The Recollection by Gareth L. Powell

so much left unresolved. “Just promise me you’ll still be here when I get back.”
    Her father reached out a hand. “Don’t worry about us, Katherine.”
    “Dad, I—”
    “Concentrate on your mission. There’s no need to—”
    The screen flickered and Feliks staggered. He put out an arm to steady himself. The lights above him dimmed to brown, and then came back up to full strength. Alarms sounded.
    “Dad! What’s happening?”
    She checked her implant. Traffic control was offline. People were shouting all over the Quay. The walls of Bay 49 had buckled, rocking the station. They had been sucked inward and the blast doors had cracked, revealing the gaping vacuum left by the ship that had been resting at its heart.
    Kat blinked at the pictures, unwilling to believe what she saw: the Tristero had gone. It had left the station without even bothering to wait for the blast doors to open, activating its engines while still wrapped in its docking cradle.
    “Jesus,” she said, “he jumped ?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    PRIME RADIANT
     
    “Hey, I found a sign!”
    Kristin came running across the stone circle towards them, waving her arms, boots kicking though the long grass.
    Ed Rico leaned out of the Land Rover.
    “Where?”
    “On one of the uprights.” She stumbled to a halt and bent over, hands on knees. “An arrow.”
    When she’d caught her breath, she led them over to the stone. Sure enough, someone had scratched a crude arrow into its weathered surface. Ed traced the shape with his finger. It pointed to the arch on the right of the stone. The scratches were pale and gritty and rough to the touch.
    “It’s fresh.”
    “Sure is. No more than a week old, I reckon.”
    Alice said, “Do you think your team left it?”
    The American woman rubbed the short white bristles at the back of her neck. “They must have done. It’s standard operating procedure, if you have to leave a man behind.”
    She dropped to one knee and gathered her bagged samples of grass and soil. She stuffed them into the pockets of her cargo pants and stood, brushing the dirt from her hands.
    “Are you ready to move?”
     
    They waded back through the wind-ruffled grass to the Land Rover. As they walked, Alice reached out to touch Kristin’s elbow.
    “You know, you haven’t told us who you work for.”
    The taller woman stopped.
    “I haven’t?”
    She glanced impatiently back at the marked arch, shifting her weight from one booted foot to the other.
    Ed rubbed his eyes. His skin itched. After sleeping in his clothes, he needed a shower.
    “You’re obviously military but you don’t have any insignia,” he said.
    Kristin glanced down at her khaki hoodie.
    “We’re part of a joint UN recon team,” she said. “I guess all the badges are on my jacket, in my kit bag.”
    Ed stepped forward. He felt the wind tug at his t-shirt. “You told us this was a one-way trip.”
    “It is.”
    “Then how can you be a recon team? How are you going to report back?”
    Kristin folded her arms and puffed out her cheeks.
    “We’re not.”
    “Then what are you doing?”
    Kristin turned and started walking toward the Land Rover, arms still folded. Ed and Alice hurried to keep pace with her.
    “We’re trying to prove a theory,” she said. “We’ve mapped part of the network and we’ve used computer extrapolation to sketch in the rest.” She kicked at the long grass. “Our model indicates an overall structure. As far as we can tell, the branches collapse toward a single point. We call it a funnelling effect.”
    Shuffling along beside her, Ed pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “You mean, all the gates lead to the same place?” He felt a sudden stab of wild hope.
    “That’s right. All roads lead to Rome. According to the model, whichever route you take, you eventually spiral in towards the centre of the network. We call it the Prime Radiant.”
    Ed saw Alice’s auburn hair flickering in the wind. He heard her say, “Like the