The Recollection by Gareth L. Powell Page B

sketchbook.” He pulled the small black Moleskine from his pocket. Its pages bulged with bookmarks, feathers and Post-it notes.
    Alice said, “You’ll have to let me look at that sometime.”
    Verne shouldered past them and opened the car door.
    “Goodbye, Ed,” he said.
    Alice sighed. “Don’t worry about him. It’s because he was in Africa when she died. He feels bad, and he’s taking it out on you.”
    Ed blew into his hands. “I know.”
    “He’ll be okay in a couple of days, you’ll see.”
    She stood on her toes. Her lips were warm on his cold cheek. Her hair smelled of peppermint shampoo.
    “I’ll come and see you soon. I’m in London next week. Verne’s going off on another assignment. I’ll drop by and make sure you’re okay.”
    She squeezed his arm.
    “If it’s any help,” she said, “I think as long as we remember someone, they’re not really dead.”
    She gave a last, brave smile and ran across the road to the waiting car. She waved once as they pulled away, and Ed watched until the brake lights reached the end of the terrace and turned right, out of sight, heading towards the M4. Then he turned up his jacket collar and began the long trudge back to the railway station.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    THE CRYSTAL SHIP
     
    Despite spending her youth in the Strauli system, Katherine Abdulov had never been this close to the Dho Ark. Under ordinary circumstances, civilian vessels were forbidden from coming within a million kilometres of its orbital path around the system’s solitary gas giant. Growing up on the beaches of Strauli, she’d seen pictures of it, of course, but as the Ameline fell into its shadow, she had to admit they’d been poor preparation for the sheer scale of the thing.
    The Ark had the appearance of a single, translucent quartz crystal. The hull was seamless, aside from a small, circular dock at one end, with sharp angles and smooth, polished facets. Leaning forward in her acceleration couch, Kat gave a low whistle.
    “That’s enormous.”
    > Target measures eleven hundred kilometres from bow to stern.
    She shook her head.
    “That’s not a ship, it’s a moon.”
    > Size isn’t everything.
    Kat rubbed her eyes. She’d been in the couch for the last two hours, since Victor’s surprise departure from Strauli Quay. Her skin felt gritty and the muscles in her back and shoulders were stiff with the need to get up and stretch.
    “Replay the footage from the Quay,” she said.
    > Again?
    A window opened in her right eye. It was a grainy shot of Victor’s ship, the Tristero , taken from the security camera in his assigned landing bay. The news stations had been replaying it constantly since the incident. Now, as she watched it again for the fifth or sixth time, she saw the ship shudder as its jump engines came online. One moment, it was a long silvery wedge squatting in the centre of a nest of cables. The next, the camera blanked out in a white flash. The ship’s engines generated a wormhole and all the air in the bay vanished, the resulting depressurisation rocking the station. Even though the walls of the bay were reinforced, built to withstand exposure to vacuum, they still sagged inward. They buckled under the wormhole’s gravitational stress. By the time the picture cleared, there was nothing to see. Disconnected hoses twitched and flopped like decapitated snakes, pumping arterial sprays of fuel and water into the sudden vacuum. The wormhole had collapsed, and the ship had gone.
    > Idiot.
    Despite the scorn, Kat sensed a grudging respect in the Ameline ’s tone, a respect she found she shared. She couldn’t help but be impressed by his cold-hearted willingness to endanger the lives of hundreds, possibly thousands of people. It revealed in Victor Luciano a callous determination that, hitherto, she’d only suspected. After this, he’d never set foot on the Quay again. He’d be arrested on sight. The whole station was in uproar. The news networks were going batshit. In the