The Recollection (5 page)

“Honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he said.

Two days ago Francis Hind, the Acolyte, had arrived at Drake’s office carrying a handwritten invitation from the leader of an expedition planning to study the Dho Ark. The Ark was a rocky planetoid on the outskirts of the Strauli system. It had been hollowed out, coated in sheets of artificial diamond, and converted into a starship by its inhabitants, the reclusive Dho. About two metres in height, the Dho wore dark gowns similar to those sported by their human agents, the Acolytes. The gowns brushed the floor as they walked, making them appear to glide, and their heads were permanently encased in baroque, chitin-like helmets that gave them the appearance of stylised stag beetles. According to Toby Drake, no-one really knew where the helmets ended and the Dho began.

“It’s a hell of an opportunity,” he said. “Apart from the Acolytes, this is the first time humans have been allowed into the interior of the Ark. I—I just don’t understand why I’ve been chosen. By the time I get there, the team will have been in place for fourteen years, and I don’t know what more I’ll be able to add. And besides, it’s not my area of specialty. There are at least a dozen better qualified candidates on Tiers Cross alone.”

Kat looked across him to the window, and saw they’d reached the end of the runway and were rolling to a halt on the compacted snow, awaiting launch clearance from the tower. Beyond the glare of the spaceport lights, she could see the bubbles of the Belt sparkling like scattered sand in the darkened sky.

“Nervous?” she asked him.

He looked at her. “How can you t-tell?” His knuckles were white.

“A lucky guess.”

The noise from the engines rose to a deafening shriek. Drake closed his eyes. His forehead shone with sweat.

“Just relax,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me about your work?”

He gave her a sideways look. “With the Gnarl?”

“Yes, why not? It might help.”

“O-okay.” He took a deep breath. “Well for a start, most people think it’s a naked singularity, but it’s not. It isn’t dense enough. If it were a gravitational singularity, its mass would be huge. But as far as we can tell, it weighs less than a medium sized star.”

Kat made a face. “I looked at it once and it made my eyes hurt. How do you study it?”

The young man smiled, as if he heard this question all the time. His teeth were very white.

“We do most of our analysis using computers. We try not to spend too much time looking directly at it, but you know, it doesn’t hurt to take a glance every now and then.”

Kat said, “A breaker once told me it was artificial, built by the same race that built the bubbles.”

Drake waggled a hand. “Iffy,” he said. “We don’t know that for sure. It could be a natural phenomena. Perhaps it was there first, and whoever built the Belt did so in order to study it?”

Kat licked her lips. She was eager to get off the ground.

“So,” she said, “we still don’t know what it’s
for
?”

“Maybe it isn’t
for
anything. Maybe it just
is
.”

“That sounds like a cop-out.”

Drake’s teeth flashed. “Maybe it is. But we’re learning a great deal just by studying it. The arch network, for example.”

“What about it?”

“It turns out that the arches all resonate on the same electromagnetic frequencies as the Gnarl.”

Kat frowned, feeling she’d missed something. “What does that mean?”

“It means the Gnarl may be powering the network.”

“Really?”

Drake shrugged a leather-clad shoulder.

“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you one thing.” His teeth flashed again. “I’d give my right nut to find out.”

Behind them, the engine noise increased. Then the pilot let the brakes off and the shuttle leapt forward, kicking them back in their seats.

As they rattled down the runway, Kat felt her heart pump a wild surge of joy. A grin split her face, and her feet drummed excitedly on the floor. Beside her, Drake sat stiffly in his seat, still sweating, eyes closed.

As the cabin tipped upward and the wheels left the tarmac, he reached for her hand.

CHAPTER FIVE

AMETHYST

Ed Rico was painting at his easel, in front of the sash window of his apartment. The window looked down on the darkened street, and the buildings opposite: an estate agent, now closed for the night; a church repurposed as office space; an off-licence still open on the corner. Terraced houses. Sun-bleached poppies on the war memorial in the park at the end of the road. Shadowy back alleys and garages.
For Sale
signs like brave little flags. Black railings. Scaffolding.

When his mobile rang, he put the brush down and lifted the phone to his ear.

“Ed?” It was Alice. They hadn’t spoken since that night in her apartment, six months ago. “Ed, I’ve got an arch in my field.”

Ed looked at his watch. It was around ten-thirty. He knew Alice no longer stayed at her flat in Peckham, that she’d left London some weeks ago for Verne’s old farmhouse on the other side of High Wycombe, forty miles away.

“I can be there in an hour,” he said.

Above the rooftops, the brightly-lit towers of Canary Wharf stood like sentries. An armoured car rumbled past below, its spotlight sweeping the pavements. Helicopters criss-crossed the sky. Ed gave his brush a quick rinse in the jam jar on the windowsill and went over to the wardrobe, where he swapped his jogging bottoms for a pair of black 501 jeans. He pulled a green army surplus combat jacket over his paint-flecked black t-shirt, and laced his feet into a sturdy pair of black leather work boots.

His apartment was an anonymous two-room studio above a newsagent in Millwall, on the upper floor of a converted brown brick terrace, with a mattress on the bare floor and canvasses stacked against a chair by the door. When it was new, in the building boom at the start of the new century, it had been a desirable residence; now, two decades later, it was fucked. The paint had started to flake around the windows, light fittings dangled loose, the ceilings were cracked and stained, food cupboards no longer closed properly. It was as if the house, a Victorian brick terrace, had begun reverting to its pre-redevelopment condition, slowly reassuming its shabby natural state.

Moving to the kitchenette, he retrieved his emergency bag from the cupboard beside the fridge. It was a holdall containing a first aid kit and foil survival blanket, a couple of torches, a gas stove, some teabags, a penknife, and enough dried rations and water purification tablets to last a week. You could buy kits like it anywhere. Since the arches came, people were scared. No-one knew what to make of them.

Ed himself had been pulling double shifts at the taxi ranks. He’d tried throwing himself into his work. He’d taken fares no one else would touch. But with the radio and newspapers reporting new arches opening almost daily, nothing he did, took or drank could blot out the guilt he felt at his brother’s loss. Nor could it dampen his passion for Alice. Try as he might, it was always there, seething away.

An old semiautomatic pistol lay on top of Ed’s survival kit, wrapped in an oiled rag. He’d stolen it from the one-legged Iraq war veteran in the flat down the hall. He peeled off the rag and put the gun in the pocket of his combat jacket. Then he hefted the bag onto his shoulder and took a last look at the half-finished picture on the easel: a messy and expressionistic portrait of Alice as he remembered her on the evening of her wedding to Verne, three years ago, standing on the terrace outside the hotel.

Verne and Alice decided to get married in the autumn, almost a year after they first met, and they asked Ed to be the best man.

Towards the end of the evening, as he stepped out onto the hotel’s terrace for a breath of air, he saw her leaning on the stone balustrade, picking at her skirt.

“You look really good,” he said.

She laughed and flattened the hem down.

“I look like a meringue...” She gave him a sly look. “Hey, Ed. Have you got a spare cigarette?”

“You don’t smoke.”

“Not usually, but tonight all bets are off.”

He pulled a pack from his inside jacket pocket, tapped out a couple and lit them both. He handed one to her.

“Thanks.” She took a hit, and then sat back, trailing curls of blue smoke from her nose.

“Ah, that’s better.”

Behind her, the hotel gardens were dark. The sun had set, leaving the clouds piled like embers on the horizon, the sky purple as a bruise, the moon white as a splinter of bone. Coloured party lights had been strung in the trees and music drifted out through the open doors from the dance floor.

Ed cleared his throat.

“Look, would you like to dance?”

Alice raised her eyebrows. For a moment, she looked like she was going to make a smart remark. Then she dropped the cigarette and smoothed down the front of her wedding dress.

“Okay.”

Ed reached for her hand. He was going to take her inside, but she pulled back. She looked around at the lights and the sky and said, “Here’s fine.”

She held him tight as they started to sway. She had goose bumps on her bare arms and her hair smelled of pine-scented shampoo.

“Tell me,” she murmured. “How’s it going with that girl Verne introduced you to? What’s her name?”

Ed looked away. “Her name’s Gill. We’ve been out a couple of times.”

“And...?”

Ed stopped dancing, feeling suddenly foolish. He let go.

“Oh, she’s nice enough.” He ran a finger round the inside of his collar. “But she’s not as pretty as you.”

Alice lowered her eyes. Inside, the final song wound to its end. The house lights came up on the dance floor.

“Look, I’d better go and find Verne.” She had her hair teased into short curls, her lips and nails painted silver. Her arms were thin and cold, her eyes wide and bright.

She put a hand on his sleeve.

“But thank you,” she said.

Ed stuck out his bottom lip. “What for?”

“I know you have feelings for me, Ed. I know how hard it must have been for you today, but you’ve been great, you really have.”

He looked away.

“Thanks for the dance,” he said.

She paused a moment.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“I expect so.” He forced a smile and shooed her in. “Go!”

Verne’s old farmhouse lay at the end of a lane off the A420. When Ed arrived, he found Alice waiting in the yard in front of the house, with a shotgun in one hand and a backpack in the other.

“Nice car.” She threw the pack onto the back seat. “Where did you get it?”

“From a friend.” He’d stolen the long-wheelbase Land Rover up off the street after a taxi ride to Bethnal Green. It had been pimped out with an engine snorkel for deep water, and black wire grilles to protect the headlamps. It belonged to Grigor the Serbian butcher, and Ed had had his eye on it for weeks.

“Where’s the arch?” he said.

Wind chimes hung on the farmhouse gate. The night air smelled of cut grass, and the stars above were hard and sharp. Alice slid onto the seat beside him, with the shotgun across her knees. She pointed across the yard to a rutted dirt path leading downhill, through the fields.

“It’s down that way.”

He let the handbrake off and they started rolling.

“Is it far?”

Alice fished a band from her pocket and leaned forward, tying her bluish hair into a loose ponytail. Her jeans squeaked on the leather seat. She wore a blue zip-up fleece over a white t-shirt.

“It’s in the paddock at the end of the track, by the river.”

About a mile later, at the bottom of the valley, they bumped off onto a patch of wet ground. Caught in the Land Rover’s headlights was the arch she’d promised him, four metres wide at its base and six tall.

He killed the engine.

“Does anyone else know about this?”

She shook her head. “This is all private property. The only footpath’s on the other side of the river, behind the trees.”

Ed popped the door and climbed out. It was midnight.

“Stay here.” He walked over to the arch. Looking at it made the hairs rise on the back of his neck—a frightening and exhilarating sensation that reminded him of the time he stood, as a backpacking art student in Australia, on the parapet of a single span bridge overlooking a deep river gorge, with a bungee cord lashed around his ankles.

The sides of the arch glowed like amethyst. Hesitantly, he reached out to touch the nearest. It was warm and pleasantly smooth, like candle wax. Intrigued, he walked over and laid his hand on the other, being careful not to step between them.