THE BUBBLE BELT

Tiers Cross was a small planet orbiting just beyond the outer fringes of the Bubble Belt. It was icy and cold but it had been given an atmosphere, and two artificial orbiting suns that kept the surface from completely freezing up.

Only one city sprawled across its icy plains. Uptown, there were bright lights, crowds and skyscrapers, but down by the spaceport, drifters and tired hustlers worked the narrow streets. They huddled at windy intersections in flapping coats, waiting for the right deal, the big score. Katherine Abdulov moved among them, avoiding the ebb and flow of their skinny bodies. She had an appointment to keep with a potential client. Her insulated boots crunched on the frozen ground, her breath coming in ragged clouds. She wore a long grey coat over a set of stained ship fatigues, and a warm cap with fur earflaps. The glyphs on her shoulder identified her as the master of the
Ameline
, an old trading vessel currently mothballed in orbit.

She walked through the same old familiar street smells: the greasy stink of the fast food joints, the mingled reek of urine and vomit, the burned plastic tang of fuel drum alley fires. Her ears picked up the electric fizz of the illuminated signs in the windows of the bars she passed; the buzz of a tattooist’s needle from a shop on the corner; raised voices and the crash of shattering glass off somewhere down the block.

Above the street, the Bubble Belt stretched across the night sky like a curtain of beads, filling the heavens. It was a Dyson swarm of bubble habitats, as wide as the orbit of Mars. There were maybe a billion individual habitats in there, each one sporting a different size, shape and internal environment. No-one knew who’d built them. Most were between one and two hundred metres across. Some had working biospheres with animals and insects. Others were tight-packed mazes of empty corridors. Some were filled with water or gas, others with nothing more than soil. But all were as unique as snowflakes, and all perfectly self-contained.

At the Belt’s heart, something like a naked singularity lay wreathed in a fog of incandescent gas. As a fixed point where the rules of space and time broke down, it resisted the mind’s attempts to interpret it. When looking at it, some saw a mirrored sphere, others a greasy, writhing mess of flabby tendrils. Nobody saw it in the same way twice. It had driven good men insane. It was an inexplicable gnarl in the grain of the universe and after a while, in order to preserve your sanity, you learned to stop noticing it.

Although a handful of the Dyson habitats had been settled, the vast majority remained unexplored. The crews scouting them called themselves ‘bubble breakers.’ In all, there were upwards of fifty breaker crews operating in the Belt at any one time. They were salvage teams and they were scavengers. They hit the bubbles, drilled their way in, stripped out anything useful-looking, and auctioned it online, to the highest bidder. It was a dirty and dangerous get-rich-quick kind of a job, and in these lean economic times it tended to attract dangerous and desperate people. People with little left to lose.

People like Katherine Abdulov.

Twenty-six years old and the estranged scion of a wealthy trading family, Kat had come to the Belt the same way so many others did: out of fuel and out of funds. She’d been hoping to score a lucrative charter, carrying a few rich prospectors and their recovered loot. Low on cash, she’d gambled everything to get here, a desperate last throw that left her with nothing, not even enough money to refuel her ship. Unable to find either passengers or cargo, she’d been forced to put the
Ameline
into storage and join a breaker crew.

She looked up, to where a green dot indicated the position of her ship on her visual overlay. Increasing the magnification in her eye, she managed to resolve a recognizable and familiar silhouette: the
Ameline
lay in a standard parking orbit above the moon. Tiny readouts flickered in the corner of Kat’s eye, giving estimates of distance and relative velocity. Red and green navigation lights blinked along the ship’s blunt, wedge-shaped hull. Maintenance tugs nosed around it like curious fish around a sleeping shark.

The
Ameline
had been a derelict when Kat had first found it, half-cannibalised, stripped for parts, and it had taken weeks of patient work to get it flight-worthy again. Since then, she’d worked her way along the branching trade routes that stretched, like the threads of a spider’s web, from Earth to the Outer Worlds, hauling whatever passengers or cargoes were available, trying to get home, back to Strauli. Somehow, she’d managed to stay one step ahead of the wolves crying outside the airlock door. Against all the odds, she’d lurched from one job to the next, keeping the old ship flying until finally, broken down and busted, she’d reached the Belt.

A chill wind blew up the street. Kat returned her vision to its default setting. She wondered if the ship’s eager, dog-like mind felt as restless as she did.

On Tiers Cross, life was tough at the bottom of the food chain. There were too many people here seeking their fortunes. Every time a ship arrived, it brought more of them. They all came to Tiers Cross looking to make a fast buck. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they were disappointed. If they weren’t killed or crippled, they wound up broke and starving. They huddled around fires burning in old fuel drums, or slept uncomfortably beneath tarpaulins, waking at dawn to find themselves covered in frost. Some picked through heaps of scrap for saleable fragments of obsolete cyber-crap, or tried to hawk homemade jewellery to tourists. Others, like Kat, joined breaker crews when they’d spent the last of their savings. It was dangerous, but it was the only option they had left.