On the overhead screen, Ezra’s mouth opened and shut wordlessly as he tried to think of a suitable response. Jumping under thrust was even more strictly forbidden than jumping within a hundred diameters. If another ship happened to be in the way when she appeared at her destination, she wouldn’t have time to take evasive action, and she’d still be accelerating when she hit it. Worse still, if it was behind her, her exhaust would incinerate it before she had time to cut the thrust. The risks to everyone were too great, and harsh punishments were doled out to captains caught engaging in such reckless behaviour. Punishments up to and including imprisonment and ship seizure.
“I know what I’m doing,” she said.
Ezra scratched his head. “But what happens at Strauli when they see you coming in hot?”
Kat smiled. “That won’t be for another seven years, and you’ll be well into middle age before the news works its way back here, so why don’t you let me worry about it?”
Ezra opened his mouth again to protest but she broke the connection before he could.
Fuck it, she thought. I’m never coming back to this dump.
She blinked up the engine controls and ramped up the thrust, letting it push her back in her seat. Accelerating hard, she told the Ameline to bring the jump engines online. Hooked into the ship’s senses, she felt the two smooth purple coils of twisted space-time powering up in its belly, their design back-engineered from the arches that first allowed humanity to spread out into the universe.
Thousands of kilometres ahead, Victor’s ship stood against the darkness like a silver splinter in the night.
She opened a channel.
“Hey,” she said.
On the overhead screen, Victor regarded her with tired eyes.
“What are you doing, Katherine?”
Strapped into her couch, she did her best to smile against the acceleration.
“I’m beating you to Djatt.”
There was a short delay as her words crawled across the gulf separating them, and then Victor shook his head sadly.
“You can’t catch us, Kat. Not in that old tub.”
Katherine bit her lip, enjoying the moment.
“You think so? Watch this.”
Knowing she’d be gone before her words reached him, she gave the mental command for the ship to activate its jump engines. All the power gauges spiked at once, there was a flash of white, and the Ameline vanished.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MISMATCHED MOONS
After the flash, darkness in the Land Rover’s cab.
Alice let out a cry: “I can’t see!”
Also blind, Ed stood on the brakes. The big car ground to a halt. Groping, he reached over and found her arm. They were both shivering and breathless, as if drenched in iced water.
“It’s okay,” he said, “I’m here.”
The flash had been too bright, like staring into the sun. He screwed his eyes shut and waited for the blobby green and purple afterimages to fade. When he opened them, he saw they were parked on a beach, in the dark. Breakers crashed and slithered on the sand ahead, froth bone-white in the light of the Land Rover’s headlamps.
Beside him, Alice knuckled her eyes.
“Stop it, you’ll make it worse.” He pushed her fists away and cupped her face in his hands.
“Look at me,” he said.
Her eyes were red and watering. With an effort, she focussed on him.
“Are you okay?”
She looked uncomfortable. “I think so.” She pulled back and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her fleece.
Ed reached down and killed the engine. It shuddered into a deep silence, broken only by the rush and hiss of the surf.
Alice said, “Where do you think we are?”
Ed leant forward over the wheel. Beyond the headlamp beams, the beach stretched away in both directions, a long strip of sand bookended by the cliffs of distant headlands. The stars above were clear and bright and unfamiliar, and two crescent moons hung low over the water, one white and the other orange.
An arch shone in the rear view mirror, red in the reflected light from the Land Rover’s brakes. While Alice finished rubbing her eyes, Ed dug a torch from his survival kit.
“I’m going to take a look,” he said.
Alice caught his sleeve. “Wait! How do we know it’s safe out there?”
“Safe?”
She looked around at the darkened sand. “What if the air’s poisonous or something?”
Ed took a couple of experimental sniffs, then shrugged. “If it was, I guess we’d be dead already.”
He shouldered the door open. Cold air swirled into the cab. The offshore breeze smelled salty, and reassuringly Earth-like. If it weren’t for the double moons, they could almost be on a beach in France or Spain.
Alice zipped her fleece to her chin, and opened the door on her side. Neither of them wanted to be the first to speak. They stepped out of the cab in silence, onto the gritty sand. Ed felt the grains crunch beneath his feet. With Alice beside him, he followed the Land Rover’s tyre tracks back to the arch. His boots left crisp pleated tracks. Alice scuffed her feet, kicking little sprays of sand with the toes of her white trainers.
The arch looked the same as the one they’d just driven into, in the paddock by the river. The sides were just as cool and smooth, and glowing with the same purple hue. Ed crouched down at its base and scooped up a handful of damp sand, rubbing it between his fingers. The grains were coarse and sharp, like powdered glass. With a laugh, he brushed it from his hands. On impulse, he dug his mobile phone from the inside pocket of his combat jacket, and checked the reception.
“No signal,” he said, then grabbed Alice by the shoulders.
“We’ve done it,” he told her. “We’re on another planet!”
Alice coughed. She seemed to be having trouble catching her breath.
“You were right, then,” she wheezed, “about the arches?”
“Can you believe it?”
Ed felt a bit breathless himself. He took her hand and pulled her down to the water’s edge, where the waves hunched and sizzled onto the shore, eerily white in the moonlight. He couldn’t stop laughing: here he was, Edward Jason Rico, taxi driver and failed artist, walking on a new world. He put his head back and howled at the unfamiliar stars. He spun in circles with his arms out, and kicked through the surf, soaking his boots and the legs of his jeans.
A new world!
Beside him, Alice walked as if dazed. She kept folding and unfolding her arms, unsure what to do with her hands. Ed guessed she wanted the camera she’d left on the passenger seat of the Land Rover.
“Oh Ed,” she said, turning slowly around and around, taking it all in, and unable to quite believe where she was.
He put his arms around her.
“We did it,” he said.
She looked over his shoulder and he felt her stiffen.
“What’s that?” she said.
Ed let go of her and turned to see.
“Where?”
Alice pointed into the dunes at the back of the beach, about a mile down the beach, to where a silhouette stood against the night sky.
“Over there, on the horizon.”
Ed’s chest felt tight. He was breathless from shouting.
“It’s another arch,” he said.
They took it slowly over the dunes. The Land Rover coped well, but the sand was loose and treacherous and kept falling away beneath the wheels, threatening to topple the vehicle over onto its side. Hands tight on the steering wheel, Ed inched them forward, trying to keep the axles as level as possible, following the contours from the top of one dune to the next rather than risk getting mired in the soft depressions between. It was slow, difficult going, and by the time they reached the arch they both had piercing headaches.
Ahead, a sea of charcoal grey dunes rolled toward the horizon, shadowy in the double moonlight. Several had the silhouettes of further arches atop them, maybe a dozen in all.
Slumped in the driving seat, Ed rubbed his eyes. “I don’t feel so good.”
Sitting beside him, Alice put a hand to her mouth and yawned.
“I think I know what’s going on,” she said. “I think we’re getting altitude sickness.”
“Altitude?” Ed looked out of the rear window, at the beach and the moons hanging over it. Even on top of this dune, they weren’t more than ten or twelve feet above sea level.
“Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.” Alice took a deep breath and pushed it out again. “It happened to me once before in Mexico City. It wasn’t fun. You never forget shit like that.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Well, if the air here’s too thin to breathe properly, then we have a choice. We can either go on, or we can go back.”
“Do you want to go back?”
Alice glanced over her shoulder, at the crisp tyre tracks they’d left on the charcoal sand.
“No, not yet.”
“Then we go forward?”
Alice turned her attention to the other arches in the distance, each on the crest of its own dune. “Okay. But how do we know which one to take?”
Ed lowered his head to rest on the steering wheel.
“I don’t think we’ve got the time to struggle over to another, not if we can’t breathe properly. It took us long enough to get here, and if we get stuck...”
“So we take this one?”
“I guess it’s as good as any.”
He pushed himself upright. The headache made it hard for him to concentrate. His chest heaved as if he’d been running. Ahead, the new arch looked identical to the one they’d just left, its sides glistening purple and smooth, throwing complex shadows in the combined light of the mismatched moons.
He picked the St Christopher from the dashboard and draped its chain over the rear view mirror.
“Are you ready for this?”
Alice drew her knees up and closed her eyes.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
This time, the light didn’t seem to fade as quickly. They passed through the arch and, when they could see again, found themselves in daylight, rolling through a flat, rocky desert beneath a swollen crimson sun. Volcanic plumes stained the horizon. Packed grit formed a makeshift road leading away from the arch. Thin sidewinders of dust and ash skittered across it. Squinting in the hellish light, Ed reached into the glove box and found a pair of Grigor’s fake designer sunglasses, which he flicked open one-handed and slid onto his face. The dry desert air was warm, and he could breathe again. He wound his window down and sucked in a big, grateful lungful.
Ahead, half a dozen dome-shaped mud huts stood to either side of the road, each about a metre in height, their walls the same colour as the surrounding desert.
“It’s a village,” Alice said, shading her eyes with her hand. She reached for her camera. Ed said nothing. The settlement, such as it was, had long been abandoned to the encroaching sands. Some of the domes were sagging, others had already fallen in. Doors and windows stood empty to the wind.
Beyond the village, the crude road branched, and then branched again, and each branch led to another arch.
“Four of them,” Ed said. But even from here, he could see that three were damaged, toppled and twisted by the sand shifting beneath them. Only one remained upright.
He brought the car to a halt, feeling himself start to sweat. The road ahead shimmered like the surface of a lake.
Alice pulled off her fleece, revealing her white t-shirt.
“And that’s not all,” she said. About a mile ahead, close to the upright arch, a vehicle sat at the side of the road. It was a ruggedly built tractor with fat mesh tyres, and its cab was a transparent bubble.
“What the hell’s that?”
Cautiously, Ed eased the Land Rover forward again. A woman crouched by one of the tractor’s plump wheels. She stood as they approached, wiping her hands on a rag. Ed pulled up beside her and wound down his window.
“Jesus Christ, am I glad to see you,” she said. Her drab olive vest and matching cargo pants were grimy, and she had smears of engine grease on her arms and face. To Ed, she looked to be somewhere in her mid-thirties, with bright green eyes, and peroxide white hair chopped into a platinum fuzz.
“Are you American?” he asked.
She smiled. “I’m from Iowa. What about you? You’re British, right?”
Ed stuck his hand out. “Hi. My name’s Ed, this is Alice.”
She finished wiping her fingers and stuffed the rag into her back pocket, then took his hand in a firm grip.
“Kristin. Kristin Cole. Very much at your service.”
“What’s wrong with your vehicle, Kristin?”
She looked back at it and gave a snort. “The drive unit’s completely fucked.”
“Can we give you a lift?”
“Just let me get my stuff.”
She leaned into the vehicle’s cab and pulled out a kit bag.
“Thanks for coming by,” she said.
Alice moved the shotgun, and Kristin climbed onto the Land Rover’s back seat, behind Ed.
“Have you been here long?” Alice asked.
Kristin stretched.
“A few days, maybe a week. It’s hard to tell; the days are much longer here.”
Ed looked at her in the rear view mirror. “Are you on your own?”
Kristin hugged the kit bag to her chest. “I was until you guys came along. I got separated from the rest of my unit. They went on ahead.”
“They left you here?”
“I don’t think they realised. If they did, it must have been too late. Once they’d gone through the arch, they couldn’t have come back to get me.”
Ed said, “Why didn’t you follow on foot?”
Kristin looked at him. “It’s a long way to where we’re going. But if you hadn’t come along, I guess I’d have had to try it sooner or later.”
She sniffed the air.
“Say, does this car really run on gas?”
Ed leaned forward over the steering wheel, looking through the heat shimmering off the Land Rover’s hood. Ahead, fat tyre tracks led to the one arch remaining upright.
“Your friends went that way.” He said. “Do you want to follow them?”
“Hell, yeah.” Kristin gave a frown. “Where else is there?”
Hanging over the back of her seat, Alice said, “We could take you back?”
Kristin glowered. “That’s not even funny.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be.”
The American leaned forward. “Don’t you know where you are, girl? For Christ’s sake, weren’t you briefed at all?”
Ed undid his seatbelt and slid around to face her.
“No-one briefed us,” he said, keeping his voice level. “We’re here under our own steam.”
“You’re civilians?” Kristin sat back on the leather seat. She rubbed her face, further smearing the grease on her forehead and cheeks, and then looked at the roof. “In that case, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you,” she said, “but there’s no point trying to get home.”
Alice looked puzzled.
“Why not?”
Kristin let her head rest on the back of the seat. She wiped a hand across her mouth.
“Because they’re all dead.”
Ed gripped the back of his seat. “Who? Who’s dead?”
Kristin closed her eyes.
“Everyone,” she said. “Everyone you’ve ever known.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
RAGGED-ASS DRIVE SIGNATURE
Mercifully, the Ameline dropped out of jump in an empty patch of sky a good distance from the planet, and Kat shut off the fusion engines as soon as she could, hoping her transgression had gone unnoticed.
But of course, it hadn’t.
As the old ship moved toward Strauli, the port authority bombarded it with outraged protests, which Kat duly ignored, squirting Ezra’s letter of explanation at the Abdulov compound.
Within minutes, she received a return call from her father.
“Katherine? Is that really you?”
“Dad, listen—”
“You’re alone?”
“I have passengers.”
He made a chopping gesture. “It doesn’t matter. I’m on the Quay as we speak. Whatever it is, whatever’s happened, we can talk about it when you get here.”
He looked older, the decades having taken more of a toll than she’d expected: his hair thinner and greyer than she remembered, the lines around his mouth and eyes deeper and more defined, like a pattern of cuts worked into a leather mask. But his eyes were just as bright and hard as ever, the eyes of a man accustomed to command.
“Dad, the port authority—”
He held up a gnarled hand. “Leave them to me, Katherine.”
Katherine Abdulov had grown up in a villa overlooking the ocean, on the edge of the family compound. She’d spent the days studying and the evenings walking alone on the beach. The beach was her sanctuary: a place where, as long as she remained within the compound’s secure perimeter, she could walk alone and undisturbed for hours at a time.
As she kicked through the warm surf, she watched the trading ships crawl across the sky, the sparks of their fusion drives burning like tiny, angry stars, and remembered the stories her father had told her about Great Aunt Sylvia, the black sheep of the family.
If the stories were true, before she vanished, Sylvia had been one of the Abdulovs’ best captains. She’d been everywhere, carving out new trade routes and building herself a formidable reputation. She’d been courageous, fiercely self-reliant, and notoriously promiscuous, and Kat desperately wanted to be just like her.
On a clear summer’s night, she saw the orbital docks bulking low in the hazy southern sky, their gigantic habitat wheels turning ponderously in the light of the long-set sun. Every time she saw them, they filled her with such yearning, making her wish for the far-off day when she’d graduate from flight school and take her rightful place at the helm of one of her family’s trading ships, just like her aunt.
The Recollection Page 5