The Abyss Beyond Dreams (14 page)

She crawled out of the exopod and looked round. It really was a desert, a flat expanse of gritty sand with meandering rills rippling away in every direction. She crawled round the exopod to be
sure, but nothing broke the desolate span of ochre sand except for the red-and-yellow striped fabric puddle of the chutes. There were no clouds in the sky. No wind. No humidity. Nothing alive apart
from her.

‘Oww, bollocks.’

The sunlight was intense; she was already sweating. If she stayed out for much longer, she’d burn. Probably get sunstroke too.

She squirmed her way back through the hatch, only to find the interior of the exopod was now hotter than outside. The damn thing was acting like an oven under the midday sun.

Oh, just great!

The environmental unit came back on with an unhealthy clanking sound. It settled down soon enough, producing a slightly strained whirring. Laura didn’t care; she wormed herself into a
sitting position with her face under one of the vents, enjoying the cool air blowing across her skin. When she checked the display screen above her, she saw the power levels dropping already. At
this rate, the power cells didn’t even have enough charge to keep the environmental unit going until evening.

With a groan, she lumbered up out of the hatch again and scuttled round to a small panel in the base of the exopod. The emergency planetary survival kit was inside, but streaks of molten metal
from some sensor or antenna had solidified over the panel, practically welding it shut. She tried prising at it with her telekinesis, but she certainly wasn’t strong enough to shift the metal
bonds. She looked round, and found a sharpish rock. Flakes of the blackened metal broke off as she hammered away. The irony made her grin fiercely: a rock hammer to open a spaceship, surely the
ultimate clash of primitive against sophistication.

She was sweating profusely by the time she finally managed to clear the panel and tug it open. The case slid out, containing basic supplies – four water bottles with built-in purification
filters, another medical kit, a couple of array tablets with high-power transmitters, two insulated one-piece suits (which would be useful in this heat, she admitted), some simple tools, including
an axe and multifunction knife not dissimilar to the Swiss army knife, two force-field skeleton suits (their processors didn’t even respond to her u-shadow’s ping), a pair of
high-density power cells and an amazingly thin photovoltaic sheet that just kept unrolling. She spread that out, holding it down with rocks on each corner, and plugged it in to the high-density
cells, then plugged them into the exopod’s power circuit.

Back inside, she gulped down a litre of water after her exertions. The photovoltaic sheet alone was producing enough electricity to keep the environmental unit going. Her exposed skin was
starting to smart from sunburn, so she slathered on some salve. She spent a long minute staring at her damaged ankle. It hadn’t got any worse, but sun exposure definitely hadn’t helped.
If she was going to put an insulated suit on she’d have to cut the trouser leg open first.

She turned to the two array tablets. They had black solar cases that would recharge their cells. So she set them to broadcast a distress signal at full power for ten minutes then charge up for
fifty minutes before signalling again. As they were solid state, they should be able to maintain that cycle indefinitely.

After she’d set them outside she ate another tube of pasta and checked the sensors. There was no trace of the
Vermillion
or the other starships. The sky was clear of any signal.
It made her wonder how far she’d travelled into the past. Not that it was possible. But
if
. . .

Four hours later the sun dropped below the horizon. After another hour it was cool enough for her to turn the environmental unit off. She looked out of the hatch without venturing outside. Above
her, the Void’s nebulas dominated the sky. Below them, the desert was perfectly still – a silence that was unnerving now the environmental unit had stopped its wheezing and rattling.
Looking at that vast unyielding stretch of grainy sand, she knew there was no way she could get across it on her own. The solar sheet would supply power long after her food and water ran out. All
she could do was stay put and keep alive until
Vermillion
arrived. There was nothing else. Just wait and pray that, against all logic and science, Joey had been right.

*

In the morning she started an inventory of food. She refused to cut down on her water intake. That would be dangerous, but she could afford to eat fewer calories, especially as
she planned on doing nothing.

She settled back in the tiny cabin and began reviewing the science data she’d assiduously stored in her lacuna. The molecular pathways inside the distortion tree were truly extraordinary.
Mapping them properly was going to be a serious task. But it would stop her thinking about Ayanna and the others.

Seven hours after dawn, the environmental unit packed up. Laura just laughed at the silence. ‘What’s next? A tsunami?’ She was beginning to believe the Void’s controlling
intelligence was taking a personal and very macabre interest in her. This catastrophic mission was her very own rat maze.
And I can’t find the cheese.

She’d got the top of the environmental unit open when a sonic boom hit the exopod.

The harsh sound made her jump. She dropped the tools and stuck her head out of the hatch, searching the sky.

High above her, a small black speck was falling at terminal velocity, producing a grubby vertical contrail filled with twinkling embers. The contrail shrank away to nothing, and the speck fell
in silence. Then a couple of drogue chutes shot out.

Laura’s heart thudded hard. ‘It can’t be,’ she murmured. ‘I killed you. I killed you, damn it! I killed you.’

It was as if her own memory was false. She closed her eyes and saw the tumbling wreckage of Shuttle Fourteen, its rear quarter shredded. It had happened. She knew it had.

But the drogues pulled out the main chutes. Three big red-and-yellow striped circles bloomed across the clear sapphire basin. An exopod hung underneath them, floating gently to the ground.

‘No,’ Laura said numbly. ‘No no. This can’t be right. This isn’t my cheese.’ Even to her own ears she sounded as if she was cracking up. Then she noticed her
time display. Twenty-seven hours, forty minutes since she’d landed. Which was weird, because the descending exopod probably had about a couple of minutes before touchdown.

She shielded her eyes and frowned up at it. It was coming down close. Very close. Directly above now, and –

‘Shit!’ Laura heaved herself out of the hatch and started crawling frantically across the hot grainy sand. She’d made probably nine metres when there was a soft pop of impact
bags inflating out of the base of the exopod. It landed smack on top of hers and tilted sharply sideways, thudding to the ground. The main chutes fluttered away.

Laura’s time display read twenty-seven hours and forty-two minutes since she’d landed. Exactly.

‘No way,’ Laura said, too stunned to move.
Out of an entire planet, it lands on top of my exopod. Precisely on top!
‘What the fuck do you want from me?’ she
yelled into the empty sky.

She started crawling back to the two exopods, snarling as the grainy sand scratched her knees and wrists raw. She didn’t care. She had to get to the exopod, to face down whatever fresh
horror the Void was taunting her with.

The newly arrived exopod was lying on its side. Laura picked up the axe from the planetary survival kit and clawed her way up to the hatch which was at shoulder height. Putting all her weight on
her good foot, she pulled the lever. There was a hiss of pressure equalling, and she swung the hatch back. She raised the axe, expecting to see the copy-Rojas or the copy-Ibu – most probably
both. But it wasn’t them.

A perfect Laura Brandt hung in the webbing straps, squinting against the brilliant sunlight flooding in. She was flawless, even down to the discoloured, badly swollen ankle and slit shipsuit
trouser leg.

Laura screamed long and hard.

The other Laura screamed back at her.

Laura brought the axe down with manic strength, burying the edge in her doppelganger’s skull.

Nigel Sheldon woke up. He was immediately aware of feeling warm and cosy, exactly how it should be after a good night’s sleep. Then he remembered the last thing that had
happened—

His eyes snapped open. There was a face looking down at him. It was his own.

‘Welcome to the world,’ said the grinning Nigel at the side of the bed.

‘Oh, hell,’ Nigel groaned.

‘Yeah. ’Fraid so.’

New Costa: a megacity that once sprawled for more than four hundred miles along the coastline of Augusta’s Sinebar continent, then extended almost as far inland. At its
peak, home to a billion people, all of them devoted to one ideal: making money. In those days, the city boasted over a million factories, producing every consumer product the human race had ever
dreamt up. The heavy industrial plants consumed the minerals ruthlessly strip-mined from Augusta’s other continents, spewing their contaminated effluent out into the oceans. Its wormhole
station, New Costa Junction, with its strategic connection back to Earth, boasted fifty wormhole generators creating permanent gateways to the thriving, ambitious new H-congruous planets still
further away from the old homeworld. Gateways that were the perfect export routes, enabling those Halcion worlds to develop cleaner greener societies by transferring their industrial pollution debt
to Augusta, where no one cared. Multiplanetary corporations, entrepreneurs, financiers – all of them spent their work-addict life in New Costa’s endless, centreless chequerboard of
industrial districts and residential zones. And when it was all over, when they were burnt out and prematurely aged, they’d re-life and do it all over again – and again – forcing
themselves a little further up the corporate ladder each time in a way that would have made Darwin shudder.

Augusta’s commercial expansion was performed with a ruthless imperial nonchalance, conquering all it reached out to. That was back in the era of the Starflyer War, nine hundred years ago:
the Commonwealth’s first and, to-date, only interstellar conflict. Victory came in no small part thanks to the terrible and sophisticated weapons developed, then mass-produced on Augusta.

All of which made New Costa as rich in history as it was poor in culture. If you looked down on the ramshackle old road grid and chaotic layout of neighbourhoods, it was a history that could be
read like the rings of a terrestrial tree.

Flying away from New Costa Junction, Nigel Sheldon had a perfect view of all that living archaeology as he turned his capsule’s forward fuselage transparent. For all that the megacity was
in a period of drastic reduction, the old CST (Compression Space Transport) station was still as busy as ever. The three ancient terminus buildings were still standing, each one with a roof that
spanned a square mile. Today it was mainly people who used the wormholes that knitted the Central worlds together. When he’d started the company, it was trains that zipped through the
wormholes, carrying freight and passengers between disparate planets. Nowadays, with fabricators and replicators reproducing most things, including themselves, consumerism was effectively dead on
the Central worlds. Anybody could assemble whatever they wanted in their own home. In practice, though, there were limits. Large or sophisticated machines were still built in New Costa. The
megacity had even held on to its lead in starship manufacture, accounting for nearly thirty per cent of the Commonwealth’s total.

The capsule headed north, keeping parallel to the coast, its ellipsoid shape pushing through the air at just below subsonic speed. Right on the shore he could see the big airbarges hovering
above the waves, with dozens of smaller earthmover bots loading them up with soil. It was the Port Klye peninsula – now crater, he acknowledged wryly. In the good old days there had been
thirty-five massive nuclear fission reactors sited there, providing cheap energy to almost ten per cent of the city. Today the clean-up was almost complete. Before long, the giant hole would be
filled in and turned into a wildlife park. Not that Augusta had much native vegetation or animal life, which was one reason he’d chosen it as the ideal location to build his corporate
fiefdom.

His u-shadow told him he had a call from his wife. ‘I’m not going to make it tonight,’ she told him.

‘Why not?’ He tried not to make it sound petulant. He and Anine Saleeb had been married for eighty years now, a record – for both of them. She was only four hundred and thirty,
while he was now close to his one thousand three hundredth birthday. That meant that being together all of the time wasn’t as important as it had been even six hundred years ago, back when he
still had a harem and lived a ridiculously lavish multi-trillionaire’s lifestyle to the full. But they had been apart for a month now. He missed her.

‘There’s been some hanky-panky going on at our McLeod facility,’ she told him.

Nigel blinked in surprise. ‘Hanky-panky?’

‘The managers think the smartcore has been compromised.’

‘Why?’ he asked in genuine puzzlement. The Sheldon Dynasty’s McLeod facility had been tasked with building a hundred and fifty huge exospheric stations that would float just
outside Earth’s atmosphere, ultimately providing the entire planet with a T-sphere, allowing practical teleportation anywhere on the surface. It wasn’t a controversial project; ANA:
Governance had only commissioned it after a long and no doubt tediously parochial debate amid the many political factions that flourished within humanity’s downloaded personalities.

‘Production hasn’t been disrupted, so it wasn’t sabotage,’ Anine said. ‘Admiral Kazimir believes it may be the Knights Guardians movement.’