The Abyss Beyond Dreams (10 page)

Laura followed her gaze round the shambolic cabin. There was still a tang of ozone and burnt plastic in the air. It had taken them over three hours to deal with all the power cells and their
associated ancillary systems, which had to be disconnected as well. There wasn’t much to show for all that work, and they hadn’t even begun repairs. ‘You’re right,’
she admitted.

Joey was in the service compartment, staring at a panel they’d opened on the ceiling to expose an environment system unit which had suffered in the power surge, shutting down to protect
itself. His arms and legs were now twitching constantly, preventing him from doing any precise work. But Laura watched in fascination as wires and electronic modules moved obediently as he
manipulated them with telekinesis. Even screws unwound themselves under his control and hovered in a neat three-dimensional stack to one side.

‘Cool,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’ His mental tone was one of relief. ‘I do have a use after all.’

‘You’ve had a use right from the start.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Come on, you’re not some first-life sympathy junkie. All anybody does in this age is think. We don’t measure people by their physical ability any more.’

Joey emitted a low grunt of disparagement. ‘That might just be about to change once we reach the surface. No bots down there; it’ll be back to physical labour for us.’

She arched an eyebrow coyly. ‘A Brandt doing manual work? We’re doomed, then.’

He let out a guttural laugh and focused on the complex innards of the unit he’d exposed.

Laura airswam into the forward cabin and took a look at all the display screens and holograph projections. The drone flock was still surrounding the tip of the tree, though it was down to
sixty-three operational units now. There was no sign of Ibu or Rojas, no signal from their suits. The exopod remained in place, holding station where Rojas had left it. And her burnt hand hurt like
hell.

‘Ouch! Bollocks.’ Laura pushed stray fronds of hair back inside her padded helmet with her good hand. Like a child, she’d imagined that everything would have come right while
she was away giving her attention to the shuttle’s screwed-up power systems.

‘Take a rest,’ Ayanna said. ‘You’re exhausted.’

‘So are you.’

‘Grouchy, too.’

‘I’m . . . Ah, crap.’

‘It’s okay. I’ll wake you in a few hours. I need sleep, too; you’re right.’

‘We have to do something.’

‘The shuttle’s falling apart. We’re too strung-out to think objectively. Nothing out here makes any sense. We don’t have enough data. You want me to go on?’

‘No.’

‘Get something to eat. Spray some painkiller on that hand. Go to sleep. Trust me, I won’t let you have long.’

‘Right.’ Laura nodded in defeat. She drifted to the rear of the cabin where they’d stowed thermal bags of food. ‘You know what worries me more?’

‘More than Ibu and Rojas? You’re kidding.’

‘I guess they’re a part of the worry.’

‘Go on.’

‘Where everyone goes.’ She opened a medic kit on the bulkhead above the thermal bags. ‘I get that the tree snatched Ibu and Rojas, or zapped them, or teleported them back
outside the Void or something. But the
Vermillion
, too? Everybody vanishes apart from us. Why? What’s different about us three?’

‘Ask a Skylord. They’ll tell you it’s because we’re not fulfilled.’

‘Screw the Skylords. There’s got to be some reason.’

‘Eat. Sleep. Once we’ve all recovered from the tank yank, we’ll have some functioning neurons and know what to do.’

‘Sure.’ Laura sprayed some salve on her red-raw hand, wincing at all the little blisters, then peeled the wrapper off a taco – meals in freefall were always tacos or something
similar; bread produced crumbs that messed with the filters and jammed in bad places. ‘How long are we going to give them?’

‘We’ll find them. Don’t worry.’

‘You said it. The shuttle’s screwed. If we’re going to help them, we need the
Vermillion
. Crap, I hope they got down okay.’

‘Once we’re outside the Forest, we’ll make contact again.’

‘Joey couldn’t spot them on the surface.’

‘Okay, either you go to sleep, or I grab an aerosol from that medic kit and put you under.’

‘All right. All right.’ Laura settled on a couch and fastened the straps – not too tight. It was pointless because she knew she couldn’t sleep. Her hand throbbed. She
chewed on the taco again, tasting nothing. She was about to start asking what Ayanna thought about using the Viking drill on the tree itself, when she fell asleep.

*

Something shook Laura roughly. For a confused moment she thought she was being tank yanked again; the whole thing was like a fading dream that was just too real.

‘Wake up,’ Ayanna was saying, her face centimetres away. Behind the face, thoughts shone with delight and relief – a lot of relief. ‘Wake up. They’re back.
They’re coming back.’

‘What?’ Laura asked sluggishly. ‘Who?’

‘Rojas and Ibu. The exopod is coming back.’

‘Huh?’ She tried to sit up. The couch straps dug in, and she fumbled round to release them. ‘How?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ayanna said, her expression half fearful. ‘We’ve lost most of the Mk16bs now. I noticed it was moving a minute ago.’

‘Hell’s teeth. What did they say?’

‘There’s no contact. All I know is the exopod’s coming, and it’s not the greatest bit of flying I’ve ever seen.’

Laura felt a little burst of alarm. ‘No contact? Is the signal down again?’

‘No. The exopod is transmitting. They’re just not saying anything. Hell, that’s no surprise. Our systems have taken a real beating from the Void.’

Laura tried to get her breathing under control. She looked round the forward cabin. There were a lot of red symbols shining on the console. Five of the blue emergency lighting strips were dark.
And she was sure it was several degrees colder. ‘What’s their ETA?’ As she said it, she noticed her exovision time display. Ten hours! She’d been asleep for ten hours.
‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

Ayanna gave her a sheepish glance. ‘I fell asleep myself. Only woke up an hour ago.’

Laura winced as she finished releasing the last strap with her burnt hand. The skin was still red, but the salve had turned the blisters hard. For one silly moment she wondered if the Void had
glitched the spray’s chemical structure, rendering the salve useless – or worse.

Several screens on the console were running feeds from Shuttle Fourteen’s external cameras. They all showed her the exopod gliding sedately towards them.

She anchored herself on the front couch and stared through the windscreen. Sure enough, the exopod was close enough to show as a small speck against the glowing crystal, its strobes still
flashing away faithfully. ‘It’s them,’ she said in amazement.

‘I told you,’ Ayanna said happily. ‘They’re back.’

‘Where the hell were they?’

‘They had to be inside the distortion tree,’ Joey said.

‘Right.’ Laura hadn’t taken her eyes off the exopod. Her u-shadow had a narrow link to the shuttle’s faltering network, which was monitoring the exopod’s signal.
Only the basic telemetry was coming in. ‘Have any of the Mk24s reappeared?’

‘No,’ Ayanna said.

‘I just don’t get any of this. Why—?’

‘Just ask them,’ Joey said. For a moment he managed to force his mouth into a smile.

The three of them went back through the service compartment. Joey lagged behind, his spasming limbs making it difficult for him to manoeuvre as easily as the others. Laura resisted the urge to
offer him any help. He was way too proud for that.

Once they were in the EVA hangar her u-shadow lost the link to Fourteen’s network. She grabbed the handholds in front of a backup console on the bulkhead and activated its manual
functions. Two screens slid out, showing her that the exopod was a lot closer.

‘I’m opening the outer door,’ she said.

‘Wait,’ Joey’s mental voice urged her as he wriggled his way through the hatch. ‘We don’t actually know what’s inside the exopod.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ Laura said. ‘What do you think’s inside? A Prime motile?’ Even as she said it, her secondary routines pulled an image file from
her storage lacuna, showing her the eggs of a Prime. They were nothing like the globes on the distortion tree.
Bollocks, I’m getting paranoid
, she thought.

‘I don’t know. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Why haven’t they ordered the airlock door to open?’

‘With the state of our communications? Come on!’ she appealed to Ayanna.

‘I’d be happier knowing,’ Ayanna said awkwardly.

‘And how are we going to do that?’

‘Wait until it’s on the docking cradle, but don’t open the airlock,’ Joey said. ‘The umbilical will plug in and we’ll have a decent link.’

‘Well?’ Laura asked Ayanna.

‘Seems reasonable.’

Laura turned back to the console, and keyed in the cradle recovery sequence. She felt a tiny vibration run through Fourteen’s structure. On the screen, long electromuscle arms were pushing
the exopod’s cradle out from the rear of the shuttle.

‘What the hell is that?’ Joey’s mental voice was twinned with a great deal of concern.

Laura peered at the screen showing the approaching exopod. Its cluster of electromuscle tentacles were curled protectively round one of the dark globes from the distortion tree. ‘They
can’t be serious,’ she exclaimed. ‘How did they detach it?’

‘Are you going to let them in carrying that thing?’ Joey asked.

Ayanna shot Laura a glance, her thoughts emanating all kinds of uncertainty. ‘They wouldn’t bring anything harmful into the shuttle. They know the protocols.’

‘If it’s them,’ Joey said. ‘If they haven’t been brainwashed. We don’t know what we’re dealing with!’

‘What do you think?’ Ayanna asked.

‘I think Joey may have a point,’ Laura said reluctantly. Her delight at seeing the exopod return was dwindling fast. Carrying the alien globe back to Fourteen was unusual, at the
very least. ‘Let them dock on the cradle, but keep the airlock closed until we establish just what’s going on.’

‘Right,’ Ayanna said. ‘Good call.’

It took several minutes for the pilot to manoeuvre the exopod over the cradle. Laura made no comment about that. Rojas had certainly seemed more competent when the little craft was flying out to
the distortion tree.

‘Are they eggs?’ Joey asked as they watched the exopod wobble about unsteadily.

‘We know they contain organic matter,’ Laura said slowly, wishing she’d thought more about the problem before. ‘And we’ve seen a batch flying down to the planet.
Logically they’re eggs or seeds, or some kind of biological agent.’

‘Agent?’

‘They come from the trees, which are completely different objects. Shape, nature, material – none of it’s the same. So . . . I’d say the trees manufacture the globes
molecule by molecule. And on this scale, that probably means it’s a bioforming system. These trees arrive at a planet in a new star system and start converting it to the kind of environment
their creators live in.’

‘That works for me,’ Ayanna said.

‘So what are the Skylords?’ Joey asked.

‘Oh, bollocks to you, Joey,’ Laura snapped at him. ‘They’re the tugboats? I don’t know!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Let’s just keep it calm, shall we?’ Ayanna said.

Laura made an effort to damp her temper down. The screen was showing her the cradle arms reaching out and clamping onto the base of the exopod. One of them carried the data umbilical.

Laura keyed in a series of instructions. The console’s second screen played the feed from the exopod’s internal camera. Laura let out a small gasp of relief. Behind her, Ayanna made
an almost identical sound.

The camera was set near the top of the exopod’s cabin. It looked down on Rojas and Ibu suspended in the webs. Both of them were in their suits – without helmets.

‘Welcome back, guys,’ she said inanely.

They both looked up at the camera. Ibu grinned weakly. It looked to be a big effort on his part.

‘Good to hear your voice,’ he said croakily.

‘This is Ayanna. What happened? Where have you been?’

‘We’ve been inside.’

‘Inside what?’ Laura said. ‘The tree is solid.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Ibu said. ‘There’s all kinds of chambers in there.’

‘Where? The drone sensors showed us a solid structure. How did you get in? You were stuck to that globe when the links went down.’

‘There are entrances along the bottom of the folds. The crystal just morphs like our malmetal and plyplastic.’

‘Can you let us in now, please?’ Rojas said. His voice croaked like Ibu’s. It was as if both of them had caught laryngitis.

‘Ask him about the globe,’ Joey’s mental voice urged.

‘Rojas,’ Ayanna said, ‘why have you brought one of the globes back?’

Rojas looked away from the camera, studying the displays on the bulkhead in front of him. ‘Analysis.’

‘What?’

‘Analysis.’

‘Hang on. Wait,’ Laura said. ‘What have you been doing inside the tree? How did you get in and out? Why were you in there so long? You’ve been out of contact the whole
time. You know that’s against every protocol ever written.’

‘Sorry about that,’ Ibu said. ‘It’s fascinating in there. You’ll have to come in, Laura.’

‘What’s happened to your voice?’ Ayanna asked. ‘Have you been exposed to the alien environment?’

‘No.’

‘Then what—’

‘Nothing; we’re fine. The exopod’s systems are glitching. That’s the problem.’

‘What’s in the tree?’ Laura asked, trying to keep her concern from creeping into her voice.

‘Nothing. We think the cavities are conduits of some kind. We’ll go over the recordings when we’re back inside.’

‘What was wonderful?’ Joey asked. ‘Ibu said the globes were wonderful, Rojas said they were awesome. ‘Why?’

‘Ibu,’ Ayanna said, ‘what was awesome about the globe you got stuck on?’

‘What?’

‘We need to come in,’ Rojas said.

‘You said it was wonderful. What did you mean?’

‘This whole place is wonderful, that’s all.’