The Recollection (22 page)

The cave ended in a sheer drop. They were in a cliff wall overlooking the sea. Far below, waves churned against ragged boulders.

Searching for options, Ed looked up.

“It’s not far to the top. About ten metres, I guess.”

“Can we get up there?”

The top of the cliff had been eroded by the wind, and bits had crumbled away. It looked lumpy and rough, with plenty of potential handholds.

“Are you up to climbing?”

Alice put a hand to her head. “I don’t know.”

Ed looked back into the cave, to the arch. “Well, we’re going to have to try. We can’t go back that way. And we can’t stay here in case one of those creatures comes through.”

Alice looked up in alarm. “Do you think they might?”

“If we can step through, I see no reason they can’t.”

She swallowed and shook herself.

“Okay,” she said, “but you’re going to have to help me.”

“Don’t worry. If you’re hurting too much, we can take it slowly.”

“No, you don’t understand.” She touched his arm. “Ed, I’ve never told anyone this before.”

“What?”

“I’m terrified of heights.”

She looked down. Then she frowned. Something had caught her eye. She took her hand from Ed’s arm and walked past him to the cave wall, where she bent to retrieve an object from the dirt floor, and straightened, holding a pair of spectacles. The arms were bent and rusty. One of the lenses had been lost, and scratches and dust covered the other. They looked a thousand years old, like something pulled by an archaeologist from the sands of Egypt. Pinching them between finger and thumb, Alice looked up at Ed, open-mouthed.

“Are they—?”

Her voice was almost lost in the crash of the waves below. Ed took them from her. He turned them over and over reverently, as if inspecting an antique. He opened and closed the arms. The hinges were stiff and rusty.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re his all right.”

“Then we’re close?”

He gave the glasses back to her.

“We could be. At least we know he made it this far.” He thought of Kristin and shuddered.

Alice bit her lip. “I can’t believe it. He actually stood here.” For the first time since leaving home, she seemed excited. “We’re actually on the right track.”

Ed took her hand.

“All the more reason to keep moving, then,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE WRATH OF GOD

The
Ameline
’s hull creaked as it kissed the top of the atmosphere. Linked into the ship’s sensors, Kat felt the growing friction as a fire in her belly. They were coming in as steeply as they dared, trading safety for speed, on a course that would take them directly under the spreading blood-red cloud.

“Steady,” she said. They were over the ocean. Already, the leading edges of the hull glowed a dull crimson.

> Twelve minutes to target.

Scrawling a line of fire through the tortured air, they crossed the coastline and passed over the snow-capped western mountains at many times the speed of sound.

Ahead, the cloud’s streamers raked the land, reaching from heaven to earth like the kilometres-long tentacles of an angry desert god. Lightning flickered. Looking at it, Kat struggled to comprehend the sheer scale of the unleashed fury. This was a storm of biblical proportions. It boiled across the sky from horizon to horizon, large enough to rain destruction across the whole face of the world. It was by turns terrifying and exhilarating, and she could feel her heart leaping in her chest.

> Five minutes.

She popped her safety straps.

“Okay, I’m going to the airlock. Keep scanning for new transmissions, in case he tries to make contact again.”

> Are you sure you know what you’re doing?

“Yes.”

> Only I thought you wanted to kill him.

Kat paused. She thought of Victor’s face as it had appeared on her screen, looking old and worn and scared.

“Maybe later,” she said. “In the meantime, we stick to the plan.”

She clambered back down the ladder into the passageway connecting the bridge to the rest of the ship’s interior. They were being buffeted around; she had to use her arms to brace herself against the passage walls. She stopped at the equipment locker, strapped a handgun to either hip, and lifted out the biggest weapon in her collection: a sturdy composite assault rifle with laser scope, explosive rounds, and a 30mm grenade launcher slung under the barrel.

“How are we doing?”

> Down to subsonic. Two minutes and closing.

As steadily as she could, she made her way through the crew lounge and cargo bay towards the rear airlock. Halfway there, the ship lurched violently. Despite the inertial compensators, she lost her footing and tumbled against the bay’s bulkhead. Loose pieces of un-stowed equipment crashed and rattled down around her.

“What the hell was that?”

> Emergency evasion. One of the streamers got too close for comfort.

Kat picked herself up. Still clutching the rifle, she clambered into the rear airlock and sealed herself inside. She sat with her back to the inner door, booted feet braced against the opposite wall, to either side of the outer hatch.

“I’m in position.”

> Ten seconds.

She felt the ship’s landing jets kick in, pushing hard against her back. Then they hit the ground and the outer hatch snapped open.

Cautiously, Kat got to her feet. Smoke and ash filled the air. A hot wind snatched at her hair, whipping it, and sand stung her eyes.

They’d put down in the desert beyond the spaceport, a few metres from Victor’s last recorded position. The red cloud roiled overhead, bigger than the world. Lightning filled the sky. Seen from below, the massive columns looked like tornadoes: dozens of them in every direction.

> Captain!

She shook herself. They had no time to waste. On the ground, the redness that had engulfed the spaceport buildings rolled towards her, as flat as a lake and as inexorable as lava, dissolving everything in its path. Ahead of the oncoming slick marched the ranked figures she’d seen from orbit. There were maybe a hundred of them, shambling along shoulder-to-shoulder, like zombies in the red light. Using her implant to ramp up the magnification in her left eye, she tried to get a good look at them, but they were as featureless as silhouettes, and certainly no longer human.

Her comlink crackled.

“Kat?”

“Victor!” The zombies were getting uncomfortably close. “Victor, get up here.”

She scanned the battlefield. She couldn’t see him. Then three figures broke from the cover of nearby boulders, running at a crouch. Kat recognised him immediately. He was older and heavier than the other two, but he’d always kept himself in shape. She lowered the airlock ladder ready for them, and then lifted the rifle to her shoulder, ready to lay down covering fire.

“Come on!” she called.

She sighted on the front row of the approaching phalanx and pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked against her like a startled animal, kicking against her shoulder. Bloody, fist-sized chunks blew from the heads and torsos of the horde, making them stagger. Time after time she raked the gun back and forth, yet none of the figures fell dead. They twitched and jerked, but remained stubbornly upright. She stopped firing when Victor reached the foot of the ladder. Putting her rifle down on the deck, she dropped to her knees, reaching down to help him.

“They don’t fall down,” she said.

Victor didn’t reply. He started climbing.

> We have incoming. Fifty seconds. Tendril headed this way.

Kat used her new arm to haul Victor into the airlock by the back of his belt. At the foot of the ladder, one of the other men—a local, by his clothes and beard—hesitated. He looked up at her, eyes wild with terror. Unbidden, Kat saw Enid’s face in her mind, felt again the other woman’s fingers brush hers in the final seconds before the emergency door slammed down, severing her arm.

“Come on!” she yelled.

The bearded man had one sandaled foot on the first rung of the ladder. Kat reached down with her new arm and grabbed hold of his outstretched wrist. The man cried out in a language Kat didn’t speak. Bright scarlet tendrils were snaking up his legs, under his clothes. They sprouted from the collar of his shirt, and from the cuffs of his sleeves. Like a striking snake, one shot from his wrist and glommed onto Kat’s hand. She pulled back reflexively, but the tendril wouldn’t break. It wrapped itself around her wrist, squeezing like a small red python. The more she tried to shake it loose, the tighter it coiled, sinking into the metal of her hand, melting like acid. Where it touched, the smooth alloys turned to reddish-black oil. And it spread fast. Within seconds it had consumed her hand and wrist and its edge was working its way along her forearm, leaving nothing in its wake but writhing darkness.

She yanked back hard. The man below had begun frothing a dark red paste. It bubbled from his mouth and nostrils and eyes. It ran like tears down his face and cascaded over his clothes. His limbs shook as if electrified. His hair and skin boiled away, swallowed by the red tide bursting from within. Seconds later, he was gone, eaten away to nothing, leaving only a shambling stick figure in his place, like an afterimage. In desperation, Kat clawed for her rifle with her free hand. She swung it to point at the zombie, and her scrabbling finger found the trigger, firing a burst of explosive bolts into the thing’s chest. The shots hurt her ears. The bullets blew ragged holes through the zombie’s torso and it staggered back, but didn’t fall, its arm still tied to hers by the red tendril sprouting from its wrist. As she watched, horrified, the punctures in its body started to close, the red flesh oozing back to fill the craters left by the bullets. Where pieces had fallen from it, new figures began to grow, tiny arms and heads sprouting from the sand with obscene haste.

Fighting down panic, she moved the gun until the barrel touched the tendril connecting her to the writhing figure below, and pulled the trigger. The gun leapt in her hand, hurting her thumb, but she was free. She’d blown the red rope apart, and the severed end flapped from her hand. Steam came from the melting metal of her prosthetic arm.

She scrambled to her knees and a shadow fell over her. She looked up at a crimson tornado filling the sky, towering over the ship. Where it touched the ground, the dirt erupted in spurts of hot blood. It made a sound like a freight train and it bore down on them like the very wrath of God.

“Kat!”

Victor was beside her. He hauled her by the shoulders and they both tumbled into the airlock.

The outer door smacked shut.

“Go!” Victor yelled. But they were already airborne.

Kat lay shaking on the carbon deck plates as the
Ameline
powered skyward. Victor leaned over her. His voice seemed to echo from a great distance.

“Kat, talk to me!”

He shook her by the shoulders.

“Kat!”

She couldn’t unclench her jaw. Sweat ran down her spine, and her legs quivered. The redness had eaten its way into the metal of her arm, using the prosthetic’s artificial nerves as a conduit. It was inside her now, forcing its greasy tendrils into her brain, its hunger an agony within her, vast and unquenchable.

As it pushed into her mind, she heard the voices of those it had already consumed, their souls crying out in torment, trapped forever in the belly of the beast. Her mind touched theirs and knew their agony, knew that they had been torn from their physical bodies and imprisoned here, in virtual simulation spaces contained within the redness itself.

A name came to her, borne on a tide of anguish:
The Recollection.

She tried to fight. The Recollection was eating her from within, as it had done to that poor bastard she’d tried to save at the foot of the ladder. Her arms jerked as she tried to struggle. Her back arched. She couldn’t get the breath to scream. In her head, the presence of The Recollection felt as cold and dark as interstellar space.

Then suddenly she felt a different kind of pain. There was something hot touching the base of her throat. The skin split and shriveled away from it like polythene. Her nostrils filled with the reek of her own cooked flesh. Still unable to scream, she thrashed around.

And a white light blew through her like a scouring wind.

DJATT GRID

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