The Recollection (21 page)

All goes onward and outward,

nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one

supposed, and luckier.

– Walt Whitman,
Song of Myself

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

DJATT

The
Ameline
popped back into being four hundred thousand kilometres above the sands of Djatt’s eastern desert, slap-bang in the centre of the planet’s designated Emergence Zone. Coasting inward on its residual velocity, the ship’s scanners raked the surrounding space for potential threats.

Djatt was a small brown world out on the edge of human space, a hop and a skip away from most trade routes. With only one product to trade, it was ignored by the wider galaxy for ninety-nine years out of every hundred. It only attracted trade ships once a lifetime, when the centennial flowers of the cacti-like desert succulents were harvested to make the stimulant known simply as Pep. Then for a few weeks, merchants would come from far and wide in the hope of buying enough to make a fortune.

There were old men on the surface who hadn’t even been born at the time of the last harvest, and children alive now who would grow old and die long before the next one. They were a nomadic people, mostly of Middle Eastern and Saharan African descent. The name ‘Djatt’ meant ‘dustbowl’ in one of their dialects. In between harvests, they slept in inflatable tents and followed their goats and camels around the coastline, from the snow-capped mountains of the west to the scrubby deserts of the east. Their only permanent structures were clustered like barnacles around the spaceport’s perimeter: a score of warehouses, several leaky air processing plants, a church, and two or three hotels. Everything else they either carried with them or foraged for in coastal rock pools. Their needs were simple. Yet in business, they were as sharp as magpies. They always drove a hard deal, and for a third of a thousand years they had been loyal to the Abdulovs. This time, however, Kat was arriving empty-handed, with nothing to trade, and it remained to be seen how far that loyalty would carry her.

> Uh-oh.

Strapped into the pilot’s chair, Kat heard the ship’s voice in her head, relayed through her implant.

“Problem?”

> I’m not getting any response from the local grid.

“That’s strange.”

> And I’m picking up distress calls.

Kat felt herself stiffen.

“Show me.”

The bridge around her dissolved into darkness. Through her implant, the ship gave her a real-time view of the surrounding volume. Red circles appeared, indicating the origins of the received transmissions. Numerical figures chattered away next to each one, reeling off measurements of signal strength and distance. Roughly half came from ships drifting in odd, unpowered orbits, the rest from points on the planet’s surface.

Kat focused on the ships first. She saw four or five trading ships and a dozen in-system vehicles: passenger shuttles, automated tugs and the like. Most were adrift. Some had lost all their power. A few twitched like dying insects. She took a closer look at the nearest, a blocky freighter from a rival family, which wheeled slowly past her bow, tumbling end over end through a cloud of its own vented gas. Its airlocks were open and she could see smoke. Only fires didn’t burn in vacuum, and the red-tinged ‘smoke’ seemed to be coagulating out of nothingness and streaming
into
the ship, not out.

Beyond the wreck, something obscured her view of the planet’s daylight side. She frowned. For a moment, she couldn’t make sense of what she saw. Then it snapped into focus.

“What the hell is that?”

Streamers of blood-red fog reached to encircle the globe’s equator, as if the very fabric of space were trying to wrap itself in an embrace around the planet.

> Unknown.

The ship magnified the image. Seen closer, the fog resembled an impossible storm cloud. Although the main bulk of the cloud stretched maybe two thirds of the way around the world, its edges were diffuse and hard to define, its ruddiness streaming back and merging into the greater blackness of space. She had to infer its shape from the way its edges occluded the stars beyond. From its underside, bloody tendrils snaked down into the atmosphere, sixty kilometres long and grasping at the surface. Lightning crackled around them. Where they touched the ground, fractal red blots bloomed like blood stains, spreading to cover land and sea alike, swallowing deserts, lakes and mountains.

“Can you raise the local family office?”

> Nope.

The ship expanded the image. The spaceport and most of its attendant buildings were gone, consumed by what looked like an expanding lake of glutinous gore. As she watched, a group of specks broke from one of the surviving warehouses, running pell-mell ahead of the slowly-advancing flood.

“There are people down there.”

A second larger group appeared, shambling after the first in ordered ranks.

“What are they doing?”

> It looks like they’re fighting each other.

Members of the first group kept stopping and turning to face their pursuers. By increasing the magnification yet again, Kat saw they held weapons.

“They’re shooting each other?”

She turned her attention to the ranks of the second group.

“That’s weird,” she said.

> What?

“Look at how they move.”

The ship was silent for a second.

> Ah, I see. They turn as one, like shoals of fish or flocks of birds.

“And they’re making no attempt to dodge the shots of the first group.”

> Weird.

“Can we raise them?”

> I’m getting several distress signals from the planet’s surface including one from—

> Ah.

“What?”

> You may want to see this.

The
Ameline
had unfolded its communication array to its fullest extent—gossamer thin receivers stretching out like dragonfly wings from the hull—yet the transmissions were still faint and snowed with static, prone to dissolving into jagged bursts of random pixels. Through the interference, Kat made out a face: unshaven, haggard and dirty, like a hostage in a video. Through the grime and bristles, it took her a moment to recognise it. When she did, her stomach flipped. The face belonged to Victor Luciano. The picture came from a handheld camera. From the little background she could make out, it seemed he’d taken shelter behind a row of storage crates somewhere on the edge of the disappearing spaceport.

“Kat? Kat, is that you? Oh, thank God. I thought you were dead.”

“I very nearly was.”

He leaned in close to the camera. A piece had been torn from one of his ears and blood matted the hair on that side of his head. “Get out of here, Kat. Just turn around and run. Don’t look back.”

Crouched figures moved back and forth behind him. Some carried rifles. Gunshots popped like firecrackers.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

Something exploded near the tanks, and Victor flinched as dirt rained down around him.

“It’s that red cloud,” he said. “It hit the ships in orbit first. We’ve been stranded down here for three days, running with the locals.”

“What about the
Tristero
?”

“We lost contact. It’s gone.”

He rubbed hollow eyes with dirty fingers, as if he hadn’t slept for the whole of those three days.

“Listen to me, Kat. This is important. I wasn’t behind that bomb. You have to believe me. I know I’ve done some stupid things recently, but that wasn’t one of them.”

Kat narrowed her eyes. “A friend of mine died.”

Victor looked away, visibly upset. “I know. I thought you had, too. But it wasn’t my fault. You have to believe me.”

“Why?”

“You used to.”

“Before you walked out, you mean?”

Victor wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a dirty smear. He looked a lot older than she remembered. “What choice did I have? You deliberately went behind my back.”

Kat’s jaw tightened. “I did what I had to do.”

“You killed our child.”

“No!” Static fuzzed the screen for a second. Kat felt her eyes prickle with the threat of long-denied tears. “I was twenty-two years old,” she said, not knowing if he could hear her through the interference. “I’d just left my family for you. I didn’t know how to look after myself, let alone a child.”

The picture flickered, gained some solidity.

“You should have told me,” Victor said.

Kat screwed her fists into balls. “It was my choice, not yours. And anyway, it’s only stored, not terminated. It can be re-implanted—”

The picture fuzzed out again. When it steadied, Victor looked old and tired.

“Stored?”

She put a hand to her brow.

“Yes, stored. It’s there on Strauli, waiting for us.”

“So you didn’t—”

“No.”

For a moment, Victor had the look of a man struck by lightning. Then he shook himself.

“We don’t have time for this,” he said. “None of it matters anymore, anyway. Not now. Just go, Kat. Get out of here.”

“But—”

Over the link she heard the rattle of small arms fire. Victor glanced back over his shoulder.

“It’s too late,” he said. “It’s over. I’m sorry. Sorry for everything.”

Someone tugged at his sleeve. People were shouting.

“Look Kat, I’ve got to go. You get out of here. There’s nothing more you can do.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

SCRATCHES

wo days after Alice returned from her trip to Barcelona, Ed went to her photographic studio. The studio was on the third floor of a converted brick warehouse off Westferry Road. He didn’t go in. Instead, he waited in the doorway of the apartment block across the street. It was raining. The rain fell from the sky like scratches on celluloid. When Alice emerged at lunchtime, he followed her to an Italian café by the river.

He walked up to her table and said, “So that’s it?”

Alice looked up, clearly annoyed to see him.

“I guess so.”

She fiddled with the stem of her glass. The place smelled of pizzas and bottled beer. Football flickered on a screen by the bar. Italian flags hung from the walls. She finished the wine in silence, and got up to leave.

Ed put a hand on her arm.

“Don’t go.”

“It’s over, Ed.”

“Is it?”

She hitched her camera bag onto her shoulder and tossed a ten pound note onto the table, to cover the drinks.

“It’s Verne,” she said. “He wants us to have a baby.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

She turned on her heel. He followed her out into the street. It had started to rain. She kissed him abruptly on the cheek. Then he watched her climb into a cab, not caring if he got wet. The rain ran down his cheeks.

“Don’t go,” he said.

Half-blind with afterimages and shivering with cold, Ed stumbled backward from the arch. Alice caught him, and they clung to each other. He could feel her trembling. After the heat of the savannah, the air here felt as refreshingly light and cool as a drink of iced water.

“Are you okay?” he said.

Alice hugged him. “Kristin—?”

“Kristin’s dead.”

He felt her shiver in his arms.

“But those animals—”

“I know.”

“We shouldn’t have left her.”

Ed rubbed his eyes with the finger and thumb of one hand. The spots were clearing from his vision. They were in a cave.

“There’s nothing we can do,” he said. “We can’t go back.”

The cave measured about fifteen metres in length, with the softly glowing purple arch wedged about two-thirds of the way in, in much the same way as the arch that swallowed Verne had wedged itself across the escalator at Chancery Lane. The walls of the cave were smooth and dry. Loose stones crunched underfoot.

In the opposite direction, the mouth of the cave framed an almost circular ring of blue sky. From outside came the crash and boom of ocean surf.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re not out of this yet.”

He took her hand and walked her to the entrance. The pull of gravity was less here, making movement easier. As they got closer to the light, he could see how pale she was. Her eyes were dim and unfocussed and blood oozed from the scratches on her arms and chest. He had plenty of scrapes of his own, and his head still hurt from the crack it had taken in the Land Rover crash. They badly needed to rest and recuperate, to have a hot shower, a good meal and a long sleep.