Free The Recollection by Gareth L. Powell Page B

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