The Recollection (35 page)

“I love you,” he said.

Alice bit her lip. Before she could answer, Toby Drake strode into the room, flanked by two Acolytes. The Acolytes wore ship suits beneath their open robes, Drake wore a shirt and tie beneath his chocolate-coloured leather coat.

He looked at Ed.

“They’re ready for you,” he said.

Linked in to the
Ameline
, Kat watched the crystalline immensity of the Dho Ark recede. Further up the behemoth’s hull, a thousand hidden cavities yawned open, disgorging ships like thistledown. Crewed by Acolytes, these ships were transports of inhuman design: fat, streamlined freighters designed to pick up and carry as many refugees as possible.

> Chubby little buggers, aren’t they?

“Shhh.”

She spoke to the ships.

“Okay,” she told them, “form up behind me, as we planned.” She cut the broadcast and opened a private channel to Ed Rico, cocooned like a caterpillar in the heart of the lumpy weapon now fixed to the underside of the
Ameline
’s bow. “How are you doing?”

Ed sounded muffled, as if he had something in his mouth. He said, “Doing all right, I think, considering it’s only my second time in space.”

“Good to go?”

“Just find me something to shoot at, okay?”

Kat backed out of the
Ameline
’s sensorium. She turned to Verne. He was sitting beside her, in the co-pilot’s chair. He gave her an encouraging grin.

“Ready to kick some ass?”

She grinned and looked up at the screens, and saw the freighters were more or less in position, arranged in a flying v-shape with the
Ameline
at its tip. She reopened communications.

“All right,” she told the fleet. “Follow me. We jump on my mark.

“Three.

“Two.

“One.

“
Mark
.”

A subjective instant later, they came out of their jumps on the nighttime side of the planet. With so many ships appearing almost simultaneously, stealth wasn’t an option. Each arrived in its own dazzling burst of pure white light. All at once, ten hundred flares blossomed in the vacuum, their reflected lights glittering off the waters of Strauli’s darkened oceans.

On the bridge of the
Ameline
, Kat surveyed her fleet. The freighters were built like silver-skinned blimps, with heavy torpedo-shaped bodies and wide tail fins.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” she advised them.

Below, her home planet turned. Dawn broke over the beaches of the Abdulov family compound.

The ship broke into her thoughts.

> Recollection dead ahead.

In the tactical display, an area the size of a football pitch lay directly in their path, its edges blurring into fractal spines.

> It’s just a fragment, but I’m picking up microwave packet bursts.

“It’s in touch with other fragments?”

> In continuous contact and capable of coordinated action, right across the system.

“Range to this piece?”

> Thirty kilometres.

“What’s it doing?”

> It’s trying to communicate with us. Shall I put it on speaker?

Kat gave an involuntary shiver. “No.” She didn’t want to hear the trapped souls wailing in the depths of the swarm. She was afraid that now it had eaten its way through the Quay, she might recognise some of their voices. Instead, she opened her channel to Ed Rico.

“Do you see it?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Kill it for me.”

Wrapped in the warm, slippery folds of the Dho Weapon, Ed turned his attention to the cluster of nanomachinery between him and the planet. Through the weapon’s heightened senses, he perceived the tiny blood-coloured machines as they went about their business, swarming and multiplying. They were tearing apart the carcass of an unlucky shuttlecraft, converting its raw mass into newly-minted copies of themselves.

Looking closer, he perceived the net of signals that linked them together. It was a seething, flickering web of data that encircled the globe, connecting this clump of machines to all the others in the Strauli system, whether floating in orbit, swarming over the remains of the Quay, or chewing into the rock and soil of the planet’s surface. As a network, it had no centre, no hierarchy. The individual machines were simply cells in a distributed organism. The consciousness of The Recollection lived in the interplay of data between them: simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

Contemplating this, Ed felt the mind of the Torch curl into his skull with a silky, feline grace. He sensed its feral eagerness, its drive to fulfill its purpose. The feeling was heady and contagious. All the mad soldiers, Serbian butchers, and weird otter creatures were as nothing now. For the first time in his life he felt empowered and confident. Almost omnipotent.

Target acquired.

The weapon worked by plucking wormholes from the quantum foam. One end it placed in the heart of the nearest star, while the other it aimed at the target he selected. When activated, the wormhole behaved like a flamethrower, firing a superheated jet of fusing solar hydrogen.

Thirteen million degrees centigrade.

And all he had to do was reach out...

The
Ameline
bucked. A pencil-thin line of fire shot from its bows, bright enough to blind an unprotected eye. In the quarter-second of its duration, the beam seemed to sear the very fabric of the sky itself. It punched through the thin cloud ahead, flashing the swarming machines in its path to plasma. Over the next second and a half, it fired a further three times, slicing and dicing.

> Holy fucking shit!

On the bridge, Kat rubbed her eyes to get rid of the stark violet afterimages, giving thanks for the
Ameline
’s filters.

> Target destroyed.

With a shaking hand, she opened a line to the fleet.

“Okay,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, “You all have your coordinates. Get going.”

She stayed high, watching them drop away, scattering across the face of the planet, their noses glowing cerise as they entered the atmosphere. Looking down at them, she felt a sense of trepidation. As far as she was aware, there had never been a gathering of so many jump-capable ships. And they were trying to evacuate an entire planet! In all of human history, there had never been an operation to compare. According to Francis Hind, the Dho had been planning it for centuries, training their Acolyte pilots in secret, planning the best way to retrieve as many human souls as possible. Even so, there was so much that could go wrong; and with only a thousand ships, they wouldn’t be able to save more than a fraction of Strauli’s sixty million inhabitants—even if they managed two or three trips before the planet was overrun.

When she was sure they were all safely on their way, she turned to Verne.

“Have you located the hospital?”

In the co-pilot’s chair, he glanced up from his instruments.

“Yes, but there’s a problem. It’s on the edge of an infected area.”

“Has it been overrun?”

“Not yet, but it’s going to be close.”

Kat closed her eyes and fought to keep her breathing steady. If they were going to pull this off, she had to remain calm and focused, ready to respond to whatever The Recollection threw their way.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

She tapped a command into her pilot’s console. The
Ameline
tipped over onto its nose and fired its engines.

> Hold tight.

They hit the atmosphere at seven kilometres a second, and the ship began to shudder. Almost immediately, the friction raised the temperature on the bow’s outer skin to well over sixteen hundred degrees centigrade, creating an envelope of ionized air around the craft, interfering with their communications and cutting them off from the rest of the fleet for a little over three minutes. In the dead time, Kat turned to Verne.

“You know, I’m going to have this baby,” she said matter-of-factly.

Verne gave her a look.

“No,” she said, “I mean it. As soon as we get back to the Ark, I’ll have one of the doctors re-implant her.”

“Are you sure this is the best time?”

Kat swallowed. “It’s the end of the world,” she said. “If I don’t do it now, I mightn’t get another chance.”

Verne’s forefinger stroked the bridge of his nose.

“Okay,” he said.

Kat smiled.

“I want to call her Sylvia, after my aunt.”

Verne raised an eyebrow.

“What if it’s a boy?”

Kat shook her head. It was impossible to tell the sex of the foetus at this early stage, but she had a feeling.

“It won’t be. But if it is, we’ll call him Victor.”

The buffeting on the hull eased. The display screens came back online.

> Comms restored.

“Sit-rep?”

> We’ve lost two of the freighters. The rest are closing on their designated targets.

“What’s our distance to the hospital?”

> Six hundred kilometres. ETA four minutes.

“Okay, bring us in low and fast. Vic… I mean, Verne, you’re with me.”

Kat prised herself from her seat and scrambled down the ladder to the corridor connecting the bridge to the passenger lounge. Verne came behind her. When she reached the foot, she paused to select two chunky handguns from the equipment locker. As she strapped their holsters to the thighs of her ship suit, she regretted the loss of her assault rifle on Djatt. She had the uncomfortable feeling that if they were going to survive the next half an hour, they were going to need every bit of firepower they could muster.

Coming in over the darkened islands, approaching the coast, Ed stabbed each of the red blooms they passed over, lancing them with beams of incandescent fury, drawn from the raging heart of a star.

The landscape rolled below him like a canvas.

The weapon was his brush.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

GNARL

Back on the Ark, Toby Drake stood with Harris and the Acolyte, Hind. They observed the deployment of the fleet via a stylised two-dimensional map displayed on the upper surface of a glass table in the human quarters. Toby had his hand over his mouth. His stomach churned.

“I wish I’d gone with them,” he muttered.

Hind gave him a stern look. Beneath the black hood of his robe, his skin looked thin and pale, his cheeks like stretched sheets of scraped vellum.

“Our hosts have another task in mind for you,” he said. “Come with me.”

He led Toby out of the room. Harris watched them leave from beneath shaggy brows.

“This way.” Hind set off along the corridor that led to the workstation from which Toby had spent so many years studying the Gnarl at the Ark’s heart.

“Look,” he said, as they stepped into the alcove, with its trestle tables and ranks of instruments.

Toby craned forward, hands pressed on the glass of the floor-to-ceiling window. Below, a group of Dho stood in a wide circle on the cavern floor, ringing the pulsating Gnarl that floated in the centre of the room. Their horns were tipped forward in attitudes of worship and deference. They seemed impervious to its writhing chemical vapours.

“What are they doing?”

“Communing.”

Hind did something to the frame of the window, and the glass slid back, allowing the cavern air to swirl in around them. The hairs on Toby’s arms rose. He smelled burnt hair and cinnamon, and heard a fizzing crackle like the sound of a badly-tuned radio.

“Over the past quarter of a century, you’ve done everything we’ve asked of you, Mr Drake,” Hind said. “You gave up your home and your career, even the woman you loved, to come here and study with us. And now, I think you’ve earned the right to know the truth.”

Toby took a step back, away from the edge of the window frame. The drop to the cavern floor was at least twelve metres.

“What truth?”

“The nature of the Gnarl.”

Hind reached into the folds of his robe and produced a child’s toy: a small, grey plastic elephant.

“Do you know the old Indian story of the blind men and the elephant?” he asked.

Toby shook his head.

Hind held up the toy.

“Once upon a time in India, six blind men were asked to describe an elephant. The one who felt the trunk said the elephant was like a tree branch. The one who felt its leg said it was like a pillar. The one who felt its tail thought it felt like a rope, and so on. Not one of them perceived the whole creature.”

He handed the toy to Toby, who took it and turned it over in his hand, examining it.

“So, the Gnarl is the elephant?”

Hind nodded.

“Good,” he said.

“And I’m one of the blind men?”