The Abyss Beyond Dreams (12 page)

An involuntary tremor ran the length of her body. She let out a pitiful squeak of fear. ‘No. No, I can’t.’

‘They will come for you. You know that. They will find tools. They will cut through the hatch.’

Just the thought of it made tears well up again. Without gravity, the liquid simply swelled up on her eyeballs, distorting her vision. ‘I left her, Joey,’ she confessed. ‘I
just left her with them. I didn’t even try to help, I was too scared. How awful am I? She was all alone with them. And she died like
that
. She died alone, Joey, with those things
eating her. Nothing could be worse than that. Nothing! Maybe I deserve them coming for me.’

‘Stop it. They’re strong – much stronger than us. You couldn’t have done anything. It would have happened to you, too.’

‘Have they . . . ? Did they . . . ? To you?’

‘No. I’m intact. I just can’t move, that’s all. Laura, you have to get down here. You won’t have much time.’

‘I can’t get through the hatch; I screwed it up pretty good. But even if I could get it open again, I wouldn’t ever get past them.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that. Don’t even try to fight your way past them. You have to EVA.’

‘What?’

‘There are emergency suits in the forward cabin. Put one on and break the windscreen. I control the exopod airlock; my telekinesis can reach the control panel. I’ve already opened
the outer hatch ready for you. I wouldn’t have suggested this otherwise. Check the network if you don’t believe me.’

It took a long time for Laura to make herself move. Her macrocellular clusters were still blocking the terrible pain from her ruined ankle. Exovision icons were flashing up constant warnings
about tissue damage and internal bleeding, which she’d ignored along with everything else as she dropped into a dangerous denial state. She hauled herself along the couches to the curving
console under the windscreen. There were several system schematics up and running. They confirmed it: the EVA hangar airlock’s outer door was open.

‘I see,’ Laura said.

‘Then come and collect me,’ Joey said. ‘We’ll fly the second exopod down to the planet and find
Vermillion
.’

Laura gave the windscreen a long look. The remaining hologram graphics blinking inside the glass were mostly warning symbols. ‘Joey, how the hell am I going to break the windscreen? It can
withstand aerobrake entry into an atmosphere, and the shuttle is rated for gas giant work. The damn thing is tough – probably tougher than the rest of the fuselage.’

‘Yeah, but any chain is only as strong as the weakest link, remember? Take a look at how it’s fastened to the main structure.’

Laura took a breath and sent her ESP into the fuselage itself, examining the layers and material, the seal all around the super-strengthened glass. Her mind’s eye revealed the coloured
shadows that were stacked against each other like strata in rock – the same as a crude hologram display, she thought. There didn’t seem to be many weak points. Her perception ranged
wider, probing the rest of the forward cabin. ‘I’m not coming through the windscreen,’ she told him. ‘There’s an emergency rescue panel in the roof.’ She pushed
off the console, and reached out for the rectangle above the second couch. When she squeezed a small recessed handle, it allowed her to pull it away. The metre-wide circle it exposed was covered in
warnings about having equal pressure before triggering. ‘There’s a lot of safety locks,’ she reported.

‘Bureaucrats should never be allowed anywhere near aerospace design teams.’

‘True.’

‘Now put your suit on.’

‘Joey, this is a bit—’

Something started buzzing intermittently against the hatch to the service compartment. Softly at first, the way a bee knocks against glass. But then the frequency began to rise and became
continuous.

‘A bit what?’

‘Nothing.’

She tugged one of the emergency pressure suits from its overhead wallet. There was a moment of hesitation as she bent her knee, ready to push her foot into the baggy clump of silver-white
fabric. Her ankle had swollen dramatically. The small gap between the hem of the shipsuit trouser leg and her shoe exposed skin that was a nasty purple red. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t
be able to get the shoe off. The sight of it made her nauseous again – not that there was anything left to throw up. For a moment her nerve block seemed to fail, that or she imagined the
pain. It practically overwhelmed her.

Nothing
, she told herself with miserable fury.
You’re feeling nothing compared to Ayanna.
She forced her numb leg into the spacesuit, then pushed her arms into the
sleeves. Her u-shadow managed an interface with the spacesuit processor, and the fabric contracted around her.

The intense buzzing from the hatch rose towards ultrasonic. A blue-white point appeared along the edge of the hatch, shining like an arc spot.

Laura grabbed the helmet and jabbed it onto the thick metal collar. It sealed immediately, and dry air hissed in, cutting off most of the buzzing sound. Molten droplets were spraying out from
the hatch. They glowed like embers as they swarmed along the central aisle. She pulled down the quick-release lever on the overhead rescue panel. Alarms sounded, and the rim of the hatch turned
scarlet. Two safety latches clicked out from the lever, warning her of a one-atmosphere pressure difference. She flicked them back with her thumb, and the alarm grew even louder.

With one hand wrapped round a couch strap to hold her in the cabin, Laura twisted the lever round ninety degrees. The hatch immediately blew out amid a fast, violent blast of air. It pummelled
her hard, shunting her around so her knees slammed into the cabin ceiling. More pain poured into her brain as she was spun round by the howling stream of air, to be quickly damped down by the nerve
blocks.

It took only seconds to evacuate the forward cabin’s atmosphere. Laura found herself flailing about on the end of the strap, engulfed by a muffled silence. The distortion tree had vanished
from view. The rest of the Forest was a smear of motion as the shuttle lurched from the impetus of the abrupt gas vent. All she could hear was her own ragged breathing.

She checked the service compartment hatch. The blue-white light had dimmed to a patch of glowing crimson metal. A tiny jet of white vapour was shooting out from a hole in the centre of it.

‘Was that it?’ Joey asked. ‘I felt Fourteen jolt round. Was that the cabin air blowing?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You need to get down here. They’ll realize they need the exopod to escape alive.’

‘Ah, bollocks. Okay, I’m coming.’

She unwound her arm from the strap and pushed herself through the hatch. The Forest whirled around her. Shuttle Fourteen was performing a lazy nose-over-tail flip every two hundred seconds, with
some yaw thrown in just to make the sight even more disorientating.

Stkpads on her wrists and soles adhered to the shuttle’s fuselage, allowing her to crawl along. With the nerve blocks effectively paralysing the lower half of her right leg, she could only
use her left foot. Even so, it was easier than she’d expected. It probably helped that she didn’t look round at the Forest trees tracing their glowing arcs across Voidspace. Her eyes
were focused hard on the grey thermal shielding that was the outer layer of the fuselage. She made her way down the side of the forward cabin until she was clinging to the belly, then began the
long haul to the tail.

Peel a wrist stkpad off with a roll – ignore the fact that you’re now only attached by two stkpads and if they fail the shuttle’s tumble will fling you off into Voidspace
– and extend the free arm as far as you comfortably can, then press down again. Apply a slight vertical pressure to make sure the stkpad is bonding correctly, then twist the sole’s
stkpad free. Bring the leg up as if you’re going into a crouch, press down. Check.

Repeat, and repeat, and repeat—

‘I know what it is,’ Joey told her through the gaiafield.

‘What?’

‘I told you I was seeing something wrong with the planet. I know what it is.’

Laura brought her head up to check she was crawling in the right direction. Fourteen’s tail was about twelve metres away now, and she was veering off line slightly. She pushed her arm wide
to compensate and pressed the stkpad down. ‘Go on, then. At this point, I seriously doubt that knowing will make anything worse.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘Bollocks, Joey! What is it?’

‘I’m telling you because you need to know.’

The crawl was becoming harder. Her body was feeling the strain. She could hear her heart pounding away; she didn’t need the exovision medical graphics to know that, nor see she needed more
oxygen.
How can zero gee be so exhausting?
‘Joey, either tell me or shut the fuck up.’

‘All right. The planet is spinning the wrong way.’

‘What?’

‘It’s reversed. When we were in
Vermillion
, the continents were turning east to west. Now we’re in the Forest, they’re going west to east. That’s what I
saw, the continents going the wrong way round. Which is why it took a while to figure out – it’s almost too big to grasp.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘We’re seeing the planet going backwards. There’s only one thing that could cause an effect like that. Now do you get it?’

The shuttle’s tail was about seven metres away. Laura had to pause to give her over-exerted muscles a rest. ‘No,’ she whinged. ‘Joey – just, what is it?’

‘Time,’ he said, accompanied by a wash of wonder and dismay. ‘Ayanna said the trees were distorting time, and she was right, but they’re not slowing it down inside the
Forest, they’re reversing it.’

‘Reversing?’

‘The Forest is travelling back in time, Laura. That’s why we can see the planet spinning backwards.
Vermillion
didn’t vanish; we’re travelling back to a time
before it arrived.’

Laura let out a distraught groan. She didn’t need
this
, not on top of everything else. She rolled her stkpad and moved her arm, resuming the punishing crawl. ‘Time travel is
impossible. You know this. Causality. Paradox. Entropy. They can’t be beaten, Joey.’

‘They can’t be beaten in ordinary spacetime,’ he said. ‘But we’re in Voidspace.’

‘And Voidspace exists within spacetime,’ she said. ‘The fundamentals are unchanged.’

‘The planet’s spin is reversed,’ he told her stubbornly. ‘We’re travelling back in time.’

‘Whatever.’

‘You need to know, Laura. Once you leave the Forest, all you have to do is wait for the
Vermillion
to show up and warn them about the globes.’

‘Which isn’t going to happen,’ she retorted almost angrily. ‘Because I didn’t show up, I didn’t meet me and I didn’t stop us from coming here. Did
I?’ She reached the flat trailing edge of the delta wings and started to clamber up around them. The blunt end of the fuselage swung into view. Clamshell doors had hinged up and to one side,
exposing the wide circular airlock which made up the end of the EVA hangar. Its outer door was open. It made her let out a small whimper of relief; Joey had been telling the truth about that at
least. She was starting to worry the tank yank malady was affecting his brain.

‘Joey, I’m at the airlock.’

‘Great. Find something to hang on to. You’ll need to be really secure.’

‘What?’ she asked in bewilderment.

‘I’ve overridden the safeties. I’m going to open the inner door, blow the hangar’s atmosphere out. It’ll be quite a blast, so you need to be secure. I don’t
want you blowing away, okay?’

‘Joey, what the fuck . . .’

‘You’ll see. And you’ll make it out of the Forest, too. The second exopod’s intact.’

‘What’s happened?’ she sobbed. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘I can’t come with you. Please, Laura, find something to fasten yourself to.’

‘What have they done to you, Joey?’ she asked in dread. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Are you secure?’

She couldn’t argue; she was too exhausted. Besides, the fatalism he was releasing into the gaiafield told her there was no point. She looked round the inside of the big airlock. There were
a dozen handholds and several empty equipment racks. She crawled over to one of them and hinged its titanium latches around her. ‘Secure.’

The inner doors began to peel apart. Gas rushed out of the expanding hole, thin white vapour streaking past her. Shuttle Fourteen began to move, propelled along a weirdly erratic course, the
escaping plume of atmosphere exaggerating its original tumble. Laura saw the glowing distortion trees whirl round and round as she was shoved against the rack’s latches. The distant planet
crescent whipped by once.

There seemed to be an incredible amount of atmosphere in the EVA hangar. It even kept roaring out in a vast hurricane when the airlock doors were fully open. Streams of vapour played across her
spacesuit – it was like being caught in a powerful water jet. She could actually hear the noise.

Then it was over. A cloud of twinkling ice crystals swarmed around the end of the whirling shuttle, expanding fast. Laura freed herself from the rack and started to crawl inside where the blue
emergency lighting cast everything in sharp relief.

‘That worked, then,’ Joey said.

Laura could feel his emotions through the gaiafield link, satisfaction and fatalism combined. Also fright. He was allowing that to show for the first time. Pain was starting to colour his
thoughts now, a dull ache spreading out from his empty lungs. She scuttled past the airlock’s inner door and saw him. Every limb locked rigid in shock. ‘Joey! Oh, Joey, no. No, no,
no.’

He was stuck to the alien globe. One leg, an arm and a third of his torso had sunk into it. The side of his head was up against the wrinkled black surface, an ear already absorbed.

Laura used the handholds now, gliding over to him.

‘Don’t touch me,’ he warned.

‘Why didn’t you say? Oh, bollocks, Joey,
why
?’

Explosive decompression had ruptured capillaries under his skin, turning his flesh scarlet. Blood oozed through his pores and wept out from around his eyeballs. His mouth was open, also emitting
a spray of fine scarlet droplets with every heartbeat. ‘I was bodylossed the moment the fake Rojas grabbed me. This way you get to live. And they don’t get to copy me.
Worthwhile.’