The Recollection (27 page)

His instruments showed unbelievable amounts of energy flickering through the Gnarl, like the electrical pulses of dreams flickering in the mind of a sleeping giant; its outer shell seemed composed of both baryonic and non-baryonic matter; and the plain fact was that its observable properties didn’t conform to any of the accepted theories of physics or cosmology. But then, he’d known
that
before he left Tiers Cross.

“You’re doing better than you give yourself credit for,” the Professor rumbled.

Toby turned away. He walked back to his instruments and started to turn them off, one by one. It was time to retire for the night.

“Why do I have to study this thing?” he complained. “Why can’t the Dho simply tell us how it works?”

Behind him, Harris made a gruff noise in the base of his throat. “You’re not the first to express such sentiments.”

“Well?”

“Think about it, my boy. Really think about it. Why would an alien race make us figure these things out for ourselves?”

Toby bent down to disconnect a power cable.

“Spite?”

Harris brayed with laughter.

“Oh, dear me,” he said, wiping his eyes. “One might think so, but no.”

“How can you be sure?”

The old man composed himself.

“I have spoken at length to our hosts. They claim that they’re testing us. They want to establish that we’re capable of figuring out the basic principles of their culture and technology for ourselves.”

Toby threw up his hands in frustration. “But why don’t they just teach us?”

Harris looked sympathetic. “I asked the self-same question.”

“And?”

“The Dho regard received knowledge as being of less worth than knowledge deduced from personal empirical observation. Cultural transmission of information has its place, of course, but to really understand a pupil’s capabilities, they believe you have to watch them discover and comprehend the basics for themselves.”

“So all of this, the expedition, the whole reason they invited us here in the first place, it’s all an intelligence test?”

“Of a sort, yes.”

“What do we get if we pass?”

Harris thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his tweed blazer.

“Toby, do you think it’s possible to describe the Gnarl using our current understanding of physics?”

“No.”

“And what does that tell you?”

Toby scratched his head. He’d struggled against these thoughts and doubts for so long. “Either the Gnarl can’t exist, or there’s something wrong with our theories.”

“But the Gnarl does exist.”

“So our theories are wrong?”

Harris leaned forward, eyebrows drawn together in thought.

“Perhaps.”

Toby let his hands drop to his sides. He turned to face the window that looked out on the chamber holding the Gnarl.

“But what does it
do
? What’s it
for
? What’s the connection between this object and the other Gnarl, the one at the heart of the Bubble Belt?”

Harris shook his head.

“I think you’ve been studying this too long, my boy. You’re missing the obvious.”

“What obvious?”

“Ask yourself: for what purpose are the Dho using this particular Gnarl?”

Toby frowned.

“They’re drawing power from it.”

“Good. And what else? Do you recall what I said the first time I showed it to you?”

Toby thought back.

“You said it was the... engine?”

Harris clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly.

“Exactly!”

“So if this is the Ark’s engine, then the Gnarl at the centre of the Bubble Belt...”

The old man gave an encouraging nod. “Go on.”

“The Gnarl at the centre of the Bubble Belt is
also
an engine?”

“Excellent, Toby! Excellent.” Harris slapped him on the shoulder. “Now come here.”

The Professor led Toby over to a Grid terminal that had been patched into the table. With a few deft touches, he brought up a computer rendering of the Bubble Belt: a shell of billions of spherical habitats surrounding the gas-wreathed Gnarl at its centre.

“The Belt,” he said.

Toby leaned forward. The diagram was a crude schematic, but it was sufficient to provoke a pang of homesickness. Shaking it off, he pointed to the Gnarl at the centre, represented by a spherical white dot.

“You’re not telling me that this thing’s an engine for the whole Belt?”

“That’s exactly what I am saying. Watch this.”

Harris tapped a couple of controls and the simulation changed.

“Now look closely. Once activated, the Gnarl flares like this.” On the screen, a pencil-thin beam of blue light lanced from the object. Where it passed, the orbiting habitats drew aside, staying clear of the beam.

“But the acceleration,” Toby said. “Won’t it leave the bubbles behind?”

The Professor shook his bushy head. “Not at these speeds. Remember, we’re talking about moving something with the mass of a solar system. The accelerations involved are minute, a few tenths of a gee at most.”

Toby rocked back on his heels.

“But why would you want to move it?” he said, feeling he had missed a crucial point.

Harris gave him a sharp glance.

“Oh, use your head, boy. Why do you think? What possible threat could the Dho have foreseen when they were building the Belt?”

“The Dho built the Belt?”

“Well, of course they did. Who else goes around using Gnarls as engines?”

Toby put his hand to his chin. “Then they must have wanted to move it because of The Recollection.”

“A fair assumption.”

“But they already have their Ark.”

Harris gave another irritated shake of the head. “Obviously, the Bubble Belt isn’t for them.”

“Then who is it for?”

“For us, of course. It’s a lifeboat, Toby. A lifeboat for humanity. That’s why they built the arch network, to get us off Earth. They linked it to every human-habitable planet they could find. The clues were all there in the carvings. They wanted us to spread out, in the hope The Recollection would miss a few of us here and there, that somehow we’d survive. And they wanted some of us to find our way to the Bubble Belt, so we could join them in their exodus; so that they’d know for certain they’d saved at least some of us.”

Toby could feel his heart pounding against his ribs. He glanced down at his shirt, half-expecting to see the fabric moving in time to each beat.

He reached out and brushed the image of the accelerating Bubble Belt.

“Surely that’s too slow? How can that outrun anything?”

Harris crossed his arms, tweed rasping against tweed.

“The Belt’s expected to take a few years to reach its optimal cruising speed.”

“What happens if we’re attacked in the meantime? What happens if The Recollection finds a way to move faster?”

The old man glowered.

“Have you heard of Socrates, Toby? He was an ancient Greek philosopher, the teacher of Plato. One of his most important maxims was the phrase ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ If we are truly ready to learn, to question every assumption we’ve previously relied upon, then the Dho will be ready to teach us.”

“And what will they teach us?”

Harris held up a crooked finger.

“That there is a way to hold back the darkness while we escape.”

Toby blinked. He thought for a moment. “In the carving, the ships covering the Ark’s retreat were shooting beams of light at oncoming cloud.”

“Yes, the Dho call it the ‘Torch That Burns The Sky.’”

“They still have those weapons?”

“They do.”

Toby’s heart surged. “And we can use them?” For a weightless instant he imagined outfitting a ship and jumping to Djatt in time to save Katherine from the encroaching menace; even though in his heart he knew he’d arrive too late, that whatever she’d faced, whatever had befallen her, would be long over and done by the time he got there.

“No,” Harris said, cutting across his thoughts. “Humanity must have its champion. The Dho tell us there is a man coming. He is a pure-born Earthman. He has travelled a long way and he is trying to atone for great misdeeds. He alone will operate the weapon.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

COLD EQUATIONS

Ejected from the simulation, Kat sat up on her couch. She moaned. Her head ached and the burn mark on her chest stung beneath its dressing.

> Are you okay? the ship asked.

She put a hand to her brow. “I think so.”

On the couch beside hers, Victor lay with his eyes still closed. He looked older with his face slack and grimy, and lacking the 1950s sunglasses he’d worn in the simulation: old enough to be her father, maybe even her grandfather. For a dizzying moment, she realised how defenceless he was. She could reach over and use her metal hand to crush his larynx before he regained consciousness. Even if he did wake, he wouldn’t have the strength to break her grip.

The
Kilimanjaro
flashed into her mind. The Abdulov ship that never arrived, whose sabotage had set in motion this whole sorry chain of events. Had he really been involved in its destruction? Lying there on the co-pilot’s couch, he looked so spent and helpless that, for the first time, she entertained the thought that the explosion on board the missing ship might have been an accident after all, and her subsequent encounters with Victor an unfortunate twist of fate. Granted, his exit from Strauli Quay, jumping from within a sealed bay, had been a risky, reckless and illegal maneuver—but no-one had been hurt. Similarly, the bomb blast on the
Ticonderoga
—the one that killed Enid—had been the work of Seth Murphy, Victor’s First Mate, and he had received a bullet in the head for his efforts.

That killing was the only one she could definitely attribute to Victor, the man now lying here beside her, and it had seemingly been enacted in punishment for the bomb. She had nothing but supposition to link Victor to either that explosion or the one on the
Kilimanjaro
; and that wasn’t enough for her to pass a death sentence on a sleeping man.

She looked into the face of the man she’d once loved hard enough to abandon her family for, the father of her unborn child, and realised she’d lost the rage that had sustained her from Tiers Cross. It had gone. With the appearance of The Recollection, things had changed. The universe had become a darker and more terrifying place, and her bruised pride had ceased to seem all that important. Not even her family honour mattered anymore, because down on the surface of Djatt, people were dying in their millions. There was no-one left to trade with, only an unimaginable horror to be avoided; a contamination to be stopped. She knew that theoretically she could kill Victor here and now—against the holocaust outside, what would one more death matter?—and yet deep inside, she also knew she lacked the will to go through with it. Instead, she gave his shoulder a gentle shake. After a moment, he coughed. She helped him sit up, and he looked around the bridge, blinking and rubbing his eyes, obviously disorientated.

“What happened?”

“Something went wrong with the simulation,” she said, feeling awkward. “The Recollection took control. I think it tried to hack our brains.”

Victor’s eyes widened. Kat put what she hoped was a reassuring hand on his forearm.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “we’re okay. The ship pulled the plug.”

At that moment, as if on cue, the
Ameline
chipped in.

> Memory core isolated and flushed. Whatever it was trying to do, I stopped it.

Kat said, “Can you eject the core?”

> Already done and dusted. And just to make certain, I fired it through our main engine exhaust. Crisped it up nicely.

“And what of the infected ships?”

The
Ameline
connected to her implant, superimposing over her vision a tactical view of the surrounding volume. The two infected ships were marked in red. One she recognised as Victor’s ship, the
Tristero
. The other was a freighter from the planet Icefall: an old rust bucket travelling under the given name
Hesperus
. Both were under thrust, moving away from the planet on divergent trajectories, and neither were answering the
Ameline
’s hails. As she watched, the
Tristero
flashed white and disappeared. Seconds later, the other ship did likewise.

> Both ships have jumped.

“And they’re definitely heading for Strauli?”

> Only the
Tristero
. As far as I can tell, the other’s going for Inakpa.

Kat looked at the roiling blood-red cloud now enveloping most of the planet beneath her. Lightning flashed in the atmosphere. She thought again of her home, and the carnage that would ensue should this horror fall upon it.

“We have to stop them,” she said.