The Recollection (9 page)

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NEW ALIEN CIVILISATION?

Astronomers detect anomaly obscuring nearby stars.

Dust cloud or second bubble belt?

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CIVIL WAR ON LANCASTER

Traders bring reports of fighting.

Rebels seize capital buildings.

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TAKING SHAKESPEARE TO THE STARS

One way ticket for performers.

New tour to last 80 years, and take in 35 planets.

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SCIENTISTS PREDICT COLLAPSE OF ARCH NETWORK

Wormholes inherently unstable, say experts.

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TRADER OVERDUE

Freighter
Emily
declared lost with all hands.

Fails to return from routine flight to Djatt.

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CHAPTER NINE

TRIANGLE

“I can’t believe nobody told you.”

They were out of the car now, standing in the desert watching the swollen red sun as it sank low over the domed mud huts of the little abandoned village. The heat made it too stifling to stay inside. A parched breeze stirred the air, flowing in ahead of the oncoming night, and drying the sweat on their backs and faces. Ed Rico had his arms folded. His combat jacket lay draped over the back of the driver’s seat.

“I still don’t get it,” he said.

Kristin slapped a palm on the Land Rover’s bonnet. She was getting impatient.

“It’s quite simple,” she said. “Each arch leads to a different planet, right? This one we’re standing on is about a hundred light years from Earth; and to us, the journey here didn’t seem to take any time at all, did it? But relativity tells us that
nothing
travels faster than light. So in reality, it must have actually taken us a hundred years to pass from one arch to the other, the same amount of time it’d take light to cross the same distance.”

“But that doesn’t explain why we can’t go back.”

Kristin tapped her fingernails on the hood.

“Now we’re here, it will take us another hundred years to get back to Earth. As far as we’re concerned, it’s only been a short time since we left, but by the time we got back there, we’d find two whole centuries had passed. We’d be stranded in a strange and distant future.” She looked at the fat mesh tyre tracks leading to the intact arch. “That’s the reason why my unit hasn’t tried to come back to find me. By the time they got back here, I’d most likely be dead or gone.”

Ed leaned back against the Land Rover’s warm door and yawned. He felt jet-lagged. According to his wristwatch, the time was two-thirty in the morning.

“How do you know all this?” he said.

Kristin turned her face to him. “People
have
come back, you know. Some of the arches lead from Earth to Mars and some of the nearer stars. Short roundtrips. They showed us how it works.”

Ed wiped his eyes. He’d assumed the journeys had been as instantaneous as they felt.

“Surely it would be better to be on Earth in the future, rather than stuck in a dump like this?” he said.

Kristin shrugged.

“I guess it depends on your point of view. Me, I’ve got a mission to accomplish.”

Ed stifled another yawn.

“But we didn’t come straight here,” he said around his fist. “The first arch we used took us to a beach, on a planet with two moons.”

“Then you have to factor in the extra journey time. When did you leave Earth?”

Ed told her the date, and she nodded. “Which arch did you use?”

“We found it on a farm, near Oxford.”

Kristin frowned. “I don’t know that one. I came through the excavated Chancery Lane arch.”

Ed sat up, suddenly alert. “That’s the arch my brother used! He was one of the first through. We’re trying to find him.”

Kristin put her hands on her hips.

“If he came through the same arch as me, he’ll have come straight here, same as I did.”

Ed looked around, feeling his pulse quicken. Verne had actually been here, standing on this spot, breathing this air?

He said, “He fell into the arch about seven months before we left.”

Kristin did a quick mental calculation. “In that case, he’ll have passed through about ten years ago.”

Ed felt his heart thump like a stone in his chest.

Ten years
?

“But how can that be?” he said. “We were only seven months behind him.”

Kristin let out a tired sigh. She used the toe of her combat boot to sketch a triangle in the dirt. She tapped one of its points.

“This is the Earth, right? And this here is where we are now, a hundred light years away. And this third point up here, that’s the planet you detoured to. Now, I came through the same arch as your brother and I came straight here, along the base of the triangle, while you two went up this side to this other planet, and then down again to here, adding an extra nine and a half years to your journey.” She wiped her hands together as if brushing off sand.

“Ten years?” Alice said, looking crestfallen.

Kristin gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.

“Ain’t relativity a bitch?”

Ed looked down at the triangle sketched in the sand. Then he turned away and stalked around to the Land Rover’s tailgate.

Ten years
?

His mind reeled. He didn’t know how to begin to take in the news. Instead, he kicked a pebble with the toe of one of his work boots, and watched it bounce and skitter across the dirt track. At his sides, his hands clenched and unclenched.

“But we were only on that beach for a few minutes,” he said.

CHAPTER TEN

MEDINA

Kat lay in her bunk, looking at the curved metal ceiling of her cabin. Toby Drake lay with his cheek in the hollow of her shoulder, his skin dark against hers, glossy with drying sweat. His breath was warm on her chest.

The ship scratched at the edge of her awareness.

> Have you quite finished?

“What do you want?”

> We’re docking in fifteen minutes. Perhaps you should get some clothes on?

“Oh, leave me alone.”

Drake stirred and blinked up at her.

“Pardon?”

Her palm soothed the damp, prickly hairs at the nape of his neck.

“I’m talking to the ship.” She extracted her arm and sat upright, letting the sheet fall from her chest.

“I have to get back to the bridge,” she said, trying to sound professional. She didn’t know what she wanted. She put one arm across her chest and the other hand to her throat. She felt suddenly, stupidly vulnerable. She hadn’t let her guard down like this since Victor. She hadn’t let anyone get this close.

Drake scratched his ears and yawned. “What time is it?”

Kat checked the display in her right eye. “We’ve got about a quarter of an hour.”

Nearly home
.

She had butterflies in her stomach and felt like a child again. Blushing furiously, she reached for her clothes. Drake sat up in bed, watching her. “I can’t believe we’re there already.” He shook his head. “Seven light years in six hours, it’s amazing.”

Kat wriggled awkwardly into her flight suit.

“It wasn’t really six hours,” she said.

He looked up at her. “It wasn’t?”

Kat fastened her suit and brushed it down with her hand. The skin-tight material didn’t leave her feeling any less exposed, but somehow she drew comfort from it and her confidence returned.

“No,” she said. “We spent most of that time manoeuvring. The jump itself took half a second.”

Drake looked thoughtful.

“Of course, it was longer than that, though, wasn’t it?”

Kat walked to the door. She said, “You’re a physicist, you know how it works. Half a second to us, seven long years to the rest of the universe.”

Kat met her father at a café in the
Medina
section of Strauli Quay, on a first floor balcony overlooking the market stalls on one of the main concourses. She wore her thick coat over her flight suit, and she’d added half a dozen silver bangles to each wrist and smoothed her hair back with gel. She wanted to look tough, independent and feminine.

Below, shoppers thronged the concourse, even though the local time was almost three o’clock in the morning. The Quay never slept. It ran twenty-five hours a day, catering to bleary-eyed travellers arriving from worlds with days of different lengths, and jet-lagged representatives from all the time zones on the planet below.

Looking out over their milling heads, Kat heard the lilt and hubbub of a hundred dialects and accents. She saw tourists and ship captains browsing the ramshackle stalls that lined the walls, immigrants with wide eyes and heavy suitcases, small knots of Acolytes gliding through the crowd. You could buy anything in the
Medina
. That was its claim to fame. There were no laws governing what could and couldn’t be sold. Bales of silk were traded on one stall, and automatic weapons on the next. Barbeque grills filled the air with the greasy hiss and spit of vat-grown meat. Slave traders rubbed shoulders with preachers and spice merchants. Gene-splicers and tattooists operated out of tents set up on the metal deck. Over the bustle of commerce, you could hear the whine and bite of their needles.

Sitting on the opposite side of the café table, Feliks Abdulov toyed absently with a teaspoon, watching her with his grey eyes.

“This is unfortunate,” he said.

Kat added sweetener to her coffee, stirred it and set her own spoon aside. Her bangles rattled as she moved her arms.

“Unfortunate?”

“That you have to leave so soon. If I had another ship to send, I would.”

Kat shrugged. The family’s shipping schedules were arranged decades in advance.

“Do you think Ezra was right, that the
Kilimanjaro
was sabotaged?”

Feliks took a deep breath through his nose.

“I think it’s highly likely.” He stopped fiddling with the spoon. “But of course, it’ll be years before we know for sure.”

He reached out. The tips of his fingers brushed the back of her hand.

“But you, Katherine. How have
you
been?”

Kat leaned back. She felt her neck growing hot. “Since you kicked me out, you mean?”

Feliks shook his head. The grandson of the founder of the Abdulov trading dynasty, he’d commanded his own starship for forty years before moving back to Strauli to take over as head of the family.

“I did what I had to do.”

Kat gave a snort.

“You cut me out of the family!”

Feliks looked down at his hands.

“I had no choice. You were one of my officers and you were openly consorting with the competition. I couldn’t give you preferential treatment. What else could I do?”

“You could have trusted me.”

“I had a reputation to maintain.”

Kat pushed back in her chair.

“And now?”

Feliks raised his eyes to the steel ceiling.

“I don’t know,” he said. He seemed to be struggling with himself. “Look, this isn’t easy for me. I thought I’d never see you again.”

Kat stamped her boot. She got to her feet. She knew from the local Grid that Victor’s ship had already docked and she didn’t have time to be angry about the past. If she was going to beat him, she had to act now. Recriminations could wait.

“Forget it,” she said. She used her implant to call up schematics for the
Ameline
and displayed them on the smart screen built into the tabletop.

Feliks raised his eyebrows.

“This is your ship?”

Kat leant her fists on the table. “It’s the best I could get.”

Her father’s fingers traced the outline of the ship’s engines. He looked at her from beneath grey brows. “Do you really think you can beat him to Djatt in
this
?”

“She’s faster than she looks.”

“She’d have to be.”

Kat scowled. Feliks sat back, hands raised.

“I’m not criticising you, Katherine.” He tapped the image on the table. “You made a good choice. These old Renfrew Mark IVs are very reliable. Ships of this class run forever, if they’re looked after right. They’re just not very quick. Nevertheless...” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a data crystal. “Your mother’s
really
going to hate me for this.” He slid it across to her.