ANOTHER APOCALYPSE

 

GARETH L. POWELL

 

Gareth is the author of the novels The Recollection and Silversands, both of which were favourably reviewed in The Guardian, and the short story collection The Last Reef, which Morpheus Tales described as “One of the finest collections of SF short stories I have had the privilege of reading.” He is currently working on a new novel for Solaris Books, entitled Ack-Ack Macaque, inspired by his short story of the same name, which won Interzone magazine’s Readers’ Poll for best short story of 2007. You can find him online at www.garethlpowell.com

 

 

1.

 

VILCA’S MEN WERE going to kill him. He tried tolose himself in the improvised warrens of the vertical favelas, but knew it was only a matter of time before they found him. He’d been away too long; his memories of the rat runs and back ways were out of date by at least a couple of decades. In the end, two of his pursuers cornered him on one of the innumerable wire footbridges stretched between the barrios that clung coral-like to both walls of the steep, narrow canyon.

“Stay where you are, Jones.” The short one’s name was Faro. He was a tough young street kid. His elder brother Emilio blocked the other end of the bridge. They would have both been small boys the last time Napoleon Jones had been here; but now they were in their mid-twenties and armed with machetes. Caught between them, he realised he had nowhere left to run. The springy bridge was less than two metres in width and fifty in length. Half a kilometre below, corrugated metal rooftops patchworked the canyon’s rocky floor. Other bridges crisscrossed the gap at various heights. Flyers and cargo zeppelins nosed like cautious fish between them. Shanties crusted both the canyon’s cliff faces, layer upon layer. Lines of laundry drooped from window to window. Cooking fires filled the air with the bitter tang of smouldering wood and plastic. He could hear shouts and screams and children’s voices. Somewhere a young woman sang.

“What do you want?” he said, buying time.

The two kids each took a step onto the wire bridge. Napoleon took hold of the handrails to steady himself.

“We got something for you, from Vilca,” Emilio said.

Napoleon tipped back the brim of his Stetson. “Maybe I don’t want it.”

Faro laughed cruelly. He slapped the flat blade of his machete against the palm of his hand. “Maybe you’re going to get it, whether you want it or not.”

Napoleon risked a peep over the handrail. This canyon was just one of hundreds arranged in a vast, sprawling delta, carved out over millennia by the patient action of wind and water. Like the tentacles of an enormous squid, the canyons stretched from the mountains at one end of the planet’s solitary supercontinent to the sea at the other, providing the only shade in what was otherwise a pitiless, UV-drenched desert.

Looking down, he saw a cargo zeppelin about to pass beneath the bridge, its broad back like the smooth hump of a browsing whale; and felt the walkway shudder beneath his feet as the street kids advanced, weapons raised.

He should never have come back to Nuevo Cordoba. At his age, he should have known better. He looked longingly down the canyon, towards the distant ocean. The wind tugged at his lizardskin coat. If he could only get back to his starship, the Bobcat, floating tethered at the offshore spaceport, he’d be free. He could finally shake this planet’s dust from his boots. As things stood, though, it looked as if he’d be lucky to make it off this bridge alive; or at least in one piece.

He glanced at the approaching thugs. They were closer now. Emilio swung his machete from side-to-side.

“Nowhere to hide?”

Napoleon glanced from one brother to the other. They were almost within striking distance.

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“Shut it,” Faro said.

Below, the zeppelin slid its blunt nose into the shadow of the bridge. Napoleon took the antique flying goggles that hung around his neck and pulled them up over his eyes. Seeing the movement, Emilio stepped forward with a grunt. He scythed his machete around in a powerful swing aimed at Napoleon’s head. Napoleon ducked the blade and came up hard, grasping for the big lad’s arm while the force of the swing still had him off-balance. He slammed Emilio’s wrist against the rail of the bridge, trying to get him to drop the knife. Emilio roared in annoyance and pushed back. The machete came up in a vicious backhand swipe. Napoleon tried to twist out of the way, but the tip of the blade caught him across the right forearm, biting through lizardskin, cotton and flesh.

“Ah!” He staggered back, clutching the stinging wound. He saw more of Vilca’s men arrive. They began to advance across the bridge, and Napoleon knew this was a fight he couldn’t win. As the brothers dropped into fighting crouches on either side of him, ready to hack him to pieces, he braced himself against the handrail.

“Sorry, boys,” he said.

Using his boot heel to push off, he crossed the width of the walkway in two quick steps and launched himself over the opposite rail, into empty air.

 

 

THE WIND TORE at him. His coat flapped. The fall seemed to take forever.

Then his boots hit the top of the zeppelin hard enough to jar his spine. He bounced, sprawling forward in an ungainly tangle of limbs and coattails. For a second, he thought he was going to roll right off the side and fall to his death at the bottom of the canyon. Then his hands and feet found purchase against the fabric and he clung spread-eagled, sucking in great raw lungfuls of cold canyon air.

If he raised his head, he could see, over the curve of the hull, one of the engine nacelles, with the blurred, hissing circle of its black carbon impeller blades. Beyond that, nothing but air and rooftops.

Heart hammering in his chest, he clawed his way back up to the relatively flat surface at the top of the zeppelin. Once there, he rolled onto his back and sat up. He’d skinned his knees and palms. His right arm hurt and his hand and sleeve were slathered and sticky with blood. Worst of all, he’d lost his hat. Still, he was alive. Behind him, Faro and Emilio boggled open-mouthed from the footbridge. He pushed his goggles up onto his forehead and raised a bloody, one-fingered salute.

“So long, fuckers.”

The wind straggled his hair. Staying low to avoid being blown off the airship altogether, he crawled back towards the tail fin and found a maintenance hatch set into the fabric at its base. He pulled the hatch open and climbed down an aluminium ladder into the shadowy interior.

The outer envelope of the airship housed a number of helium gas bags, with walkways and cargo spaces wedged between them. The air was dark and cold in there, like a cave. Moving as quickly as his protesting limbs would allow, Napoleon made his way shakily across a catwalk and down another ladder to the access panel leading to the control gondola slung beneath the main hull. As he dropped into the cabin, the pilot—a scruffy young technician sipping coffee at a cup-strewn computer console—turned to him in amazement.

“Where did you come from?”

Clutching the torn sleeve of his snakeskin coat, blood seeping through his fingers, Napoleon glowered. He pointed forward, through the windshield, at a docking mast protruding from a cluster of warehouses near the base of the canyon’s right-hand wall.

“Take us down, boy,” he said.

 

 

AS SOON AS the zeppelin’s nose nudged the mast, Napoleon Jones was off and running again. He pushed through the narrow stairwells and crowded walkways that formed the streets of the vertical town. His boots splashed through water; broken glass floors of shattered tile. Down here at the base of the favela, water dripped constantly from the upper levels. Strip lights flickered and sizzled; power cables hung in improvised loops. He passed dirty kitchens, tattoo parlours, street dentists. Blanket-wrapped figures slept in alcoves behind steam pipes. He smelled hot, sour plastic from the corner kiosks, where fabbers made shoes and toys from discarded bottles and cans. He turned right, then left, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and Vilca’s men. He moved awkwardly, cradling his hurt arm, trying to keep pressure on the wound.

Reappearing like this, after two decades, had been a mistake. Twenty years ago, he’d been at the top of his game: a celebrated daredevil repeatedly flinging his craft into hyperspace on arbitrary trajectories, just to see where he’d end up. The media called the sport ‘random jumping,’ and it was a dangerous pastime; not all the pilots who took part returned. Those who did, especially those who’d discovered a newly habitable world or the location of an ore-rich asteroid belt, became celebrities. Venture capitalists and would-be entrepreneurs lined up to sponsor them. And in his time, Napoleon Jones had been one of the best and brightest of their number. But he’d been unable to manage the wealth and attention. He fucked up. He developed a tranquilizer dependency and let things slide. He got sloppy. And then one day, he simply disappeared.

Now he was back, he was a fugitive. In his absence, Vilca had gone from a small-time gang boss to de facto ruler of Nuevo Cordoba’s favelas, and he wanted the money Napoleon owed him; money that should have part-financed another random jump into the unknown, but went instead to supporting an extended stay on Strauli, a crossroads world eight light years in the wrong direction.

Napoleon came to the end of a corridor and cut through a laundry area. Hot wet steam filled the air. He squeezed through the narrow spaces between the vats of boiling clothes, searching for another way out. Spilled detergent made the floor slick and slippery. The workers watched him with dull, incurious eyes. They knew better than to get involved. Eventually, he found a hatchway that led into a narrow service duct between one set of buildings and the next. Thick cables ran the length of the floor, beneath a layer of waste paper and discarded packing materials. At the end of the duct, he emerged into daylight. He was on the floor of the canyon now, looking up at the layers of improvised dwellings that towered a hundred metres up the side of the cliff above him.

A tangle of shacks and warehouses covered the ground between him and the vertical settlements on the far wall, clustered to either side of the meltwater stream that ran from the mountains at one end of the canyon to the sea at the other. Napoleon looked left and right, trying to orientate himself. He wasn’t familiar with this part of town. His old stamping grounds were further downstream, towards the port. He’d come this far inland seeking an old flame: the girl he’d ditched twenty years ago, when he’d jumped out of the system en route for Strauli, half-baked on tranquilisers and intending never to return. He brought his ship down in the ocean off the coast, where the canyons met the water, and left it floating there. Then he went looking for her.

Her name was Crystal. He found her in a small room off a darkened landing, half an hour before Vilca’s men found him.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“It’s me, honey. Napoleon.” He took off his hat.

“I know who you are.”

“I’ve come to see you. To see how you are.”

She looked him up and down with contempt.

“You still look exactly the same,” she said.

He forced a smile.

“So do you.”

Crystal gave a snort. “You always were a lousy liar, Jones.” She stepped back from the door, her heels clicking on the vinyl floor. “You can come on in, if you want.”

Napoleon hesitated at the threshold, both hands holding the brim of his hat. The room wasn’t much larger than the bed it contained, and dark; and the air smelled of stale sheets.

“I thought you might have been married.”

“I was, for a while.” Crystal squeezed her hands together. “It didn’t take.”

“What happened?”

She stopped kneading her fingers and wrapped her arms across her ample chest.

“Why the hell do you care?”

Napoleon shrugged.

“Look, I’m sorry—”

“You’re sorry? You stand there all sorry, not having aged at all. While the rest of us have had to live through the past twenty years.”

He held up his hands.

“I just wanted to see how you were.”

Crystal tossed back her mane of red hair.

“I’m fat and middle-aged and alone. Are you happy now?”

Napoleon stepped back onto the landing. While the hyperspace jumps from one star system to the next took the same amount of time as it took light to cross the intervening distance, the jumps themselves felt instantaneous to the crews of the ships making them; so for every light year Napoleon had travelled, a calendar year had worn away here, for Crystal. She’d gone from her mid-twenties to her mid-forties, while he’d only aged by a couple of years.

“I should be going,” he said, regretting the sentimental impulse that had brought him to her door.

Her lip curled. She took hold of the door, ready to close it.

“Yes, go on. Leave. It’s the only thing you’re good at.”

Napoleon backed off another step.

“I can see you’re upset—”

“Oh, just go.”

She closed the door, leaving him standing alone in the gloom of a solitary overhead fluorescent strip. He could hear her sobbing behind the door. The sound gave him a sick, empty feeling.

He replaced his Stetson and, hands in pockets, walked back to the stairwell. From there, he went looking for a bar; but before he could find one, Faro and Emilio found him.

Now, still on the run after his adventures on the zeppelin, and still bleeding heavily from the gash in his arm, Napoleon started making his way through the maze-like shanties on the canyon floor, heading for the transport tube that threaded along the base of the far wall, fifty or so metres away. If he could get there and get on a train, he’d be at the port in no time.

He staggered forward. The sky was a thin strip of blue, high above. Flyers and zeppelins floated like fish in an undersea trench. Down here at the bottom, a thin frost covered everything. The sun rarely penetrated to this depth.

The houses were ramshackle affairs. Some were two or three storeys in height. They looked like pieces fallen from the cliff-hugging favelas looming over them on either side: minor debris presaging a forthcoming avalanche. The houses belonged to mushroom farmers. Between them lay tended rows of edible fungi, like the fingers of dead white hands thrusting up through the damp soil.

Napoleon picked his path with care, sticking close to the houses, avoiding the crops. The last thing he needed was an irate farmer taking pot shots at him; and besides, he didn’t want to get his boots any dirtier than they already were.

He was almost to the river before Vilca’s men caught up with him again. This time, it was four of them in a flyer. They came in low and fast, the flyer’s fans kicking up dirt and rubbish. Napoleon started running as best he could, but he couldn’t move quickly while cradling his arm. Bullets ripped into the ground around him, sending up angry spurts of dust, each one closer than the last.

He made maybe ten metres before something punched through his thigh. The impact spun him around in a graceless pirouette.

He landed on his back in the dirt. The flyer’s howling fans kicked up a maelstrom of dust and grit around him, and he rolled onto his side, trying to curl into a ball, cringing in anticipation. Waiting for the next shot.

 

 

2.

 

THE TRADING SHIP Ameline flashed into existence a thousand kilometres above the inhospitable sands of Nuevo Cordoba. The ship was a snub-nosed wedge, thirty metres across at the stern, narrowing to five at the bow; its paintwork was the faded blue and red livery of the Abdulov trading family. Alone on its bridge, her neural implant hooked into its virtual senses, Katherine Abdulov looked down at the planet beneath, with its deep, fertile oceans and single barren supercontinent. Even from here, she could see the tracery of fissures that made up the canyon system that gave shelter and life to the planet’s human population.

“Any trace of infection?” she asked the ship, and felt it run a sensor sweep, scouring the globe for signs of The Recollection’s all-consuming spores.

> NOTHING I CAN DETECT, AND NO MENTION OF ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS ON THE PLANETARY GRID.

Kat heard the ship’s words in her mind via her neural link, and pursed her lips. For the moment she was relieved, but she knew her relief to be premature. Even if the contagion hadn’t yet spread to this planet, it was almost certainly already on its way, using cannibalised human starships to spread itself along the trade routes from Strauli Quay. She took a moment to remember the other worlds already lost to the unstoppable red tide. Their names burned in her mind: Djatt, Inakpa... Strauli.

She’d seen her home world swallowed by The Recollection; lost most of her family, including her mother, to its insatiable hunger. Now she was out here, at this world on the edge of unknown space, hoping to warn the inhabitants of the approaching threat, and rescue as many of them as she could.

Through the ship’s senses, she felt the arrival of the rest of her flotilla: two dozen fat-arsed freighters, each piloted by a crew of Acolytes, and each with the cargo capacity to transport several hundred refugees.

One by one, they reported in.

“Target the spaceport and the main canyon settlements,” she told them. “Save as many people as you can.”

 

 

HER ONLY PREVIOUS visit to the isolated world of Nuevo Cordoba had taken place years ago—whole decades in local time—during her first trip as an independent trader. That had been back before her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter; back before the coming of The Recollection and the loss of her left arm. She remembered the planet as a corrupt, mean-spirited place, the canyon dwellers made hard and cynical by the harshness of their environment, and lives spent mining the rock or grubbing for mushrooms and lichen. She wondered how they were coping without the arch network. She also remembered one Cordoban in particular: a random hyperspace jumper with whom she’d had a brief affair. She remembered his Mephistophelean beard; his long hair tied back in a dark ponytail; his Stetson hat and lizardskin coat. The way his skin smelled of cologne and old leather.

On a whim, she said, “Scan the port for the Bobcat’s transponder.”

> ALREADY LOCATED. THE BOBCAT IS CURRENTLY FLOATING IN THE PARKING ZONE OFF THE CONTINENT’S WESTERN COAST. DO YOU WANT TO MAKE CONTACT?

Kat settled back in her couch. She drummed on the instrument console with the tungsten fingers of her prosthetic hand.

“Just see if he’s on board.”

The Ameline opened a comms channel. Through her neural link, Kat felt it squirt a high-density info burst at the other ship. The reply—a similarly compressed screech of data—came a couple of seconds later, delayed by distance.

> HE’S NOT THERE AT THE MOMENT.

“Can the ship patch us through to his implant?”

> I’M AFRAID NOT.

“Any mention of him on the Grid?”

The Ameline accessed the planetary communications net and ran a quick search.

> 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.”

 

 

UNDER 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.

 

SHE 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.

 

 

THE AMELINE 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.”

 

 

WEAPON 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.

“I don’t think so.”

The kid scowled.

“Give me the shotgun or I won’t take you to Vilca.”

She looked him up and down: just another armed street thug with bad teeth and delusions of competence. A few years ago, she would have been intimidated; now she couldn’t care less.

She cleared her throat.

“You saw my ship land?”

The kid’s eyes narrowed further.

“Yeah.”

Kat took a step closer to the razor wire gate.

“You saw its fusion motors?”

The barest nod.

“They spew out star fire, son. That’s fourteen zillion degrees centigrade. What do you think will happen if I let them hover over your little citadel?”

Behind her, she heard the Ameline’s engines whine into life. The ship was monitoring her conversation via her neural implant, and this was its idea of theatrics. Suppressing a smile, Kat took another step forward, so that her stomach pressed up against the spikes on the wire gate. At the same time, she brought the shotgun to bear, pointing the barrel at the bridge of the kid’s nose.

“Open up,” she growled.

The kid’s eyes went wide. He knew he was out of his depth. He looked at her, then over her shoulder at the rising wedge of the Ameline. She saw him swallow. Without taking his eyes from the looming ship, he reached for a button inside the door and the gate drew back. Kat stepped forward, shotgun still pointed at his midriff.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Faro.”

She raised a finger and waggled it, indicating he should turn around.

“Never try to out-negotiate a trader, Faro.”

 

 

FARO LED HER down a set of pleated metal steps. His trainers dragged on each step. She kept the shotgun trained on the small of his back.

“How old are you?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. His vest and jeans hung off him, several sizes too large for his half-starved junkie frame.

“Down ’ere,” he muttered.

At the foot of the steps was an iron door. Beyond that, a poorly-carpeted corridor that stank of incense. Faro flapped an arm at a pair of rough pine doors that formed the corridor’s far end.

“Vilca’s office.”

Kat gave him a prod with the shotgun barrel.

“Why don’t you knock for me?”

She followed him to the doors.

“Go on,” she said.

Faro tapped reluctant knuckles against the wood. From inside, a voice called: “What is it?”

Faro glanced back at Kat, his eyes wide, unsure what to do. She nudged him in the back with the tip of the shotgun.

“Open the door,” she suggested.

Inside, the office was as rough and raw as the rest of the building, but the rugs on the floor were thicker and newer than elsewhere, and there were curtains at the windows. A heavy-set bald man sat behind a scuffed steel desk.

“I said I wasn’t to be disturbed. Who the devil are you?”

Kat took Faro by the shoulder and pushed him aside. She drew herself up.

“My name is Katherine Denktash Abdulov, master of the trading vessel Ameline and scion of the Strauli Abdulovs. Are you Earl Vilca?”

The fat man frowned.

“You’re a trader?”

Kat lowered the shotgun so that the barrel pointed at the floor.

“As I said, I represent the Abdulov trading family.”

The man eased back in his chair. He gave her an appraising look.

“And what can I do for you, Miss Abdulov?”

Kat took a pace towards the desk.

“That’s Captain Abdulov, and you have a friend of mine. I want him released.”

Vilca chuckled. He folded his hands over the bulge of his stomach. Gold rings glistened on his sausage-like fingers.

“Very good,” he said approvingly. “I do so like a woman who comes straight to the point.”

According to the profile the Ameline had been able to piece together from information retrieved from the local Grid, Earl Vilca was one of the most powerful men on Nuevo Cordoba. His operation dealt in drugs, prostitution and extortion. He had politicians and high-ranking police officers in his pocket, and a seemingly endless supply of teenage muscle. On a world of high-piled shanties and meagre mushroom harvests, he lived like a king. But when Kat looked down at him, all she saw was a white, bloated parasite: a puffed-up hoodlum in a cheaply-fabbed suit.

“I know who you are, and what you are,” she said. “And I’m not impressed. So if you’d be kind enough to release Napoleon Jones, I’ll be on my way.”

On the opposite side of the desk, Vilca pursed his lips. He drummed his fingers against his belt buckle.

“Jones, eh? Well, well, well.” He shook his head with a smile. “You’ve come bursting in here to rescue Napoleon Jones? He’s nothing but a two-bit hustler. He used to be a good pilot, twenty years ago, but he’s all washed up now. What do you want with him?”

Kat gripped the shotgun.

“As I said, he’s a friend.”

Vilca narrowed his eyes. He ran his tongue across his bottom lip. Then he sat forward, hands resting on the desk.

“All right, Captain. I’ll make you a trade. Jones for some information.”

“What kind of information?”

The fat man waved his hand at the sky.

“I hear things. Rumours. Shipments have disappeared. Scheduled deliveries from Strauli have not arrived. Ships are overdue.”

Kat felt her pulse quicken. She knew where this was going, and she didn’t have time to waste playing games.

“Strauli has fallen,” she said bluntly. “Inakpa, Djatt and probably several others.”

Vilca blinked at her.

“Fallen?”

“Gone, destroyed. No more.”

The man’s brows drew together. He plainly didn’t believe her.

“I am serious, Captain. I have been losing money—”

Kat stepped right up to the desk and glared down at him.

“They’re gone.”

“Gone?” Vilca’s cheeks flushed. His fingers brushed his lower lip. “But what could do such a thing?”

Kat used her implant to signal the Ameline.

“I’ve asked my ship to download all the information we have to the local Grid. See for yourself. It’s all tagged with the keyword ‘Recollection.’”

Vilca gave her a long look. He was getting flustered.

“Go on,” she said. “Check it out. I’ll wait here.”

“No tricks?”

Kat nodded in the direction of Faro, still cowering in the corner of the room.

“Your boy here can keep an eye on me.”

Vilca looked up and to the right, accessing the cranial implant that connected him to the vast cloud of data that formed the planetary Grid. Kat stood watching him. She shifted her weight from one hip to the other. After a few seconds, she saw the colour drain from his cheeks. She knew what he was seeing. She’d seen it herself firsthand: the destruction of Djatt, the boiling red cloud that seemed to emerge from the fabric of space itself, closing like a fist around the planet.

His eyes snapped back into focus.

“Madre de Dios.”

“Quite.”

“What can we do?”

“Give me Jones.”

Vilca’s eyes narrowed to slits. “What’s to stop me killing you and using your ship to escape?”

Kat hefted the shotgun.

“You try to kill me and I’ll use my ship’s fusion exhaust to scour this canyon back to the bedrock.”

Vilca gave a snort. He seemed to have recovered his composure.

“You wouldn’t. You’re not the type.”

Kat leaned toward him.

“Check the data, Vilca. Look at the fall of Strauli Quay.”

“Strauli...?”

The man’s eyes flicked away for a second.

“You fired on the Quay?”

Kat set her jaw. “I had no choice.”

“But there were more than a million—”

She raised her shotgun, pointing the barrel at his chest.

“Do you still think I’m bluffing?”

Vilca swallowed. She could see a damp sheen on his bald pate. After a moment, he let his shoulders slump.

“All right,” he said. “You win. Faro, would you please fetch Mister Jones?”

Kat realised she’d stepped too close to Vilca’s desk. She hadn’t kept track of the boy. As she turned, she saw him raise his gun. Her finger yanked the trigger. The shotgun jumped in her hand. Faro jerked backward, chest shredded by three rapid-fire blasts. She turned back to Vilca, and caught the fat man in the act of reaching for the pistol in his desk drawer. She fired into the surface of the desk and he jerked his hand back, eyes wide.

“Okay, that’s enough!”

Kat’s pulse battered in her head. She didn’t know if she was angry with Vilca, Faro or herself.

“Get Jones up here, right now!”

Vilca knew he had been defeated. He sent an order via his implant. Moments later, a pair of wide-eyed teenagers brought Napoleon Jones to the door. They were half-carrying him. He couldn’t walk by himself. They looked down at Faro’s smoking corpse and turned questioning eyes on their boss. Vilca waved them away with a flap of his meaty paw.

“These people are leaving,” he said.

Kat looked at Jones. His arm and leg were bandaged. His coat was torn. The antique goggles still hung around his neck.

“Kat?”

“I’ve got a ship up top. We’re leaving.”

Jones shook his head, as if trying to clear it. He’d been beaten. His lips and eyes were swollen; his moustache caked with dried blood.

“What about Vilca?”

The man behind the desk looked up at him.

“You should not have come back, seňor. People love a daredevil because they are always awaiting his death. If he lives too long, well”—he spread his hands—“they become resentful.”

Kat pulled on Napoleon’s sleeve.

“Leave him. He knows it’s all over.” She picked Faro’s pistol from the dead boy’s fingers.

“What’s over?”

“His little empire.” She glared at the fat man. “This whole planet.”

Vilca put his head in his hands.

“Go now,” he said.

Kat put an arm around Napoleon and he leaned his weight on her shoulder. They backed out of the room. When they reached the door at the far end of the corridor, the one that led to the roof, Vilca raised his head.

“Captain?” he said, his voice hoarse.

Kat paused.

“Yes?”

“What can we do? About The Recollection, I mean.”

She took a deep breath. She owed him nothing. Further down the canyon, the freighters were filling their holds with refugees. She’d done all she could.

She looked him in the eye.

“Pray it doesn’t take you alive.”