The soldier paused, hanging from his hands and feet.
“Lieutenant Cole?” He turned his head and spat. “What does it matter? What difference does it make? We’re all dead, aren’t we. None of us are going home. We’re all alone out here.”
“But you killed her.”
The soldier slid a knife from his thigh pocket.
“Don’t,” said Ed. He raised the stone. Krous ignored him. With the blade between his teeth, he started climbing again.
“I mean it.” Ed let the stone drop. It hit the other man in the shoulder. Krous let out a grunt of annoyance, and the stone fell away into empty air.
Ed picked up another, slightly larger.
“Stay back,” he said.
Krous glowered at him, and pulled the knife from his mouth.
“I’m going to kill the two of you as soon as I get up there,” he said. His eyes flashed. “Although, of course, I may take my time with your little friend.” He reached up and pulled himself another metre closer to the top. Ed’s heart hammered. His mouth was dry. He squeezed the stone in his fist.
“That’s it,” he said. “That is it.”
He got to his knees and whipped the stone down with as much force as he could muster. It hit Krous on the arm, almost dislodging him completely. The soldier cried in pain and anger, dropping the knife. The injured arm dangled uselessly.
Ed scrambled over to a larger stone. This one was the size of a human skull, and heavy enough that he could only just heft it in one hand. He dragged it over to the cliff edge and looked down at Krous. The man swung from his one good hand.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Ed said. He could hardly breathe. He’d never been this angry in his entire life. “I’ve had enough of the arches, of you and those animals, and the fucking Serbians.”
Krous snarled up at him. “So what are you going to do about it?”
Hands shaking, Ed raised the rock above his head.
“Last chance,” he said.
Krous laughed hoarsely. “Fuck you. You’re a painter, you don’t have the guts.”
Ed tasted something sour at the back of his throat. His pulse drummed in his ears.
“No,” he said. He climbed to his feet. Krous looked up at him. For a long moment, the two men stared into each other’s bloodshot eyes, and Ed saw in them the madness that had crept in following the loss of his comrades and the days he’d spent alone at sea on that giant wooden hulk. Ordinarily, Ed would have felt sorry for the man, but out here, there could be no truce, no discussion. Krous had already killed once and Ed had every reason to believe he’d kill again, just as soon as he reached solid ground. They couldn’t outrun him and they couldn’t placate him. Out here, the only thing they could rely on was themselves.
He gave the rock a final squeeze, swallowed hard, and let it fall. Krous tried to turn away but it slammed into his chest. He cried out and lost his grip. His hands flailed as he desperately tried to save himself. Then he fell, tumbling backward into the abyss.
Amplified by the rock walls, his scream went on for a long, long time. Even after it was over, it seemed to hang in the frosty air, rolling back and forth across the cliff tops in time to the surge of the waves on the rocks below. Neither Ed nor Alice spoke. They just stood, looking down at the crumpled figure in the surf. Ed kept glancing at his open right hand—and the rock it no longer held. Then, as the final echoes faded to nothing, he became aware of another sound. He tilted his head.
“Can you hear something?”
He turned slowly, just as a camouflaged halftrack appeared over the nearest rise. Its caterpillar tracks flicked up dust and stones, and an unfamiliar flag flapped from its aerial. Soldiers fanned out behind it, guns at the ready. One of them jerked a thumb at the floor.
“Get down,” he barked. “Put your hands behind your back.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MEET THE MONSTER
Victor booked them into a hotel suite on Strauli, in a city less than fifty kilometres from the Abdulov family compound. The room looked out over the spaceport. It had a large double bed, and the staff delivered a bowl of fresh fruit each and every morning. They’d been together for six subjective months, and now they were planning to ship out from the Quay together, as crew-members on a Blue Star Trading vessel taking a run up the coreward stars to Nolton Relay, on the very edge of explored space.
In the week before the departure, they lay wrapped in each other’s arms, telling each other of the sights they would see and the wonders they would experience. It was their dream. They had both flown before, but this time it would be different, as they were doing it for each other. They would crew together and save up enough to buy their own ship.
“Not one of those old clunkers,” Victor said, looking out of the window at the derelicts left rusting in the rain at the edge of the port. They were old ships no-one could be bothered to repair. They had outlived their usefulness and, in some cases, their owners. They had names like Tortilla Moon, Candy Star and Ameline.
“We’ll get a new one, a fast one,” he said. “The best we can afford.”
Kat had already emptied the trust fund her family had put aside for her, and transferred the balance to an anonymous account. When topped-up with their earnings from this trip, it would be enough to put a deposit on a new trading ship.
She hugged him.
“We can, can’t we? We can do that.”
Then, the morning before they were due to leave, she took a pregnancy test. She’d been feeling strange for a few days. At first, she’d put it down to excitement. Then she started feeling queasy at night, as she lay in bed. She took the test in the bathroom of the hotel suite, while Victor was out, buying in a few last minute essentials. When the test came up positive, she stared at it in dismay. She didn’t know how it had happened. Or rather, she did, but didn’t know how they could have been so careless. She was twenty-two years old and just taking her first steps away from home. She didn’t want to be pregnant. Not now. She wanted to prove herself, get her own ship first. She didn’t want Victor to feel obligated. It was too soon in their relationship.
So she delayed the decision.
She pulled on her coat and took herself off to the hospital.
The operation was a simple one: a small incision, the foetus removed and placed in storage; still alive but frozen. The whole procedure took less than ten minutes. Afterwards, the surgeon glued her closed and told her she wouldn’t even have a scar. He told her to stop crying. She could have the child re-implanted at any time, and carry it to term naturally, if that’s what she wanted. In the meantime, it would be here on ice, waiting for her.
Outside the hospital, the rain still pattered on the pavements. At this stage her baby—their baby—was only a cluster of cells, smaller than her smallest fingernail. Would it know it had been frozen? Would it feel time passing it by?
She walked all the way back to the hotel, water streaming down her face. By the time she got there, she was a wet, sniveling mess.
“Where have you been?” Victor said. He had their cases packed and ready to go. A bottle of wine stood open on the nightstand, two plastic glasses ready to toast their adventure. When she told him what she’d done, he sat on the bed. He scratched the bridge of his nose.
“You should have told me,” he said.
Kat folded her arms across her chest. She sniffled miserably.
“I thought you’d be angry.”
Victor got to his feet. “What?”
She nudged one of the suitcases with the toe of her boot.
“If it stopped us leaving. I thought you’d be angry if it stopped us leaving.”
His face flushed. He took a step toward her, fists squeezed tight.
“Do you know how long I’ve—?” His voice faltered and he broke off.
“I did what I thought you would have wanted.”
“You have no idea what I want.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Victor turned away. He bent at
the knees and picked up one of the cases.
“I’m leaving,” he said. “I’ve got a flight to catch.”
Kat felt the strength drain out of her. She watched him walk to the door.
“You can’t leave me here,” she said.
Victor paused. “Watch me.”
Without thinking, she scooped one of the glasses from the nightstand and dashed the wine in his face.
“Fuck you,” she said.
When he’d gone, she threw herself on the bed and stayed there for a long time.
The next morning, the rain had given way to a chill breeze. Feeling raw inside, she walked to the spaceport. She had more than enough money for a train ticket home, but no intention of buying one. Instead, she went to the scrap yard at the edge of the port, where the derelict ships were waiting. She climbed through the cargo bay of the one that looked the most promising: a wedge-shaped trader decked out in the faded blue and red livery of the Abdulovs, its hull dotted with sensor pods and lateral thruster arrays.
“It needs a lot of work,” she said, eyeing the loose deck plates and exposed wiring.
The scrap merchant shrugged. He didn’t care. Although he’d doubtless acquired the ship as cheap scrap, the price he was asking would more or less wipe out her savings, and he knew it.
Kat climbed up to the bridge. In the cold air, her breath came in little clouds.
She patted the back of the pilot’s couch.
“Hello,” she said.
Lights flickered on the instrument console.
> Hey there. I’m the Ameline. How are you doing?
“My name’s Katherine. Tell me, are you Sylvia Abdulov’s Ameline?”
The ship seemed to consider this for a moment.
> I was once owned by Sylvia Abdulov. She was a fine woman. Why do you ask?
Kat smiled. She’d never met her great-aunt, but knew of the woman’s exploits. Sylvia Abdulov had been a legend in the family’s beach compound, having captained a dozen ships and repeatedly crisscrossed the sky from Old Earth to New Chongqing, Port Douglas and the Far Stars. She’d been one of the original Abdulov pilots, and some said she had a man in every port; others that she alternated between men and women, taking whichever took her fancy. One thing was certain: Sylvia had been one hell of a trader. She’d known how to turn a profit. Without her, the Abdulovs would still have been a local concern, instead of today’s galaxy-spanning conglomerate. As a cadet, Kat had had a picture of her taped to the inside of her locker door. Now, realising that she was standing on the bridge of her great-aunt’s first ship, she felt closer to home than she had in months.
“Yes,” she said to herself, “I can do this.”
She ran a finger through the dust on the Ameline’s navigation console, leaving a trail.
“Are you ready to fly again?” she asked the ship.
Waves of eagerness leaked through her implant. She felt power building in the engine cores, and long-dormant systems flickering back into life.
> I thought you’d never ask.
Three weeks later, after patching the old ship up just enough to make her flight-worthy, Kat took the Ameline up into the clear blue sky above the port. The rain had stopped and the sun shone.
Determined to follow her great-aunt’s example, she flew the little ship all over, from the stable, middle-aged stars around Sol to the bright blue archipelagos near the rim. She hauled whatever cargoes she could find, legal or otherwise, and used every scrap of profit to refit the engines and repair the hull and vital electrical systems. Often, the Ameline’s blue and red paintwork led people to assume the ship was still an active part of the Abdulov fleet; and when it suited her, Kat played along with that assumption, using her family’s reputation in order to win business.
On Nuevo Cordoba, she fell in with a random jumper by the name of Napoleon Jones. Random jumping was an extreme sport, illegal on some worlds, prime entertainment on others. It was the ultimate gamble. It was a pilot throwing his or her craft into hyperspace on a random trajectory, just to see where they’d end up. Some pilots discovered habitable planets beyond the limits of the arch network, or rich mineral deposits. They became celebrities. They brought back wild tales of bizarre planetary systems, of swollen stars and uncharted asteroid belts. But the risks were huge. Roulette pilots gambled with their lives, and there were ugly rumours of ghost ships, of murder and cannibalism, and individuals dying lonely, lingering deaths in distant star systems. Those lucky enough to find their way home clustered on worlds close to the edge of familiar space, where they could stand under the clear night sky and see the unexplored frontier stretching away before them. Nuevo Cordoba was one such world. It was a dirty little outpost on a half-forgotten moon.
Napoleon Jones was one of the better roulette pilots, in that he was still alive. In the random jumping community, he was something of a legend, having jumped further into the unknown than anyone else. He had a penchant for leather jackets and wide-brimmed hats. He had dark green eyes the colour of the Strauli sea after a storm; eyes that had maybe seen too much, yet still hankered for something new; eyes which glittered in the low lights of the port bars, where the other patrons treated him with the wary respect accorded to a shaman. His ship was named the Bobcat. It was small and fast and tough.
“You could slam it into a rocky moon at Mach 6,” he often boasted, “and still walk away unscathed.”
Kat’s affair with him lasted a little over four weeks. In that time, he taught her more about flying than she had learned at the Strauli Flight School. He taught her how to surf the solar wind. He showed her how to wring every last watt of power from her ship’s engines; how to jump further and faster by stretching their safety tolerances to the absolute limit.
When she left him, it was with a renewed sense of self-confidence and a way of carrying herself that identified her as an experienced trader, rather than the rookie she’d been before.
On her travels, she saw the vast old wooden sailing ships of Trafalgar, and she hiked through Valhalla’s ice caverns. On Earth, she walked the streets of Paris, Rio and Berlin, and saw the massive geo-engineering projects that had been deployed to fight the climate crisis... and the monuments to those the crisis had already claimed.
For a while, she made enough money to keep flying, living from cargo to cargo, but her luck didn’t last. On Sand Haven, the Ameline failed a routine safety inspection, and she had to replace the primary and secondary cooling arrays. A few jumps later, she delivered a cargo only to find that her buyer had gone out of business, leaving her several thousand out of pocket. She couldn’t afford to refuel. She couldn’t afford to eat. By the time she reached the Bubble Belt and Tiers Cross, she was broke, with the Ameline running on fumes...
Kat jerked awake in her bunk. Victor sat beside her. Victor, the man who’d abandoned her on Strauli. The man who’d shipped out as a hired hand and returned as a captain. The man she’d come here to kill.
She blinked at the ceiling. “What…?”
He stroked her hair.
“Shhh,” he said. “It’s all right. You’re going to be okay.”
“But—” She brought her left hand up to touch the dressing at the base of her throat. The skin felt stiff and numb beneath.
“Does it still hurt?”
“No.”
“Good,” he said. “I cleaned it and sprayed it with anaesthetic before I applied the bandage.”
“What happened to me?”
Victor’s brow furrowed. “I don’t really know. You were on the floor in the cargo hold. I thought you were dying like the others. Then this white light... What was that?”
Kat shook her head. She had no idea.
Victor tapped her prosthetic arm. “Whatever it was, it seems to have killed the infection.”
Kat held up the hand. The metal no longer seethed like boiling oil. Instead, where the redness had passed through it, it looked half-melted, like candle wax. Where the light caught it, it held a sheen like a fly’s wing.
“The Recollection,” she said softly.
Victor looked at her. “What?”
“The Recollection. That’s what the red stuff calls itself.”
“How do you know that?”
Kat frowned. “I’m not sure.”
He touched her hair again. “What else do you know?”
She thought.
“It’s very old,” she said. “And it’s not a cloud. It’s a, a memory matrix. It breaks everything down, stores it as code. It preserves everything it touches.”
Victor drew his hand back. He looked concerned.
“Kat, are you okay?”
She pushed herself up on her elbows. “I think so. I mean, I feel okay.”
In truth, she felt anesthetized. The shocks had come too rapidly, one after another. First Enid’s death and the loss of her arm, then the catastrophe on Djatt. Finally, her infection by, and mental brush with, the red cloud. She needed time to stop and take stock, to grieve for everything and everyone that had been lost. She needed to wriggle deeper into her bunk and pull the blankets over her head, but she couldn’t do that with Victor sitting there. Instead, she sat up straight and shook out her hair. She flexed her metal hand. Despite their half-melted appearance, the servos in the joints still worked.
“Help me to the bridge,” she said.
When they got there, she sank gratefully into the pilot’s couch. Her chest hurt where it had been burned.
“Okay,” she said to the ship, “show me what you’ve got.”
The forward screen cleared and the stars were replaced by black and white footage taken from a camera in the cargo hold. Kat saw herself lying on the deck plates by the inner airlock door, Victor kneeling over her. Oily red paste frothed from her mouth, and her arms and legs twitched spasmodically.
> As far as I can tell, The Recollection is a gestalt entity, comprising trillions of individual machines, all identical, all molecular in size. Once they were inside your body, they set to work reproducing, converting your molecules into copies of themselves.
The scene flashed. Kat’s pendant burst with the radiance of a sun. Victor fell back, shading his eyes with his arm. The screen went white and the recording ended.
The Recollection Page 17
