The Recollection (19 page)

Kat lifted her head. “But I was with someone. Enid Abdulov. She’d hurt her leg. What happened to her?”

Misaki’s fingertips eased her back against the pillow.

“Don’t try to get up,” he said.

“But Enid…”

The doctor scratched his forehead, his face pained. “Look Katherine, we’ve already had this conversation three times. It’s the anaesthetics. They’ll wear off soon.”

“Just tell me she’s all right.”

Misaki drew back. “I can’t, I’m sorry.”

Kat struggled. “She’s
dead
?”

The doctor put a friendly hand on her shoulder.

“Try not to upset yourself.”

“No—”

“If it’s any consolation, you did all you could. The people who dragged you clear said you were still reaching back through the airlock when the room sealed itself.” He took a deep breath, preparing to impart more bad news. “As a matter of fact, that’s how you hurt your arm.”

“My arm?”

Kat watched as, slowly, Misaki peeled back the crisp white sheet.

“When the airlock door slammed shut, it severed your left arm just above the elbow. We saved what we could, but...” He finished sliding the sheet down, revealing two black struts protruding from the loose sleeve of her hospital nightgown. For a disorientating moment she couldn’t understand what she saw, and then it all clicked into place and she felt the room sway drunkenly around her.

“We can grow you a new arm from stem cells,” Misaki said, “but it will take some months to fully mature. In the meantime, we’ve given you this prosthetic.”

He took the arm and gently raised it off the bed. The black struts she’d seen were bones carved from black carbon fibre, light and strong. As they moved, tiny servo motors hissed and clicked in the elbow, wrist and finger joints.

“There are pressure sensors in the palm here and here, and on the tip of each finger,” Misaki said, touching each in turn, his fingers producing an unfamiliar tickling sensation. Kat jerked the arm away. She turned it back and forth, examining it. She didn’t dare roll her sleeve high enough to see where it had been grafted to her flesh.

“It hurts.”

“Where?”

“All over.”

Misaki gave a sympathetic nod. “You may get phantom pains as your brain adjusts to the loss of your limb.”

Kat screwed her eyes tight. She didn’t want to look at it any more.

Oh Enid, I’m so sorry.

She rolled away from the pain until she faced the wall. Behind her, Misaki continued to talk but she wasn’t really listening. Her concentration came and went. She felt cold and raw inside, and her thoughts were slippery and hard to pin down. The disinfectant smell of the hospital sheets reminded her of the day Victor walked out on her: of the operation, and the baby...

Eventually, the reassuring words dried up. She heard Misaki turn to leave.

“Why am I so calm?” she said.

He stopped, half-turned.

“It’s the drugs, Katherine.”

“Drugs?”

“We’ve been keeping you pretty heavily sedated for the past seventy hours. You’ve had a shock. Lie back. You need time to recuperate.” He gave her a final sideways glance, then stepped past the armed guard, out into the corridor.

“Try to get some rest,” he called as he hurried away. “You’ll feel better.”

Alone, Kat closed her eyes.

“Screw you,” she said.

An hour later, wearing her coat draped over her shoulders, her new arm held tight to her chest like a sling, Kat stepped unsteadily from the floating jetty to the
Ameline
’s rear airlock. One of the coat’s arms was ripped, torn off just above the elbow. The fresh wind blew through her hair. Both the ship and the jetty moved on the ocean swell, and the unfamiliar weight of the prosthetic arm unbalanced her.

As soon as both her feet were aboard, she closed the outer airlock door and strode forth through the echoing cargo hold toward the bridge at the ship’s bow. Passing through the passenger lounge, her eyes lingered for a second on the couch so recently occupied by Toby Drake. What would he think if he could see her now, like this? Climbing the ladder to the flight deck, she screwed her eyes tight. She still couldn’t bring herself to look at the black alloy struts of her new hand.

> Girl, you look terrible.

Her lips twitched. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of it all. She clenched her teeth.

“Get your systems fired up, we’re leaving.”

> Are you sure you can fly? My records show you discharged yourself against the advice of your surgeon.

Kat shrugged off her coat and tossed it over the back of the co-pilot’s couch.

“He was an asshole.”

> But still, you’ve been under sedation. Are you fit to fly?

“Do you
want
to stay here?”

The ship gave an electronic snort.

> Have you any idea what this salt water’s doing to the underside of my hull?

“You’ve been waterproofed.”

> Thirty years ago. That stuff wears off, you know.

Kat stepped onto the bridge. “Well, we’re leaving now,” she said.

> For Djatt?

“Where else?”

> You know Victor blew out of here three days ago?

Kat settled herself into the pilot’s chair. “We’ll catch him.”

> He left something behind.

“What?”

> Seth Murphy.

Kat swallowed. She pictured Murphy as she’d last seen him, framed in the doorway of the
Ticonderoga
’s observation deck.

“See you in Hell, Abdulov
.”

Her fists tightened.

“Where is he?”

> The police found him floating in the sea, near the
Tristero
’s docking pontoon.

Kat frowned. “Floating?”

> Shot through the head.

She sat back with a huff, as if the wind had been knocked out of her. Even after everything he’d done, she found it hard to believe Victor capable of cold-bloodedly executing one of his own men.

Her good right hand had begun to shake. So far, she’d been running on the drugs Misaki had given her. She needed time to rest and recuperate, but knew she couldn’t afford to waste another second. She
had
to reach Djatt before Victor conned the locals into dealing with him rather than waiting for an Abdulov ship. If he scooped the lion’s share of the cargo, she’d be left scrabbling for scraps.

“Let’s go,” she said quietly.

There was no answer. For the first time, she sensed reluctance in the ship. She said, “What’s the matter?”

> He has a three day head start. We could give up now and return to Strauli.

“But we’d have failed.”

> We’d have survived.

Kat flexed her metal hand. She could feel a phantom ache in the black, artificial bones of her forearm. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

For a moment, the ship remained silent.

> I’ve been monitoring traffic reports on the local grids. It started at Strauli. I noticed two flights from Djatt had been declared overdue. Since we arrived here, I’ve noticed another one, making three altogether.

“What are you saying?”

> The last three ships to visit Djatt have failed to return.

Kat bit her lip, considering the idea. “Do you think they ran into trouble?”

>
Something’s
going on. I can’t believe all three ships suffered more-or-less simultaneous malfunctions.

Kat thought of the
Kilimanjaro
, sabotaged before it reached Tiers Cross and the Bubble Cloud.

“Do you think Victor’s behind it?”

> Unlikely given the distances involved, unless he planned this entire thing decades in advance.

“Then he could be walking into trouble himself, same as the other ships?”

> Quite possibly.

Kat looked out at the shadow pattern of clouds on the surface of the sea. Flecks of sunlight shone through the gaps and rippled on the water. She thought of the beach below the family compound on Strauli, where she’d kicked through the surf as a girl, dreaming of life as a trader captain. She could be back there in a few hours, she realised, if she allowed the ship’s fears to discourage her from her goal. She could give up her pursuit of Victor and run home to her mother and father, and let the family doctors grow her a new arm. She could see Toby and take him walking on the beach... She closed her eyes and shivered, thinking how good and warm the sand would feel between her toes.

She let out a long, ragged breath. She’d come this far, and she couldn’t chicken out now. She couldn’t go home one-armed and empty-handed. Victor couldn’t be allowed to win. Hooked into the ship, she felt power building in the engines. The daylight on the hull itched at her skin like sunburn, and she longed for the soothing coolness of space. If she gave up the chase, she’d be letting her family down, and she’d also be disappointing her younger self—the girl who’d dreamed of piloting her own ship, who’d studied and worked and been through hell in order to get where she was today, and wasn’t about to quit.

She opened her eyes and gazed down at the metal hand resting on the arm of her couch.

“Getting knocked down makes you tougher,” her great aunt Sylvia had been fond of saying, “and setbacks are opportunities in disguise.”

Kat frowned, trying to be dispassionate. Looked at objectively, stripped of the abhorrence it stirred in her, she supposed there was a kind of functional beauty to the sleek design of the matt black bones and hinged knuckle joints; and with that thought, she realised it wasn’t the arm she feared. Her revulsion sprang from her unwillingness to face her own guilt at her failure to save her friend. The arm was a badge of shame. For a second, Enid’s face swam before her, blonde, blue-eyed and terrified. Kat blinked it away. Enid had died because of her squabble with Victor. Innocent people had been killed and hurt. She gripped the sides of her couch.

Time to end it, she thought.

For the first time since leaving Strauli, she considered the six missiles her father had installed. Converted from probes used for asteroid prospecting, the nimble little rockets had become delivery systems for single megatonne nuclear mining charges. They were small, manoeuvrable and designed to be guided remotely. If trouble waited for her at Djatt, she’d be ready. No-one would expect a ship like the
Ameline
to be armed. If anyone came at her, all she’d have to do would be to detonate one of those bombs within a few hundred metres of their ship.

Her hand came up to touch the pendant hanging around her neck. She gave the knife-sharp, watery horizon a final glance.

“You know we’re going anyway, don’t you?” she said.

The
Ameline
shivered. She could feel its excitement overriding its caution. Like her, it itched for the up-and-out.

> Oh, yes.

They quit Vertebrae Beach with as much style as they could muster. The
Ameline
rose a few metres into the air and shook like a wet dog. Water poured from its hull. Kat scanned the green telltales on her head-up display. All systems were clear.

“Ready?” she said.

The ship tipped back until it stood on its tail, nose pointed at the sky.

> Always.

It leapt heavenwards, like a prayer. It left the atmosphere at full acceleration and activated its jump engines the second it hit hard vacuum, levering itself out of the universe with a brilliant white flash like the burst of a miniature nova, the reflection of which momentarily flared off the waters of Vertebrae Beach, a thousand kilometres below.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

RAPTORS

The gunshots echoed away across the grass plain. Standing in the marsh, Ed went cold inside.

“Alice...”

He felt Kristin move and looked down, to see that even though she still clung to him with one hand, she’d managed to pull her sidearm free of its holster.

“Get me to the bank.” It was an order. Not knowing what else to do, he obeyed. He pulled her forward, moving as quickly as he dared. Rank-smelling mud slithered and slipped beneath the soles of his boots. Twice his leg went in up to the knee in cold, gritty water, and he hardly noticed. All he could think of was Alice. Was she hurt? Had Krous killed her?

He stumbled on, using all his strength to keep Kristin upright.

A few steps from the shore, he heard a splash. Something slithered beneath the surface. He caught a glimpse of a sleek, powerful tail.

Kristin waved her gun at the disappearing shadow.

“What was that?”

Ed didn’t answer. He was too busy trying to keep his balance, and all he could think of was Alice possibly lying hurt somewhere up ahead, beyond the rise. With a last effort, he heaved Kristin ashore and they both fell to their knees. Kristin had her gun raised, scanning the grassy skyline at the top of the slope. Ed dropped his pack and dug out the semi-automatic pistol he’d stolen from the Iraq War veteran in the flat down the hall from his place in London. His hands shook. He could hear his pulse battering in his ears.