> HE’S IN TROUBLE.
Kat rolled her eyes. Of course... “With the law?”
> THERE’S A PRICE ON HIS HEAD.
“Can you locate him?”
> IT SEEMS HE’S BEEN TAKEN CAPTIVE BY ONE OF THE LOCAL GANGSTERS, A MAN NAMED EARL VILCA.
“Show me.”
A map unfolded before her eyes: a three-dimensional aerial view of one of the canyons, patched together by the ship from direct observation, public records and intercepted satellite observation. A yellow tag marked Jones’s last known location, on the canyon floor.
> THE
BOBCAT
WAS ABLE TO TRACK HIM THIS FAR, THEN HE VANISHED. EITHER HE’S DEAD, OR HE’S BEING HELD SOMEWHERE WITH COMMS SCREENING.
A scarlet circle appeared on the map, near the upper lip of the canyon wall, at the top of the vertical favela.
> THIS IS VILCA’S COMPOUND. IF HE’S STILL ALIVE, CHANCES ARE THAT’S WHERE THEY’RE HOLDING HIM.
“Can I speak to Vilca?”
> I’LL SEE IF I CAN—
The ship’s voice cut off. Kat sat forward. “What is it?”
> INCOMING.
The map of the canyons vanished, to be replaced by a stylised strategic overview of the planetary system. Nuevo Cordoba floated in the centre. Green tags picked out each of the twenty-four rescue freighters. Off to the left, coming in above the plane of the planet’s equator, a flashing red circle highlighted an unidentified ship.
> IT JUST JUMPED IN. COURSE EXTRAPOLATION MARKS ITS POINT OF ORIGIN AS STRAULI.
Kat’s heart seemed to squirm in her chest. These days, every unidentified ship was a potential threat.
“Is it infected?”
> ALMOST CERTAINLY.
The intruder seemed to be heading straight for the planet, ignoring the scattering freighters. Kat disconnected her neural implant from the ship’s sensorium and reeled her perceptions back into the confines of her skull.
“Are we close enough to intercept and engage?”
> AYE.
She flexed the fingers of her artificial hand. The joints buzzed like mosquitoes.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
U
NDER FULL ACCELERATION
, it took the
Ameline
an hour and a half to get close enough to fire on the unidentified ship. Throughout that time, Kat remained in place on the little ship’s bridge. Housing only two crash couches, the room was too small for her to pace nervously—more of a large cockpit than a ship’s bridge in the accepted sense. Instead, she sat impatiently watching their progress via the interactive touch screens on the forward wall.
When they were almost within range, she activated her implant and joined her mind once more to the
Ameline
’s heightened senses. When hooked in to the ship like this, she could feel the thrust as a tingle in her feet; the power of the engines as a growl in her chest and stomach. Her nostrils were full of the cold, coppery smell of the vacuum. The heat of the local sun warmed her. The lights of distant stars pinpricked her cheeks.
She opened a line to the weapon pod slung beneath the
Ameline
’s bows.
“Are you ready, Ed?”
Ed Rico lay submerged in the greasily organic entrails of the Dho weapon. Its flabby white wax forced its way into his eyes and ears; it filled his lungs and stomach, even the pores of his skin.
“I’m here.” His voice sounded thick; the sound forcing its way up through the alien mucus clogging his throat.
Ed had once been an artist, back on Earth. He had come to Strauli the hard way, through the arch network, and been chosen by the Dho to wield this ancient weapon; to become part of it.
Cocooned within, he had no access to the rest of the ship while in flight. The weapon’s tendrils fed him nutrients and oxygen to keep him alive; and when he wasn’t needed, it simply put him to sleep.
Now though, Kat knew he’d be fully awake, brain pumped with synthetic adrenalin; all his senses filled with a real-time strategic view of the space surrounding them.
All he had to do was point and click.
> IN RANGE IN TWENTY SECONDS.
“Get ready to fire.”
Ahead, the infected craft continued toward the planet, seemingly oblivious to their approach. Yet deep in her head, Kat felt a strange scratching sensation, as if tiny animals were flexing their claws against the inside of her skull. She knew this feeling, recognised it for what it was. During her first brush with The Recollection, she’d been briefly infected by it, and now the dormant nanomachines it had pushed into her body were stirring, disturbed from their slumber by the proximity of an active mass of their fellows.
There could be no doubt now that the ship ahead was infested.
“Over to you,” she told Ed. “Fire when ready.”
> TEN SECONDS.
The Recollection was a gestalt entity comprised of uncounted trillions of self-replicating molecular-sized machines—each one in the swarm acting as a processing node, like a synapse in a human brain. Destroy one and the network simply re-routed, maintaining its integrity. Let one touch you, and it would start converting your atoms into copies of itself: remorseless and unstoppable. The ship ahead would be packed with them, like an overripe seedpod, ready to spread its voracious cargo across the unsuspecting globe below.
> FIVE.
Kat swallowed. Ahead, the target remained on course, still apparently unaware of the attack about to rain down upon it.
> THREE.
> TWO.
A white, pencil-thin line stabbed from the
Ameline
’s nose: a superheated jet of fusing hydrogen plucked by wormhole from the heart of the nearest star. Still hooked into the ship, Kat saw it on the tactical display. It cut the sky like a knife. The hellish backwash of its scouring light hit her virtual face like sunburn. Where it touched the infected ship, metal boiled away.
The beam flickered once; twice; three times. The target broke apart. The pieces that hadn’t been vapourised began to tumble.
Kat pulled out of the tactical simulation, back into the real world of the
Ameline
’s cockpit.
“Did we get it?”
> SCANNING NOW.
Kat blinked. Her eyes were watering. Although she’d witnessed the scouring light via her neural implant, her body’s reflexes still expected afterimages on her retinas, and seemed confused to find none.
A wall screen lit, showing a forward view of the planet, which instantly crash-zoomed to a sizeable piece of wreckage silhouetted against the daylight side, tumbling through space wrapped in a cloud of hull fragments and loose cables. Fluid dribbled from a severed tube.
> VESSEL DESTROYED, BUT SOME DEBRIS REMAINS.
“Damn. Can we hit it again?”
> IT’S ALREADY ENTERING THE ATMOSPHERE OVER THE CANYONS. IF WE FIRE NOW WE CAN EXPECT CIVILIAN CASULATIES.
Kat hesitated. She didn’t know if she could bring herself to fire on innocent people. Not again. During The Recollection’s attack on her home planet of Strauli, she’d been forced to destroy the orbital docks in a futile attempt to stem the spread of infection. A million people had died, either in the initial explosions or the subsequent disintegration of the structure, and their deaths still troubled her.
She looked down and flexed the fingers of her left hand. The metal of the fingers and wrist had been stained and half-melted during an attack by The Recollection. She could have had the whole arm surgically re-grown months ago, but she preferred to keep this clunky souvenir. It reminded her of everything and everyone that had been lost. It was her scar and she’d earned it.
She watched the tumbling wreck flare as it hit thicker air.
“Follow it down,” she said.
3.
S
HE DIDN’T HAVE
much time. Standing in the airlock of the
Ameline
, Katherine Abdulov could see greasy black smoke belching from the site of the crashed starship debris. It had been a big ship, probably a container carrier of some sort. Sliced apart and half-vapourised by the Dho weapon, fragments of the vessel had fallen to the ground, ploughing into the desert that covered most of the planet’s solitary supercontinent, flaming like meteors. By the time she’d followed them down, huge tracts of scrubland were already ablaze. Now, surveying the impact crater from a dozen kilometres away, with her eyes on full magnification, she could make out grain-sized specks of red in the smoke: clumps of infected matter from the ship riding the hot air like embers, using the updraft to spread themselves across the landscape.
Embers on the wind.
This was exactly what she’d been trying to prevent. The specks contained tightly-packed clusters of aggressive nanomachinery. Where they landed, the ground turned red. Spreading stains of wine-coloured destruction bloomed as the tiny machines ate into the surface of the planet, turning rock and dust into more machines, exponentially swelling their numbers.
The ship had been a seed pod: its systems hijacked by the contagion, its hold full of seething red nanomachines ready to split the hull and burst forth in an orgy of destruction.
Kat felt her lips harden. Her little fleet might rescue a couple of thousand people; but there was nothing she could do for the rest of the population. She was five light years from the Bubble Belt. By the time she jumped there and came back, a whole decade would have passed, and this world would have fallen. She thought of the tortured, wailing minds she’d encountered during her own brush with The Recollection; of her mother, pinned like a butterfly in its virtual storage spaces, with nothing to look forward to but an eternity of torment.
She turned back into the familiar confines of the
Ameline
.
“We should have been quicker,” she said.
> WE HIT THAT SHIP WITH EVERYTHING WE HAD. THERE WASN’T ANYTHING ELSE WE COULD HAVE DONE.
“We could have rammed it.”
> AND WHAT WOULD THAT HAVE ACHIEVED? IT WAS TOO BIG. IT WOULD HAVE FLATTENED US AND KEPT RIGHT ON GOING.
“I know, but still.”
> THIS IS A WAR, AND WE’RE LOSING. CASUALTIES ARE INEVITABLE.
“We should be doing more.”
> THE FREIGHTERS WILL RESCUE SOME OF THE POPULATION.
“A tiny fraction.”
> BETTER THAN NONE.
She let out a long sigh. This was the third world she’d seen fall to The Recollection. First Djatt, then her home world of Strauli. Now this place, New Cordoba or whatever the hell it was called.
Just another apocalypse.
Before it arrived at Djatt, The Recollection had been drifting through space for thousands of years, the relic of an ancient and long-forgotten alien war. Now it had access to human ships, it could spread unstoppably from world to world, consuming everything it touched. And all humanity could do was fall back.
As the airlock door slid closed behind her, she turned for one last glimpse of the redness spreading across the land, the widening circles meeting and merging, growing with obscene haste. With nothing to stop it, she knew the infection would cover the entire surface of the globe within days.
There was nothing she could do.
Except...
She gripped the gun.
“Take me to Vilca,” she said.
T
HE
A
MELINE
DROPPED
onto the desert sand a dozen metres from the edge of the canyon, directly above Vilca’s compound. The old ship came down with a whine of engines and a hot blast of dirt. As the landing struts settled and the engines whined into silence, Kat unhooked herself from the pilot’s chair and made her way down the ladder that led to the rest of the ship’s interior.
At the foot of the ladder, opposite the door of her cabin, the ship’s locker held a rack of weaponry picked up on half a dozen different worlds. She reached up and pulled a twelve gauge shotgun from the wall. It was a gas-powered model, fully automatic and drum-loaded; capable of delivering three hundred flesh-shredding rounds per minute. She hefted it in one hand, resting the stock on her hip as she picked up a couple of extra magazines and pushed them into her thigh pocket.
> I HOPE YOU’RE NOT PLANNING ON DOING ANYTHING STUPID.
“Define stupid.”
W
EAPON AT THE
ready, Kat stepped from the bottom of the
Ameline
’s cargo ramp. Her boots crunched into the coarse desert sand. Tough little grass tufts poked through here and there, stirring in the thin, scouring wind. Overhead, the sun burned blue and hot. Ahead, the canyon lay ragged and raw like a claw mark in the skin of the world; and over the lip, Vilca’s compound.
She took three quick steps to the edge and looked down. As she’d expected, a metal fire escape led down to an armoured door in the side of the building. A razor wire gate blocked the top of the staircase. She considered cutting her way through; then decided it wasn’t worth the bother. The people inside must know she was here. They would have heard the
Ameline
set down, and they were sure to be watching her, even if she couldn’t see any cameras.
She held the shotgun across her chest and raised her chin.
“I’m here to see Vilca,” she said.
A minute later, she heard the sound of scraping bolts. The heavy door hinged open. A gun appeared from behind it, clutched in the fists of a young kid, gaunt with malnourishment.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Katherine Denktash Abdulov, of the Strauli Abdulovs, and I am here to request an audience with your esteemed Capo, the Right Honourable Lord Vilca.”
Beneath the rim of his cap, suspicion screwed the kid’s face into a wary scowl.
“Huh?”
Kat sighed.
Young people today...
She licked her lips, and then tried again.
“Take me to your leader,” she said.
The kid’s eyes scanned the canyon’s lip, alert for treachery.
“You alone?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her shotgun, then down at the pistol in his hand, transparently calculating their relative value and firepower.
“You’ll have to give me your weapon.”
Kat shook her head.