"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?"

> I isolated it in the main core. It can't get out.

Victor broke in: "Can we talk to it?"

> I've already established preliminary contact.

Kat sat forward. She said, "Can you tell us what it is, what it wants?"

> As I said, The Recollection is a swarm of nano-scale machinery. The individual machines are not themselves conscious, but each contributes towards the intelligence of the whole. The closest analogy I can find is that of an ant colony. On their own, the individual ants are mindless and vulnerable, but acting together, they're capable of performing complex feats of engineering.

"So it's conscious?" Victor asked.

> After a fashion.

"And we're holding that consciousness in Grid Storage?"

> No. What we've got is a simplified, much reduced copy. It had to compress itself to transmit through Captain Abdulov's implant.

"Is it active?"

> Its primary mission seems to be to collect and store as much information as possible. We're holding complete copies of the Strauli and Vertebrae Beach Grids, so while it's busy digesting those, I expect it'll be as happy as a pig in shit.

Kat pulled herself upright in her chair.

"Open a channel," she said.

> Are you sure?

"Yes. I want to talk to this motherfucker."

> Okay. Brace yourselves.

For a second silence reigned on the Ameline's bridge as the speakers held only the hiss of dead air. Then, without warning, an earsplitting howl filled the room.

Kat slapped her hands to her ears.

"Turn it off!"

Immediately, the ship cut the feed.

> Sorry.

Ears still ringing, Kat lowered her hands and let out a long, shuddering breath. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest. Even while flinching from the howl, she'd thought she could hear within it the individual screams and cries of a million tormented souls: an earsplitting confluence of agony and fear.

In the copilot's couch, Victor rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked ashen.

"Christ," he said weakly. "What was that?"

> That was The Recollection.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

THE WILLIAM PILGRIM HOSTEL FOR DISPLACED TIME TRAVELLERS.

The soldiers were polite but firm. Ed and Alice were searched and then put in the back of the half-track truck.

Alice said, "Where are they taking us?"

Ed didn't know.

One of the younger soldiers leaned over the edge of the cliff and looked down at Krous's body, lying smashed among the boulders and the waves.

"It's too bad about your friend. What happened to him?"

Ed and Alice exchanged a meaningful glance.

Alice said, "He slipped."

The soldier took one last look at the body, then shrugged and climbed in with them. He looked about Ed's age. He wore green and brown camouflage and carried a black assault rifle.

"You came through the arch in the cave?"

"Yes."

The man scratched under his chin, at the strap of his helmet.

"We don't get many people coming through that one. There are too many predators on the other side. To be honest, that's why we left it where it was, instead of dragging it into town with the others." He pulled a canteen from his belt. "Do you want some water?"

Alice declined, Ed accepted.

"Where are we?" he asked, after coughing on his first mouthful. "I mean what planet are we on?"

"You're on Strauli, sir." The soldier took the canteen back, wiped the rim on his sleeve, and refastened the lid. Ed looked at Alice. The name meant nothing to either of them.

"So you have other arches?" Ed asked.

The soldier gave a curt nod. "Hundreds of them. The ones we could move, we've collected together at the Downport, on the edge of town. The rest, like the one you came through, they're stuck."

The truck's engine shook into life and they started moving. Through the flap in the back of the canvas, Ed watched as they rolled through the grasslands, and over heather and bracken.

"I'm Ed," he said at length. "This is Alice."

"Kelly. Corporal Kelly. You guys English?"

"Yes. We're looking for my brother. He's a British bloke, about my height, wears glasses. He probably came through here about ten years ago?"

Kelly shook his head.

"No use asking me, sir. I only work the arches, picking up waifs and strays like yourselves. I don't get involved with the civilians."

As night fell, they came to the edge of a city. The lights of the downtown skyscrapers burned brightly in the desert night. Holograms shimmered in the air above them. Spaceships came and went from a landing strip. Ed and Alice stared, open-mouthed. The skyscrapers reminded Ed of the office blocks of Canary Wharf, as seen from the window of his Millwall flat-yet these were taller and sleeker, and more numerous. The surrounding buildings were lower: apartment blocks, hotels, factories. Those by the spaceport were squat and utilitarian. Some were prefab units, others repurposed shipping containers and fuel tanks, with bright neon signs fizzing above the doors and windows hacked into their sides. Ed saw department stores, noodle bars, coffee houses. The sounds and smells of the street reached him through the open flap. He heard music, voices and laughter. Headily, he inhaled the smoky cooking aromas of a dozen different cuisines.

Alice said, "I wish I had my camera."

Ed didn't bother to reply. He was lost in it all. As a city boy, the street called to him. After fighting through barren deserts and empty grasslands to get here, the alleys and shop fronts felt like home. He longed to join the well-wrapped men and women on the crowded pavements, to lose himself in the hustle and bustle of the night.