The Recollection

by Gareth L. Powell

  What the hell is that?

  In black and white, the corrosive tide poured from the wrecked ship like gushing oil, coating every surface, eating through walls and deck floors like acid. The pictures came with a priority link to footage downloaded from the Ameline.

  Kat?

  He clicked through and found himself looking down on the stifled face of Djatt; the immense claret-coloured tentacles; lightning; zombies; contagion.

  The alarms were still ringing. Panicky messages appeared from his people: of the fifty rotating wheels stacked on the Quay’s seventy-five kilometer axle, fourteen were already offline, overwhelmed. One had shattered into fragments.

  “Get out,” he told them curtly. “Get to a shuttle, get to a ship. Do whatever you have to, just get out.”

  Even as he spoke, his legs were in motion, carrying him to the door of his office. The floor shuddered beneath his feet. Out in the corridor, people were pushing in all directions. They didn’t know which way to run. He paused in the doorway and, using his implant, sent an emergency text message to any and all remaining Abdulov ships still in dock, telling them to cast off and retreat to a safe distance. The floor shook again. Priority alerts flashed up over the vision of his left eye, competing for attention. He ignored them. He didn’t need to be told how serious the situation was, and he already knew exactly where he was going.

  There wasn’t time to reach the hangars. Instead, wading forward into the jostling crowd, his breathing loud in the confines of his pressure suit, Feliks fought his way towards his family’s cryogenic cargo handling facility.

  The ground-to-orbit shuttle shook as its main engines fired. The Acolytes had given up their attempt to reach the Quay and were thrusting for a higher orbit. In the main cabin, Francis Hind had hacked into the Quay’s security feed, and was pulling grainy black and white shots from all parts of the station, assembling them into a mosaic of uproar and violence, projected onto the screens on the back of each seat. Ed and Alice watched the pictures but didn’t understand what they were seeing, only that people were dying. They were taken aback by the ferocity and scale of the destruction.

  “What is this?” Ed asked, as he watched the dark blizzard fill a corridor, shredding everything and everyone in its path.

  Toby Drake looked at him from across the aisle.

  “It’s called The Recollection,” he said. “It’s the reason we brought you here.”

  Ed grimaced.

  “To see this?”

  Drake shook his head. He put his hand on Ed’s forearm.

  “We want you to stop it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  MEGATONNE

  For a long time, Kat said nothing. The images from the Quay held her frozen, unable to think or act or do anything save bear witness to the unfolding devastation.

  “Open a channel to the Quay,” she said at last.

  > To the Port Authority?

  “No. Find my father.”

  > I’ll try.

  “Just find him.”

  She sat back in her pilot’s couch and rubbed her eyes with the knuckles of her fists, hoping against hope that Feliks Abdulov had been down on the planet’s surface when the attack hit, in the family compound enjoying the autumn sunshine instead of up on the Quay taking care of business.

  > Receiving signal.

  Kat’s stomach seemed to flip over. She swallowed nervously.

  “Put it through.”

  > But it—

  “Katherine Abdulov!” The voice boomed from the speakers on the bridge.

  “Cut it off!”

  > I can’t. It’s hacked the primary comms array.

  “Surrender yourself, Katherine.”

  The words sent a tingle through her. She felt an unfamiliar stirring in her head and remembered what the ship had said about the nanomachines on Djatt rewiring parts of her pre-frontal cortex.

  “Never.”

  “But I have so many of your friends already. Don’t you want to be with your friends?”

  Something tugged at her: an urge to respond, to throw herself into the red storm consuming the Quay. Sweat broke out on her forehead, and her nose started to bleed. She wiped it on the back of her hand.

  “Disconnect and isolate the primary array, switch to secondary.”

  > Working...

  “Come to me, Katherine. Bring me your ship.”

  She wasn’t hearing the voice with her ears anymore. It seemed to resonate in her skull, persuasive and commanding, compelling her to obey. Behind it, she could hear the anguished cries of those the monster had already consumed. How many of those voices belonged to people she had known and loved?

  “Go to hell,” she thought, summoning up the last of her strength. She couldn’t hold out. She couldn’t even speak to warn Victor. Whatever was in her head quashed all resistance. The last scraps of her former resolve were crumbling. The Recollection had her.

  And then the connection broke.

  She fell back against her couch as if slapped, chest heaving for air.

  > Primary array offline.

  “Kat!” Victor struggled with his straps. “Kat, what’s wrong?”

  She lay still, dazed, looking up at the overhead screens. Her breathing roared in her ears. Her heart thumped painfully. She could feel blood oozing from her nose.

  “Kat, talk to me. Are you okay?”

  For a few seconds, she watched the screens, still displaying pictures of the carnage taking place in the rooms and corridors of Strauli Quay. Then, without being consciously aware of having made a decision, her hands started to move. She wiped the blood and tears from her face. Still keeping most of her attention on the video screens, she reached forward and tapped on the pilot’s instrument console, accessing the onboard flight computers controlling the nuclear-tipped atmospheric probes stacked in the Ameline’s cargo bay.

  Victor looked from her to the controls, then back again.

  “What are you doing?”

  She hawked up blood and spat onto the deck. “What I have to.”

  He leaned across to get a better look at the console, and when he saw the menu options she’s accessed, his eyes widened in alarm.

  “You’re going to fire on the Quay?”

  Using her metal hand, Kat shoved him firmly back into his own seat.

  “Yes.”

  “But there are a million people over there!”

  With her other hand, she opened a sub menu and ran a query.

  “One million, three hundred and eighty-seven,” she read aloud. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded hard and flat.

  “And you’re going to kill them?”

  “They’re already dying.”

  She tapped in additional commands. The Quay had its defences, and the probes would have to be quick and agile to get close enough to do real damage.

  “I can’t let you do it.”

  “You don’t have any choice!”

  She added her final instructions to the probes’ flight computers.

  “Open the bay doors,” she told the ship.

  > Opening.

  The bridge quivered as the Ameline depressurized its cargo hold and cracked open the main loading hatch in the floor, opening the interior to vacuum.

  Victor put his hand on Kat’s arm.

  “Kat—”

  She shook him off. Her chest burned as if filled with hot coals, hard and bright. Her mouth was dry, her tongue numb.

  “There are over a dozen ships in dock,” she said. “Over a dozen. Can you imagine what’ll happen if that red muck infects a dozen more ships? How fast it will spread?”

  “But the Quay—”

  “Better the Quay than the surface. If it gets down onto the planet, that’s it: game over.”

  “But the people—”

  Kat snarled. “Better a quick, clean death than an eternity of torment.”

  All six of the probes were now under her control. Using her implant, she instructed the ship’s cargo boom to move them
from their secure mounts to the lip of the open doors.

  > Done.

  “Okay, then. Prepare to fire on my mark.”

  “Kat, I can’t let you do this.”

  “Shut up, Victor.”

  Kat ran her tongue over her dry bottom lip. She seemed to be sitting somewhere else, watching herself from a distance.

  “But Kat—”

  “Fire!”

  The Ameline rocked.

  > Probes away.

  Kat jacked into the ship’s sensors. All six of the missiles had fired. She watched them flare away on divergent courses, rolling and weaving. In the lower corner of her vision, countdowns were running, numbers almost blurring as they ticked off the distance and time remaining until impact.

  Still pinned to his seat by the shuttle’s acceleration, Ed Rico saw Francis Hind mutter something to Toby Drake. He heard the words ‘Ameline’ and ‘missiles.’

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Drake looked him in the eye.

  “You’d better hold on,” he said.

  Clad in the cumbersome pressure suit, Feliks Abdulov staggered into the cryogenic cargo facility. His thighs and calves were burning with effort, and his panting breath kept misting his faceplate.

  “I’m getting way too old for this,” he wheezed, admitting it to himself for the first time.

  The cargo facility was a large room on the outer edge of one of the Quay’s rings, holding rank upon rank of stacked shipping containers. The containers were insulated, designed for shipping frozen foodstuffs, and livestock in cryogenic hibernation. When full, they were dropped through doors in the floor, out into the arms of tugs, which then ferried them through the vacuum to the holds of waiting starships. On a normal day, four or five staff would have been on duty, checking manifests and supervising the automated forklifts. Now, the facility was empty, although the forklifts were still hard at work preparing the next scheduled shipment.

  Using his implant, Feliks accessed the facility records and identified the next container to be shipped. Then, hampered by the suit, he shuffled over to it and heaved open the squeaky metal doors. Cold air blew out around him. Inside, crates of fresh fish filled the container from floor to ceiling, on their way from Strauli’s warm oceans to the desert world of Catriona. Grunting with the effort, he toppled two of the nearest stacks out of the container, scattering fish and ice over the metal floor of the facility. This left a space just about large enough for him to wedge himself into. One of the automated forklifts was coming his way. He pulled the door shut and heard the lock engage.

  The container lurched, seconds later, as it was lifted and borne towards the outside doors. Feliks braced himself against the stacked boxes of fish, glad his suit prevented him from smelling them. In moments, he’d be outside the Quay, the container flung outward by the centripetal force of the ring’s rotation. With luck, the automated tugs would still be working, in which case he’d be taken to a waiting starship, where he could signal the crew via his implant. If either the tugs or the ship were absent, he’d be in trouble. The heating elements sewn into the fabric of his suit would keep him from freezing until the suit’s batteries ran out, and the filters in the helmet would keep recycling oxygen for the next thirty hours. Whatever was happening on the Quay, he hoped someone would intercept and rescue him before then.

  Plugged into the Ameline, Kat watched the six missiles close on the Quay. They showed as angry little sparks on her tactical display, each attacking on a slightly different trajectory, hoping to confuse the Quay’s computerized meteor defense.

  > Sixty seconds, said the ship.

  Kat bit her lip. Her hands were squeezed so tightly she could feel her fingernails digging into her palms.

  > Fifty.

  Gun turrets fired from their mounts on the Quay. Brightly-lit tracer rounds streaked the sky. One missile flared and died. Another was clipped, lost attitude control and tumbled out of control, corkscrewing off into the void.

  > Forty.

  Four missiles remained on course, each one packing a single-megatonne mining charge. The guns fired again. Another missile vanished from her display.

  “Come on,” she urged.

  > Thirty.

  > Twenty.

  An alert popped up: The Recollection was attempting to hack her secondary communications array. She told the ship to keep it offline.

  > Ten.

  Defensive tracer fire erupted again, but it was sporadic and unfocussed. Nothing could stop the missiles now. They were programmed to detonate as soon as they got within ten metres of the Quay.

  Kat bit back the shout building within her, the urge to cry out, to warn the people on the Quay of the approaching danger.

  > Five.

  > Four.

  Unbidden, a tear ran down her face.

  > Three.

  > Two.

  Light blossomed. The first charge exploded, swiftly followed by the second and third. Each one hit a different part of the station. The explosions vapourised large sections of the hull. The central axle hinged apart about a third of the way down, broken by the blast waves. Chunks of wreckage blew outward. Sections of the ruined wheel spun away, torn ends spilling air and water and people into space.

  Hooked into the ship’s sensors, Kat felt the heat of the explosions as warm sunlight on her face. Beside her on the Ameline’s bridge, she heard Victor curse under his breath. She couldn’t back out of her link with the ship, couldn’t tear her eyes away from the disintegrating Quay. Like a great old ocean liner holed beneath the waterline, it listed over, its back truly broken. The separated sections were moving away from each other; one down toward the planet, the other off to the side, caught in an expanding cloud of smaller fragments.

  All the lights went off, and the shuttle bucked like a frightened horse. Ed cried out. Alice gripped his arm. In the darkness, Francis Hind asked, “Is everybody all right?”

  “We’re okay,” Alice replied. She had her face pressed against Ed’s shoulder.

  Ed said, “What the hell was that?”

  Toby Drake cleared his throat.

  “It was the Quay,” the scholar said, voice tight with disbelief and barely-suppressed fear. “Katherine Abdulov’s nuked the bloody Quay!”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  REUNION

  > 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 t
he 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...?”