"Where?" she said.

> The individual machines are too small to resolve at these distances. But you may be able to make out some of the larger clumps here, and here.

The ship magnified a couple of areas near the falling ruin. Squinting, Kat made out a pair of irregular red stains falling toward the planet.

"That's it?"

> Much of the infection was destroyed, but some escaped. That which isn't actively converting the remains of the Quay is already on its way down to the planet's surface.

"Will it survive reentry?"

> It survived three nuclear blasts.

"Damn." Kat ground her palm into her forehead. "What are we going to do?"

> There's not much we can do. We don't have any weapons, and we're low on fuel. If we followed it down to the surface, we wouldn't have enough to get airborne again.

Kat let out a breath. "Do we have enough to get to the Dho Ark?"

> Barely.

She took a last, lingering look at the fat crescent of Strauli. On the daylight side, the oceans shone a rich, wholesome blue, dotted with high, white clouds, scattered with green islands. On the nighttime side, city lights traced the coastlines. It looked so peaceful and perfect, and yet all she saw when she looked at it was the terrible red cloud that had loomed over Djatt. She thought of her mother and father, her aunts, uncles and cousins. She'd sent the footage from Djatt as a warning signal. Now she hoped they'd find a way to escape the coming horror.

"Set course," she said. "Jump when ready."

> Aye-aye, Captain.

In her gut, she felt the engines come online, their capacitors ramping up for the short hop to the Ark.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE.

THE TORCH THAT BURNS THE SKY.

Upon arrival at the Dho Ark, Kat Abdulov stayed with the Ameline to supervise repairs and refueling, while Verne and Alice retired to one of the ship's cabins to talk. Ed found himself surrounded by Acolytes and marched to a crystal elevator, accompanied by Drake and Hind.

"Where are we going?" he asked, hands in the pockets of his green combat jacket.

Drake regarded him with wide, sympathetic brown eyes.

"Not far."

The elevator doors closed and the car dropped rapidly into the depths of the crystal Ark. Ed looked down. Through the floor, he could see the lift shaft fall away into seemingly infinite darkness. At his shoulder, Drake said, "You'll get used to it."

Ed looked up from the floor and shrugged.

"It doesn't bother me."

Drake gave a rueful snort, the trace of a smile. "It bothered the hell out of me, the first time I rode in one of these things."

Ed saw a light rising to meet them, and then the elevator dropped into a bright cavern the size of a warehouse. He raised his hand to shade his eyes from the sudden brightness. The floor of the room was polished rock, bare save for something roughly the size and shape of a Volkswagen Beetle, which sat on a plinth in the exact centre of the cavern.

"What's that?" he said.

Behind him, Francis Hind leaned forward.

"That, my son, is the reason we've brought you here."

On the opposite wall, a second elevator car matched their descent. As far as Ed could make out, it contained a single robed figure wearing a weirdly-spiked helmet.

"Ah," Drake said. "One of our hosts."

They reached the floor and the doors opened. The air in the cavern was cold and dry. Drake and the Acolytes stood unmoving, their breath steaming. Drake gave Ed a nudge.

"Go ahead," he said.

Ed looked at him. "Aren't you coming?"

The other man shook his head regretfully.

"I'm afraid not," he said. "Much as I'd love the chance to inspect that thing, this is for you, and you alone."

He gently pushed Ed forward. With his hands still in the pockets of his combat jacket, Ed stepped out onto the floor of the cavern and turned to watch the crystal elevator as it accelerated back up into the ceiling.

When it had disappeared into the shaft from whence it came, he turned and started to walk toward the object on the plinth. On the far side of the room, the horned figure did likewise, seeming to glide as the hem of its robe brushed the floor. As it got closer and closer, he slowly realised that it wasn't a man at all: the body under the robe seemed to be proportioned all wrong, and the 'helmet' came down to the creature's shoulders without the benefit of a neck.

This must be one of the Dho, Ed thought, trying to remember the little he'd gleaned about them in his time on Strauli, doing the Downport hustle. All he knew was all that anyone else really knew: that the Dho were aliens; that the Ark had been in the Strauli system for a thousand years before the first humans stumbled through the arch network; and that in nearly four hundred years, only a handful of humans had ever met one face-to-face.

"Welcome, Edward," the creature said, in a voice composed chiefly of clicks and scrapes. Ed stopped walking. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets, trying to look relaxed.

"Call me Ed," he said.

The Dho stood at least a foot taller than him. Its robe was the colour of the night sky, its outline pregnant with asymmetrical lumps and protrusions beneath the fabric.

"Do you know why you are here, Ed?"

From the roots of its short, spiky front horns, wet black eyes regarded him. They looked like prunes swimming in their own juice. Ed shivered.

"I've no idea," he said truthfully.

The Dho glided forward another pace. Its bony head reminded him of the fly-covered sheep's skull he'd found as a child on the outskirts of Cardiff, in the woods up behind his school playing field.

"You are here because you are an artist." The object on the plinth had the same black texture as the creature's robe. As he watched, the Dho extended a limb towards the lumpy mass and a cavity opened in response.

"Crawl inside," the creature said.

Ed leant forward. He peered doubtfully into the hole.

"In there?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

The Dho let forth a stream of irritated clicks and whirrs, sounding to Ed much the way he imagined a swarm of locust would sound if amplified.

"We call this 'The Torch,'" the creature husked. "It is a weapon, the most powerful weapon we possess."

The hole looked uncomfortably organic. It was lined with a pale, greasy-looking material that seemed to shift and undulate as Ed watched it.

"And you want me to operate it?"

"Yes."

"Me?"

"You are an artist, Edward Rico. You have enviable depth perception. You are used to visualizing abstract shapes in three dimensional space." It started to glide around the edge of the plinth towards him.

Ed backed away. "I'm not a soldier. I'm not even very good at computer games."

"The Torch is best wielded by one with the soul of an artist. It does not respond well to professional soldiers. It is a weapon designed purely for defense."

Ed took his hands out of his pockets. He said, "How do you know anything about my soul?"

The creature stopped and clicked to itself as if surprised.

"The arch network records and encodes information about everything it transmits. Did you not know this? It stores the quantum states of every creature passing through its portals. As soon as you passed through the first arch, we knew all there was to know about you, right down to the quantum level, and we judged you an ideal candidate. You may have made mistakes in your life, Edward, but by hurling yourself into the arch network in search of your brother, you have shown that you are capable of acts of great courage and selflessness."

Ed looked away. "But why just me? There must be other people better qualified for this sort of thing."

The Dho made a mournful scraping sound. "There were other candidates, other men and women from Earth, but they died, or wandered off and got lost. You are the only one to make it all the way here."

Ed took a deep breath. He rubbed his chin.

"Drake said you wanted me to stop this Recollection."

"That is correct."

He jerked a thumb at the cavity in the Torch.

"And this'll do it, will it?" He shuddered. "If I climb into this thing, I'll be able to stop it."

The creature inclined its head, tipping its bony horns.

"We can but try."

Ed slid in feet first, skin crawling. Where it brushed his hands and face, the lining of the hole felt warm and pliable, like grease or candle wax.

"All the way in," said the Dho, watching.

Ed muttered under his breath.

"Why am I doing this?"

He wriggled his shoulders, inching his way deeper, until his head dropped below the rim of the hole. Almost immediately, the lining began to compress around him, hugging his arms and legs with a soft, but insistent pressure. He'd never suffered from claustrophobia, but now it was all he could do not to try to thrash his way free. His chest rose and fell as he gasped in air.

"Relax," said the Dho. "The Torch is becoming accustomed to you."

Ed swallowed. His fists were bunched at his sides.

"What do I do?"

"Just lie still. Whatever happens, just lie still."

Ed felt something touch his cheek. The lining had extruded hair-fine filaments of slippery white material that reached for his face like wires. He tried to jerk his head away, but found he was pinned in place, unable to move. With agonizing slowness, the questing filaments explored his face. He felt one push into his left ear, another slide into his nostril. Another two insinuated themselves greasily into his eye sockets, sliding through his tightly-squeezed eyelids into the soft flesh beneath his eyeballs. He wanted to scream, but there were already wires in his mouth, reaching down into his throat, making him gag.

For an instant, every nerve in his body flared with excruciating pain.

And then there was silence.

Space opened up around him. He saw the whole Strauli system laid out before him: the Ark orbiting its gas giant; Strauli and the radioactive wreckage of the Quay; individual ships; asteroids; comets; space junk. Everything was there, laid out and labeled like pieces on a chess board. All he had to do was select a target and he knew the Torch would do the rest. He could feel it behind his eyes, twisting itself around his thoughts like an affectionate tiger; as vast, powerful and unpredictable as the ocean.

I have waited such a long time, it seemed to be saying. Such a long time. But now you're here.

And the further it dug into him, the more wonders it showed him. He saw himself from the outside, saw his whole stupid, dust bowl life lain out like a flowchart, one poor decision leading inexorably on to the next, and the next. A bell rang in his mind. He re-experienced his childhood, felt his mother's soothing hand, his father's chin stubble. Re-lived the pain of their loss. Saw Verne. Saw Alice on the day he'd first met her. Was shown every wrong turn he'd ever made, every chance he'd missed or let slide. Every knock he'd taken. For one brief instant he was simultaneously present in every individual second of his life. The whole thing whirled around him, and then once more, there was silence.

He felt calm. Raw and naked, but calm. All his regrets and hang-ups were gone, washed away from the core of his being, leaving in their place only two rock-hard certainties: Firstly, he loved Alice. Really loved her. Loved her in a way he'd been too stupid to admit to himself.

Secondly, he was also in love with this outrageous, extraordinarily eldritch weapon, and together, they were really going to fucking kill something.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO.

KICKING ASS.