> It's trying to communicate with us. Shall I put it on speaker?

Kat gave an involuntary shiver. "No." She didn't want to hear the trapped souls wailing in the depths of the swarm. She was afraid that now it had eaten its way through the Quay, she might recognise some of their voices. Instead, she opened her channel to Ed Rico.

"Do you see it?"

"Yes, Captain."

"Kill it for me."

Wrapped in the warm, slippery folds of the Dho Weapon, Ed turned his attention to the cluster of nanomachinery between him and the planet. Through the weapon's heightened senses, he perceived the tiny blood-coloured machines as they went about their business, swarming and multiplying. They were tearing apart the carcass of an unlucky shuttlecraft, converting its raw mass into newly-minted copies of themselves.

Looking closer, he perceived the net of signals that linked them together. It was a seething, flickering web of data that encircled the globe, connecting this clump of machines to all the others in the Strauli system, whether floating in orbit, swarming over the remains of the Quay, or chewing into the rock and soil of the planet's surface. As a network, it had no centre, no hierarchy. The individual machines were simply cells in a distributed organism. The consciousness of The Recollection lived in the interplay of data between them: simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

Contemplating this, Ed felt the mind of the Torch curl into his skull with a silky, feline grace. He sensed its feral eagerness, its drive to fulfill its purpose. The feeling was heady and contagious. All the mad soldiers, Serbian butchers, and weird otter creatures were as nothing now. For the first time in his life he felt empowered and confident. Almost omnipotent.

Target acquired.

The weapon worked by plucking wormholes from the quantum foam. One end it placed in the heart of the nearest star, while the other it aimed at the target he selected. When activated, the wormhole behaved like a flamethrower, firing a superheated jet of fusing solar hydrogen.

Thirteen million degrees centigrade.

And all he had to do was reach out...

The Ameline bucked. A pencil-thin line of fire shot from its bows, bright enough to blind an unprotected eye. In the quarter-second of its duration, the beam seemed to sear the very fabric of the sky itself. It punched through the thin cloud ahead, flashing the swarming machines in its path to plasma. Over the next second and a half, it fired a further three times, slicing and dicing.

> Holy fucking shit!

On the bridge, Kat rubbed her eyes to get rid of the stark violet afterimages, giving thanks for the Ameline's filters.

> Target destroyed.

With a shaking hand, she opened a line to the fleet.

"Okay," she said, trying to keep her voice steady, "You all have your coordinates. Get going."

She stayed high, watching them drop away, scattering across the face of the planet, their noses glowing cerise as they entered the atmosphere. Looking down at them, she felt a sense of trepidation. As far as she was aware, there had never been a gathering of so many jump-capable ships. And they were trying to evacuate an entire planet! In all of human history, there had never been an operation to compare. According to Francis Hind, the Dho had been planning it for centuries, training their Acolyte pilots in secret, planning the best way to retrieve as many human souls as possible. Even so, there was so much that could go wrong; and with only a thousand ships, they wouldn't be able to save more than a fraction of Strauli's sixty million inhabitants-even if they managed two or three trips before the planet was overrun.

When she was sure they were all safely on their way, she turned to Verne.

"Have you located the hospital?"

In the co-pilot's chair, he glanced up from his instruments.

"Yes, but there's a problem. It's on the edge of an infected area."

"Has it been overrun?"

"Not yet, but it's going to be close."

Kat closed her eyes and fought to keep her breathing steady. If they were going to pull this off, she had to remain calm and focused, ready to respond to whatever The Recollection threw their way.

"Okay," she said. "Let's do it."

She tapped a command into her pilot's console. The Ameline tipped over onto its nose and fired its engines.

> Hold tight.

They hit the atmosphere at seven kilometres a second, and the ship began to shudder. Almost immediately, the friction raised the temperature on the bow's outer skin to well over sixteen hundred degrees centigrade, creating an envelope of ionized air around the craft, interfering with their communications and cutting them off from the rest of the fleet for a little over three minutes. In the dead time, Kat turned to Verne.

"You know, I'm going to have this baby," she said matter-of-factly.

Verne gave her a look.

"No," she said, "I mean it. As soon as we get back to the Ark, I'll have one of the doctors re-implant her."

"Are you sure this is the best time?"

Kat swallowed. "It's the end of the world," she said. "If I don't do it now, I mightn't get another chance."

Verne's forefinger stroked the bridge of his nose.

"Okay," he said.

Kat smiled.

"I want to call her Sylvia, after my aunt."

Verne raised an eyebrow.

"What if it's a boy?"

Kat shook her head. It was impossible to tell the sex of the foetus at this early stage, but she had a feeling.

"It won't be. But if it is, we'll call him Victor."

The buffeting on the hull eased. The display screens came back online.

> Comms restored.

"Sit-rep?"

> We've lost two of the freighters. The rest are closing on their designated targets.

"What's our distance to the hospital?"

> Six hundred kilometres. ETA four minutes.

"Okay, bring us in low and fast. Vic... I mean, Verne, you're with me."

Kat prised herself from her seat and scrambled down the ladder to the corridor connecting the bridge to the passenger lounge. Verne came behind her. When she reached the foot, she paused to select two chunky handguns from the equipment locker. As she strapped their holsters to the thighs of her ship suit, she regretted the loss of her assault rifle on Djatt. She had the uncomfortable feeling that if they were going to survive the next half an hour, they were going to need every bit of firepower they could muster.

Coming in over the darkened islands, approaching the coast, Ed stabbed each of the red blooms they passed over, lancing them with beams of incandescent fury, drawn from the raging heart of a star.

The landscape rolled below him like a canvas.

The weapon was his brush.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE.

GNARL.

Back on the Ark, Toby Drake stood with Harris and the Acolyte, Hind. They observed the deployment of the fleet via a stylised two-dimensional map displayed on the upper surface of a glass table in the human quarters. Toby had his hand over his mouth. His stomach churned.

"I wish I'd gone with them," he muttered.

Hind gave him a stern look. Beneath the black hood of his robe, his skin looked thin and pale, his cheeks like stretched sheets of scraped vellum.

"Our hosts have another task in mind for you," he said. "Come with me."

He led Toby out of the room. Harris watched them leave from beneath shaggy brows.

"This way." Hind set off along the corridor that led to the workstation from which Toby had spent so many years studying the Gnarl at the Ark's heart.

"Look," he said, as they stepped into the alcove, with its trestle tables and ranks of instruments.

Toby craned forward, hands pressed on the glass of the floor-to-ceiling window. Below, a group of Dho stood in a wide circle on the cavern floor, ringing the pulsating Gnarl that floated in the centre of the room. Their horns were tipped forward in attitudes of worship and deference. They seemed impervious to its writhing chemical vapours.

"What are they doing?"

"Communing."

Hind did something to the frame of the window, and the glass slid back, allowing the cavern air to swirl in around them. The hairs on Toby's arms rose. He smelled burnt hair and cinnamon, and heard a fizzing crackle like the sound of a badly-tuned radio.

"Over the past quarter of a century, you've done everything we've asked of you, Mr Drake," Hind said. "You gave up your home and your career, even the woman you loved, to come here and study with us. And now, I think you've earned the right to know the truth."

Toby took a step back, away from the edge of the window frame. The drop to the cavern floor was at least twelve metres.

"What truth?"

"The nature of the Gnarl."

Hind reached into the folds of his robe and produced a child's toy: a small, grey plastic elephant.

"Do you know the old Indian story of the blind men and the elephant?" he asked.

Toby shook his head.

Hind held up the toy.

"Once upon a time in India, six blind men were asked to describe an elephant. The one who felt the trunk said the elephant was like a tree branch. The one who felt its leg said it was like a pillar. The one who felt its tail thought it felt like a rope, and so on. Not one of them perceived the whole creature."

He handed the toy to Toby, who took it and turned it over in his hand, examining it.

"So, the Gnarl is the elephant?"

Hind nodded.

"Good," he said.

"And I'm one of the blind men?"

Hind smiled. "We're all blind. At least, we're all incapable of perceiving the Gnarl in its entirety. What we see here," he gestured through the open window, "forms merely one aspect of the whole. The Gnarl at the centre of the Bubble Belt; the arch network; the Torch; even parts of the Dho themselves: they are all facets of the same object, viewed from different angles in space and time."

Toby closed his fist around the plastic elephant.

"I don't understand."

Hind wrapped his hands together in the folds of his loose sleeves.

"Nor should you. Like the blind men in the story, we lack the faculties to comprehend the entirety of what we've encountered."

In the centre of the cavern, the Gnarl had begun to beat like an immense heart. Below, the Dho began to chant, their voices full of clicks and pops.

"I'm afraid you've been on something of a wild goose chase," Hind said. "When the Dho asked you to study the Gnarl, they had no expectation of you discovering anything of its nature. At least, nothing significant."

Toby felt himself bridle.

"Then what have I been doing for the past twenty-four years?"

Hind smiled.

"You are the one who has been studied." He took a step towards the lip of the open floor-to-ceiling window. "As you peered deeper into the Gnarl, so the Gnarl peered into you. It learned from you, and became accustomed and attuned to you."

Toby glanced at the waxy sphere. For a moment, he thought he could feel each of its pulsations in his chest; then he realised that its beats mirrored the rhythm of his heart.

"I thought this was an engine, a power source..."

"It's a lot more than that." Standing on the lip of the window, high above the cavern floor, Hind unfurled his arms, throwing them wide.

"This is an intelligence we can't hope to comprehend," he said, raising his voice over the chanting, "existing in quantum states we can barely recognize. But it is alive. It has wants and needs. And enemies."