Toby felt himself bridle.
“Then what have I been doing for the past twenty-four years?”
Hind smiled.
“You are the one who has been studied.” He took a step towards the lip of the open floor-to-ceiling window. “As you peered deeper into the Gnarl, so the Gnarl peered into you. It learned from you, and became accustomed and attuned to you.”
Toby glanced at the waxy sphere. For a moment, he thought he could feel each of its pulsations in his chest; then he realised that its beats mirrored the rhythm of his heart.
“I thought this was an engine, a power source...”
“It’s a lot more than that.” Standing on the lip of the window, high above the cavern floor, Hind unfurled his arms, throwing them wide.
“This is an intelligence we can’t hope to comprehend,” he said, raising his voice over the chanting, “existing in quantum states we can barely recognize. But it is alive. It has wants and needs. And enemies.”
Toby looked up, startled.
“Enemies? Do you mean The Recollection?”
Hind turned back into the room.
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
He walked across to Toby and put his hands on the younger man’s shoulders.
“Listen, Drake,” he said, voice level, eyes burning with an intensity belying his age. “For you are the first non-Acolyte to hear this.
“The war that spawned The Recollection also spawned the Gnarl. But unlike the red cloud that now endangers us, the Gnarl was not conceived as a weapon. It was built in the last moments of that conflict, by minds infinitely superior to ours. Minds who foresaw their death at the hands of The Recollection and wanted to protect the younger races from a similar fate.”
“So they built the Gnarl?”
“They designed it as a saviour. A god, if you like. It found the Dho and raised them from a mediaeval culture. It helped them build and power this vast Ark.
“And then it found us.”
In the cavern, the Dho’s chanting became louder and faster. The writhing mass above them seemed to swell.
Hind put his hand to Toby’s cheek.
“The Gnarl built the arch network to get us out into space. And at the centre of the network, at the Prime Radiant, it built the Bubble Belt to be our Ark.”
Toby tried to pull away, but the old man had a firm grip on him. From the corner of his eye, he could see the Gnarl drifting towards them through the air of the cavern, its surface crawling with patterns and symbols.
“That’s where you come in,” Hind said.
Toby struggled. “Me?”
“The Ark needs a pilot.”
The glowing Gnarl was almost at the window now. Static sparked off metal objects. Toby felt his hair standing on end. He stopped wriggling and looked down at the old man in astonishment.
“You’ve seen the simulation,” Hind said. “You know the whole Belt can be moved. Well, the Gnarl built that for us. It’s given us a means of escape. But it doesn’t know where we want to go.”
“Neither do I!”
Hind pulled Toby down to him.
“You will,” he whispered fiercely.
Then, without warning, he stepped back and shoved Toby in the chest with both bony hands. Caught off guard, Toby staggered back. His heel caught on the window sill and he cried out in alarm as he toppled into the cavern, his hands flailing desperately for purchase.
And the Gnarl caught him.
He sank into its gluey, ever-changing embrace, felt it invade every orifice and pore. His whole life unfurled before his eyes, opening out like a map spread on a tabletop.
And everything changed.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
MOTHER
The Ameline came down on the lawn in front of the hospital, its jets scorching a wide circle of the grass to black ash. As soon as its landing struts hit the dirt, it popped its rear airlock. Kat and Verne spilled out, guns at the ready, heads turning back and forth, alert for threats. They covered each other as they descended the ladder, then ran from the residual heat of the main engine exhausts.
“This way,” Kat said.
She ran towards a set of glass doors in the main hospital building. Beyond the building, she could see the familiar red stain of a Recollection outbreak. Like molten lava, it oozed between and around the office blocks and department stores of the town centre. Where it passed, the buildings crumbled, their walls eaten from below, their concrete, glass and stone broken down and converted into more tiny machines to add to the tide. She heard sirens and alarms. Vehicles wove crazily along half-choked streets, searching for escape.
“We don’t have much time,” she said.
The hospital doors opened as she approached, and she ran through into the deserted foyer beyond. The hospital had been abandoned. Her boots crunched over the broken remains of dropped coffee mugs, knocked-over plant pots, and discarded items of medical equipment. Wheelchairs lay on their sides. Patients, some still attached to intravenous drips, staggered around looking for help. Overhead, the strip lights flickered and buzzed as the electrical power fluctuated.
“Don’t use the elevators,” Verne panted, coming up behind her.
“No need.” She pointed one of her guns down a corridor leading off into the distance, its ceiling hung with signs giving the names and functions of the wards. “Halfway down, on the right.”
She set off again, boots making a thunderous clamour in the confined space.
“How are we doing?” she asked the ship via her implant.
> We’re down to single-digit minutes. Maybe less. Don’t hang about.
“I don’t intend to. Keep the engines warm.”
Intent on this exchange, she ran past the door she wanted. Her feet slithered to a halt on the vinyl floor. Running close behind, Verne almost crashed into her.
“In here,” she gasped.
The door to the storage facility stood open. The lights were still flickering. Inside, ranks of freezers receded into the gloom. Red warning lights blinked on their monitor panels, indicating loss of power. Kat ran to the nearest and used her prosthetic hand to start yanking open doors. Cold mist swirled around her.
Body parts.
Organs half-grown from cloned cells.
A tray of partially-developed ears.
Verne hunched over the workstation by the door, accessing the computer terminal on the desk, scanning lists of freezer contents.
“Try seven forty-two,” he called.
Kat looked up. Each freezer had a number stencilled on the top of the door.
> Captain, we need to leave.
She ran down the row until she found the one she needed, and hauled back the heavy metal door.
Babies.
Hundreds and hundreds of babies.
Trays filled every shelf, and transparent flasks filled every tray, each one with a tiny embryo suspended within. The trays were labelled by year. Feverishly, she sorted through until she found the right one. Her flask was near the back, the name Abdulov-K printed on its label, above a barcode. With shaking hands, she lifted it clear.
“Got it,” she said.
Inside the flask: a small, red clump of cells about the size of a grain of rice.
It meant nothing.
It meant everything.
Verne called, “Kat, come on!”
She pushed the flask into the pocket of her ship suit and made to go.
Stopped after a couple of steps.
Turned around.
Hundreds and hundreds of babies.
In her mind, she heard the wailing of The Recollection’s captured souls, and knew she couldn’t leave. Instead, she began pulling out the trays.
> Hurry it up. We’ve got incoming.
Verne came running.
“What are you doing?”
“Shut up and help me.”
There were more trays than they could possibly carry between them. Desperately, she cast around.
>
“Find me a stretcher,” she said. “One with wheels.”
Minutes later, they burst from the hospital foyer pushing a stretcher piled with trays upon trays of flasks. Thick smoke filled the air. Gunfire crackled in the street. A few hundred metres away, a phalanx of red stick zombies lurched in their direction. Behind the shambling figures, the creeping infection ate its way along the road like an incoming tide. Somewhere in the buildings to either side, human soldiers fired into the shambling ranks from windows and doorways. A helicopter whirred overhead, spiralling crazily, and disappeared behind the shops on the other side of the street. A couple of seconds later, the ground shook with the force of its impact, and a greasy fireball appeared over the rooftops.
“Get to the ship,” Kat panted, un-holstering her guns. “I’ll cover you.”
She started to move sideways, keeping herself between the blood-coloured zombies and the stretcher of rescued foetuses. She held the pistols at arms’ length, ready to fire.
Behind her, Verne gave a grunt as he bent to push.
“Come on,” she urged.
Across the lawn, the Ameline squatted on its landing shocks, the black bulge of the Dho weapon like a fat leech clinging to the underside of its bows.
“Open the cargo doors and lower the ramp,” she told the ship. “We’re bringing something aboard.”
Screams rang from a nearby building. She exchanged a glance with Verne.
“Keep going,” she said. They couldn’t rescue everybody.
Already, over the screams, she could hear the wail emanating from the zombies and the tide of red that dogged their heels. They were maybe fifty metres away now. She squeezed off an experimental shot. One of the lumbering figures twitched and staggered, then righted itself and kept coming.
“Katherine,” the zombies chanted in unison. “Katherine Abdulov.”
She took aim at another of the figures and fired again, both guns at once, aiming for its head. Her shots caught it dead centre, right in the middle of what passed for its face, and its head burst like a balloon full of dark red paint. With satisfaction, she watched it drop to its knees and fall, only to be overtaken and absorbed by the advancing tide behind it.
She heard Verne curse and looked over her shoulder. The stretcher’s rubber wheels weren’t designed to be used on grass, and kept sliding, spinning the wrong way on their casters.
“Hurry it up,” she said.
Verne gave her a look and swore under his breath.
When she turned back to the street, the zombies had almost halved the distance between them and her.
“Katherine Abdulov, speak to us.”
She fired more shots into the front row, trying to shut them up, blasting chunks from their heads and torsos. Some fell, others took the impacts and kept coming.
“Katherine, we have your mother, she wants to speak to you.”
She fired again, saw an arm blown off at the elbow. Then, as if in a nightmare, she heard her mother’s voice emerge from the background wail of the oncoming tide, her words spoken in unison from the slit-like mouths of the blood-red bodies shambling towards her.
“Kat? Kat is that you?”
She lowered her guns, felt her mouth hang open. Her gut gave a little lurch, like it did when the ship went into freefall.
“No,” she said.
“Kat, where am I? Why can’t I see anything? What’s happening?”
Kat felt the muscles in her neck and jaw tighten. Bile rose in her throat. She swallowed.
“Mum?”
“Kat, where are you? I want to see you. Come here.”
In her head, she felt the strange prickling sensation she’d felt facing The Recollection at the Quay, before she’d launched the missiles. Her head swam with the urge to throw down her weapons and surrender: a compulsion to hurl herself into the red tide and let it sweep her to the Omega Point at the end of the habitable universe.
She took a step forward. Then another.
Last time, The Recollection had almost had her. She knew she couldn’t hold out for long, knew she was close to losing the fight. This time, she couldn’t resist for long, not with its fingers already in her head, pulling her inward.
Snarling, she summoned the last scraps of her old determination.
“You don’t get me that easily,” she said. With shaking hands, she raised the guns, and with a drawn-out howl of pain, emptied them into the ranks of approaching figures. Then spent, she let herself sag. The pistols clattered onto the road at her feet.
“Mum?” she said.
Then Verne was there with her, pulling her roughly back towards the ship. She fought against him, kicking and swearing. Tears ran down her face.
“Let me go! We have to go back, we have to find a way to get her out!”
Verne held her by the shoulders and shook her roughly.
“It’s too late, Kat. It’s too late.”
He dragged her up the ramp. Her head reeled with unfamiliar voices, all of them pleading with her to turn around and join them. It took every gram of strength she had to keep walking, putting one foot in front of the other as she allowed herself to be herded into the ship.
Once inside, she dropped to her knees.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Dimly, she saw the cargo ramp hinge upwards, sealing the hull.
Mum!
And then the ship shook as it fired up its engines, ready to launch. Moving in a daze, she followed Verne to the bridge and strapped into her couch.
Ed Rico’s voice came through the speaker from the weapon on the ship’s bows.
“What’s happening? What do you want me to do?”
Kat closed her eyes.
“Kill it,” she told him. “Kill everything.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lightning flared. The superhot stellar hydrogen flashed the air it passed through to glowing plasma. It scoured the zombies from the street, punched molten holes in the bloody red slick of advancing nanomachinery.
Watching the destruction, Kat’s lips drew back in something that was half snarl and half grin.
“See how you like it,” she said.
Beside her, Verne reached out and tapped the console in front of him.
“Go,” he said to the ship.
Through her implant, Kat felt the jump engines come online. She tried to struggle against her harness. Although Verne had jumped his ship out of its bay in the Quay, no-one had ever jumped from the surface of a world before.
“No, not yet,” she protested, but already it was too late.
The power spiked.
And they were gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
SURVIVAL
Of the thousand freighters in the fleet, only four were lost: three on the surface and one on takeoff. The rest returned to the Ark in dribs and drabs, two or three at a time, over the course of the next few hours. Each carried upwards of eight hundred refugees from the surface: frightened, bewildered people struggling to understand the horrors befalling their world.
When the Ameline docked, Feliks Abdulov was the first person waiting to greet the crew. He stepped forward as the airlock slid open.
“Katherine!”
“Dad!”
She climbed down and ran to him. Saw him wince.
“Dad, are you okay? What happened to you?”
Feliks looked ruefully at his bandaged hands. “Frostbite,” he said. “The doc says I’m going to lose the ends of my fingers.”
She took him gently by the wrists and he looked her up and down. A frown crossed his face.
“But never mind me, what the hell happened to your arm?”
Kat raised her metal hand. The motors in the knuckles caught the light.
“It’s a long story,” she said, dropping it again. “But now’s not the time. There’s something else. Dad, it’s Mum.”
“I know.” He put his arms around her. “I already heard. The compound’s gone. We were too late.”
Kat felt her eyes grow h
ot.
“It’s worse than that,” she said.
Her father squeezed her.
“Don’t say it, please.”
“But, Dad—”
Feliks put a hand to the back of her head, smoothing her hair with his bandaged fingers.
“Katherine, I was adrift in a refrigerated crate for thirty hours, and I had time to review your footage from Djatt.” His voice wavered. “I know what’s happened to your mother.”
“But we can’t leave her trapped in there forever. There must be something we can do?”
“There’s nothing,” he said. Over his shoulder, Kat saw lines of confused, grief-stricken survivors disembarking from one of the freighters. They had all lost friends and loved ones. They’d left behind mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, husbands and wives. They had nothing but their misery and the clothes in which they stood. Tears running down her face, she felt a surge of kinship with them.
“For now, all we can do is survive,” Feliks said in her ear. He kissed her temple. “Survive, and remember.”
Ed clawed his way out of the slippery embrace of the Torch, emerging into the air above the deck like a newborn foal struggling to free itself from its mother’s womb. Tired and stiff, he let himself drop to the floor.
Alice stooped to help him up.
“Are you all right?” she asked. She brushed away the blood from his eyes and nostrils, and ducked beneath his arm, taking some of his weight on her shoulders.
“I’ll be okay,” he said. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with one hand. The lights in the hangar seemed harsh and bright. All he could see were afterimages of the tactical display.
“Wait,” he said. He turned to face her. She looked up at him, eyes wide, and a strand of auburn hair fell across her left eye. He smoothed it back.
“Alice, there’s something I have to tell you.”
She smiled and shook her head.
“I know, Ed.”
“What?”
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