The Recollection (33 page)

> I’m picking up a call from Toby Drake.

Kat shook herself. She’d been watching the expanding cloud of debris from the Quay. Now she backed out of the ship’s sensorium and ran a hand through her hair.

“Put it on screen,” she said.

One of the smaller displays on her console blinked and lit to reveal Drake, looking twice as old as he had when she bid him farewell, and now lit from above by low red emergency lighting.

“Katherine.”

“Toby, where are you?”

Drake rubbed his forehead.

“In a shuttle. We were headed for the Quay when The Recollection struck.”

“Are you okay?”

“We’re fine but we’re drifting. We caught the edge of one of your explosions, and it fried some of our systems. For the moment, we’re running on back-up battery power.”

On another screen, Kat tapped up a 2D tactical display. The
Ameline
illuminated the shuttle with a blinking green cursor.

“You’re past the Quay, heading outward,” Kat said. “Hold tight and we’ll rendezvous.”

“We?”

“I have Victor Luciano with me.”

“Victor...” Toby’s brow creased. “In that case, I have some people here who are very keen to speak with him. Can you put him on?”

Kat shrugged. She turned to Victor. He’d been staring at his own clasped hands for the past few minutes, shocked into silence by the Quay’s destruction. Now he looked up, blinking curiously.

“He’s here,” she said.

On the screen, Drake’s hand loomed into the picture. He took hold of the camera and turned it, revealing a scared-looking couple strapped into seats on the other side of the shuttle’s aisle.

Victor’s eyes narrowed. It was hard to make out much detail in the glow of the red lights.

“Hello?” he said.

The woman in the picture screamed. She put her hands over her mouth.

“Oh, my god,” she squeaked.

“Alice?”

“Verne!”

“And who’s that with you. Is it Ed? Jesus Christ, what are you two doing here?”

The man he’d referred to as Ed leaned towards the camera.

“Looking for you,” he said.

An hour later, the
Ameline
docked with the stricken shuttle.

There was only room for one person to fit through the airlock at a time, so Ed hung back and let Alice, Drake and the Acolyte go first. His stomach churned. He hadn’t felt this nervous since the police asked him to identify Verne from the CCTV footage at the Chancery Lane Underground station; to confirm that the grainy black and white figure falling into the alien portal was indeed his elder brother.

When he finally climbed through into the
Ameline
’s passenger cabin, he found Verne with his hand on Alice’s shoulder. He could see she was crying.

“It’s okay,” Verne was saying, soothing her. He’d lost weight and there were grey streaks in his hair. He looked strange without his spectacles; he had a faint, spidery scar under one eye, and a tiny chunk missing from his left ear. He turned as he heard Ed approaching.

“Ed!”

Ed stopped a few paces away. He pulled the rusted glasses from his pocket.

“I think these are yours.”

Verne looked at them, then up at Ed.

“Are they really...?”

He took a step forward and reached out for the glasses. Ed let him take them.

“Jesus. Where did you find them?”

“In a cave, in a cliff.”

Verne turned the glasses over and over in his hands. He kept shaking his head.

“You know, I had to climb that cliff half blind. Half blind
and
half dead.” He looked up at Ed. “Did you meet those fucking creatures?”

Ed gave a mute nod. Verne made a face.

“I hated those fucking things,” he said. “They almost had me a couple of times.”

Ed swallowed. He rubbed his hands together. “Yeah. We, uh, we left someone there.”

Verne’s eyes narrowed.

“You did?”

Ed gave a nod.

Verne looked down at his feet. “I’m sorry.”

Ed took a step forward.

“Look, Verne...”

His brother held up a hand. “Don’t say it, Ed.”

“But—”

“I mean it.” Verne glanced at Alice. “I can’t pretend that what the two of you did was right and I can’t pretend it didn’t hurt, but I never thought I’d ever see either of you again. I gave you both up for dead, years ago. Decades ago. So whatever’s happened, I’m just glad you’re both here now.” He caught Ed in a bear hug. “You came to find me,” he said. “Everything else is history.”

Ed didn’t know what to say. He’d been nerving himself for a confrontation. At the very least, he’d expected Verne to punch him in the face.

“Aren’t you angry?” he said.

Verne released the hug, held him at arms length. “I told you, it’s okay.”

“Not to me, it’s not. It might all be ancient history to you, but it still feels pretty raw to me.”

“So, what do you want me to say?” Verne held his hands out, palms up. “I’ve already forgiven you.”

“But I don’t want your forgiveness.”

“Then what do you want?”

Ed waved his arms in frustration.

“I don’t know. Get mad. Shout at me. Do something.”

“Would that make you feel better?”

Ed took a deep breath. His fists were clenched. “I don’t know how you can be so calm.”

Verne shrugged. “Things are different now.”

Ed let his fists relax. “How different?”

Verne rubbed the bridge of his nose with his index finger. He didn’t seem to know where to look.

“Let me introduce you to someone,” he said, beckoning to a young woman standing impatiently on the other side of the room. “Ed, Alice. This is Katherine.”

Alice pushed a strand of auburn hair out of her eyes and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her silver vinyl jacket. She looked the other woman up and down, from heavy boots to dark eyes and hair.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said.

Kat gave an uncomfortable smile.

“Hello.”

Silence fell. Ed shuffled his feet on the polished rock floor. Everything felt awkward and wrong, not at all as he’d expected. Nobody knew what to say. Then Francis Hind stepped into the centre of the group. He pushed back the hood of his black robe, revealing his wizened, bald pate.

“If I may interject? I’m afraid time is of the essence. Captain Abdulov, it
is
good to see you again, but I must prevail upon you to deliver us to the Ark without delay.”

He turned to face Ed.

“It seems our friend here has a destiny to fulfill.”

Kat left the others in the passenger lounge and climbed up the ladder to the ship’s bridge.

“How are we doing?” she asked.

The ship didn’t answer straight away. When it finally spoke, it sounded concerned.

> We’ve got a problem.

“What is it?”

> The Recollection survived our attack.

“You are
kidding
.”

> I wish.

Kat slid into the pilot’s chair and hooked her implant into the ship’s senses.

“Let me see,” she said. She closed her eyes and the tactical display opened up around her. She saw the wrecked Quay, the lower portion of it falling toward Strauli. Smaller fragments already burned as meteors in the planet’s upper atmosphere.

“Where?” she said.

> The individual machines are too small to resolve at these distances. But you may be able to make out some of the larger clumps here, and here.

The ship magnified a couple of areas near the falling ruin. Squinting, Kat made out a pair of irregular red stains falling toward the planet.

“That’s it?”

> Much of the infection was destroyed, but some escaped. That which isn’t actively converting the remains of the Quay is already on its way down to the planet’s surface.

“Will it survive reentry?”

> It survived three nuclear blasts.

“Damn.” Kat ground her palm into her forehead. “What are we going to do?”

> There’s not much we can do. We don’t have any weapons, and we’re low on fuel. If we followed it down to the surface, we wouldn’t have enough to get airborne again.

Kat let out a breath. “Do we have enough to get to the Dho Ark?”

> Barely.

She took a last, lingering look at the fat crescent of Strauli. On the daylight side, the oceans shone a rich, wholesome blue, dotted with high, white clouds, scattered with green islands. On the nighttime side, city lights traced the coastlines. It looked so peaceful and perfect, and yet all she saw when she looked at it was the terrible red cloud that had loomed over Djatt. She thought of her mother and father, her aunts, uncles and cousins. She’d sent the footage from Djatt as a warning signal. Now she hoped they’d find a way to escape the coming horror.

“Set course,” she said. “Jump when ready.”

> Aye-aye, Captain.

In her gut, she felt the engines come online, their capacitors ramping up for the short hop to the Ark.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THE TORCH THAT BURNS THE SKY

Upon arrival at the Dho Ark, Kat Abdulov stayed with the
Ameline
to supervise repairs and refueling, while Verne and Alice retired to one of the ship’s cabins to talk. Ed found himself surrounded by Acolytes and marched to a crystal elevator, accompanied by Drake and Hind.

“Where are we going?” he asked, hands in the pockets of his green combat jacket.

Drake regarded him with wide, sympathetic brown eyes.

“Not far.”

The elevator doors closed and the car dropped rapidly into the depths of the crystal Ark. Ed looked down. Through the floor, he could see the lift shaft fall away into seemingly infinite darkness. At his shoulder, Drake said, “You’ll get used to it.”

Ed looked up from the floor and shrugged.

“It doesn’t bother me.”

Drake gave a rueful snort, the trace of a smile. “It bothered the hell out of me, the first time I rode in one of these things.”

Ed saw a light rising to meet them, and then the elevator dropped into a bright cavern the size of a warehouse. He raised his hand to shade his eyes from the sudden brightness. The floor of the room was polished rock, bare save for something roughly the size and shape of a Volkswagen Beetle, which sat on a plinth in the exact centre of the cavern.

“What’s that?” he said.

Behind him, Francis Hind leaned forward.

“That, my son, is the reason we’ve brought you here.”

On the opposite wall, a second elevator car matched their descent. As far as Ed could make out, it contained a single robed figure wearing a weirdly-spiked helmet.

“Ah,” Drake said. “One of our hosts.”

They reached the floor and the doors opened. The air in the cavern was cold and dry. Drake and the Acolytes stood unmoving, their breath steaming. Drake gave Ed a nudge.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Ed looked at him. “Aren’t you coming?”

The other man shook his head regretfully.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Much as I’d love the chance to inspect that thing, this is for you, and you alone.”

He gently pushed Ed forward. With his hands still in the pockets of his combat jacket, Ed stepped out onto the floor of the cavern and turned to watch the crystal elevator as it accelerated back up into the ceiling.

When it had disappeared into the shaft from whence it came, he turned and started to walk toward the object on the plinth. On the far side of the room, the horned figure did likewise, seeming to glide as the hem of its robe brushed the floor. As it got closer and closer, he slowly realised that it wasn’t a man at all: the body under the robe seemed to be proportioned all wrong, and the ‘helmet’ came down to the creature’s shoulders without the benefit of a neck.

This must be one of the Dho, Ed thought, trying to remember the little he’d gleaned about them in his time on Strauli, doing the Downport hustle. All he knew was all that anyone else really knew: that the Dho were aliens; that the Ark had been in the Strauli system for a thousand years before the first humans stumbled through the arch network; and that in nearly four hundred years, only a handful of humans had ever met one face-to-face.

“Welcome, Edward,” the creature said, in a voice composed chiefly of clicks and scrapes. Ed stopped walking. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets, trying to look relaxed.

“Call me Ed,” he said.

The Dho stood at least a foot taller than him. Its robe was the colour of the night sky, its outline pregnant with asymmetrical lumps and protrusions beneath the fabric.

“Do you know why you are here, Ed?”