The Recollection

by Gareth L. Powell

  “But we were only on that beach for a few minutes,” he said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MEDINA

  Kat lay in her bunk, looking at the curved metal ceiling of her cabin. Toby Drake lay with his cheek in the hollow of her shoulder, his skin dark against hers, glossy with drying sweat. His breath was warm on her chest.

  The ship scratched at the edge of her awareness.

  > Have you quite finished?

  “What do you want?”

  > We’re docking in fifteen minutes. Perhaps you should get some clothes on?

  “Oh, leave me alone.”

  Drake stirred and blinked up at her.

  “Pardon?”

  Her palm soothed the damp, prickly hairs at the nape of his neck.

  “I’m talking to the ship.” She extracted her arm and sat upright, letting the sheet fall from her chest.

  “I have to get back to the bridge,” she said, trying to sound professional. She didn’t know what she wanted. She put one arm across her chest and the other hand to her throat. She felt suddenly, stupidly vulnerable. She hadn’t let her guard down like this since Victor. She hadn’t let anyone get this close.

  Drake scratched his ears and yawned. “What time is it?”

  Kat checked the display in her right eye. “We’ve got about a quarter of an hour.”

  Nearly home.

  She had butterflies in her stomach and felt like a child again. Blushing furiously, she reached for her clothes. Drake sat up in bed, watching her. “I can’t believe we’re there already.” He shook his head. “Seven light years in six hours, it’s amazing.”

  Kat wriggled awkwardly into her flight suit.

  “It wasn’t really six hours,” she said.

  He looked up at her. “It wasn’t?”

  Kat fastened her suit and brushed it down with her hand. The skin-tight material didn’t leave her feeling any less exposed, but somehow she drew comfort from it and her confidence returned.

  “No,” she said. “We spent most of that time manoeuvring. The jump itself took half a second.”

  Drake looked thoughtful.

  “Of course, it was longer than that, though, wasn’t it?”

  Kat walked to the door. She said, “You’re a physicist, you know how it works. Half a second to us, seven long years to the rest of the universe.”

  Kat met her father at a café in the Medina section of Strauli Quay, on a first floor balcony overlooking the market stalls on one of the main concourses. She wore her thick coat over her flight suit, and she’d added half a dozen silver bangles to each wrist and smoothed her hair back with gel. She wanted to look tough, independent and feminine.

  Below, shoppers thronged the concourse, even though the local time was almost three o’clock in the morning. The Quay never slept. It ran twenty-five hours a day, catering to bleary-eyed travellers arriving from worlds with days of different lengths, and jet-lagged representatives from all the time zones on the planet below.

  Looking out over their milling heads, Kat heard the lilt and hubbub of a hundred dialects and accents. She saw tourists and ship captains browsing the ramshackle stalls that lined the walls, immigrants with wide eyes and heavy suitcases, small knots of Acolytes gliding through the crowd. You could buy anything in the Medina. That was its claim to fame. There were no laws governing what could and couldn’t be sold. Bales of silk were traded on one stall, and automatic weapons on the next. Barbeque grills filled the air with the greasy hiss and spit of vat-grown meat. Slave traders rubbed shoulders with preachers and spice merchants. Gene-splicers and tattooists operated out of tents set up on the metal deck. Over the bustle of commerce, you could hear the whine and bite of their needles.

  Sitting on the opposite side of the café table, Feliks Abdulov toyed absently with a teaspoon, watching her with his grey eyes.

  “This is unfortunate,” he said.

  Kat added sweetener to her coffee, stirred it and set her own spoon aside. Her bangles rattled as she moved her arms.

  “Unfortunate?”

  “That you have to leave so soon. If I had another ship to send, I would.”

  Kat shrugged. The family’s shipping schedules were arranged decades in advance.

  “Do you think Ezra was right, that the Kilimanjaro was sabotaged?”

  Feliks took a deep breath through his nose.

  “I think it’s highly likely.” He stopped fiddling with the spoon. “But of course, it’ll be years before we know for sure.”

  He reached out. The tips of his fingers brushed the back of her hand.

  “But you, Katherine. How have you been?”

  Kat leaned back. She felt her neck growing hot. “Since you kicked me out, you mean?”

  Feliks shook his head. The grandson of the founder of the Abdulov trading dynasty, he’d commanded his own starship for forty years before moving back to Strauli to take over as head of the family.

  “I did what I had to do.”

  Kat gave a snort.

  “You cut me out of the family!”

  Feliks looked down at his hands.

  “I had no choice. You were one of my officers and you were openly consorting with the competition. I couldn’t give you preferential treatment. What else could I do?”

  “You could have trusted me.”

  “I had a reputation to maintain.”

  Kat pushed back in her chair.

  “And now?”

  Feliks raised his eyes to the steel ceiling.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He seemed to be struggling with himself. “Look, this isn’t easy for me. I thought I’d never see you again.”

  Kat stamped her boot. She got to her feet. She knew from the local Grid that Victor’s ship had already docked and she didn’t have time to be angry about the past. If she was going to beat him, she had to act now. Recriminations could wait.

  “Forget it,” she said. She used her implant to call up schematics for the Ameline and displayed them on the smart screen built into the tabletop.

  Feliks raised his eyebrows.

  “This is your ship?”

  Kat leant her fists on the table. “It’s the best I could get.”

  Her father’s fingers traced the outline of the ship’s engines. He looked at her from beneath grey brows. “Do you really think you can beat him to Djatt in this?”

  “She’s faster than she looks.”

  “She’d have to be.”

  Kat scowled. Feliks sat back, hands raised.

  “I’m not criticising you, Katherine.” He tapped the image on the table. “You made a good choice. These old Renfrew Mark IVs are very reliable. Ships of this class run forever, if they’re looked after right. They’re just not very quick. Nevertheless...” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a data crystal. “Your mother’s really going to hate me for this.” He slid it across to her.

  “What is it?”

  Feliks looked around. They were alone, aside from a middle aged man in a fur cap drinking gin and tonic at a corner table.

  “It’s your commission.” He wouldn’t meet her eye. Feliks wasn’t a man used to making apologies. “I’ll send a copy to your implant, but this is the official version, with the family seals. It reinstates you as a full captain in the Abdulov fleet, with refuelling privileges at every port between here and Djatt. We’ll also refit your ship, as much as we can in the time it takes to refuel her. Have you booked a departure slot yet?”

  “Eleven hundred hours.”

  She saw her father’s eyes flick down and to the right, checking the time display in his right eye.

  “That gives us around seven hours. I’ll get a crew on it right away.”

  “Thank you.”

  Feliks wagged a finger: No thanks were necessary. This wasn’t personal, this was business.

  “Just make sure you get there first,” he said.

  Their coffees were cold now. He pushed his away and rose.“There’s one other thing,” he said. “If our first shi
p was sabotaged, chances are you’ll need to defend yourself.”

  Kat patted her thigh. “I have a gun.”

  Feliks leaned in close. “I’m talking about arming your ship, Katherine. I’m talking about a crate of mining charges, and half a dozen atmospheric probes. They’re both perfectly legal cargoes, but if push comes to shove, you can mount the explosives onto the probes and voila, you have missiles.”

  He took her shoulders, holding her at arm’s length.

  “Are you really up to this, Katherine?”

  “Yes, father.”

  “Then come along, let me walk you to your ship. Time’s short and we have a lot of work to do.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SWITCHING YARD

  For want of a better option, they drove into the unbroken arch, following the tracks left by Kristin’s colleagues—and emerged a subjective instant later in the centre of a vast stone circle.

  Still shivering from the cold blast that accompanied the white flash, Alice leaned forward, peering through the windscreen. She rubbed her eyes.

  “It’s like Stonehenge,” she said.

  Ed silenced the engine. With its noise gone, all they could hear was the wind. They were on a hillside overlooking brown, desolate tundra. There were maybe fifty upright stones arranged in a ring around the car, with flatter stones laid across the top to form a series of doorways, each of which housed a purple arch.

  Ed opened his door and climbed down onto the springy grass. The wind hit him, blowing though his hair and t-shirt, drying the sweat on his ribs, cold and fresh after the airless desert heat.

  Behind him, Kristin climbed from the back of the Land Rover. She pulled a quilted khaki hoodie from her pack and slipped it over her head. She walked a few steps from the car and turned in a complete circle.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  She lifted a finger, twirling her wrist to take in the entirety of the monument.

  “What do you notice about this structure?”

  Ed looked around. The gaps between the stones each housed a purple arch. He shrugged, feeling numb, his head heavy.

  “What?”

  “There’s no way out.”

  Ed rubbed his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “All the gaps are filled. You come in through one arch and you have to leave through another. It’s like a railroad switching yard, or an airport terminal.”

  He trudged around the car to stand beside her.

  “How did they get this way?”

  She put her hands on her hips. “My guess is they were dragged into position and the stones erected around them.”

  Ed scratched at the stubble on his jaw. He looked back into the Land Rover’s cab and saw Alice slumped forward in her seat, her head resting on her folded arms, her auburn ponytail hanging down past her ear. He yawned. By his reckoning, it was now somewhere around four o’clock in the morning. He’d been awake for at least twenty hours.

  He pushed a hand through his hair.

  “Look, it’s been a long, strange day. We really need to take a break,” he said.

  A small, cool sun burned overhead. His nose twitched with familiar smells on the wind: wet mud, dry grass, hints of something flowery, like heather. He fetched his bag from the back of the Land Rover and lit the camping stove, then took a bottle of water from Alice’s pack, filled a pan and put it on to boil. Kristin was off walking the circle, hands clasped behind her back, examining the stones.

  “You know what this is?” she called.

  Ed shrugged. He took a handful of teabags from his bag and dropped them into the pan. Then he stretched out on the soft grass.

  She came back and stood over him, hands on hips. “It’s a message,” she said. “And it says: you’re not welcome here, keep moving.”

  Ed put an arm over his eyes.

  “Who built it?”

  Kristin brushed her hands together.

  “Who knows?” she said. “Whoever did this, they didn’t want anyone getting out of the circle.”

  “Is it safe to stay here?”

  She walked away. Her footsteps receded, soft and rustling in the long grass. When she spoke over her shoulder, there was amusement in her voice.

  “Yes, it’s safe.”

  Ed turned his head and watched her walk from stone to stone, bending to examine each in turn. She had her khaki hood pulled up to cover her face. He could smell the tea warming in the pan. He rolled onto his side, facing the open door of the Land Rover, and saw Alice curled up asleep on the passenger seat, cheek against the back of the seat, white trainers resting on the handbrake. He smiled at her and closed his eyes. The wind stirred the grass beneath him. He imagined himself as a recumbent figure in a painting by Cézanne. The blades stroked his face and then, without meaning to, he fell asleep, lulled by the comforting hiss of the blue gas flame.

  Ed first met Alice at a product launch in Aldgate. He’d been out of art school a month. His career as an artist hadn’t taken off yet and he’d just started his first job as a minicab driver, working shifts to pay the rent.

  The launch was being held in a hotel off the main high street, and Ed was there to pick up a fare. She was at the bar drinking orange juice when he walked up to her.

  “Cab for Alice Conley?”

  “That’s me. Give me a moment to finish this?”

  “Okay.”

  As she drank, he looked her up and down: she was a little older than he was, with shoulder-length hair the colour of rust, a tasteful charcoal grey suit, red lipstick, and silver hoop earrings. She looked very professional, and very sexy. Despite his own slovenliness (or maybe because of it), Ed had always been drawn to smartly-dressed women.

  She finished the orange juice and set the glass on the bar. “God, don’t you hate these things?” she said.

  Ed shrugged. He’d never been to a corporate do like this. There were maybe fifty or sixty people enjoying the free champagne. The launch was for a new type of phone, consisting of silvery circuits printed directly onto the user’s skin. Half naked men and women prowled the room, showing off imaginative ways to wear them. Ed had one himself, a free sample that had been stamped onto the inside of his wrist as he entered.

  “Have you been doing this long?” Alice eyed his cargo pants, Hawaiian shirt and baggy cardigan.

  “I just started.” He leaned an elbow on the bar and wagged a finger at the press tag dangling from her jacket pocket. “What about you? How long have you been a journalist?”

  A leather bag sat on the floor by her stool. She tapped it with her foot.

  “I’m a photographer.” She pushed back her auburn hair with one hand.

  “Then shouldn’t you be down that end?” He nodded towards the crowd at the far end of the room.

  Alice glanced back over her shoulder, then reached into her bag and pulled out a compact digital camera. She pointed it at the crowd and pressed the shutter without bothering to look through the viewfinder.

  “There,” she said, “job done.”

  She dropped the camera back into the bag and yanked the zipper shut.

  “Now, if you don’t mind...?” She got up to go, but Ed put a hand on her arm. “What’s the hurry?” he said. “This looks like fun. Let me get you some champagne.”

  She shook him off. “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, in that case, how about another orange juice?”

  She stepped back.

  “You don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, do you?”

  Ed grinned and dropped his car keys onto the shiny counter. He gave her his cheekiest grin.

  “I’m not taking you anywhere until you agree to have a drink with me.”

  Alice hitched the bag’s strap over her shoulder and let out a long, deflating breath.

  “I’ll tell you what.” She checked her watch. “I have to be somewhere right now, but I’m free later.”

  Ed wrote the number of his new wrist phone on a napkin and passed it to her.

  “I’m meetin
g my brother for dinner at ten,” he said. “He’s a journalist too. You should definitely come along.”

  They arranged to meet at a tapas restaurant on West India Quay, in the shadow of Canary Wharf. When Alice arrived, she’d changed into a short denim jacket and a green cotton dress that matched her eyes. It was raining outside and the skirt of the dress was damp and clinging to her legs. From the table, Ed watched her walk across the room. She walked better than most girls danced.

  “I’m glad you could come.” He introduced her to Verne and they all shook hands.

  “Verne works for the BBC, and he’s just bought a farm.”

  Alice raised an eyebrow. “I thought I recognised you. Did you do that report about the insurgents in Pakistan?”

  A waitress came and guided them to their table. Verne pulled Alice’s chair out for her.

  “Yes, that was me.”

  She sat gracefully and shrugged off her damp denim jacket. Her green dress looked as enticing as the foil wrapping on a chocolate coin.

  “You’re the Verne Rico? You’re a legend. You’ve been everywhere. And now you’ve bought a farm?” She glanced at Ed to make sure she hadn’t misheard. “Are you retiring?”

  Verne looked at his hands. “It’s not really a farm.”

  “You’ve got chickens,” said Ed. “And pigs.”

  Verne glared at him. He lifted the rough clay jug of water from the centre of the table and filled Alice’s glass.

  “It’s more of a smallholding. I’m trying to be self-sufficient.” He shifted in his chair, momentarily uncomfortable. “It’s a change of pace after, you know, some of the things I’ve seen...”

  Alice took the glass stem between her fingers and thumb, steadying it.

  “Well, I’m all for that. The way food prices are at the moment, I wish I had time to do it myself.”

  Verne stopped pouring. He pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “Then you should definitely come out and visit at the weekend. The leaves are just turning, and we’ll have the piglets in a few months.”

  Alice chewed her bottom lip. “You know, I may just take you up on that.”