‘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.’
‘Joey.’
‘Say hi to my re-life clone. Tell me how noble I am.’
‘Joey—’
The gaiafield connection faded out. Laura stared at Joey’s awful ruined face as the blood droplets started to vacuum boil. It was only when the swelling scarlet mist started to smear her helmet that she suddenly moved again.
She hauled her way over to the second exopod and slipped in through the open hatch. The webbing floated about in a tangle, which she sorted out, clicking the buckles together to hold her in place. Power-up was a simple sequence. The hatch closed; air squirted in.
Piloting wasn’t exactly her talent set, but there were some basic files in her storage lacuna. They ran as secondary routines in her macrocellular clusters, and she managed to steer the little craft out through the open airlock, only scraping the sides twice as she went.
The shuttle twisted about, its spin rate increased massively by the loss of the EVA hangar atmosphere. She stabilized the exopod and carefully brought it back as close as she could to the floundering delta shape. The biggest engines she had were three high-density ion rockets in the base of the spherical fuselage, capable of producing a fifth of a gee.
Laura fired the rockets at full thrust. Three plumes of high-energy plasma stabbed down onto Shuttle Fourteen’s fuselage, striking at the port wing root just behind the forward cabin. They punctured the grey thermal shielding and roasted the composite and metal stress structure beneath. Systems vaporized. Tanks ruptured. The pressure hull fractured, blowing out the passenger cabin’s atmosphere.
The exopod was two hundred metres away from the shuttle when Laura switched the ion rockets off. She fired the manoeuvring thrusters, turning the little craft so she could see the shuttle through the wide circular port. It was tumbling even faster now, surrounded by a cloud of scintillating debris. The port wing was badly buckled, with a dark ruptured crater still venting spurts of gas. One of the clamshell doors had broken off. When the tail swung into view, even the EVA hangar’s emergency lights were out. But the centre of the shuttle was still intact; the alien things could still be alive in there.
She flew the exopod back to Fourteen, nudging it as close as she dared. Radar tracked the tumble, showing her the tail swinging around towards her. She fired the ion rockets again, sending the ice-blue spears of plasma slamming into the EVA hangar. They must have scored a direct hit on the other exopod’s fuel tanks. An explosion blew the rear quarter of the shuttle apart. Jagged fragments came whirling past the port, along with a vivid plume of vapour that was alive with snapping static discharges.
When she manoeuvred the exopod to view the results, Fourteen had broken in two. The port wing had ripped free, and the main cabin section was split open along the length of the remaining fuselage. She stared numbly at the wreckage for several minutes as it drifted away. There was no satisfaction, no sense of winning. She’d done what was necessary to survive. That was all. Behind the dwindling shuttle, the vast distortion trees maintained their radiant constellation, unknowing or uncaring about the demise of their creatures.
The exopod’s sensors locked on to the planet one and a half million kilometres away. Laura loaded that into the network, which incorporated it into the existing navigation data and began to plot a vector for her. The first burn, lasting three minutes, took her out of the Forest.
As she passed through the edge of the distortion trees, a time symbol flicked up into her exovision. It had been twenty-seven hours forty-two minutes since Shuttle Fourteen had actually entered the Forest and its altered temporal environment.
Laura shook her head ruefully. She still didn’t believe poor Joey’s theory of time travel.
The second burn lasted seventeen minutes and consumed sixty-eight per cent of her fuel. There would have to be regular corrective burns, but flight time to the planet was calculated at ninety-two hours.
She took off her helmet and smelt the tiny cabin’s air. It was a lot fresher than the recycled atmosphere the suit had been feeding her. Her first priority had to be her ankle. Half her exovision was filled with medical displays, most of which were red or amber.
The suit released its grip on her, and she wriggled out with a distinct lack of elegance. It was cramped in the little craft, and the straps didn’t help. Elbows, knees, head, feet – they all bumped into some part of the walls or port or consoles.
When she finally rid herself of the suit, it was an effort not to wince at the sight of her ankle. Released from the suit’s grip, the flesh was swelling badly. She did have to cut the shoe free and slice the trouser leg open. The Swiss army knife would have been really useful for that, she acknowledged grimly. Fortunately, the medical kit had an old-style scalpel blade. What it lacked was a decent selection of medicines and treatment packs. Not that she would have trusted the packs in the Void anyway. It really was a
basic emergency pack, intended to triage wounds until the exopod returned to the main ship where there would be a hospital and doctors who knew how to program biononics properly.
So she had to make do with anti-inflammatories and a large dose of coagulants to stop any further internal bleeding. Thankfully, her nerve blocks were still functional. She didn’t like to think what the pain levels would be like otherwise. And she had no idea what to do once she had landed. The bone needed setting properly, and the fluid draining.
There were files in her storage lacuna that showed how to deal with such an injury using only primitive equipment. It was like a text left over from the twenty-first century. Laura had no idea if she could self-operate even with one hundred per cent pain blocks.
Once the medicines were administered, she ordered the exopod’s sensors to scan for the Vermillion’s beacon. Even if – and you’re being ridiculous here, she told herself – she had somehow travelled back in time, the Vermillion would be approaching the planet. Captain Cornelius would be preparing to launch a science mission to the Forest. And somewhere deeper in the giant starship, medical staff would be tank yanking her and Ayanna, and Joey, and Ibu, and Rojas.
The exopod completed three scans and reported no beacon signal of any type or at any strength. Not in space. Not coming from the planet, either.
‘Bollocks! Bollocks, bollocks.’ Where the hell were they? Three starships that size couldn’t simply vanish.
Unless they haven’t arrived yet, a traitorous part of her mind whispered. So she did what she should have done as soon as she left the Forest and switched on the exopod’s own beacon. It made her feel better, even though it didn’t exactly help her situation.
She ran a quick inventory. There was enough food for two weeks. That’s if you counted dehydrated packets as food. They’d all have to be rehydrated. Water wasn’t a problem. The exopod carried ten litres – and a recycle filter system. Laura wrinkled her nose up at that, but there wasn’t much choice. Only eighty-nine hours left.
A day later, she wasn’t sure she would make it. Her ankle was the size of a football, the skin dark purple, and a fever was taking hold. She was shivering with cold as her flesh burnt. More worryingly, there were odd moments when she was losing lucidity. Lapses of time when she thought she was talking to Ayanna. Twice she woke up shouting at Joey not to open the airlock.
Every time it happened, she cursed herself for being so weak. She was afraid to take any more drugs for fear of making the delirium worse. She knew she had to drink more, but couldn’t bring herself to suck on the tube. Her mind started to drift, constructing terrible scenarios of the world she was heading for. That the surface would be nothing but mounds of the dark alien globes. That the exopod would sink into them. That they’d penetrate the hull from every direction, and contract around her. She’d be stuck to six different globes at once, and they’d each start tugging at her, trying to be the one that consumed her –
‘Where are you?’ she shouted as the sensors reported there was still no beacon signal from Vermillion.
By the end of the second day she had withdrawn into a perfect storm of misery and self-loathing. There was so much she could have done to help Ayanna. If she wasn’t such a coward. If she had a shred of human decency. Joey too could have been saved if she hadn’t been so totally self-absorbed.
Maybe Joey had the right of it, she wondered. Accept bodyloss and get re-lifed when the Vermillion escaped the Void. She just wished she could believe that would happen.
She had to take some drugs ten hours out from the planet. Even in her wretched state, she acknowledged the next trajectory correction burn had to be performed correctly. If the exopod was going to aerobrake, it had to hit the outer atmosphere at a precise angle. There was little margin for error.
It was a fifty-two-second burn, aligning the exopod to graze the top of the atmosphere. Too long, and she would shoot past the planet, to be lost in Voidspace. Too short, and the exopod would hit the atmosphere at a steep angle, overloading the thermal protective coating.
There were so many factors involved, so much that could go wrong. No Commonwealth citizen was used to this level of uncertainty any more; technology simply worked. Aerobrake entry was the ultimate safety fallback, a capability provided almost as an afterthought. Nobody ever expected an exopod actually to do this. And as for using parachutes to land – she had to pull that file out of her lacunas, all the while praying that the explanation of the chute system too was some kind of Void-derived glitch. Her life was going to depend on a bit of fabric and strings? Seriously?
Fear began to supplant Laura’s misery. Perhaps bodyloss isn’t such a good idea after all?
The burn lasted its pre-programed time, and cut off. Sensors measured her new vector and reported she was on track for a correct aerobrake insertion.
‘Wow, something went right.’
She forced herself to eat on the final approach phase. She hydrated a tube of pasta. As always, it tasted of nothing, a gooey paste with spaghetti chunks blocking the nozzle every time she squeezed. She drank water to wash it down, mildly grateful she couldn’t taste that, either.
An hour out from the atmosphere, she fastened herself back in the webbing. There was no way she was going to risk any weight being placed on her ankle. By now, the skin colour around the broken tibia and fibula bones had darkened considerably, although she managed to convince herself that the swelling had gone down slightly.
The exopod hit the atmosphere. It was only the sensors which told her that to start with, showing the increased density of ions outside. Then the exopod started to tremble. That soon evolved into a pronounced shaking. A ruby glow crept in through the pod, overwhelming the bright white radiance of the clouds far below.
Laura’s hands tightened on the straps holding her upright as gravity began to reassert itself. A rumble began to penetrate the hull insulation as the exopod tore its way down at hypersonic speed. Her weight increased, straining the straps. The exopod reached four gees, and Laura’s nerve blocks began to fail. Her ankle was a throbbing mass of red-hot pressure. She cried out – a sound that was lost amid the tormented howl of air being shredded by the little craft’s deceleration.
Incandescent sparks were starting to zip past the port as unprotected systems vaporized off the hull. Sensor coverage was non-existent now. Not that she could have concentrated on anything they showed her. The exopod was shaking so much she couldn’t focus.
Gradually the shaking began to ease off. The shriek of obliterated air faded away and the red glow of the thermal coating died out. Bright sunlight shone into the cabin. It was a glorious sapphire blue outside. Sky!
The exopod slowed to subsonic speed fifteen hundred metres above the ground. Laura let out a relieved groan, which was immediately knocked out of her as the drogue chutes deployed, jerking the exopod viciously. Savage pain jabbed up her leg, and she screamed. Then the main chutes deployed. The exopod began to drift gently towards the planet’s surface.
It’s actually working? Fuck me!
Breathing heavily, Laura peered out through the port, eager to see the type of ground she was going to land on. It was a uniform ochre, undulating away to the horizon.
‘A desert!’ she shouted in fury. ‘After all this, a fucking desert? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’ She started crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks as she hung there in the straps, waiting numbly for the touchdown.
Ten metres above the ground, a cluster of impact bags inflated out from the base of the exopod. They hit and immediately deflated, cushioning the landing. The exopod rocked about sharply, gouging out a shallow crater in the sand before slowly coming to a halt, tilted over at about twenty degrees. The main chutes fluttered away for several hundred metres before collapsing.
Laura took her time unhooking herself from the straps. She was hanging slightly face down, and didn’t want to fall on her damaged ankle. Slowly she lowered herself onto what was now the floor. The hatch was level with he
r head. All the port showed was a patch of sandy ground in the shade cast by the rest of the exopod.
She reached up to one of the small consoles and studied the display screen. Power was down to fifteen per cent. She shut down the flight systems. All that was left now was the beacon, sending out its call for help, and the environmental unit. It could recycle her air for another three hundred hours with the remaining power.
‘Bollocks to that.’ Laura turned the environmental unit off, and pulled the hatch lever. There was a loud hiss as the pressure equalized, then the hatch swung open. A wave of warm dry air rolled in. She breathed it down, not too worried about spores or any other alien microbes. Even without functional biononics, her immune system was enhanced by Advancer genes; it could cope with a lot of dangerous biological crud. In any case, she was past caring. It wasn’t going to be bugs which killed her now.
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.