The Recollection

by Gareth L. Powell

  He took a step forward and reached out for the glasses. Ed let him take them.

  “Jesus. Where did you find them?”

  “In a cave, in a cliff.”

  Verne turned the glasses over and over in his hands. He kept shaking his head.

  “You know, I had to climb that cliff half blind. Half blind and half dead.” He looked up at Ed. “Did you meet those fucking creatures?”

  Ed gave a mute nod. Verne made a face.

  “I hated those fucking things,” he said. “They almost had me a couple of times.”

  Ed swallowed. He rubbed his hands together. “Yeah. We, uh, we left someone there.”

  Verne’s eyes narrowed.

  “You did?”

  Ed gave a nod.

  Verne looked down at his feet. “I’m sorry.”

  Ed took a step forward.

  “Look, Verne...”

  His brother held up a hand. “Don’t say it, Ed.”

  “But—”

  “I mean it.” Verne glanced at Alice. “I can’t pretend that what the two of you did was right and I can’t pretend it didn’t hurt, but I never thought I’d ever see either of you again. I gave you both up for dead, years ago. Decades ago. So whatever’s happened, I’m just glad you’re both here now.” He caught Ed in a bear hug. “You came to find me,” he said. “Everything else is history.”

  Ed didn’t know what to say. He’d been nerving himself for a confrontation. At the very least, he’d expected Verne to punch him in the face.

  “Aren’t you angry?” he said.

  Verne released the hug, held him at arms length. “I told you, it’s okay.”

  “Not to me, it’s not. It might all be ancient history to you, but it still feels pretty raw to me.”

  “So, what do you want me to say?” Verne held his hands out, palms up. “I’ve already forgiven you.”

  “But I don’t want your forgiveness.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  Ed waved his arms in frustration.

  “I don’t know. Get mad. Shout at me. Do something.”

  “Would that make you feel better?”

  Ed took a deep breath. His fists were clenched. “I don’t know how you can be so calm.”

  Verne shrugged. “Things are different now.”

  Ed let his fists relax. “How different?”

  Verne rubbed the bridge of his nose with his index finger. He didn’t seem to know where to look.

  “Let me introduce you to someone,” he said, beckoning to a young woman standing impatiently on the other side of the room. “Ed, Alice. This is Katherine.”

  Alice pushed a strand of auburn hair out of her eyes and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her silver vinyl jacket. She looked the other woman up and down, from heavy boots to dark eyes and hair.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

  Kat gave an uncomfortable smile.

  “Hello.”

  Silence fell. Ed shuffled his feet on the polished rock floor. Everything felt awkward and wrong, not at all as he’d expected. Nobody knew what to say. Then Francis Hind stepped into the centre of the group. He pushed back the hood of his black robe, revealing his wizened, bald pate.

  “If I may interject? I’m afraid time is of the essence. Captain Abdulov, it is good to see you again, but I must prevail upon you to deliver us to the Ark without delay.”

  He turned to face Ed.

  “It seems our friend here has a destiny to fulfill.”

  Kat left the others in the passenger lounge and climbed up the ladder to the ship’s bridge.

  “How are we doing?” she asked.

  The ship didn’t answer straight away. When it finally spoke, it sounded concerned.

  > We’ve got a problem.

  “What is it?”

  > The Recollection survived our attack.

  “You are kidding.”

  > I wish.

  Kat slid into the pilot’s chair and hooked her implant into the ship’s senses.

  “Let me see,” she said. She closed her eyes and the tactical display opened up around her. She saw the wrecked Quay, the lower portion of it falling toward Strauli. Smaller fragments already burned as meteors in the planet’s upper atmosphere.

  “Where?” she said.

  > The individual machines are too small to resolve at these distances. But you may be able to make out some of the larger clumps here, and here.

  The ship magnified a couple of areas near the falling ruin. Squinting, Kat made out a pair of irregular red stains falling toward the planet.

  “That’s it?”

  > Much of the infection was destroyed, but some escaped. That which isn’t actively converting the remains of the Quay is already on its way down to the planet’s surface.

  “Will it survive reentry?”

  > It survived three nuclear blasts.

  “Damn.” Kat ground her palm into her forehead. “What are we going to do?”

  > There’s not much we can do. We don’t have any weapons, and we’re low on fuel. If we followed it down to the surface, we wouldn’t have enough to get airborne again.

  Kat let out a breath. “Do we have enough to get to the Dho Ark?”

  > Barely.

  She took a last, lingering look at the fat crescent of Strauli. On the daylight side, the oceans shone a rich, wholesome blue, dotted with high, white clouds, scattered with green islands. On the nighttime side, city lights traced the coastlines. It looked so peaceful and perfect, and yet all she saw when she looked at it was the terrible red cloud that had loomed over Djatt. She thought of her mother and father, her aunts, uncles and cousins. She’d sent the footage from Djatt as a warning signal. Now she hoped they’d find a way to escape the coming horror.

  “Set course,” she said. “Jump when ready.”

  > Aye-aye, Captain.

  In her gut, she felt the engines come online, their capacitors ramping up for the short hop to the Ark.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  THE TORCH THAT BURNS THE SKY

  Upon arrival at the Dho Ark, Kat Abdulov stayed with the Ameline to supervise repairs and refueling, while Verne and Alice retired to one of the ship’s cabins to talk. Ed found himself surrounded by Acolytes and marched to a crystal elevator, accompanied by Drake and Hind.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, hands in the pockets of his green combat jacket.

  Drake regarded him with wide, sympathetic brown eyes.

  “Not far.”

  The elevator doors closed and the car dropped rapidly into the depths of the crystal Ark. Ed looked down. Through the floor, he could see the lift shaft fall away into seemingly infinite darkness. At his shoulder, Drake said, “You’ll get used to it.”

  Ed looked up from the floor and shrugged.

  “It doesn’t bother me.”

  Drake gave a rueful snort, the trace of a smile. “It bothered the hell out of me, the first time I rode in one of these things.”

  Ed saw a light rising to meet them, and then the elevator dropped into a bright cavern the size of a warehouse. He raised his hand to shade his eyes from the sudden brightness. The floor of the room was polished rock, bare save for something roughly the size and shape of a Volkswagen Beetle, which sat on a plinth in the exact centre of the cavern.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  Behind him, Francis Hind leaned forward.

  “That, my son, is the reason we’ve brought you here.”

  On the opposite wall, a second elevator car matched their descent. As far as Ed could make out, it contained a single robed figure wearing a weirdly-spiked helmet.

  “Ah,” Drake said. “One of our hosts.”

  They reached the floor and the doors opened. The air in the cavern was cold and dry. Drake and the Acolytes stood unmoving, their breath steaming. Drake gave Ed a nudge.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  Ed looked at him. “Aren’t you coming?”

  The other man shook his head regretfully
.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said. “Much as I’d love the chance to inspect that thing, this is for you, and you alone.”

  He gently pushed Ed forward. With his hands still in the pockets of his combat jacket, Ed stepped out onto the floor of the cavern and turned to watch the crystal elevator as it accelerated back up into the ceiling.

  When it had disappeared into the shaft from whence it came, he turned and started to walk toward the object on the plinth. On the far side of the room, the horned figure did likewise, seeming to glide as the hem of its robe brushed the floor. As it got closer and closer, he slowly realised that it wasn’t a man at all: the body under the robe seemed to be proportioned all wrong, and the ‘helmet’ came down to the creature’s shoulders without the benefit of a neck.

  This must be one of the Dho, Ed thought, trying to remember the little he’d gleaned about them in his time on Strauli, doing the Downport hustle. All he knew was all that anyone else really knew: that the Dho were aliens; that the Ark had been in the Strauli system for a thousand years before the first humans stumbled through the arch network; and that in nearly four hundred years, only a handful of humans had ever met one face-to-face.

  “Welcome, Edward,” the creature said, in a voice composed chiefly of clicks and scrapes. Ed stopped walking. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets, trying to look relaxed.

  “Call me Ed,” he said.

  The Dho stood at least a foot taller than him. Its robe was the colour of the night sky, its outline pregnant with asymmetrical lumps and protrusions beneath the fabric.

  “Do you know why you are here, Ed?”

  From the roots of its short, spiky front horns, wet black eyes regarded him. They looked like prunes swimming in their own juice. Ed shivered.

  “I’ve no idea,” he said truthfully.

  The Dho glided forward another pace. Its bony head reminded him of the fly-covered sheep’s skull he’d found as a child on the outskirts of Cardiff, in the woods up behind his school playing field.

  “You are here because you are an artist.” The object on the plinth had the same black texture as the creature’s robe. As he watched, the Dho extended a limb towards the lumpy mass and a cavity opened in response.

  “Crawl inside,” the creature said.

  Ed leant forward. He peered doubtfully into the hole.

  “In there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  The Dho let forth a stream of irritated clicks and whirrs, sounding to Ed much the way he imagined a swarm of locust would sound if amplified.

  “We call this ‘The Torch,’” the creature husked. “It is a weapon, the most powerful weapon we possess.”

  The hole looked uncomfortably organic. It was lined with a pale, greasy-looking material that seemed to shift and undulate as Ed watched it.

  “And you want me to operate it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me?”

  “You are an artist, Edward Rico. You have enviable depth perception. You are used to visualizing abstract shapes in three dimensional space.” It started to glide around the edge of the plinth towards him.

  Ed backed away. “I’m not a soldier. I’m not even very good at computer games.”

  “The Torch is best wielded by one with the soul of an artist. It does not respond well to professional soldiers. It is a weapon designed purely for defense.”

  Ed took his hands out of his pockets. He said, “How do you know anything about my soul?”

  The creature stopped and clicked to itself as if surprised.

  “The arch network records and encodes information about everything it transmits. Did you not know this? It stores the quantum states of every creature passing through its portals. As soon as you passed through the first arch, we knew all there was to know about you, right down to the quantum level, and we judged you an ideal candidate. You may have made mistakes in your life, Edward, but by hurling yourself into the arch network in search of your brother, you have shown that you are capable of acts of great courage and selflessness.”

  Ed looked away. “But why just me? There must be other people better qualified for this sort of thing.”

  The Dho made a mournful scraping sound. “There were other candidates, other men and women from Earth, but they died, or wandered off and got lost. You are the only one to make it all the way here.”

  Ed took a deep breath. He rubbed his chin.

  “Drake said you wanted me to stop this Recollection.”

  “That is correct.”

  He jerked a thumb at the cavity in the Torch.

  “And this’ll do it, will it?” He shuddered. “If I climb into this thing, I’ll be able to stop it.”

  The creature inclined its head, tipping its bony horns.

  “We can but try.”

  Ed slid in feet first, skin crawling. Where it brushed his hands and face, the lining of the hole felt warm and pliable, like grease or candle wax.

  “All the way in,” said the Dho, watching.

  Ed muttered under his breath.

  “Why am I doing this?”

  He wriggled his shoulders, inching his way deeper, until his head dropped below the rim of the hole. Almost immediately, the lining began to compress around him, hugging his arms and legs with a soft, but insistent pressure. He’d never suffered from claustrophobia, but now it was all he could do not to try to thrash his way free. His chest rose and fell as he gasped in air.

  “Relax,” said the Dho. “The Torch is becoming accustomed to you.”

  Ed swallowed. His fists were bunched at his sides.

  “What do I do?”

  “Just lie still. Whatever happens, just lie still.”

  Ed felt something touch his cheek. The lining had extruded hair-fine filaments of slippery white material that reached for his face like wires. He tried to jerk his head away, but found he was pinned in place, unable to move. With agonizing slowness, the questing filaments explored his face. He felt one push into his left ear, another slide into his nostril. Another two insinuated themselves greasily into his eye sockets, sliding through his tightly-squeezed eyelids into the soft flesh beneath his eyeballs. He wanted to scream, but there were already wires in his mouth, reaching down into his throat, making him gag.

  For an instant, every nerve in his body flared with excruciating pain.

  And then there was silence.

  Space opened up around him. He saw the whole Strauli system laid out before him: the Ark orbiting its gas giant; Strauli and the radioactive wreckage of the Quay; individual ships; asteroids; comets; space junk. Everything was there, laid out and labeled like pieces on a chess board. All he had to do was select a target and he knew the Torch would do the rest. He could feel it behind his eyes, twisting itself around his thoughts like an affectionate tiger; as vast, powerful and unpredictable as the ocean.

  I have waited such a long time, it seemed to be saying. Such a long time. But now you’re here.

  And the further it dug into him, the more wonders it showed him. He saw himself from the outside, saw his whole stupid, dust bowl life lain out like a flowchart, one poor decision leading inexorably on to the next, and the next. A bell rang in his mind. He re-experienced his childhood, felt his mother’s soothing hand, his father’s chin stubble. Re-lived the pain of their loss. Saw Verne. Saw Alice on the day he’d first met her. Was shown every wrong turn he’d ever made, every chance he’d missed or let slide. Every knock he’d taken. For one brief instant he was simultaneously present in every individual second of his life. The whole thing whirled around him, and then once more, there was silence.

  He felt calm. Raw and naked, but calm. All his regrets and hang-ups were gone, washed away from the core of his being, leaving in their place only two rock-hard certainties:

  Firstly, he loved Alice. Really loved her. Loved her in a way he’d been too stupid to admit to himself.

  Secondly, he was also in love with this outrageous, extraordinarily eldritch weapon,
and together, they were really going to fucking kill something.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  KICKING ASS

  Over the next twenty hours, gory red welts blossomed on the islands and land masses of Strauli, disfiguring its genteel serenity. Although keeping track of their progress, Kat spent much of the time supervising the refueling of the Ameline and, later, the fixture of a lumpy Dho weapon to the ship’s belly. The Dho called the weapon ‘The Torch,’ and apparently Victor’s brother would be operating it.

  Verne, she corrected herself. Not Victor, Verne.

  Working without a break, she checked every system on the ship. She worked until her eyes were too tired to focus, and only then allowed herself a few snatched minutes of sleep on the pilot’s couch. Her purpose sustained her. She couldn’t afford to let herself slacken, she had to keep active. She was determined to have the ship in peak condition, ready to take it down to the surface of her home planet, to the very door of the Abdulov compound if necessary. The work distracted her from thoughts of her attack on the Quay. The numbers of potential casualties were too great to comfortably grasp. If she stopped to imagine all those people, all those faces, she had no doubt that they’d overwhelm her, preventing her from completing her rescue mission. Later, there would be time for grief and self-disgust. Right now, she had to keep her focus. People were depending on her. She had to get down there, pick up her family, and rescue her unborn child, and she wouldn’t let anything get in the way of that, not even guilt.

  When Verne found her, she was crouched beneath the ship, working on one of its landing struts, making sure the hydraulics were primed for a rough touchdown.

  “What do you want?” she said without looking around, wiping her hands on the thighs of her overalls.

  “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know.”

  Kat rose to her feet, shoulders hunched.

  “What about Alice?”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s your wife.”

  “Was my wife.”

  Kat turned to face him. He’d changed into a standard skin-tight black ship suit, which revealed the slight middle-aged paunch around his midriff. A large-bore pistol hung at his hip.