CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

SUNBURN

 

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 and narrowing to five at the bow, its paintwork 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 comprising 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, yet knew such 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 snakeskin coat. The way his skin smelled of cologne and old leather.

 

 

PROMPTED BY THE memory, 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 feeling winded. She’d been half-joking when she asked for the scan. She hadn’t actually expected him to be here. Swallowing down an unwelcome flutter, she drummed 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’ 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 cheek.

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 adrenaline; 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 vaporised 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 CASUALTIES.

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.