The Recollection (24 page)

Victor got to his feet. “What?”

She nudged one of the suitcases with the toe of her boot.

“If it stopped us leaving. I thought you’d be angry if it stopped us leaving.”

His face flushed. He took a step toward her, fists squeezed tight.

“Do you know how long I’ve
—
?” His voice faltered and he broke off.

“I did what I thought you would have wanted.”

“You have no idea what I want.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Victor turned away. He bent at the knees and picked up one of the cases.

“I’m leaving,” he said. “I’ve got a flight to catch.”

Kat felt the strength drain out of her. She watched him walk to the door.

“You can’t leave me here,” she said.

Victor paused. “Watch me.”

Without thinking, she scooped one of the glasses from the nightstand and dashed the wine in his face.

“Fuck you,” she said.

When he’d gone, she threw herself on the bed and stayed there for a long time.

The next morning, the rain had given way to a chill breeze. Feeling raw inside, she walked to the spaceport. She had more than enough money for a train ticket home, but no intention of buying one. Instead, she went to the scrap yard at the edge of the port, where the derelict ships were waiting. She climbed through the cargo bay of the one that looked the most promising: a wedge-shaped trader decked out in the faded blue and red livery of the Abdulovs, its hull dotted with sensor pods and lateral thruster arrays.

“It needs a lot of work,” she said, eyeing the loose deck plates and exposed wiring.

The scrap merchant shrugged. He didn’t care. Although he’d doubtless acquired the ship as cheap scrap, the price he was asking would more or less wipe out her savings, and he knew it.

Kat climbed up to the bridge. In the cold air, her breath came in little clouds.

She patted the back of the pilot’s couch.

“Hello,” she said.

Lights flickered on the instrument console.

> Hey there. I’m the
Ameline
. How are you doing?

“My name’s Katherine. Tell me, are you Sylvia Abdulov’s
Ameline
?”

The ship seemed to consider this for a moment.

> I was once owned by Sylvia Abdulov. She was a fine woman. Why do you ask?

Kat smiled. She’d never met her great-aunt, but knew of the woman’s exploits. Sylvia Abdulov had been a legend in the family’s beach compound, having captained a dozen ships and repeatedly crisscrossed the sky from Old Earth to New Chongqing, Port Douglas and the Far Stars. She’d been one of the original Abdulov pilots, and some said she had a man in every port; others that she alternated between men and women, taking whichever took her fancy. One thing was certain: Sylvia had been one hell of a trader. She’d known how to turn a profit. Without her, the Abdulovs would still have been a local concern, instead of today’s galaxy-spanning conglomerate. As a cadet, Kat had had a picture of her taped to the inside of her locker door. Now, realising that she was standing on the bridge of her great-aunt’s first ship, she felt closer to home than she had in months.

“Yes,” she said to herself, “I can do this.”

She ran a finger through the dust on the
Ameline
’s navigation console, leaving a trail.

“Are you ready to fly again?” she asked the ship.

Waves of eagerness leaked through her implant. She felt power building in the engine cores, and long-dormant systems flickering back into life.

> I thought you’d never ask.

Three weeks later, after patching the old ship up just enough to make her flight-worthy, Kat took the
Ameline
up into the clear blue sky above the port. The rain had stopped and the sun shone.

Determined to follow her great-aunt’s example, she flew the little ship all over, from the stable, middle-aged stars around Sol to the bright blue archipelagos near the rim. She hauled whatever cargoes she could find, legal or otherwise, and used every scrap of profit to refit the engines and repair the hull and vital electrical systems. Often, the
Ameline’s
blue and red paintwork led people to assume the ship was still an active part of the Abdulov fleet; and when it suited her, Kat played along with that assumption, using her family’s reputation in order to win business.

On Nuevo Cordoba, she fell in with a random jumper by the name of Napoleon Jones. Random jumping was an extreme sport, illegal on some worlds, prime entertainment on others. It was the ultimate gamble. It was a pilot throwing his or her craft into hyperspace on a random trajectory, just to see where they’d end up. Some pilots discovered habitable planets beyond the limits of the arch network, or rich mineral deposits. They became celebrities. They brought back wild tales of bizarre planetary systems, of swollen stars and uncharted asteroid belts. But the risks were huge. Roulette pilots gambled with their lives, and there were ugly rumours of ghost ships, of murder and cannibalism, and individuals dying lonely, lingering deaths in distant star systems. Those lucky enough to find their way home clustered on worlds close to the edge of familiar space, where they could stand under the clear night sky and see the unexplored frontier stretching away before them. Nuevo Cordoba was one such world. It was a dirty little outpost on a half-forgotten moon.

Napoleon Jones was one of the better roulette pilots, in that he was still alive. In the random jumping community, he was something of a legend, having jumped further into the unknown than anyone else. He had a penchant for leather jackets and wide-brimmed hats. He had dark green eyes the colour of the Strauli sea after a storm; eyes that had maybe seen too much, yet still hankered for something new; eyes which glittered in the low lights of the port bars, where the other patrons treated him with the wary respect accorded to a shaman. His ship was named the
Bobcat
. It was small and fast and tough.

“You could slam it into a rocky moon at Mach 6,” he often boasted, “and still walk away unscathed.”

Kat’s affair with him lasted a little over four weeks. In that time, he taught her more about flying than she had learned at the Strauli Flight School. He taught her how to surf the solar wind. He showed her how to wring every last watt of power from her ship’s engines; how to jump further and faster by stretching their safety tolerances to the absolute limit.

When she left him, it was with a renewed sense of self-confidence and a way of carrying herself that identified her as an experienced trader, rather than the rookie she’d been before.

On her travels, she saw the vast old wooden sailing ships of Trafalgar, and she hiked through Valhalla’s ice caverns. On Earth, she walked the streets of Paris, Rio and Berlin, and saw the massive geo-engineering projects that had been deployed to fight the climate crisis... and the monuments to those the crisis had already claimed.

For a while, she made enough money to keep flying, living from cargo to cargo, but her luck didn’t last. On Sand Haven, the
Ameline
failed a routine safety inspection, and she had to replace the primary and secondary cooling arrays. A few jumps later, she delivered a cargo only to find that her buyer had gone out of business, leaving her several thousand out of pocket. She couldn’t afford to refuel. She couldn’t afford to eat. By the time she reached the Bubble Belt and Tiers Cross, she was broke, with the
Ameline
running on fumes...

Kat jerked awake in her bunk. Victor sat beside her. Victor, the man who’d abandoned her on Strauli. The man who’d shipped out as a hired hand and returned as a captain. The man she’d come here to kill.

She blinked at the ceiling. “What…?”

He stroked her hair.

“Shhh,” he said. “It’s all right. You’re going to be okay.”

“But—” She brought her left hand up to touch the dressing at the base of her throat. The skin felt stiff and numb beneath.

“Does it still hurt?”

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “I cleaned it and sprayed it with anaesthetic before I applied the bandage.”

“What happened to me?”

Victor’s brow furrowed. “I don’t really know. You were on the floor in the cargo hold. I thought you were dying like the others. Then this white light... What was that?”

Kat shook her head. She had no idea.

Victor tapped her prosthetic arm. “Whatever it was, it seems to have killed the infection.”

Kat held up the hand. The metal no longer seethed like boiling oil. Instead, where the redness had passed through it, it looked half-melted, like candle wax. Where the light caught it, it held a sheen like a fly’s wing.

“The Recollection,” she said softly.

Victor looked at her. “What?”

“The Recollection. That’s what the red stuff calls itself.”

“How do you know that?”

Kat frowned. “I’m not sure.”

He touched her hair again. “What else do you know?”

She thought.

“It’s very old,” she said. “And it’s not a cloud. It’s a, a memory matrix. It breaks everything down, stores it as code. It preserves everything it touches.”

Victor drew his hand back. He looked concerned.

“Kat, are you okay?”

She pushed herself up on her elbows. “I think so. I mean, I feel okay.”

In truth, she felt anesthetized. The shocks had come too rapidly, one after another. First Enid’s death and the loss of her arm, then the catastrophe on Djatt. Finally, her infection by, and mental brush with, the red cloud. She needed time to stop and take stock, to grieve for everything and everyone that had been lost. She needed to wriggle deeper into her bunk and pull the blankets over her head, but she couldn’t do that with Victor sitting there. Instead, she sat up straight and shook out her hair. She flexed her metal hand. Despite their half-melted appearance, the servos in the joints still worked.

“Help me to the bridge,” she said.

When they got there, she sank gratefully into the pilot’s couch. Her chest hurt where it had been burned.

“Okay,” she said to the ship, “show me what you’ve got.”

The forward screen cleared and the stars were replaced by black and white footage taken from a camera in the cargo hold. Kat saw herself lying on the deck plates by the inner airlock door, Victor kneeling over her. Oily red paste frothed from her mouth, and her arms and legs twitched spasmodically.

> As far as I can tell, The Recollection is a gestalt entity, comprising trillions of individual machines, all identical, all molecular in size. Once they were inside your body, they set to work reproducing, converting your molecules into copies of themselves.

The scene flashed. Kat’s pendant burst with the radiance of a sun. Victor fell back, shading his eyes with his arm. The screen went white and the recording ended.

In the pilot’s chair, Kat shivered.

“What was that?”

> Some kind of energy release from your pendant. It neutralised the machinery invading your body.

Kat rubbed the bandage at the base of her throat, remembering the vanished pendant and the words the Acolyte had spoken.

“If you insist on going to Djatt, this will protect you.”

A new image appeared onscreen: a three-dimensional scan of her skull. The picture zoomed in on her brain, portions of which were highlighted, including the frontal lobes and hippocampus.

> However, the ship continued, some restructuring of your brain had already taken place, primarily in the areas associated with consciousness and memory.

Kat rubbed her forehead with her left hand.

“I don’t feel any different.” She glanced at Victor. He looked troubled; the ship must have connected to his implant, allowing him to see what she saw, hear what she heard.

> Would you be able to tell, if you did?

The screen display cleared again, reverting to a view of the stars beyond the hull.

> During the attack, The Recollection attempted to use your implant to infect me, by transmitting a virtual copy of itself into my memory banks.

“Are you okay?”

> Hell, yeah. I was expecting it. I’d already set up a divert and I shunted the fucker straight into Grid storage.

The
Ameline
carried enough memory capacity to transport googleflops of data from one planetary Grid to the next. You could throw in the text of every book ever printed and the music of every tune ever recorded, and there’d still be plenty of room to spare.

Kat bit her lip. “Is it safe?”