The Recollection (12 page)

The American woman rubbed the short white bristles at the back of her neck. “They must have done. It’s standard operating procedure, if you have to leave a man behind.”

She dropped to one knee and gathered her bagged samples of grass and soil. She stuffed them into the pockets of her cargo pants and stood, brushing the dirt from her hands.

“Are you ready to move?”

They waded back through the wind-ruffled grass to the Land Rover. As they walked, Alice reached out to touch Kristin’s elbow.

“You know, you haven’t told us who you work for.”

The taller woman stopped.

“I haven’t?”

She glanced impatiently back at the marked arch, shifting her weight from one booted foot to the other.

Ed rubbed his eyes. His skin itched. After sleeping in his clothes, he needed a shower.

“You’re obviously military but you don’t have any insignia,” he said.

Kristin glanced down at her khaki hoodie.

“We’re part of a joint UN recon team,” she said. “I guess all the badges are on my jacket, in my kit bag.”

Ed stepped forward. He felt the wind tug at his t-shirt. “You told us this was a one-way trip.”

“It is.”

“Then how can you be a recon team? How are you going to report back?”

Kristin folded her arms and puffed out her cheeks.

“We’re not.”

“Then what are you doing?”

Kristin turned and started walking toward the Land Rover, arms still folded. Ed and Alice hurried to keep pace with her.

“We’re trying to prove a theory,” she said. “We’ve mapped part of the network and we’ve used computer extrapolation to sketch in the rest.” She kicked at the long grass. “Our model indicates an overall structure. As far as we can tell, the branches collapse toward a single point. We call it a funnelling effect.”

Shuffling along beside her, Ed pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “You mean, all the gates lead to the same place?” He felt a sudden stab of wild hope.

“That’s right. All roads lead to Rome. According to the model, whichever route you take, you eventually spiral in towards the centre of the network. We call it the Prime Radiant.”

Ed saw Alice’s auburn hair flickering in the wind. He heard her say, “Like the canals in Amsterdam?”

Kristin raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

Alice brushed her fringe from her eyes. “In Amsterdam, the canals are arranged in semi-circular arcs. Wherever you are in the city, if you follow one, sooner or later you’ll end up back at the Central Station. You can’t get lost.”

They reached the Land Rover. Kristin pulled off her hoodie and tossed it onto the back seat.

“It’s more like a spider’s web,” she said. “Only we don’t know what’s at the centre.”

“So you’re going to find out?”

“That’s right. That’s our mission. And all our predictions point to that as the place we’ll find all the people lost in the network.”

Ed’s breath caught in his throat. He felt Alice slip her hand into his.

“Like Verne?” she said, eyes shining.

Kristin nodded.

“We may be ten years behind him, but if we head for the Prime Radiant, we’ll find him sure enough.”

For the last three years of her life, Ed’s mother had lived in a gated retirement community on the outskirts of Cardiff, paid for by her eldest son, Verne. When she died of pneumonia at the age of sixty-two, he, Ed and Alice were the only attendants at her funeral.

After the service, they crunched their way back along the shingle path to the crematorium’s wrought iron gate. Behind them, the last scraps of smoke rose from the brick chimney. It was a bright day in the Valleys. Frost lingered in the gaps and shadows between the grave markers and fir trees. A single vapour trail scratched the high blue sky. Verne and Alice were wrapped in coats and scarves. As they walked, Alice slipped her arm through Ed’s.

“It was a nice service. I’m glad you came. Shirley would have been pleased.”

Ed had his fists balled in his pockets. He wore a black suit jacket over skinny dark jeans and a paint-stained Ramones T-shirt.

He said, “I’m sorry I was late.”

Beside him, Verne had his head down and his shoulders hunched. He said, “I suppose we should be grateful you’re here at all.”

Ed stopped walking.

“What do you mean by that?”

Verne turned to face him. “What do you think I mean? You’re always so wrapped up in yourself. When was the last time you bothered coming down here?”

“I saw her at the wedding.”

“Three months ago! Where were you when she really needed you, eh?”

Ed bristled. His mother had been raised as a hard-working Valleys girl. She disapproved of his life as a penniless artist, and seldom missed an opportunity to voice her feelings on the matter. “I was going to come, you know I was. It wasn’t my fault she died when she did. And anyway, where the fuck were you?”

Verne gave an exasperated sigh. He’d been in Mogadishu when Shirley died. “You know I would have been here if I could, if the rebels hadn’t closed the airport. They were shooting Europeans. We had to stay hidden in the hotel. Whereas you, Ed, all you had to do was catch a train.”

Alice slid her arm out from under Ed’s.

“Verne, this really isn’t the time.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Well, don’t.”

She pulled the black fur hat from her head and shook her gloved fingers through her mussed, rust-coloured hair.

“I’m sorry, Ed,” she said.

She took his elbow and walked him to the gate. Moss dappled the cracked concrete path. Verne’s car waited on the opposite side of the steeply sloping street, in front of a row of terraced houses.

“Are you sure we can’t give you a lift? We could drop you at Oxford and you could get a train back to London from there.”

Ed glanced at his brother. Verne’s cheeks were a mottled red and he kept clenching and unclenching his fists.

“No, don’t worry about it. I can get a local train from here to Cardiff, then straight through to Paddington. I’ve already booked the ticket and they don’t do refunds.”

“Will you be okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” Ed said. “I’ll probably sleep most of the way. And if not, I’ve got my sketchbook.” He pulled the small black Moleskine from his pocket. Its pages bulged with bookmarks, feathers and Post-it notes.

Alice said, “You’ll have to let me look at that sometime.”

Verne shouldered past them and opened the car door.

“Goodbye, Ed,” he said.

Alice sighed. “Don’t worry about him. It’s because he was in Africa when she died. He feels bad, and he’s taking it out on you.”

Ed blew into his hands. “I know.”

“He’ll be okay in a couple of days, you’ll see.”

She stood on her toes. Her lips were warm on his cold cheek. Her hair smelled of peppermint shampoo.

“I’ll come and see you soon. I’m in London next week. Verne’s going off on another assignment. I’ll drop by and make sure you’re okay.”

She squeezed his arm.

“If it’s any help,” she said, “I think as long as we remember someone, they’re not really dead.”

She gave a last, brave smile and ran across the road to the waiting car. She waved once as they pulled away, and Ed watched until the brake lights reached the end of the terrace and turned right, out of sight, heading towards the M4. Then he turned up his jacket collar and began the long trudge back to the railway station.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE CRYSTAL SHIP

Despite spending her youth in the Strauli system, Katherine Abdulov had never been this close to the Dho Ark. Under ordinary circumstances, civilian vessels were forbidden from coming within a million kilometres of its orbital path around the system’s solitary gas giant. Growing up on the beaches of Strauli, she’d seen pictures of it, of course, but as the
Ameline
fell into its shadow, she had to admit they’d been poor preparation for the sheer scale of the thing.

The Ark had the appearance of a single, translucent quartz crystal. The hull was seamless, aside from a small, circular dock at one end, with sharp angles and smooth, polished facets. Leaning forward in her acceleration couch, Kat gave a low whistle.

“That’s enormous.”

> Target measures eleven hundred kilometres from bow to stern.

She shook her head.

“That’s not a ship, it’s a moon.”

> Size isn’t everything.

Kat rubbed her eyes. She’d been in the couch for the last two hours, since Victor’s surprise departure from Strauli Quay. Her skin felt gritty and the muscles in her back and shoulders were stiff with the need to get up and stretch.

“Replay the footage from the Quay,” she said.

> Again?

A window opened in her right eye. It was a grainy shot of Victor’s ship, the
Tristero
, taken from the security camera in his assigned landing bay. The news stations had been replaying it constantly since the incident. Now, as she watched it again for the fifth or sixth time, she saw the ship shudder as its jump engines came online. One moment, it was a long silvery wedge squatting in the centre of a nest of cables. The next, the camera blanked out in a white flash. The ship’s engines generated a wormhole and all the air in the bay vanished, the resulting depressurisation rocking the station. Even though the walls of the bay were reinforced, built to withstand exposure to vacuum, they still sagged inward. They buckled under the wormhole’s gravitational stress. By the time the picture cleared, there was nothing to see. Disconnected hoses twitched and flopped like decapitated snakes, pumping arterial sprays of fuel and water into the sudden vacuum. The wormhole had collapsed, and the ship had gone.

> Idiot.

Despite the scorn, Kat sensed a grudging respect in the
Ameline
’s tone, a respect she found she shared. She couldn’t help but be impressed by his cold-hearted willingness to endanger the lives of hundreds, possibly thousands of people. It revealed in Victor Luciano a callous determination that, hitherto, she’d only suspected. After this, he’d never set foot on the Quay again. He’d be arrested on sight. The whole station was in uproar. The news networks were going batshit. In the last two hours, she’d been called by three reporters. They knew Victor was heading for the Pep harvest on Djatt. They’d heard about her relationship with him and sensed a conspiracy. They accused her of working against her family, of plotting the entire episode. In the end, she’d asked the ship to block their calls, which only fuelled their speculation.

At least the port authority weren’t bugging her. They knew the score. Her father had given them a copy of her letter of introduction, confirming her position as a full captain in the Abdulov fleet.

From trainee to outcast, then from outcast to captain: looking out at the approaching bulk of the Dho Ark, she caught the ghostly reflection of her own smile.

At least some good’s come of all this...

Then she thought of the missing Abdulov ship, the
Kilimanjaro
, and the smile died on her lips. There had been fourteen men, women and children on that ship, their fate now unknown. Up until this moment, she’d harboured the possibility that accident or technical malfunction had delayed the vessel. She hadn’t wanted to believe Victor, her ex-lover, capable of outright piracy. She hadn’t wanted to think of him as a murderer. Now though, having seen the way he’d blasted off the Quay, she felt a cold certainty creeping over her.

She pictured the
Kilimanjaro
with its hull torn open, spilling air and warmth into the void, the corpses of adults and children turning slowly end-over-end, surrounded by frozen scraps of food, odd shoes, smashed hull plates. Some of the dead would have been her cousins, nieces, nephews. She imagined a stuffed bear clutched in a dead child’s hand, and her lip curled in disgust. Suddenly her blood felt like ice, and she knew she had to beat Victor to Djatt. More was at stake in this race than money or prestige. It wasn’t about their failed relationship any more. It wasn’t about family honour. No, she told herself, all that mattered to her now was vengeance for the blood on his hands. She had to stop him from hurting anyone else.

And for a moment, she almost believed it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ANGRY BLUE SPARK

As they rolled out of the portal, half-blind from the flash, they heard the creak of scum-greased timbers beneath the Land Rover’s tyres.

“What the fuck?”

Ed stood on the brake, felt the wheels slip. They were sliding across the deck of a wooden sailing ship. All he could see was water beyond the splintered rail. Alice screamed and grabbed his arm; he jammed all his weight onto the brake pedal and dragged the steering wheel to the right. The back end of the Land Rover slewed around with sickening slowness. For an awful, heart-stopping instant it looked as if they weren’t going to stop in time, and then the tyres bit into the wood and the big car juddered to a halt, centimetres from the remains of the broken rail.